Anon
I saw Anonymous today. I liked it! Great sets and costumes. The cgi-derived evocation of Elizabethan London is fabulous -- I would have been happy if the whole movie had just wandered those streets, evocating away -- and many of the views and scenes set in the various Globe-style theaters do a magnificent job of evoking what it must have been like to be crowded into those spaces and watching plays. Even when it's raining!
The brief glimpses we get of various productions (all but one of which are from Shakespeare) are beautifully done, with the most pronounced exception being a ludicrous dramatization of how the opening soliloquy of Richard III drives the mob into a frenzy so great that under their own collective recognizance they stream out into the streets to cross London Bridge en masse and make their way to the Queen's London palace to murder Robert Cecil, or to call for the Queen to murder him, that must be it, this for the sole reason that the actor playing Richard is made up to look like Cecil, hunchback and all. Unfortunately for them Cecil knows this is going to happen, in the absence of any reason why it should, despite the nefarious and ominous intelligence Cecil has received regarding Richard's matching hunchback, a portrayal that should have surprised no one given Sir Thomas More's well known, decades-old description of Richard as being hunchbacked, and so Cecil orders an army of cannoneers and musketmen to lie in wait for the rabble rousers at the London end of the bridge and shoot them on sight. His queen, meanwhile, is presumably completely ignorant of this action, nor does she appear to ever learn of it. All those dead rabble rousers, practically on her doorstep! It's among the most patently idiotic scenes I've ever seen in any film of any genre, let alone one so portentous it appears its writer and director consistently failed to take a goodly crap before settling down to their work each day. I suppose that's mean of me to say, but honestly, Anonymous feels like the work of men who have forgotten how to shit.
I do think it is important to point out that, as idiotic as the two men helming this movie are, that idiocy did not and does not extend to the people they hired to do the costumes and the cgi reconstruction of London and the staging and acting of the play fragments, all of whom are first-rate artisans who really know their stuff. And the acting is generally pretty good, Rhys Ifans suitably soulful in his portrayal of Edward de Vere, a man well-documented at the time for being both a major asshole and a minor poet, but Ifans' portrayal is nothing if not sympathetic, indeed if you want to enjoy it even more pretend he's secretly channeling the real William Shakespeare -- you know, the guy who, yes, really did write 3/4ths of the plays attributed to him and co-wrote the remaining 1/4th -- acting out Will's pain at Emmerich and Orloff's betrayal of him, except that of course if Will were magically whisked out of his time to watch this film, he'd laugh his ass off at it more than anything else. And then would applaud, more than just a little, there at the end, for the sake of the true artisans under Emmerich's thumb who made this film anything worth seeing at all. Still, I like that image, it really works for me: Ifans portraying the real Shakespeare, author of the plays, doing a proper actorly job of portraying a faux Shakespeare-writing De Vere. Still, I was struck that there were a few good lines that you could take straight out of De Vere's mouth and put into Shakespeare's in another movie entirely, a movie where as in the real world Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare and no one has any cause to question it, and could then get on with telling a much more interesting story.
The peanut gallery in Anonymous is of course provided by a bunch of rival playwrights, one or more of whom are already dead when we begin, who have nothing better to do than attend plays and say snarky things about that supposed idiot Shakespeare, played splendidly by Rafe Spall, who steals at least half the scenes he's in. There is the small matter that Orloff has his drooling Shakespeare murder Christopher Marlow (played ineptly by Trystan Gravelle) something like seven years after Marlow's original death, a neat trick. For a much, much better one, indeed a genuine work of art, I highly recommend the single best "review" of Anonymous I have yet read (and I've read several dozen), As cutpurses in his good queen's day -- worth reading thrice, in fact, at the very least -- it starts off amazing and gets better with each new reading.
Sebastian Armesto is very sympathetic as Ben Jonson, the go-between, despite the fact that he is ill-used by Orloff, but then everyone in this film is, in one way or another, even or perhaps especially de Vere. Given the fact that almost every play published before say 1610 or so carried no author attribution whatsoever (Shakespeare's being among the few exceptions), so that the vast majority of playwrights were indeed Anonymous (plays were the property of the playhouses that commissioned them, not the writers, who often worked in groups to crank out their product), if De Vere had wished to publish his rotten plays (the real De Vere, that is, who categorically wasn't Shakespeare) he could have done so with impunity and no one the wiser, thus rendering any need for a go-between or a pseudonym moot and void. All the real workaday professional playwrights of Elizabethan and Jacobean times were from the merchant classes anyway, every last one of them, just like Shakespeare, and regardless of whether they went on to university all of them benefited mightily from the incredible public school system that Elizabeth instituted almost from the moment she took the throne. Jonson, like our man from Stratford, had only a grammar school education, which back then meant a greater grounding in Latin and classical literature by the time you were 12 than a graduate student in those subjects would have in an American university today -- and like Will, Jonson too did not go on to University. Beyond grammar school, Jonson taught himself so well that his classical erudition was greater than any other playwright of his time, certainly greater than Shakespeare's and De Vere's too for that matter, so much so that Jonson's more serious plays are positively weighed down with classical allusions and rhetoric. Yet Orloff sees fit to portray him as a minor talent at best, a bumbling, slow-on-the-uptake servant boy, despite Derek "I'll do anything to promote Oxford's cause no matter how idiotically portrayed or maybe I just really need the money" Jacobi's pat on Jonson's back there at the very end. Oh right, and with the Globe newly completed, Orloff has Shakespeare telling Jonson that his plays will never be produced there, when we know for a fact that Jonson's plays were often performed by Shakespeare's company, the Lord Chamberlain's and later the King's Men. And on and on, endless sweepings-away of well-documented fact.
