Anonymous [DVD] [2011]

I always accepted the idea that Shakespeare wrote his own plays, and considered anything to the contrary to be merely speculation not fact. So, the premise-what if Shakespeare never wrote a word, I found not to be appealing.

Upon reading some good reviews, I decided to see it, and found it to be a high quality production and a wonderful experience. Director Roland Emmerich previously directed 2012, and Independence Day, and writer John Orloff previously wrote some episodes of Band of Brothers, and as you watch this movie you will realise this term BoB originated with Shakespeare.

Anonymous proposes the Earl of Oxford wrote all the plays, anonymously donated them to Ben Johnson, a well known writer of the time for him to take credit. Then an uncouth illiterate actor, named Shakespeare steps in to claim the credit. The peer remained anonymous for reasons of social acceptability.

Another reason he may have remained anonymous which I totally loved was the parallel structure between what happened in the plays, and the real life events of the courtiers and Queen Elizabeth. Cecil, the courtier villain in this movie is a hunchback (historical fact), and brother in law of the Earl of Oxford. Richard 3 in Shakespeare's play is a hunchback, so the play becomes a social satire.

A scene where a man is stabbed through a curtain mirrors a scene in Hamlet. A usurped heir is sent to Ireland, and there is a plot to kill him, similar to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Hamlet.

Emmerich's direction gives Anonymous a much grander scope. We have big set pieces, such as a rebel attack on a bridge leading to the tower of London, rowing a boat in the Thames with the London skyline looming behind, an aerial shot of a huge crowd in the snow, and visual scenes of quite unsanitary London of the time, and he evokes the period very well. For example it rains on the actor in the theater, as he recites his lines. Certain scenes play out in ways we have not scene before, particularly Hamlet's soliloquy where he holds a knife, Richard 3 as caricature, crowd interaction and participation, sweet talking bawdy ladies with Shakespeare's words. I loved this. Visually outstanding, with exquisite and intricate costumes.

I liked the lead actors charisma and presence. He was so in character and looked older for the part that I did not recognise him till the credits. Rhys Ifans starred in Notting Hill, and Pirate Radio. He does a terrific job, perhaps his best work, as does the actor who plays Johnson. There is a particular scene between the two of them at the end that makes me tear up even as I write. Derek Jacobi, begins and ends the movie opening and closing the premise.

Vanessa Redgrave plays the doddering confused queen, and her daughter Joely Richardson plays her younger self, who has a torrid affair with the Earl of Oxford when she was young, producing an illicit heir. The queen has several torrid affairs which become part of the plot of succession. Shakespeare was played by Rafe Spall, son of Timothy Spall, who you have probably seen in several movies.

If the screenwriter was hoping to persuade me, he certainly made me think. Perhaps he goes too overboard with Shakespeare having a unique form of illiteracy, he can read words and memorise them but he can't write, and yet he is a scheming manipulative lout, a criminal, a drunkard, a successful entrepreneur, and a sociopath. Asked to speak to a crowd he stumbles inarticulately over his words. If Shakespeare was as inarticulate, and uneducated as portrayed, how could he have convinced anyone of his genius when he lacked the most basic skills of expression.

If not Shakespeare, then who?

I did some online research. Apparently, almost two centuries passed before anyone seriously questioned Shakespeare's authorship. It has been suggested that Sir Francis Bacon wrote these plays, but why would an already famous writer give credit to someone else. DeVere appears to be the current favorite among conspiracy theorists. If DeVere was excluded from the court, as he is in the movie then he would not be in a position to satirise the court, or include such pointed commentary in his plays. DeVere as a child in the movie performs a piece from Midsummer nights dream for the queen. He could hardly have written it as an adult then, could he?Curiously, at times the movie appears to undermine its own premise.

It has been suggested that Sir Thomas North, North of Shakespeare: The True Story of the Secret Genius Who Wrote the World's Greatest Body of Literature, wrote the materials on which some of Shakespeare's plays were based.

He did translate Plutarch which Shakespeare used as a source in several plays such as Julius Caesar, Troilus and Cressida, Coriolanus, and Anthony and Cleopatra, adapting them for the stage, converting the words from prose to verse. According to this book, Shakespeare purchased North's works, and then adapted them from the page to the stage. In some cases the corresponding passages in Shakespeare are word for word what was written by North. Somehow North did not get credit. Rosalinde from As You Like It apparently is Elisa Nord, (north)North's daughter.

Hamlet was adapted from a centuries old story called Amleth, and had several iterations, including Dial of Princes by North. Shakespeare made numerous changes to the original story Amleth, making it way darker according to a book I read Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories.

In the movie Ben Johnson proclaims sincere affection for DeVere's language skills.
In reality, Ben Johnson famously said of Shakespeare: "he would... buy the reversion of old plays,"but then mark not whose 'twas first: and after-times may judge it to be his..."Epigram no.56.

