I saw the movie Anonymous last night. I'm sure the Internet has sounded off all over this thing, but, as an unabashed Bardolator, I feel like I ought to put down my thoughts.
The movie has to be judged in two ways, and neither has anything to do with the other. On the one hand, it is a film--a piece of entertainment and fiction--and ought to be graded and regarded as such. On the other hand, it is a dramatized posit of a hare-brained (pun intended: Shakespeare coined that phrase) conspiracy that has real world parallels.
The Film
As a film, I liked it well enough. Then again, I like most every film I watch, as I love being able to relax and appreciate the entertainment, so that isn't really a glowing commendation. There were some problems with the acting--the young Queen Elizabeth, in particular, really bothered me. So did the Earl of Essex. There's a way to shout emotionally and there's a way to sound like a moron with a loud voice. Much like the Queen in Snow White and the Huntsman, this Queen (and her, apparently, bastard son Essex) can only yell like a moron with a loud voice. The scenes were infrequent, but whenever they occurred I remembered that I was watching a movie.
De Vere's performance, on the other hand, I enjoyed quite a bit. While his character never--not even in his most oratorically pronounced moments--came close to having a voice like Shakespeare's, much of his character he portrayed through his eyes, which I thought was quite remarkable. Additionally, there were a handful of people whom I recognized as being from other Shakespearean productions, which put the film in very capable hands, for the most part.
The plot, despite its criticism of being overly convoluted, was easy enough for me to follow. It reminded me of some of the things I had forgotten about the Elizabethan world (though it put girls on the stages on occasion, which really confused me), and the costumes and sets were stunning. If nothing else, one should watch the film in order to enjoy the beauty of it. Anyway, the story of the film needed only one half of it to really be compelling, and--probably to the writer and director's chagrin--it was not the half about the conspiracy.
The story revolves around the extremely tense time at the end of Elizabeth I's reign, when she--without an heir--looked to be headed toward the undiscovered country. True to history, the movie depicts important nobles fretting and wringing hands over James I's potential claim to the crown and what to do about the Earl of Essex. Essex really did try to rally the common to his cause to claim the throne (done after a showing of Richard II, not Richard III as they show in the film) and there's quite a bit of speculation that Elizabeth was no virgin, despite her epithet. So in that sense, Anonymous works well.
Where it starts to fall apart is the incorporation of Shakespeare. This isn't to do with the historicity of the man Shakespeare; it has to do with the fact that, in the face of all that's going on, de Vere's sole focus is on his plays. There is an incredibly important and moving part (for me, anyway), where Edward confesses his inability to be happy unless he's writing. I completely resonated with that, and I thought that was truly significant. But even I know that writing must be put aside for important things, and the care of his earldom and the political dramas unfolding in Buckingham were far more important than listening to his muse. (As a jab at the Oxfordians, I have to say that if de Vere is their Shakespeare, and this film version of de Vere is speaking the Oxfordian line for his motivation, they have picked a shallow, myopic, and selfish man indeed to ascribe the greatest works of English to.)
To further this point, there is a scene at the end in which de Vere is told that he must do something in order to save his name. Then, as an 'insult to injury' comment, he's also commanded to forego any more drafting of plays or poems--that is, he must abandon his dreams. Now, again, as a writer I would rather lose my legs than not be able to write. But I'm just me, an average kind of guy with an eclectic taste in entertainment. I'm fully replaceable in almost every part of my life (save in relation to my family). But if I were a freakin' earl I would probably say, "You know what, you're right. I won't let this overwhelm my life." There were other things he had to do.
Of course, some of the "things" he had to do included the Queen. I won't go into details, but the bedplay in the film added a bizarre twist that seemed unnecessary and did little except lower my regard of de Vere's character. Despite many of the parts of the film working well, they addled some parts too much to make for a viable or relateable story, which dampened the film somewhat. All that being said, I still enjoyed it, as I mentioned above, for what it was as far as a film goes. Some good acting, some fantastic set pieces, and some brilliant costumes, along with a political intrigue on top and you have a solid, fun film.