Yet the film is fun, sure, bodice ripping, or bodice popping anyway, and one must mention Joely Richardson's charmingly lusty portrayal of the young Elizabeth and her mother Vanessa Redgrave's charmingly dotty portrayal of the ancient Elizabeth, and whoever has the honor of portraying her at any given moment Orloff's Elizabeth is perpetually and all-too easily swayed into action by whoever happens to be catching her ear or eye at the moment; this includes giving in to those changeful bedfellows who have her dashing off to her country palaces to deliver bastards on a regular basis, none of whom are girls. Oh gosh how the dotty Elizabeth swoons over the newly-published-in-1601 Venus and Adonis, written especially for her of course by her son and lover De Vere a full eight years after it was actually written and published in 1593 (and reprinted five times before 1601) carrying a dedication to her son and grandson the Earl of Southampton from a chap called William Shakespeare. But if Orloff can wipe away and rearrange all that history whenever it suits him, what's a little dedication to an epic poem when we're among friends?
And then finally at the end Ifans' De Vere movingly exalts his own aristocratic Oxfordian ancestry, implying heavily that it bears more responsibility for the greatness of Shakespeare's works than his own supposedly supreme individual talent, only he seems to have lost sight of the fact that, being Elizabeth's eldest bastard, and by an unknown father no less, the 17th Earl of Oxford isn't related to the earlier earls at all. Heck, for all we know, De Vere's true father was a mere commoner wandering through the forests of Arden one fine late summer day in 1549 who just happened to come upon the lovely young Princess Elizabeth, out for a constitutional, and before you know it a mutually exuberant fuck ensued between them, after which the young man answered her parting question with the words, "Me? The name's John Shakespeare, your majesty: at your service, always."
The brief glimpses we get of various productions (all but one of which are from Shakespeare) are beautifully done, with the most pronounced exception being a ludicrous dramatization of how the opening soliloquy of Richard III drives the mob into a frenzy so great that under their own collective recognizance they stream out into the streets to cross London Bridge en masse and make their way to the Queen's London palace to murder Robert Cecil, or to call for the Queen to murder him, that must be it, this for the sole reason that the actor playing Richard is made up to look like Cecil, hunchback and all. Unfortunately for them Cecil knows this is going to happen, in the absence of any reason why it should, despite the nefarious and ominous intelligence Cecil has received regarding Richard's matching hunchback, a portrayal that should have surprised no one given Sir Thomas More's well known, decades-old description of Richard as being hunchbacked, and so Cecil orders an army of cannoneers and musketmen to lie in wait for the rabble rousers at the London end of the bridge and shoot them on sight. His queen, meanwhile, is presumably completely ignorant of this action, nor does she appear to ever learn of it. All those dead rabble rousers, practically on her doorstep! It's among the most patently idiotic scenes I've ever seen in any film of any genre, let alone one so portentous it appears its writer and director consistently failed to take a goodly crap before settling down to their work each day. I suppose that's mean of me to say, but honestly, Anonymous feels like the work of men who have forgotten how to shit.
I do think it is important to point out that, as idiotic as the two men helming this movie are, that idiocy did not and does not extend to the people they hired to do the costumes and the cgi reconstruction of London and the staging and acting of the play fragments, all of whom are first-rate artisans who really know their stuff. And the acting is generally pretty good, Rhys Ifans suitably soulful in his portrayal of Edward de Vere, a man well-documented at the time for being both a major asshole and a minor poet, but Ifans' portrayal is nothing if not sympathetic, indeed if you want to enjoy it even more pretend he's secretly channeling the real William Shakespeare -- you know, the guy who, yes, really did write 3/4ths of the plays attributed to him and co-wrote the remaining 1/4th -- acting out Will's pain at Emmerich and Orloff's betrayal of him, except that of course if Will were magically whisked out of his time to watch this film, he'd laugh his ass off at it more than anything else. And then would applaud, more than just a little, there at the end, for the sake of the true artisans under Emmerich's thumb who made this film anything worth seeing at all. Still, I like that image, it really works for me: Ifans portraying the real Shakespeare, author of the plays, doing a proper actorly job of portraying a faux Shakespeare-writing De Vere. Still, I was struck that there were a few good lines that you could take straight out of De Vere's mouth and put into Shakespeare's in another movie entirely, a movie where as in the real world Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare and no one has any cause to question it, and could then get on with telling a much more interesting story.
