Rewriting History with Hollywood

The long disputed Shakespeare authorship debate gets fresh blood with director Roland Emmerich’s latest film ‘Anonymous’, a play that posits that Shakespeare was a dumb and greedy provisional actor and just a Beard for The Earl of Oxford, the erm ‘real’ writer.

I will hold my hands up and say that the film looked a gorgeous, vivid, colourful sexy romp on the trailers, but.. I so disagree with the premis, I was worried I might dismiss the whole film out of hand.

There were 12 people in the audience for this showing. If you don’t count the Cineworld usher who kept watching us with her night vision camera. (apparently the audience don’t get to be anonymous).

The film is gorgeous, well-written, oozing with vibrant colours, and factually inaccurate beyond measure. Attempting to challenge the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays by inventing a fictional alternative is daft (Marlowe was silenced for informing against the conspiracy) but it may well convince some excitable American kooks or those unfamiliar with history or the vast tide of real evidence of Shakespeare’s authorship. Instead they present the authorship debate against political intrigue and the failed rebellion of Essex, mixing real history with bubble headed bollocks.

This film makes a mockery of my nation’s greatest poet and from a German director and an American screenwriter, based on conjecture, it is an insult. The Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust devised a great 60 minute argument against this bullshit, check out their website.

It’s very entertaining, the acting is great, the film is fun, I do encourage you to see it, but don’t expect any kind of reasoned argument, it is presumptuous from the beginning, a ludicrous rewriting of history for entertainment’s sake.

I’m off to write a film about how Goethe’s works were really written by a highly literate spaniel and Abraham Lincoln’s best speeches by a particularly intelligent woodchuck.