Story by Jacob O’Gara 
Photo Courtesy of Anonymous 
Since this is a Shakespearean action thriller directed by Roland Emmerich, Anonymous is bigger, louder, and stupider than most Shakespearean action thrillers. After having made a career out of obliterating famous landmarks in movies like Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, and 2012, Emmerich decided to take that cinematic sledgehammer of his and shatter the “myth” that William Shakespeare wrote the plays and sonnets written by William Shakespeare. The result is a movie so stupendously awful, so fantastically idiotic, and so goddamn boring that it’ll make you long for the wit and craftsmanship of some of Emmerich’s other work, like Godzilla or Universal Soldier.
Anonymous starts off clumsily grasping for insight on the stage of a Broadway play called…Anonymous. So, you see, what you’re about to watch is actually a play about plays and playwrighting, a “meditation on” the craft, as it were. If that’s not clever enough for ol’ Shakespeare himself—whoever he really was—then nothing is. Derek Jacobi (who really is a wonderful actor when given better material, like Hamlet) takes the stage and delivers a faux-Shakespearean monologue about Shakespeare, basically accusing the alleged Bard of Avon of being a major-league dumbass who just couldn’t have written the words that made Derek Jacobi Sir Derek “noted Shakespearean actor” Jacobi. After a few more lines that make Shakespeare out to be like the Sarah Palin of Stratford-upon-Avon, Sir Jacobi whisks to the side and we’re off in Olde Eng-Land.
And about that—the depiction of England during the years of Queen Elizabeth I might be the one thing this movie gets right. It sucked to live back then: Elizabethan England was pretty much a police state, like North Korea with British accents. Say or do the wrong thing on-stage, look a little too much like a given person in Elizabeth’s court, and you’ll get dragged off the stage and into the Tower of London, where they don’t take too kindly to actor types. Also, there were people back then who just didn’t like theatre, called it the work of Satan. These people apparently also forced other people like Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, to write plays in secret, and then publish them using the name of an illiterate drunkard and actor named Bill Shakespeare.
That’s the gist of the particular branch of the Shakespeare authorship “dilemma” that Anonymous rather poorly expounds, called the Oxfordian theory. The real “William Shakespeare” was a nobleman named Edward de Vere, whereas the real William Shakespeare was a guy named William Shakespeare who wasn’t nearly as talented as “Shakespeare.” Add to that some royally confusing intrigue and some sizzling incest action, and you have Anonymous, a movie that makes Battlefield Earth look like a responsible bit of storytelling.
Well, does a story need to be responsible? If so, to whom and for what? Stephen Greenblatt, a Harvard professor and literary critic, once suggested that the Oxfordian theory (and all theories of Shakespeare authorship that don’t involve the man who was born in Stratford-upon-Avon) is something like Holocaust denial. So he certainly thinks a storyteller has some responsibility to his or her audience, to culture. But are Oxfordians, or anti-Stratfordians, really the equivalent of Holocaust deniers, of someone like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? That sentiment seems as far out there as the theories it’s reacting against. Anonymous represents Hollywood at its stupidest and most intellectually irresponsible, and is a really shitty movie, but it is no Holocaust. That’s the second thing it gets right.
The question of who wrote, say, Hamlet is a question of exceptionalism. Whoever wrote that play was an exceptional figure, the most astute observer of the human condition of his age or any, smarter than your average glovemaker’s son from Stratford-upon-Avon or Earl of Oxford. Those who subscribe to the theory that Edward de Vere wrote Hamlet, among other plays, are simply answering that question of exceptionalism by making someone other than Shakespeare exceptional. By obsessing over the byline, they construct a sideshow that distracts them from the stuff that really matters: the body of work that “Shakespeare” or Shakespeare left for us. It doesn’t matter that Hamlet was written by William Shakespeare. It matters that Hamlet was written.