PHILADELPHIA (CBS) – William Shakespeare was not Rodney Dangerfield, but sometimes the Bard gets no respect, no respect at all. A new movie is the latest platform for the argument that all those great plays were written by somebody else.

Getting Shakespeare out of Shakespeare has been a cottage industry in academia, says LaSalle Shakespeare scholar Robert Fallon.

While not commenting on whether the new movie, Anonymous, is any good, he says the theory it espouses, that Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, was the actual writer doesn’t fit the facts.

Fallon chalks the controversy up to England’s class system.

“They cannot understand how somebody with that kind of an education, that is: without a university education, could have written all these plays, and so they look around for someone who is properly educated and they give it to him.”

Even a “him” like deVere who was dead when some of Shakespeare’s latter works debuted.

Reported By John Ostapkovich, KYW Newsradio