The movie claims no manuscript written by Shakespeare survives. If you don't have evidence that Shakespeare wrote something, does that mean you have evidence someone else wrote it? You cannot infer alternative authorship from a negation, only from evidence. If you have evidence that these plays were previously written, and performed or were adapted from books, then you can verify that Shakespeare was not the originator, merely wrote a version, and credit the original source. It seems that with some of these plays, they were circulating already, and then Shakespeare wrote a version, or made his own adaptation, which then became the definitive version.

Undoubtedly, this movie will stimulate debate and controversy. The idea that he didn't write a single word goes too far in my opinion, it would be interesting to know for sure what he did and did not write. I do think this is one of the best movies I have seen all year.

Wherever you stand on this, I highly recommend you see it, consider it, and form your own opinion. For me, it's too tabloidy to be taken seriously, the once virgin queen now a nympho, having an illegitimate son with the real Shakespeare, and so on.

Even if like me you do not agree with the premise, you might be surprised to discover you still love the movie.

I think you will enjoy it, and I hope this was helpful.

It barely takes a couple of minutes of screen time before it becomes obvious that Roland Emmerich's much-mocked Anonymous is going to be a feast of bad acting. Long before the astonishingly inept Rafe Spall turns up doing another of his patented whiney silly singsong voices as Will Shakespeare we're treated to the sight of Ben Johnson being arrested by guards straight out of Monty Python and taken to a dungeon where a Montgomery Burns lookalike is waiting with an EX-cellent red hot poker. It doesn't get much better. As if Spall playing Shakespeare like a bad and very drunk Frankie Howard impersonator wasn't bad enough (he even dives into the mosh pit at one point), Trystan Gravelle's Christopher Marlowe (looking surprisingly healthy for someone who had been dead for five years at the time his scenes are set) is an "Ooh, get her dearie" queen with a nasal twang who makes Kenneth Williams sound butch, Jamie Campbell Bower plays the young Oxford like a sulky boy band pinup without the depth while Joely Richardson and Vanessa Redgrave play Elizabeth I as an incestuous girly flirt dropping illegitimate sprogs all over the kingdom and a batty old broad respectively. Rhys Ifans' Oxford and Sebastian Armesto's Ben Jonson come off the best, but even they have their Monty Python moments.

In fact, the performances are so universally dire that it's impossible not to conclude that the British cast are simply taking the piss out of Emmerich and his hapless writer John Orloff, for truly this is a tale told by idiots, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing so much as the conspiracy theorists' ability to conjure an unlikely alternate reality by citing the lack of physical evidence for one thing as conclusive proof of its polar opposite for which no physical proof exists either, no matter how fragile and unlikely the hypothesis. That it was first mooted by a man called - and I'm not making this up - J. Thomas Looney, author of Shakespeare Identified, should tell you all you need to know...

Yet the idea that Shakespeare never wrote a word of the plays that bear his name and was a minor cog in a major political conspiracy could, in a capable writer's hands, have made for a ripping yarn. Certainly dafter takes on history have provided plenty of entertainment in the past, while even The Da Vinci Code managed to wrap up its long-debunked conspiracy in a successful chase-cum-puzzle-solving format that had appeal to an audience way beyond the tinfoil hat brigade. Yet Anonymous' biggest problem isn't the central conceit which lumps in two unlikely Tudor conspiracies for the price of one or even that it doesn't make a convincing case, it's that it's poor drama and an even poorer historical thriller that constantly veers into outrageous camp comedy as if even the writer doesn't really believe any of it himself and is just having a bit of a lark between the chunks of clumsy historical exposition.

There's also an unfortunate undercurrent of snobbery behind its thesis that one of the common rabble could not possibly have written such plays and that only a rich noble of breeding - an heir to the very throne itself, no less - could show such insight into the human condition that might be vaguely offensive if the film weren't so clumsily executed. (J. Thomas Looney's politics were decidedly neo-fascist, with a belief in the inherent superiority of the nobility, a longing for a return of feudal rule by one's `betters' and a hatred of the democracy that gave the common man a say in his fate.) Much is made of Shakespeare's supposed illiteracy, though bad spelling is fairly common among major writers (some, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gustav Flaubert, Leonardo Da Vinci and Hans Christian Andersen, even suffered from dyslexia) while the most successful composer of the 20th Century, Irving Berlin, never learned to read or write music but hired arrangers to do it for him. Yet while it tears Shakespeare down and turns him into a drunken buffoon and murderer, it never builds Oxford up into a credible alternative.

It's a conspiracy that makes no sense. If the absence of any manuscripts in Shakespeare's handwriting rules him out of being their author, why doesn't the absence of any manuscripts in Oxford's rule him out as well? Similarly the film never addresses the question of why a man who was a popular playwright and poet as well as a major patron of the theatre would need to hire a front for his works when his plays were publicly performed under his own name in his lifetime or even why his surviving mature poetry is so stylistically different from Shakespeare's. The idea that it was to hide a political subtext in his plays, some of which the film implies were written years before the historical events they're supposedly commenting on, doesn't hold much water since most of the examples given don't really have any hidden political agenda - they're just the famous bits everyone knows. The only tangible one comes from Richard III, despite the inconvenient fact that the play that actually was performed prior to the events in the film's climax being, er, Richard II. But then, why let the facts get in the way of a half-baked secret history some imaginary `they' want to suppress?