The peanut gallery in Anonymous is of course provided by a bunch of rival playwrights, one or more of whom are already dead when we begin, who have nothing better to do than attend plays and say snarky things about that supposed idiot Shakespeare, played splendidly by Rafe Spall, who steals at least half the scenes he's in. There is the small matter that Orloff has his drooling Shakespeare murder Christopher Marlow (played ineptly by Trystan Gravelle) something like seven years after Marlow's original death, a neat trick. For a much, much better one, indeed a genuine work of art, I highly recommend the single best "review" of Anonymous I have yet read (and I've read several dozen), As cutpurses in his good queen's day -- worth reading thrice, in fact, at the very least -- it starts off amazing and gets better with each new reading.
Sebastian Armesto is very sympathetic as Ben Jonson, the go-between, despite the fact that he is ill-used by Orloff, but then everyone in this film is, in one way or another, even or perhaps especially de Vere. Given the fact that almost every play published before say 1610 or so carried no author attribution whatsoever (Shakespeare's being among the few exceptions), so that the vast majority of playwrights were indeed Anonymous (plays were the property of the playhouses that commissioned them, not the writers, who often worked in groups to crank out their product), if De Vere had wished to publish his rotten plays (the real De Vere, that is, who categorically wasn't Shakespeare) he could have done so with impunity and no one the wiser, thus rendering any need for a go-between or a pseudonym moot and void. All the real workaday professional playwrights of Elizabethan and Jacobean times were from the merchant classes anyway, every last one of them, just like Shakespeare, and regardless of whether they went on to university all of them benefited mightily from the incredible public school system that Elizabeth instituted almost from the moment she took the throne. Jonson, like our man from Stratford, had only a grammar school education, which back then meant a greater grounding in Latin and classical literature by the time you were 12 than a graduate student in those subjects would have in an American university today -- and like Will, Jonson too did not go on to University. Beyond grammar school, Jonson taught himself so well that his classical erudition was greater than any other playwright of his time, certainly greater than Shakespeare's and De Vere's too for that matter, so much so that Jonson's more serious plays are positively weighed down with classical allusions and rhetoric. Yet Orloff sees fit to portray him as a minor talent at best, a bumbling, slow-on-the-uptake servant boy, despite Derek "I'll do anything to promote Oxford's cause no matter how idiotically portrayed or maybe I just really need the money" Jacobi's pat on Jonson's back there at the very end. Oh right, and with the Globe newly completed, Orloff has Shakespeare telling Jonson that his plays will never be produced there, when we know for a fact that Jonson's plays were often performed by Shakespeare's company, the Lord Chamberlain's and later the King's Men. And on and on, endless sweepings-away of well-documented fact.
Yet the film is fun, sure, bodice ripping, or bodice popping anyway, and one must mention Joely Richardson's charmingly lusty portrayal of the young Elizabeth and her mother Vanessa Redgrave's charmingly dotty portrayal of the ancient Elizabeth, and whoever has the honor of portraying her at any given moment Orloff's Elizabeth is perpetually and all-too easily swayed into action by whoever happens to be catching her ear or eye at the moment; this includes giving in to those changeful bedfellows who have her dashing off to her country palaces to deliver bastards on a regular basis, none of whom are girls. Oh gosh how the dotty Elizabeth swoons over the newly-published-in-1601 Venus and Adonis, written especially for her of course by her son and lover De Vere a full eight years after it was actually written and published in 1593 (and reprinted five times before 1601) carrying a dedication to her son and grandson the Earl of Southampton from a chap called William Shakespeare. But if Orloff can wipe away and rearrange all that history whenever it suits him, what's a little dedication to an epic poem when we're among friends?
And then finally at the end Ifans' De Vere movingly exalts his own aristocratic Oxfordian ancestry, implying heavily that it bears more responsibility for the greatness of Shakespeare's works than his own supposedly supreme individual talent, only he seems to have lost sight of the fact that, being Elizabeth's eldest bastard, and by an unknown father no less, the 17th Earl of Oxford isn't related to the earlier earls at all. Heck, for all we know, De Vere's true father was a mere commoner wandering through the forests of Arden one fine late summer day in 1549 who just happened to come upon the lovely young Princess Elizabeth, out for a constitutional, and before you know it a mutually exuberant fuck ensued between them, after which the young man answered her parting question with the words, "Me? The name's John Shakespeare, your majesty: at your service, always."