Anonymous

Anonymous

There are few people in history who were as properly recorded as William Shakespeare. There is little doubt that if he had been a common writer, the plays would not have been brought under question. However, being that he was the best writer in English, and the language’s means to expanding around the world in many ways, as well as one of the greatest artists of all time; this is clearly not the case.

For a long time there have been those who were not happy with his background. He was born to an illiterate glover from Stratford and became an actor, which in Elizabethan England meant joining a disreputable profession. Especially for someone with no royal connections whatsoever. How could such a man write these masterpieces? They must be reassigned somewhere else, and so over the years we’ve had theories that claimed everyone from the Earl of Oxford to Sir Francis Bacon to Christopher Marlowe or even (as “Anonymous” argues) Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford wrote them.

You probably don’t know much about Shakespeare or any of these other guys either. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t see this amazing period film which I believe is gargantuanly wrong because it provides enough context for John Orloff’s ingenious screenplay and Roland Emmerich’s precise direction that even if you walk into the theater knowing nothing at all about English literature or history you can follow along and enjoy yourself immensely while doing so, leaving four hours later convinced if nothing else than that there was something deeply fascinating going on during Elizabethan times near London involving one William Shake your spear.

The deck is cruelly stacked against him in this movie too. The character of Shakespeare (Rafe Spall) is drawn more like two steps above a village idiot than one step below God; witless and graceless beyond belief, there isn’t even really any indication given by a single scene that this man could have written a grocery list, much less 37 plays (about which there is no doubt).

Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford (Rhys Ifans), on the other hand, seems like kind of an overachiever. His manner and bearing and authority and ease in the court of Elizabeth all make him seem qualified to be a candidate for authorship at least; he was so well connected with the crown that the movie even suggests he might’ve been the lover of either young Elizabeth or older Elizabeth. Not both, I hope.

The film also gets into some juicy stuff about the first Elizabethan age including what was going on with the Earl of Essex (Sam Reid), whose plot to overthrow his old girlfriend led to her having him inconveniently beheaded. And incredibly for a movie shot mostly on German soundstages “Anonymous” richly evokes the London of its time, when the splendor of the court coexisted in a metropolis with such appalling poverty that people actually lived in mud huts literally ankle-deep in mud.

It creates a realistic, convincing Globe Theater, which serves to establish just how intimate it actually was: from where Shakespeare stood onstage as an actor, groundlings could probably reach out and touch him if they wanted to; and from where Oxford sat up in one of those box seats next to Bobby De Niro, he could almost definitely see that seriously powerful s**t was being done down there by somebody who called himself William Nobody.

The whole lot of it makes “Anonymous” such a blast: the dialogue, the acting, the look of London, the sex, jealousy and intrigue. But I must wearily insist that Edward de Vere did not write Shakespeare’s plays. Apparently Roland Emmerich believes he did. Well, when Emmerich directed “2012,” he thought there might be something to the Mayan calendar.

A couple of technicalities have been cited by Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro in a New York Times article: (a) De Vere writes and stars in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” when he was 9 years old, and (b) “he died in 1604, before 10 or so of Shakespeare’s plays were written.”

I’ve got a personal theory. The most detailed and valuable record we have of life in London at that time is Samuel Pepys’ diary; as secretary of the Navy, he attended plays in court and in town, and was an inveterate gossip second only to Charles himself. He wrote this diary in a cipher code; it wasn’t meant to be read. If he knew who really wrote those plays well, I don’t think he could have kept quiet about it.

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