Emmerich has certainly made films with premises just as silly, yet in the past he's been able to make them play as engaging adventures or entertainingly jaw-dropping displays of special effects spectacle as he alternately destroys or saves the world while ensuring that cute kids and cuddly dogs survive unscathed. Some of that technical proficiency seeps through in the impressive production design and special effects recreating a spectacular Tudor London, even cheekily copying the opening shot from Olivier's Henry V along the way. Emmerich and his team may have managed to make a $30m film look like a $100m epic, but they're still working with a tuppence ha'penny script that's watchable if you're in a tolerant mood but dramatically flat as it veers all over the place, rarely focussing on anyone long enough for us to care whether they live or die, let alone what they wrote. The dreary digital photography that drowns everything in a flat fog of grey and beige as if under the delusion that it adds a sense of dramatic gravitas to the proceedings simply saps what little life is left out of it all. Forget the historical inaccuracies or the nonsensical conspiracies piled on conspiracies, it's the deadly dullness of it all that deals the fatal blow to this Fakespeare. As two minor characters note, "How will it end?" "Tragically, I should suppose."

Not much to get excited about in the way of extras, either - some redundant deleted scenes, self-serving featurettes and directors commentary on the DVD with the odd additional featurette on the Blu-ray.

Anonymous posits a controversial theory- what if Shakespeare was not William Shakespeare, but the Earl of Oxford? The problem is that the fact that it really is an academic theory, which has pretty much been debunked, means that discussions of the film's worth inevitably turn into debates on the authorship of Shakespeare's plays.

A quick first paragraph on the politics of the film before we get on to the film itself. Roland Emmerich and John Orloff, director and screenwriter respectively, are converts to the Oxfordian (or Oxonian) theory, despite a seemingly lack of academic credentials. Their main argument is that William Shakespeare from Stratford was illiterate and none of his manuscripts survive. However, as he was an actor he could blatantly read, so there's no evidence that he was illiterate. He might have had dyslexia, dyspraxia, other motor-related conditions- or simply he might have had bad handwriting and therefore not been able to write, thus having to get a scribe. And the Earl of Oxford inconveniently snuffed it before 10 of Shakespeare's plays was written. Oxfordians would really like to claim what they see as the more courtly/well-written plays and disown what they consider as "lesser" plays.

Academic debate out of the way, let's turn to the film. The film suffers from uneven tones. At first, it starts off like a comedy in the Shakespeare in Love vein, but with a twist. William Shakespeare (played by Rafe Spall, clearly made to look like Joseph Fienne's portrayal in SiL) is actually an illiterate buffoon, a low-brow comedy actor despaired of by Ben Jonson (Sebastain Arnesto). As a comedy of manners, this film would have worked well as a parody of our perceptions of Shakespeare and it would have made it clear to viewers that this was only a playful bit of fiction.

However, Orloff strives to make the politics and tragedy convincing. He argues that all the glaring anachronisms are because Shakespeare liked to change history around a bit but really, they're to cover up the unconvincing history and Orloff's lack of Shakespearean knowledge. For example, Shakespeare got himself into trouble with the queen because of Richard II, not Richard III. Had the filmmakers used the historical fact, it would have proved particularly poignant. However they went for the simplistic option.

Now, the actors. Joely Richardson and Vanessa Redgrave as young and old Queen Elizabeth do their best with an interpretation of Queen Elizabeth that...well let's just say that the nickname "Virgin Queen" would have to be ironic in this film. Jamie Campbell Bower as a younger version of the Earl of Oxford as you will eventually decipher, is a bit wet. Rhys Ifans, unrecognisable as the Earl of Oxford is excellent and the best thing about this film- unfortunately he's not in it enough and isn't given enough chance to display his genius/political views. Because if you read Shakespeare's plays, the idea that a courtier could have written them would have left poor old courtier with a warrent for his death. Oxford also needed some sort of sympathy/fascination with the working classes as Shakespeare convincingly portrays that world.

There are good moments from Rhys Ifans and Ben Jonson, even some comic ones from Rafe Spall, so the film's definitely worth watching. Shakespeare is a God-like figure to us: he is whatever you romantically desire him to be, whether that's a working-class lad with a stroke of genius or a poetic aristocrat. The very idea that the Shakespeare plays could have been misattributed is inevitably tragic, and Ifans does that tragedy well. Even Emmerich and Orloff, who are essentially saying that William shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth were silly doggy-doo-doos, show that whoeever wrote them, the play's the thing.