"Is this movie true?” an audience member bellowed during the end credit sequence in Roland Emmerich’s “Anonymous,” an Elizabethan costume drama that speculates on an issue that has intrigued academics and writers for centuries, namely: who actually created the body of work credited to William Shakespeare? And the answer to that question is a resounding…Who knows? Much like many other conspiracy theories there is certainly compelling evidence to build a case, but no one really knows for sure.
Emmerich, best known for the epic blockbusters “Independence Day,” “The Day After Tomorrow,” and “2012,” seems to be an unlikely choice for this material, yet he pulls back the usual CGI and eye-candy, and with the help of John Orlof’s well-crafted screenplay, he delivers an intriguing portrait of William Shakespeare (Rafe Spall), Ben Jonson (Sebastian Armesto) and more importantly, Edward De Vere, the Earl of Oxford (Rhys Ifans), supposedly the true author of Shakespeare’s plays. And while many writers over the years have been entertained as the true author of Shakespeare’s work, from Francis Bacon to Christopher Marlowe, “Anonymous” strongly argues the case for De Vere.
The film opens in modern time; with Shakespearean actor Derek Jacobi giving the prologue –as if he’s endorsing the theory of De Vere as the true author. It’s no secret that Jacobi, along with the likes of Mark Twain, Charles Dickens and Sigmund Freud, do not believe Shakespeare was the true author of his credited works. To further preserve the notion of De Vere as the true author, Orlof wrote Shakespeare as a vain, semi-literate, infantile actor.
Bouncing back and forth between De Vere as a young boy (Jamie Campbell Bower), and as an older gentleman, “Anonymous” shrewdly captures the political rat’s nest of Elizabethan England. It’s the stuff of Shakespeare: murder, sex, lies and betrayal. De Vere as a young child is depicted as some sort of child prodigy, but he’s forbidden to write poetry or plays as the Queen’s chief Minister, William Cecil, believes plays and art to be the work of the devil. This forces De Ville to keep his writing a secret and to eventually give his plays to Ben Jonson to pass off as his own. While Jonson has some serious moral qualms with this, Shakespeare, the dim-witted actor, has no problem stepping up and receiving the accolades for work he did not complete.
The caricature of Shakespeare as a feebleminded, money-hungry toddler is precisely where the film goes wrong. It’s plausible that a nobleman with a lot to lose may not want his name associated with playwriting; it’s another thing to accept the notion that De Vere would let any imbecile off the street take credit for his work. “Anonymous” also takes liberty with Queen Elizabeth’s character, portraying her –in her youth – as a harlot having one illegitimate child after another.
Ultimately, it all comes down to one thing: did he or did he not? That is the question scholars and artists will most likely ponder for an eternity.
DIRECTOR: Roland Emmerich SCREENWRITER: John Orloff PRODUCERS: Volker Engel, John Orloff, Mark Weigert CAST: Rafe Spall, Vanessa Redgrave, Rhys Ifans, Ben Johnson RUN TIME: 130 minutes MPAA RATING: PG-13