But there's this one little bit...
The History
Yeah. Okay, so with the caveat aside that I know it's a piece of fiction, meant to entertain and, in a sense, create a fiction based on history, I have to say that it was extremely difficult for me to overlook the (to me, at least) sometimes blatant deceptions of the film from a historical basis.
Having done more research than is normal (and hardly enough to speak authoritatively), I know just enough about the "conspiracy" of the authorship question to be able to see where subtle arguments are being made. Almost like sly winks to the conspiracy savvy members of the audience, characters would throw down little hints about the remarkable works 'by' de Vere while also belittling the man Shakespeare himself. These worked for the narrative, but for history they're dancing on even more tenuous ground than Stratfordians do when they argue about William's life.
See, the whole reason this stuff is even around is because a few famous people decided that it was weird that we didn't know a whole lot about a man so important to our language and culture (or, as Harold Bloom argues, the "invention of the human"). I mean, we know he was born, christened, lived with his glove-maker father, acted, became a gentleman, owned a theater, once sued a guy, and then died. Much of what is left of this most remarkable man comes to us through happenstance, luck, and (probably) divine providence. Because let's face it: Who remembers the lives of playwrights?
It's hard for a modern audience to think that Shakespeare wasn't in the tabloids of the times. When we have celebrities who are famous for being famous (I think of Paris Hilton and Snookie) who then go on to write books, we have an entire schema for how to conceive of their stories, careers, and writings. I can use Wikipedia and IMDB to figure out the birth date and parentage of any of the actors of Anonymous before the credits roll. Even more now than any other time, we have information about just about everything, regardless of how trivial. I'm writing a blog about a book that may never get published, for goodness' sake! So it's logical (to us) to think that four centuries earlier, people thought the same way.
The fact is, they didn't. They didn't care about Shakespeare's life so much as Shakespeare as a brand. He wrote good stuff (beyond good, but, well...) that entertained people and really turned their eyes to their napes. He could act--probably Hamlet's father in Hamlet and old Adam in As You Like It--but not terribly well. He was published--his sonnets were produced during his lifetime, as well as the epic poems. But no one bothered writing a biography on him.
This is not a mystery, but the anti-Stratfordians insist it is. A perfect indication of this is found in the opening monologue of the film. A man (who played Claudius in Brannagh's version of Hamlet) stands on stage and points out that Shakespeare left behind almost nothing--no manuscripts, no books, barely even a signature. Again, it only seems suspicious to a modern audience, who leave digital fingerprints in manifold places of their lives--a binary attempt at immortality, perhaps. But the theaters owned the plays--Shakespeare's name being on the plays worked as great branding, as they knew it'd be a quality project--and manuscripts were kept by the theater owners. The actors had cues only and their lines, not the entire play in one spot, as we do today (in a world without copyright law, theater owners had to be careful not to let spies in to steal their work), making it only logical that a man who didn't own his plays wouldn't be privy to passing down manuscripts or libraries.
Other historicity issues plague the film--Christopher Marlowe was Shakespeare's greatest rival, not some villain in the shadows (who, incidentally, actually would have been dead during the events of the film, his brain supplanted with a dagger through his eye; additionally, he was a spy for the Queen, flaming gay, and an atheist to boot--a much more intriguing Elizabethan character than Will, but, since comparatively few know him, he never gets the silver-screen treatment). Ben Jonson was also considered a poet and playwright of no small talent himself. That he rejects the film's de Vere's offer for being the name on the plays makes sense--Jonson had his own ego to think of, after all--but that he would so bend to a still-living contemporary seems a stretch at best. His words--like John Milton's, a generation later--shine with praise for the Bard:
...Soul of the age!
The applause ! delight ! the wonder of our stage!
My SHAKSPEARE rise ! I will not lodge thee by
Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie
A little further, to make thee a room :
Thou art a monument without a tomb,
And art alive still while thy book doth live
And we have wits to read, and praise to give.
