All I can say is, after watching Anonymous, the "Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare" polemic, is that avid Shakespeare defenders ought to relax a bit. The problem with Anonymous isn't the easily debunked, shoddy assertions about who wrote the plays... the problem with the film is all the dismal things it has to say about writing generally, and British History in particular.
Though I would point out that a lot of what's wrong with Anonymous, in terms of the Shakespeare angle, is something the Shakespeare worshippers brought on themselves in no small measure. It's the people who talk about Shakespeare and Shakespearean works with near biblical fervor who enable the kind of narrow, nonsensical perspective that this film brings to the the subject of playwriting.
I was brought back to my high school days and a great teacher - the one who helped me do especially well on my SATs - who encouraged his students to remember that Shakespeare wrote for the stage: that is, when reading Shakespeare's plays, it helps to stage them in your head. For me, that really unlocked a door to understanding, and both improved my approach to the plays, and increased my love of theater at the same time.
Anonymous argues that William Shakespeare was neither educated enough or serious enough to write the plays; instead, they refresh a theory that the 17th Earl of Oxford wrote the plays, and used Shakespeare as his frontman because the subjects of so many plays (the histories, the allegories in the major tragedies) could be seen as seditious. I won't go into the historical issues, but the simplest rebuttal is that the dates don't work: there are plays outside of the Earl's potential writing lifetime, and elements of theatrical history that don't fit.
But the problem with Anonymous is deeper and more basic: for a film about writing, there's really no serious attempt to examine the process; for a film about Shakespeare, there's precious little actual Shakespearean text included; and for a film about the joy and artistry in Shakespeare, the film is surprisingly dismal and downbeat.
Structurally, the film is a mess: we open on a modern day staging of some sort of play of "Anonymous" (all the world's a stage, or something), jump back to a moment late in the action, and then jump backwards and forwards through a retelling of the life of the Earl. The lack of consistent chronology is jarring and confusing (and a sign of some really sloppy screenwriting and editing), and tends to rob individual moments of their full dramatic impact.
The film cherry-picks its examples of "proof" of an outside hand: we get snippets of Hamlet, the Witch prologue from Macbeth. the initial courtship scene of Romeo and Juliet, the battle sequence from Henry V... but these examples do not an argument make. The most telling selective inclusion is from A Midsummer Night's Dream, which Oxford is supposed to have written a about age 10 (there's a slipperiness as to the dates, which matter regarding how old Elizabeth I would have been when seeing it), and conveniently, we see him recite Puck's final speech. Granted, a 10 year old might have written that. What a 10 year old probably wouldn't write is the complexities of the romantic quadrangle among the four principal young lovers, which we never see.
Examples like that abound: Hamlet's "To Be or Not To Be" is lyrical and dense... but other sections of the play don't fit so neatly into the film's convenient theories. Even as political intrigue, the "play as allegory" argument is debatable: even if one buys that the play was a warning to the Queen about her main advisor, Sir William Cecil... who is the allegorical Elizabeth? Ophelia? Gertrude? The film hedges its bets by casting two Elizabeth lookalikes (to their credit, men in panto) in both parts, but this just adds confusion. And let's just stop before getting into just how Julius Caesar applies to any of the historical incidents in question.
Anonymous, ultimately, is less about theater, anyway, and more like "The Tudors, The Next Generation" or "Elizabeth, Part 3" - a convoluted tale of intrigue and infighting amongst the titled landed gentry. This, too, plays terribly, seems historicvally inaccurate and doesn't really work. The film is a special waste because the one stellar performance in it is Elizabeth herself (actually two: Vanessa Redgrave as a sublime elderly monarch, and Joely Richardson as her younger, charismatic self), but the film reduces Elizabeth's brilliance and resilience to afterthoughts, making her all too vulnerable to the manipulations of both the older Lord Cecil and his deformed son, who both easily manipulate her with what amounts to "you're in danger, girl" rhetoric.
In the film's retelling, Elizabeth was no one's idea of a Virgin Queen - not just sexually active, but pregnant more than once. Nor is the film subtle in suggesting where her relations might have wound up - casting a string of fair strawberry blondes to suggest a bloodline; making the film, in no small part, a War Between the Blondes and Brunettes.
Beyond Redgrave and Richardson, the film's performances are both too much and not enough: Rhys Ifans, David Thewlis and Derek Jacobi are all talented actors of substantial depth... but it says something that their careers all hinge on playing fairly complicated freaks. There's a conspicuous lack of the kind of pretty, big name Brits who are traditionally associated with Shakespeare in England - Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Ken Branagh, the Fiennes brothers, the Jude Law types. The acting on display is heavy and portentous, with few moments of lightness, and little real humor. That, too, is kind of missing the point of Shakespeare's brilliance - the mix of high and low, playing to different parts of an audience.
Director Roland Emmerich has never been known as a director of particular depth, so just why a dense historical drama about the world's great plays would suit the director of Godzilla and Independence Day remains a mystery. As his pedigree suggests, Emmerich's best visual moments are big ones - vast crowd scenes, distant shots of the Elizabethan landscape, slow motion battle sequences with explosions and fire. The film's more intimate moments, and the human drama on display, just don't hvae the kind of emotional resonance they need.
Ultimately, Emmerich fails to make a case because he's so focused on Shakespeare as written text: we see nothing of the process of staging a play, as if the work of actors to create parts, or directors to stage work (or even Stage Managers to organize the production elements) were nonexistent. A script is written... and so, there's a play. That's not, really, how it works, something Emmerich should know all to well. And as impossible as it is to see this film's drunken, self satisfied Shakespeare as something other than a fool, watching Oxford simp around in dressy outfits (and a couple of stunning furs), moaning about the difficulties of the writer's life is by no means any more convincing. We see vast collections of papers, Oxford's hand are convincingly ink stained... but the effete, upperclass sensualist on display seems no more capable of writing the wide scope of Shakespeare's work than the man himself.
The real message of Anonymous, then, is dismal: classist assumptions about how high art can only come from the wealthy and well educated, while simultaneously asserting that Britain's biggest political problem is an entrenched landed upperclass with no regard for the needs of the many. The film is equally simplistic insisting that "political art" serves the simple purpose of arousing the rabble and sending mobs into the streets. All of which, really, is poppycock. Balderdash.
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