Written by Caroline Bottger    Saturday, 05 November 2011 19:45   
Review: Anonymous
Film

Roland Emmerich is the kind of director whose central creed seems to be the suspension of disbelief. With The Day After Tomorrow, it was global warming. With Independence Day, it was aliens. Now, Anonymous, his latest, tries to lend some credence to the theory that William Shakespeare did not write his own plays, poems and sonnets. The theory runs that the 17th Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere, was actually the author of Hamlet, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, and all the other works that the world holds dear.

 

The Earl of Oxford (Rhys Ifans) just really loves to write. He tells his wife Anne (Helen Baxendale) that he must write in order for “the voices” to stop. He commissions Ben Jonson (Sebastian Armesto) to produce his plays under Jonson’s name, because writing plays and being a peer were mutually exclusive in Elizabethan England. In a snap-decision at the end of a performance of Henry V, Will Shakespeare (Rafe Spall), a mere actor and moron, grabs the script and presents himself as the author. Jonson does not, because Jonson has integrity. Just try to not think too much about it because your capacity to care will recede almost immediately.

Here is an abridged list of facts which Anonymous posits: one, that Queen Elizabeth was a dithering idiot. Two, that incest produces children with no medical disabilities whatsoever. Three, that de Vere’s/Shakespeare’s last play was King Lear (spoiler: it was The Tempest). From these three unconnected items alone, it should be more than evident that Anonymous is a fraud and a total disgrace to essentially every person represented onscreen. It ignores every aspect of Shakespeare scholarship, from genre to performance history, all for the sake of titillating the masses. Spall’s Shakespeare is played as an inarticulate imbecile, and they don’t even get Christopher Marlowe’s murder right. (Through the eye! He was stabbed through the eye!) Furthermore, having Derek Jacobi, one of Britain’s most renowned Shakespearean actors, actually propose this drivel is an unwarranted ‘screw you!’ to Jacobi’s own career. This film is so patently farcical that it is difficult not to scoff your way through the entire thing.

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