I saw *Anonymous* last night

[Tom Reedy]

Judging by the attendance, it won't be given a wide release. The
theater seated about 250, and maybe 65-75 people were at the early
evening showing, mostly older, academic-looking types with expressions
of righteous disgust on their faces. Academics go crazy over things
that don't really matter in the grand scheme of things (as the old
saying goes, academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of
politics, because the stakes are so low), and they're acting exactly
the way Emmerich, et al, hoped they would, thereby giving the movie
all kinds of free publicity.

Unfortunately--or fortunately, depending on how apoplectic you are
over the release--all the free publicity won't save the movie, and in
fact it appears to have awakened the academic establishment, a
development which anti-Strats might regret if the situation reverts to
the way it was between WWII and the early 1980s.

There really wasn't a whole lot to it and what was there was all over
the place. The history is laughably bad, as you already know, and
Emmerich tried to cram in every Oxfordian argument he could. For one
example, Oxford was practicing fencing and apparently his fencing
partner for no good reason whatsoever went berserk and tried to kill
him, but succeeded only in making Oxford lame. There was no reason for
this incident whatsoever; it neither developed the character nor
advanced the narrative nor got a laugh; it was completely extraneous
to anything except to fill in the Loonerian Identi-Kit to match Oxford
with the works. Emmerich is supposed to be a good enough director to
know better than this, but I'm sure it was in the script. It produced
only puzzlement in the audience.

The acting was not marvelous, nor was it atrocious. The sets were
great, though, and there were some excerpts from the plays that were
very good, some of them with Mark Rylance (Richard Burbadge), and he
was very good also. It made me wish that Emmerich had made a movie of
one of Shakespeare's plays as it would have been played during his
lifetime--now that, I think, would be a very big hit, and would have
done what I think he tried to do here: try to jump out of the B-movie
bucket and into the rank of great directors.

I was surprised at how effeminate Derek Jacobi's voice was (I suppose
I haven't seen him in so long that I was expecting Ian McKellen, my
fav). I was also surprised to learn that (according to Jacobi's lines,
at least) Shakespeare's parents, wife, and children were all
"irrefutably illiterate", when the film itself claimed that William
Shakespeare could "read well enough, how else could learn his lines",
but couldn't form his letters.

The plot was incoherent and indecipherable to my wife, who knows a bit
about the SAQ but not really a lot, and she could not follow the
flashbacks, although I had no trouble, being already familiar with the
topic. She couldn't piece it together, although she generally knew
what was going on.

The Shakespeare character actually had more room for expression than
either Jonson or Oxford, probably because the actor knew he could have
some fun with it. Poor Ben Jonson had two expressions: pitiful and
angry. And it might come as a surprise to know that Elizabeth not only
gave birth to Oxford and Southampton, but also Essex; she should have
been called the Fruitful Queen. The deal was that she would spare
Southampton's life if Oxford renounced his right to have his plays and
poem attributed to him.

Overall, I give it a D+ to a C-. It just wasn't very good. I had hoped
that it would have been a lot worse or a lot better, so that I could
have had the pleasure of either ridiculing it as the *Plan Nine from
Oxfordia* or enjoying the cunning and ingenuity of my blood-sworn
enemies, but alas, all we get instead is this movie. Meh.

I doubt that anybody will actually convert to Oxfordism because of
seeing it. If they do, I'm sure almost all Strats will agree that the
Oxys are welcome to them--just make sure you appoint them all minders
to keep them from playing in the street and to take them to the
restroom when they need to go. In fact, I'm wondering if Emmerich and
Orloff didn't meet with the Shakespeare Trust several decades ago and
plan out a long-term campaign to take down the anti-Stratfordians and
make Oxfordians look ridiculous. If that is what actually happened
(and there's no evidence that it didn't, so it's as likely as the
Oxfordian theory), they couldn't have come up with a better movie to
do it with.

TR

[David Kathman]

Tom -- I saw the movie this afternoon with Adam Selzer and Greg
Reynolds (as Adam's post here noted), and I don't think you're right
about Oxford's fencing partner trying to kill him out of the blue, for
no reason. The movie shows Robert Cecil deciding that Oxford had to be
killed, and soon after comes the fencing scene you're talking about,
where I assumed the guy was an assassin sent by Cecil. The movie also
depicts Cecil manipulating the queen into sending Essex and
Southampton to Ireland, and I assumed that the guy who pulled a gun on
Essex in their tent (before being shot dead by Southampton) was also
an assassin sent by Robert Cecil. In the movie's made-up version of
history, it all makes sense -- only Robert Cecil knew that Oxford,
Essex, and Southampton were Elizabeth's biological sons, and so he had
to eliminate them so she wouldn't name any of them her heir, instead
of the Cecils' preferred candidate, James. I realize that a lot of
this can be hard to follow if you're not familiar with the intricacies
of Oxfordian mythology and Prince Tudor theory.

I'm writing up a review which I plan to post to the Shakespeare
Authorship page, hopefully this week sometime.

Dave Kathman
dj...@ix.netcom.com