I get the distinct feeling that he penned these words out of professional appreciation for what he came to see was the brilliance of the plays--though I should point out that, like all of the de Vere conspiracy, that's speculation on my part.
The film shows this kind of devotion to de Vere on the part of Jonson, which is all well and good, but what the film only obliquely points to is that the only one who could publish the plays after de Vere's death would be Jonson. So, for a mastermind conspirator like de Vere, he's putting his entire reputation on the line in order to turn ink into gold, and his best plan is to put his oeuvre into the hands of a firebrand, trouble-with-the-law Ben Jonson--a man already shown to be "splenitive and rash" (as Hamlet might say)--and hope that Jonson outlives Shakespeare long enough to publish them? I have a hard time with that one.
Another issue that they try to address is Shakespeare's illiteracy. Because we have nothing written in his hand, it's believed that the lack of evidence is its own type of evidence--we don't have them because they never existed. Of course, one can't prove this, and, in the film, the characters even dramatize this argument. In this scene, Shakespeare (the bumbling, drunken, lecherous actor who, though played well, I never actually saw as Shakespeare) is gloating over having a coat of arms made for himself. (This much is true; Shakespeare became a gentleman because of his success in the theater.) Jonson then demands of the fraudulent playwright to write "the letter I. It's just a straight line." In the film, Shakespeare manages to wiggle free of the request and the scene ends.
My credulity ends when one says that Shakespeare, being saturated with writing--as an actor absolutely must be--cannot write. We have a pretty strong evidence base that William actually attended the grueling grammar school education in Stratford where he grew up, a place that would have given him exposure to the resources that he used throughout his playwrighting life. We have six or seven signatures that are confirmed (as far as anything can be) of Shakespeare in his own hand--and nothing else--but this doesn't prove his illiteracy. All it shows us is that what was handwritten by him is lost--though, (praise the Almighty) his works are not.
I have more nits to pick with the film, but I'll end here. I think my final analysis is simply about why we have this conspiracy--or any, for that matter--in the first place. I would say, from what I've seen of many different types of conspiracies, that the vast majority of them come from that which Shakespeare provides in such boundless beauty--a story. Indeed, Shakespeare is the storyteller par excellence, and in a sense his own greatness works against his legitimacy. We have been trained since birth to recognize, appreciate, and enjoy a story. Some of the greatest works of human imagination and effort are framed as a story. Even the holy books of the four great monotheistic, Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Mormonism) are couched predominantly in the form of narratives. The best selling book in the world (the Bible) has a definitive, allegorical beginning in Genesis and a definitive, allegorical ending in Revelation. We expect stories to have certain structures, do certain things, and, above all, to make sense.
But life, as I have seen in my studies of history, are none of those things. Life doesn't have predictable structures--catastrophes always foment and explode, the unexpected occurs, and "the best laid plans of mice and men..."--it doesn't do what we expect and, most emphatically, it doesn't make sense--especially in the moment.
Yet we want history to be narratological. We want it to have the beginning, middle, and end that makes so much sense to us. And when there are gaps in the narrative, we feel like we're missing something--that something is omitted, that we've been fed a falsehood. That is not necessarily the case--and conspiracy is the fastest way for me to dismiss the argument (extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence). If the only way to put the narrative into a structure that "fits" is to require conspiracy, you're straining at gnats. It isn't the purpose of life to fit together seamlessly--as Oxfordians must do for their conspiracy to have validity--and that applies to Shakespeare as much as anyone.
In order to believe the Oxfordian's position (I was going to say 'lie' but that's mean, so I won't), you have to first disbelieve that a person can be quiet, reserved, and a genius at the same time. One has to disbelieve in a system of education and combination of natural gifts and favorable environments that could allow the son of a glove maker to think beyond his station. In a sense, one has to deny that greatness can come from the bottom--and that if anything is to be wonderful and good and true, it must come from the highest echelons of society. I would go so far as to argue that any anti-Stratfordian position is de facto classist and of unremitting snobbery.
