Anonymous
Intriguing Whodunit Suggests Shakespeare Was a Fraud
Anonymous
Rated PG-13 for violence and sexuality.
Running time: 130 minutes
Distributor: Columbia Pictures
Release Date: October 28, 2011
Starring: Rhys Ifans, Vanessa Redgrave, Joely Richardson, David Thewlis and
Xavier Samuel
Directed by: Roland Emmerich.
Film Review by Kam Williams
Excellent (4 stars)
Who really wrote the works of William Shakespeare? That nagging question
has remained the subject of speculation among academics for centuries, with
authorship of his poems and plays being alternately attributed to dozens of
others, most notably, Christopher Marlowe, William Stanley, Sir Francis
Bacon and Edward de Vere, aka the 17th Earl of Oxford.
The primary reason the Bard of Avon has been shown such disrespect is
because of his humble roots and the absence of evidence that he had much of
a formal education. Consequently, his detractors argue that only another
nobleman would have been capable of writing about royalty in such
sophisticated fashion.
Anonymous revives the controversial notion that the Earl of Oxford served as
Shakespeare’s ghostwriter, in spite of a plethora a problems with that
generally-rejected theory, starting with the fact that when the Earl died in
1604, ten of the Bard’s plays were yet to be published. Nonetheless,
provided you are willing to ignore an abundance of such historical
inaccuracies, the picture proves to be a delightful whodunit.
The film is a bit of a departure for Roland Emmerich, whose name one
ordinarily associates with bombastic summer blockbusters like Independence
Day and Godzilla. Here, however, the German director tones down his act
considerably in service of a multi-layered mystery given more to subtlety
and insinuation than to special effects and pyrotechnics.
Narrated by Sir Derek Jacobi, Anonymous opens and closes on Broadway in
present-day New York City. Otherwise, the plot revolves around the unlikely
financial arrangement secretly struck between rebellious, aristocrat de Vere
(Rhys Ifans) and alcoholic commoner Shakespeare (Rafe Spall) at a time when
the former was a prolific, closet playwright while the latter was a
struggling actor.
Thus, de Vere’s need for a surreptitious means of staging his incendiary,
anti-establishment productions conveniently dovetails with the Bard’s desire
for fame and fortune. But because Shakespeare is close to illiterate, the
ruse is hard to hide from most of his contemporaries in the theater world.
Meanwhile, de Vere himself has a host of his own issues to deal with,
starting with his not only being the illegitimate offspring of Queen
Elizabeth I (Vanessa Redgrave) but possibly having fathered a child with
his mom. Throw in a jealous wife (Antje Thiele) and an ambitious
father-in-law (David Thewlis) with designs on the throne, and you’ve got all
the fixins for a convoluted, costume drama of, dare I say it, Shakespearean
proportions.