John Orloff. Top credits Director Roland Emmerich. See more at IMDbPro. Trailer Trailer 1. Clip Photos Top cast Edit. Paolo De Vita Francesco as Francesco. Derek Jacobi Prologue as Prologue. Alex Hassell Spencer as Spencer. James Garnon Heminge as Heminge. Roland Emmerich. More like this.
Watch options. Storyline Edit. Edward's life is followed through flashbacks from a young child, through to the end of his life. A series of events sees his plays being performed by a frontman, Shakespeare. Was Shakespeare a Fraud? Rated PG for some violence and sexual content. Did you know Edit. In real life, they are mother and daughter. Goofs The playwrights in the movie are all astonished that Romeo and Juliet is written in verse, specifically iambic pentameter.
In fact, English drama had been written in verse for hundreds of years, and mostly in iambic pentameter for about the previous 25 years. Prose drama, not poetry, was the innovation. Quotes Ben Jonson : Politics? Crazy credits Apart from the production companies, the only opening credit is the movie's title, displayed on the marquee of the prologue's theater.
User reviews Review. We watch him woo a tubby street vendor with lines from the balcony scene; we walk in on him bare-bottomed with a prostitute. His taste may be mocked, but his heterosexuality is unimpeachable.
Even as a boy, we learn, he harbored desire for Queen Elizabeth; ultimately, he courts and wins her as his mistress. And when she rejects him, he falls into bed with one of her ladies-in-waiting. The sonnets to a young man, meanwhile, though never mentioned in the movie, are implicitly reimagined as the expression of paternal love.
In Anonymous , Oxford and Elizabeth have an illegitimate child who grows up to be the Earl of Southampton. Venus and Adonis, too, was dedicated to the Earl of Southampton, who many scholars believe was also the recipient of the sonnets.
The movie thus implies that the beloved young man of the sonnets is neither the patron of a lower-status Shakespeare, nor an object of romantic desire, but simply the son of a loving and noble father. Anonymous also straightens out Venus and Adonis. Perhaps something like being attacked by the goddess of love—overwhelming, like contending with a force of nature.
At least imagining Elizabeth as Venus gives her some credit for power, if only a sexual power. That is more than can be said for the rest of the film. Each time, she throws up her hands, leaving the realm to them. She prefers to attend to her hair and makeup, and to plays and lovers. He speaks the poem standing over her, as she bends her head below his waist. She ruled England for forty-five years, surviving multiple assassination plots and attempted invasions.
Anonymous takes that idea to an almost comical extreme. Oxford is reprimanded on multiple occasions for not living up to his position; at one point, he refers to his family as the oldest and richest in England. But the representation of Shakespeare himself is not especially comic.
The movie opens by telling us that he never finished grammar school. His worst crime, though, might be his class aspirations. A delighted Shakespeare parades into the tavern one evening, where his theater friends are drinking Falstaffian measures of ale, to show off his new coat of arms.
Unable to pronounce his own motto without help, he is humiliated when Jonson challenges him to write a letter, any letter. It might be unfair to expect a filmmaker to know the niceties of the Elizabethan education system. Emmerich has no reason to know that Stratford boys would have learned handwriting in petty school, or that grammar school then lasted for the six years between ages eight and fourteen or so. He might not have known of the rigorous training in Latin language and literature that boys received there.
What is going on here? Why would a movie of our day and age be invested in protecting the nobility from lowly upstarts? Next, probably, is the Earl of Essex. The youngest is the Earl of Southampton, who apparently never learns that De Vere is both his brother and father and it is left unclear whether the incestuous queen knows that her lover is also her eldest son. Elizabeth is no better at controlling her courtiers than she is her desires, and is easily manipulated by one adviser after the next.
Though every woman in the film is either shrewish or sluttish, the sexual politics of the film are driven not so much by wilful misogyny as they are by a need to establish a sharp opposition between opposing political coteries bent on swaying the queen, and failing that, the people. On one side are the dashing blond earls, committed to their aristocratic lineage and to keeping England free of the foreign rule of King James of Scotland. Pitted against them are dark, lowborn, machiavellian politicians, the Cecils — William and his deformed son Robert.
The two are humourless, amoral, puritanical, and motivated by personal gain like Shakespeare, both social and financial. Just as the theory supporting De Vere as author of Shakespeare's plays is patched together with half-truths and fantasy, so too is the political landscape of Anonymous.
Yes, all these characters are based on real people. No, Elizabeth didn't have any children. Yes, the Cecils were opposed to the Essex faction.
No, it was Essex who was King James's most avid supporter in England during the closing years of Elizabeth's reign, and William Cecil who feared James bore him a grudge for his role in the death of James's mother, Mary Queen of Scots. Most of the film's action is concentrated in the five years from to , when England's succession crisis was most intense.
It is not until this time that De Vere truly finds his calling after finally entering a public theatre for the first time in his life. He sees at once how easily thousands of playgoers at a time could be manipulated by his words.
Perhaps the biggest surprise of the film is that the author of the great plays is reduced to a political propagandist, his plays to vehicles to advance his faction's cause. De Vere himself is quite clear about his literary objectives: "All art is political … otherwise it is just decoration. No, this never happened. He then mocks a political foe, William Cecil, as Polonius, in Hamlet. The film conveniently forgets that when Hamlet was staged Cecil was already dead. At the film's climax, on the eve of the half-hearted Essex uprising in , De Vere stages Richard III in order to win the crowd's support for his faction.
Enraged, playgoers swarm out of the theatre in mid-performance, heading to court, before they are brutally gunned down on Robert Cecil's order. No, this never happened either. Yes, the Chamberlain's Men did stage a play before the abortive uprising, but it was Richard II , and it had no direct connection with subsequent events, unforeseen at the time of the performance.
Because Anonymous so badly needs to reduce Richard III to a propagandistic attack on a hunchback Robert Cecil, the substitution is made.
0コメント