Maybe that's why it parades around as academic rigor. There's an example of "upstart Crow, beautified with [Shakespeare's] feathers" if ever I've seen one.
The movie has to be judged in two ways, and neither has anything to do with the other. On the one hand, it is a film--a piece of entertainment and fiction--and ought to be graded and regarded as such. On the other hand, it is a dramatized posit of a hare-brained (pun intended: Shakespeare coined that phrase) conspiracy that has real world parallels.
The Film
As a film, I liked it well enough. Then again, I like most every film I watch, as I love being able to relax and appreciate the entertainment, so that isn't really a glowing commendation. There were some problems with the acting--the young Queen Elizabeth, in particular, really bothered me. So did the Earl of Essex. There's a way to shout emotionally and there's a way to sound like a moron with a loud voice. Much like the Queen in Snow White and the Huntsman, this Queen (and her, apparently, bastard son Essex) can only yell like a moron with a loud voice. The scenes were infrequent, but whenever they occurred I remembered that I was watching a movie.
De Vere's performance, on the other hand, I enjoyed quite a bit. While his character never--not even in his most oratorically pronounced moments--came close to having a voice like Shakespeare's, much of his character he portrayed through his eyes, which I thought was quite remarkable. Additionally, there were a handful of people whom I recognized as being from other Shakespearean productions, which put the film in very capable hands, for the most part.
The plot, despite its criticism of being overly convoluted, was easy enough for me to follow. It reminded me of some of the things I had forgotten about the Elizabethan world (though it put girls on the stages on occasion, which really confused me), and the costumes and sets were stunning. If nothing else, one should watch the film in order to enjoy the beauty of it. Anyway, the story of the film needed only one half of it to really be compelling, and--probably to the writer and director's chagrin--it was not the half about the conspiracy.
The story revolves around the extremely tense time at the end of Elizabeth I's reign, when she--without an heir--looked to be headed toward the undiscovered country. True to history, the movie depicts important nobles fretting and wringing hands over James I's potential claim to the crown and what to do about the Earl of Essex. Essex really did try to rally the common to his cause to claim the throne (done after a showing of Richard II, not Richard III as they show in the film) and there's quite a bit of speculation that Elizabeth was no virgin, despite her epithet. So in that sense, Anonymous works well.
Where it starts to fall apart is the incorporation of Shakespeare. This isn't to do with the historicity of the man Shakespeare; it has to do with the fact that, in the face of all that's going on, de Vere's sole focus is on his plays. There is an incredibly important and moving part (for me, anyway), where Edward confesses his inability to be happy unless he's writing. I completely resonated with that, and I thought that was truly significant. But even I know that writing must be put aside for important things, and the care of his earldom and the political dramas unfolding in Buckingham were far more important than listening to his muse. (As a jab at the Oxfordians, I have to say that if de Vere is their Shakespeare, and this film version of de Vere is speaking the Oxfordian line for his motivation, they have picked a shallow, myopic, and selfish man indeed to ascribe the greatest works of English to.)
To further this point, there is a scene at the end in which de Vere is told that he must do something in order to save his name. Then, as an 'insult to injury' comment, he's also commanded to forego any more drafting of plays or poems--that is, he must abandon his dreams. Now, again, as a writer I would rather lose my legs than not be able to write. But I'm just me, an average kind of guy with an eclectic taste in entertainment. I'm fully replaceable in almost every part of my life (save in relation to my family). But if I were a freakin' earl I would probably say, "You know what, you're right. I won't let this overwhelm my life." There were other things he had to do.
Of course, some of the "things" he had to do included the Queen. I won't go into details, but the bedplay in the film added a bizarre twist that seemed unnecessary and did little except lower my regard of de Vere's character. Despite many of the parts of the film working well, they addled some parts too much to make for a viable or relateable story, which dampened the film somewhat. All that being said, I still enjoyed it, as I mentioned above, for what it was as far as a film goes. Some good acting, some fantastic set pieces, and some brilliant costumes, along with a political intrigue on top and you have a solid, fun film.
But there's this one little bit...
