William Shakespeare Is Still News After Four Centuries : Drama: Kenneth Branagh’s film and stage productions reignite unendingly fresh controversies.

Watching Kenneth Branagh’s fine new film of “Henry V” and his Mark Taper productions of “King Lear” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” it is impossible not to realize once more just how easily the work o’erleaps the 400 intervening years.

There is a suppleness in the ideas and the characterizations that has let them speak to succeeding generations in slightly different ways, thanks to new interpreters with fresh eyes and ears.

Laurence Olivier’s film of “Henry V” in wartime was a glorious cry of patriotism and his soliloquy to the embattled island could leave only hearts of stone untouched. Branagh’s film, from the same root text, is an anti-war statement, a kind of poetic docudrama that takes nothing from the charm of the boy king nor the glorious valor of his troops but sees them with the irony of history.

Paul Scofield’s Lear, several seasons ago, suggested not a great king but a mercantile baron dividing his business empire and then quarreling over who got the servants. Yet the language soared, the descent into madness was rending, the human tragedy somehow the more affecting because it felt closer to hand, more knowable and less mythic, even if in his imperious grandeur, Scofield was a mythic figure.

Richard Brier’s Lear at the Taper is less regal, less mythic and more mundane than Scofield’s and in the end less moving, whatever the grace he was falling from. Yet the play’s language, much of it so familiar in quotation that any production seems to have been stitched together from Bartlett’s, is thrilling to hear being said well.

Teachers, many of them (I suspect) drawn as unknowingly and reluctantly to Shakespeare as the syllabi make them draw their students to Shakespeare, have much to answer for. In our day it is almost invariably necessary to rediscover Shakespeare in adulthood, through superior films and magical productions that sweep us past the memory of those tiresome classroom days spent searching for meaning and the nights spent trying to memorize “To be or not to be” to the last correct comma.

The glory of Shakespeare done well and the power of the language to convey sense and feeling, even after the subtle changes English has undergone down the centuries, inspire inevitable attention on that most astonishing of all the authors who have ever written in English.

And, unless you are a hopelessly committed Stratfordian, accepting 400 years of legend now solidified, or petrified, into fact, you must surely wonder if the untutored lad and sometime smalltime actor from the country could possibly have been the author. Could he have had or acquired the author’s genius for abstract thought, for poetry so magical it transcends time and geography, for the delineation of passions and emotions that equally transcend class, as well as place and time?

Summing up a television program examining the claims to the authorship of Shagsper of Stratford and Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, producer Al Austin said: “Those who believe De Vere was Shakespeare must accept an improbable hoax as part of it, a conspiracy of silence involving, among others, Queen Elizabeth herself. Those who side with the Stratford man must believe in miracles.”

But of the options, and improbable as it is, the conspiracy of silence is easier to accept than the miracle. It is surmised--but there is no proof of it--that the Stratford man attended the local grammar school. Yet the author used a vocabulary of 17,000 words--twice as many as the well-educated John Milton. He also coined 3,000 new words, from Latin and Greek roots.

Mark Twain, an early and eloquent doubter (who had probably never heard of Edward de Vere), wrote in a small masterwork of invective called “Is Shakespeare Dead” that what we know of his life is “an Eiffel tower of artificialities rising sky-high from a very flat and very thin foundation of inconsequential facts.” The reason we don’t know more, Twain concluded, is that “he hadn’t any history to record.”

The evidence for De Vere is all circumstantial, monumental but in the end still circumstantial. (It fills something like 900 pages in Charlton Ogburn’s “The Mysterious William Shakespeare.”)

The mystery is frustrating but it is also infuriating. Orthodox scholarship has chosen almost totally to ignore the possibility that an authorship question exists, retreating behind facades of scorn, contempt, indifference and quick dismissal.

It is true that the early advocates of Francis Bacon in particular carried their search for hidden messages encoded in the Shakespeare texts to such extremes as to invite ridicule. (They also did a disservice to those who find serious philosophical resonances between Bacon and the author.)

The exploration of the authorship question has been left, by default and necessity, to those outside academia--in the United States, in the case of the Earl of Oxford, to Charlton Ogburn and to Judge Minos D. Miller and his wife, Ruth Loyd Miller.

The Millers, both lawyers, were my accidental introduction to the authorship question several years ago. Louisianans, they make an annual visit for research at the Huntington Library. They have spent considerable sums publishing new editions of relevant books, including a two-volume annotated version of Thomas Looney’s “Shakespeare Identified in Edward de Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford,” published in 1920 as the first marking of Oxford as the possible author. They have also done, and underwritten, much research in English archives.

Ruth Miller will address the Shakespeare Authorship Roundtable at the Pasadena Public Library on Saturday, Feb. 24. Earlier, on Feb. 17, she will address the Huntington Westerners on a celebrated 19th-Century California case known as “In Re Neagle.”

The great Shakespeare mystery itself may well never be solved to everyone’s satisfaction. But this is not to say the detection should stop--in or out of academia.