Went to Anonymous

[Adam Selzer]

Here's what I'll be posting on smartalecksguide.com - we're working on
Shakespeare guides right now, soon that site will be replete with
posts about fun Shakespeare trivia, Shakespeare controversies, etc.
-

ANONYMOUS

This afternoon I went to see anonymous with David Kathman (of
shakespeareauthorship.com) and Greg Reynolds, both of whom I know from
my time on Shakespeare newsgroups, where authorship arguments tend to
overshadow any real discussion about Shakespeare. The vibe on many of
them is more like a professional wrestling match than an academic
debate. In high school I went through a period of arguing that Edward
De Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, was the real author of Shakespeare. It
didn't last long and I'm sort of ashamed of it now, but in the process
I learned a lot about Shakespeare's life, times and works, as well as
a lot of valuable lessons about info literary that have served me
well. Kathman argued me down a lot in those days, if I remember right,
but he also did so gracefully, and, anyway, all of us on that group
knew that when we argued with David, we were in over our heads to
begin with. It was fun now, a decade later, to sit laughing at a movie
about that theory with him.

Anonymous is a movie based loosely around the "Oxfordian" theory. The
sets are stunning, the cinematography is masterful, the costumes are
fantastic. But the three of us spent half the movie laughing. One
line, "I can't very well put MY name on it. I'M the 17 Earl of
Oxford!" struck us as particularly rich, as did the scene where de
Vere's wife goes into hysterics because her husband is WRITING again.

The theory put forth here is that de Vere was the illegitimate son -
and, later, lover - of Queen Elizabeth, and could have been king if
only he had been able to stay away from writing poetry. This is a
version of the Oxfordian theory that is too outlandish even for most
Oxfordian. They didn't go the route of having everyone in town know
who the REAL author was, and never dreaming that Will Shakespeare of
Stratford was anything but a grain merchant who happened to have the
same name as the Earl's pen name, but THAT version frankly would have
been more plausible than what they came up with. I don't think the
story here is going to persuade many new converts to Oxfordianism.

Shakespeare is here portrayed as a guy who reminded me of, well….
imagine if Richard Simmons grew a mustache and was constantly
wandering around in a daze, as though he'd just been clubbed in the
head with a two by four. It's said that he's illiterate - he can read,
but "never learned to form his letters," and panics when he's
challenged to write the letter I. I'm not sure that this even makes
sense. If one can read, one ought to be able to copy down the abcs,
the same way I can draw a respectable triangle without knowing much
about trigonometry.

Meanwhile, Christopher Marlowe has a small role as a villain who calls
to mind the snake from Disney's version of The Jungle Book. In one
scene where he reveals that he knows Shakespeare isn't the author, it
can only have been by sheer force of will that the actor didn't start
twirling his mustache.

Ben Johnson, meanwhile, plays the one guy who knows de Vere's secret
and who single-handedly thwarts the Essex rebellion. As a character
here he sometimes made me think of Captain Jack Sparrow. Never once
did he make me think of Ben Johnson (though one of the other
playwrights - I think it was supposed to be Thomas Nashe - did). I
never did figure out what made the character here tick, and he was
such a big character that I felt like I needed to know more about him.

The anachronisms pile up one on top of the other. We have Venus and
Adonis being published in 1601 (8 years too late), Marlowe being
stabbed by Shakespeare in 1598 (not by himself in a tavern five years
earlier), everyone being shocked that Romeo and Juliet is entirely in
iambic pentameter (they wouldn't have been even if it was). The Essex
Rebellion went down entirely differently than it does in the history
books. Etc. Changing these things around to condense the narrative,
make the story easier to follow, or to give it more emotional heft is
perfectly fine for a movie, I think - but in this case the changes
didn't really do any of those things.

I wanted to think, early on, that if you gave everyone a different
name and didn't pretend that this had anything to do with history, it
would have been a great movie. But I wound up spending too much time
wondering what was going on, and why I should care much. There seemed
to be two movies inside of the screenplay - one about political
intrigue and the relationship between Elizabeth and Edward, and quite
another about the theatre. It wound up feeling like a bit of both but
not enough of either. I spent a lot of time not quite sure what was
going on, and a general knowledge of the era didn't help, because they
deviated from the facts so much that I only got more confused.

People are going to compare this to Shakespeare in Love, which was
also entirely fiction. But for all that was wrong with SIL, it was
still a wonderful, entertaining, and moving film. Though the notion of
Shakespeare making up the plot of Romeo and Juliet himself was absurd
(like most of his plays, the plot was not original), but at least the
changes there made clear sense to the movie as a whole - and it
contained plenty of details that made it obvious that the writers knew
the Elizabethan theatre world pretty well. We don't really know what
kind of guy Shakespeare was in 1593, in his late 20s, at the time of
Marlowe's death, when he was making the transition from being a
promising playwright to being the Soul of the Age, but Shakespeare in
Love comes off as a pretty good guess. And when they changed things,
you knew it was all in good fun - not to make a point or promote a
theory.

Still, Anonymous had a lot going for it. The cinematography, as
mentioned before, was fantastic, and many of the theatrical scenes
were great - The St. Crispin's day speech was just as rousing as it
was supposed to be. I also liked Oxford's chambers, with books
everywhere, bizarre scientific specimens in glasses, a zebra head on
the wall, maps all over…it's exactly as though someone had tried to
dream up the office of a 17th century genius and done a hell of a job
with it. And even though I got confused a lot, I definitely never got
bored.

I was quite pleased for an entirely selfish reason - my new book,
EXTRAORDINARY*, is out next Tuesday, and prominently features two bits
of Shakespeare - a bit from Twelfth Night, and the St. Crispin's day
speech (which characters shout as they roll a Wells Fargo wagon full
of unicorn poop through the streets of Des Moines), and both of them
just happen to turn up in the movie (along with the opening speech
from Richard III, which is also in both).

Adam "Okay, am I going to have to write a Marlowe movie MYSELF?" Selzer