The History
Yeah. Okay, so with the caveat aside that I know it's a piece of fiction, meant to entertain and, in a sense, create a fiction based on history, I have to say that it was extremely difficult for me to overlook the (to me, at least) sometimes blatant deceptions of the film from a historical basis.
Having done more research than is normal (and hardly enough to speak authoritatively), I know just enough about the "conspiracy" of the authorship question to be able to see where subtle arguments are being made. Almost like sly winks to the conspiracy savvy members of the audience, characters would throw down little hints about the remarkable works 'by' de Vere while also belittling the man Shakespeare himself. These worked for the narrative, but for history they're dancing on even more tenuous ground than Stratfordians do when they argue about William's life.
See, the whole reason this stuff is even around is because a few famous people decided that it was weird that we didn't know a whole lot about a man so important to our language and culture (or, as Harold Bloom argues, the "invention of the human"). I mean, we know he was born, christened, lived with his glove-maker father, acted, became a gentleman, owned a theater, once sued a guy, and then died. Much of what is left of this most remarkable man comes to us through happenstance, luck, and (probably) divine providence. Because let's face it: Who remembers the lives of playwrights?
It's hard for a modern audience to think that Shakespeare wasn't in the tabloids of the times. When we have celebrities who are famous for being famous (I think of Paris Hilton and Snookie) who then go on to write books, we have an entire schema for how to conceive of their stories, careers, and writings. I can use Wikipedia and IMDB to figure out the birth date and parentage of any of the actors of Anonymous before the credits roll. Even more now than any other time, we have information about just about everything, regardless of how trivial. I'm writing a blog about a book that may never get published, for goodness' sake! So it's logical (to us) to think that four centuries earlier, people thought the same way.
The fact is, they didn't. They didn't care about Shakespeare's life so much as Shakespeare as a brand. He wrote good stuff (beyond good, but, well...) that entertained people and really turned their eyes to their napes. He could act--probably Hamlet's father in Hamlet and old Adam in As You Like It--but not terribly well. He was published--his sonnets were produced during his lifetime, as well as the epic poems. But no one bothered writing a biography on him.
This is not a mystery, but the anti-Stratfordians insist it is. A perfect indication of this is found in the opening monologue of the film. A man (who played Claudius in Brannagh's version of Hamlet) stands on stage and points out that Shakespeare left behind almost nothing--no manuscripts, no books, barely even a signature. Again, it only seems suspicious to a modern audience, who leave digital fingerprints in manifold places of their lives--a binary attempt at immortality, perhaps. But the theaters owned the plays--Shakespeare's name being on the plays worked as great branding, as they knew it'd be a quality project--and manuscripts were kept by the theater owners. The actors had cues only and their lines, not the entire play in one spot, as we do today (in a world without copyright law, theater owners had to be careful not to let spies in to steal their work), making it only logical that a man who didn't own his plays wouldn't be privy to passing down manuscripts or libraries.
Other historicity issues plague the film--Christopher Marlowe was Shakespeare's greatest rival, not some villain in the shadows (who, incidentally, actually would have been dead during the events of the film, his brain supplanted with a dagger through his eye; additionally, he was a spy for the Queen, flaming gay, and an atheist to boot--a much more intriguing Elizabethan character than Will, but, since comparatively few know him, he never gets the silver-screen treatment). Ben Jonson was also considered a poet and playwright of no small talent himself. That he rejects the film's de Vere's offer for being the name on the plays makes sense--Jonson had his own ego to think of, after all--but that he would so bend to a still-living contemporary seems a stretch at best. His words--like John Milton's, a generation later--shine with praise for the Bard:
...Soul of the age!
The applause ! delight ! the wonder of our stage!
My SHAKSPEARE rise ! I will not lodge thee by
Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie
A little further, to make thee a room :
Thou art a monument without a tomb,
And art alive still while thy book doth live
And we have wits to read, and praise to give.
I get the distinct feeling that he penned these words out of professional appreciation for what he came to see was the brilliance of the plays--though I should point out that, like all of the de Vere conspiracy, that's speculation on my part.
