Anon

[ron_drummond]

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

Comments

[sovay]

I suppose that's mean of me to say, but honestly, Anonymous feels like the work of men who have forgotten how to shit.

That is a judgment worthy of Mozart.

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."

Also, yay.

[nineweaving]

That is a judgment worthy of Mozart.

Amen. It should be set as a cantata.

Nine

[ron_drummond]

It should be set as a cantata.

Well, I know there are a few vocal canons by Mozart on scatalogical themes; perhaps composer John Adams, who might appreciate the brevity of the proposed cantata's text and its suitability for minimalist treatment, could use the must tuneful of the Mozart canons as the theme for a set of variations. Now if we could only figure out how to raise enough money to pay for the commission....

[ron_drummond]

That is a judgment worthy of Mozart.

Ah Mozart, the patron saint of scatalogs, and one of my favorite composers! You are most kind.

Also, yay.

Oh thank you! I so wanted to make it work. I doubt I would have stumbled upon the idea if not for the odd circumstance of John Orloff's ineptitude reminding me of Robert Nye's brilliance, specifically the brilliance of Chapter 20 of Nye's splendid novel The Late Mr. Shakespeare (1998); the chapter's entitled "What if Queen Elizabeth was Shakespeare's mother?" and is quite probably the most hilarious short prose narrative I have ever read in my life.

[kalimac]

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.

A couple of Gospel writers seem to have lost sight of a similar problem when they included genealogies to prove that Joseph was descended from King David. So it's not a new mental blindspot.

[ron_drummond]

Good point! The fact that Jesus is quoted elsewhere in at least one and possibly both of those gospels specifically and unambiguously denying Davidic descent might suggest either that the genealogies were later additions by a careless redactor or that the authors' blindspots were even bigger than we may have at first supposed.

[kalimac]

They're trying to tell two incompatible stories at once. The Messiah was traditionally supposed to be a descendant of David, but the new story of the direct Son of God was too good to lose. So they fudged it. The aborted sacrifice of Isaac is a similar awkward fudge: one story in which Abraham sacrificed his son, one in which the same son succeeded him, so we get this strange combination in which it's both.

The Oxfordians appear not quite to have realized yet that promoting de Vere from the line of earls to the son of QE1 herself requires a similar fudge.

[ron_drummond]

I'd be fascinated to read more about the fudging of the Abraham and Isaac story; could you recommend a good commentary that specifically examines that aspect of it, the blending of the two previously contradictory stories? I would think it would require a newly-written bridge passage to smooth away the join; that kind of redaction, and the scholarship that uncovers it, or attempts to, is deeply fascinating to me. I was aware that the author(s) of the Book of Jubilees rewrote the narrative portions of the Torah to write Satan or the devil into many of the tales where he hadn't been before, and that the tale of the sacrifice was rewritten so that it was the devil, pretending to be God, who told Abraham to sacrifice his son, with the real God distracted and only noticing at the last possible moment what was happening and swooping in just in time to stay Abraham's hand. Whew! You gotta love it. And yet ultimately not nearly so compelling, even though (or especially because!) the "original" Torah version basically lets us know that