The film shows this kind of devotion to de Vere on the part of Jonson, which is all well and good, but what the film only obliquely points to is that the only one who could publish the plays after de Vere's death would be Jonson. So, for a mastermind conspirator like de Vere, he's putting his entire reputation on the line in order to turn ink into gold, and his best plan is to put his oeuvre into the hands of a firebrand, trouble-with-the-law Ben Jonson--a man already shown to be "splenitive and rash" (as Hamlet might say)--and hope that Jonson outlives Shakespeare long enough to publish them? I have a hard time with that one.
Another issue that they try to address is Shakespeare's illiteracy. Because we have nothing written in his hand, it's believed that the lack of evidence is its own type of evidence--we don't have them because they never existed. Of course, one can't prove this, and, in the film, the characters even dramatize this argument. In this scene, Shakespeare (the bumbling, drunken, lecherous actor who, though played well, I never actually saw as Shakespeare) is gloating over having a coat of arms made for himself. (This much is true; Shakespeare became a gentleman because of his success in the theater.) Jonson then demands of the fraudulent playwright to write "the letter I. It's just a straight line." In the film, Shakespeare manages to wiggle free of the request and the scene ends.
My credulity ends when one says that Shakespeare, being saturated with writing--as an actor absolutely must be--cannot write. We have a pretty strong evidence base that William actually attended the grueling grammar school education in Stratford where he grew up, a place that would have given him exposure to the resources that he used throughout his playwrighting life. We have six or seven signatures that are confirmed (as far as anything can be) of Shakespeare in his own hand--and nothing else--but this doesn't prove his illiteracy. All it shows us is that what was handwritten by him is lost--though, (praise the Almighty) his works are not.
I have more nits to pick with the film, but I'll end here. I think my final analysis is simply about why we have this conspiracy--or any, for that matter--in the first place. I would say, from what I've seen of many different types of conspiracies, that the vast majority of them come from that which Shakespeare provides in such boundless beauty--a story. Indeed, Shakespeare is the storyteller par excellence, and in a sense his own greatness works against his legitimacy. We have been trained since birth to recognize, appreciate, and enjoy a story. Some of the greatest works of human imagination and effort are framed as a story. Even the holy books of the four great monotheistic, Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Mormonism) are couched predominantly in the form of narratives. The best selling book in the world (the Bible) has a definitive, allegorical beginning in Genesis and a definitive, allegorical ending in Revelation. We expect stories to have certain structures, do certain things, and, above all, to make sense.
But life, as I have seen in my studies of history, are none of those things. Life doesn't have predictable structures--catastrophes always foment and explode, the unexpected occurs, and "the best laid plans of mice and men..."--it doesn't do what we expect and, most emphatically, it doesn't make sense--especially in the moment.
Yet we want history to be narratological. We want it to have the beginning, middle, and end that makes so much sense to us. And when there are gaps in the narrative, we feel like we're missing something--that something is omitted, that we've been fed a falsehood. That is not necessarily the case--and conspiracy is the fastest way for me to dismiss the argument (extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence). If the only way to put the narrative into a structure that "fits" is to require conspiracy, you're straining at gnats. It isn't the purpose of life to fit together seamlessly--as Oxfordians must do for their conspiracy to have validity--and that applies to Shakespeare as much as anyone.
In order to believe the Oxfordian's position (I was going to say 'lie' but that's mean, so I won't), you have to first disbelieve that a person can be quiet, reserved, and a genius at the same time. One has to disbelieve in a system of education and combination of natural gifts and favorable environments that could allow the son of a glove maker to think beyond his station. In a sense, one has to deny that greatness can come from the bottom--and that if anything is to be wonderful and good and true, it must come from the highest echelons of society. I would go so far as to argue that any anti-Stratfordian position is de facto classist and of unremitting snobbery.
Maybe that's why it parades around as academic rigor. There's an example of "upstart Crow, beautified with [Shakespeare's] feathers" if ever I've seen one.
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