The Soul of the Age, The Amadeus of the Stage: A review of the movie ANONYMOUS

In brief: See this movie. Anonymous is, first and foremost, a ripping good yarn. It also represents the biggest media event in the history of the Oxfordian story and perhaps the whole Shakespeare authorship question. Over the coming months and years, millions of people around the world who know nothing about Edward de Vere and his relationship to the "Shakespeare" canon will be witnessing the entire Elizabethan and Oxfordian world that Anonymous has fascinatingly and carefully created -- historical liberties and all. Some critics will undoubtedly knock Anonymous's departures from documented fact, even setting the Shakespeare authorship issue aside. But such criticism, in this reviewer's opinion, misses the point of the fictionalizing: The dramatic license the movie wields all arguably helps it tell a powerful and gripping story to as wide a global audience of moviegoers as possible. This is, on balance, a very good thing.

Review: Roland Emmerich's forthcoming Oxfordian biopic Anonymous (Columbia Pictures, US & UK release Oct. 28, elsewhere here) is a revolution in a 16:9 frame. Fittingly, the story prominently features its own uprising.

An enraged mob has just seen a performance of the Shakespeare play Richard III. Incited by the play's allegorical depiction of the crook-backed Elizabethan Machiavel Robert Cecil (Edward Hogg), they're ready to smash and burn. The playwright Ben Jonson (Sebastian Armesto) sees a trap, though, and he tries to stop the masses from running headlong into it. 

However, as the "Essex Rebellion" actually played out 410 years ago, it was preceded by a performance of the Shakespeare play Richard II -- a knottier drama whose relationship to the rebellion turns on less immediately accessible points, concerning a scene depicting the deposition of an English monarch. And while we're nitpicking, Jonson wasn't part of the marauding hordes either. 

Yet the success of Anonymous is that even those who know the historical facts with which the movie takes its liberties aren't given much time to care. It's a wild and entertaining ride. The intrigue and literary double-dealing sweeps the viewer up into a shadowy world all its own. The actor Shakespeare, as the film portrays him, is an ale-hoisting codpiece who fronts as the author of plays written behind the scenes by an Elizabethan court playwright who is no stranger to readers of this blog, Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. 

The depiction of de Vere blending into his Shakespearean milieu -- from authorship of plays and poems to courtly performances to outdoor public theaters -- is a revelatory and sometimes shocking experience. Even for an Oxfordian viewer.

Those who make a hobby or (part-time) profession professing the case for de Vere as "Shakespeare" nevertheless live in a hostile Stratfordian world, forever defending ourselves from critical brickbats. We rarely if ever get, even in our minds' eyes, to inhabit these worlds. But Anonymous exerts every effort to ensure that for two hours and ten minutes, we do. And, thanks to a painstaking work of filmmaking, we really do.

The immersion comes not just from the lavish production design and photorealistic and nearly ubiquitous CGI digital backdrops. (The computer generated imagery in fact fits so comfortably and seamlessly into the scenes and settings that it actually fooled Variety's reviewer into claiming Anonymous is "nearly CGI-free.")

A few performances -- in particular the mother-daughter team of Vanessa Redgrave and Joely Richardson as the elder and younger Queen Elizabeth -- entice the viewer like a siren to join the film's Oxfordian universe.

And Rhys Ifans's quiet and measured turn as the mature Edward de Vere reverses nearly a century of academic slander against his character by flashing the fire and shaking the spears that Oxfordians have long said makes him such a compelling and convincing "Shakespeare." Ironically, Ifans' knowing glances, each themselves concealing volumes, will probably reach more eyes than the whole output of books and articles in the long history of the authorship question. 

At a public Q&A with Emmerich recently, Columbia University professor James Shapiro (Contested Will) tried to smear Emmerich with insinuations of Nazism -- a vile slander that provided a case-in-point of the desperation and intellectual bankruptcy that marks most Stratfordian rearguard actions today. 

Orthodox Shakespeare scholars -- those whose reputations and careers rely on Shakspere of Stratford claiming exclusive right to the "Shakespeare" canon --  have good reason to be worried. The comparable arrow in their quiver, Shakespeare in Love, is an empty vessel compared to the heady draught of thriller, romance and epic literary biography that Anonymous serves up.

That Anonymous surpasses Shakespeare in Love, incidentally, is actually no trivial statement from this reviewer. I am one Oxfordian who enjoyed Shakespeare in Love, especially for its own witty and carefully crafted depiction of the period. But Shakespeare in Love was -- like Stratfordian best-selling books Will in the World or 1599: A Year in the Life of Shakespeare -- entertaining ultimately only for its backdrops and bit players. None of these stitch jobs had a living, approachable, comprehensible, and fallible human soul at its core.

Anonymous, on the other hand, delivers just that. It makes the kind of immediate and visceral human connection to its protagonist that good movie performances can forge. 

Anonymous class 1: Why search? Why ask?

This week, we're welcoming all to join in a discussion led by the teachers of an eight-week course called "Anonymous the Movie and William Shakespeare's Identity." (Description here [PDF], p. 21.)

The class is offered by the University of Minnesota's Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) and taught by OLLI science/liberal arts leader George Anderson* and retired Univ. of Minn. humanities professor James Norwood.

The instructors have one question this week which they'll be asking their students -- and ask anyone else to join in here and on the "ShakesVere" Facebook page. It's as follows:

Anonymous post-Toronto: The Good, The Better, The Oscars?

It has been fascinating to monitor the press coverage of the Oxfordian Columbia/Sony Pictures film Anonymous as it had its official premiere at the Toronto Film Festival this past weekend. It opens in movie theaters across North America and the UK on Oct. 28 -- and throughout the rest of the world in the two months following.

The upshot has been very upbeat: Four reviews (that I've been able to find) have posted so far, and all four are anywhere from begrudgingly positive to wholly positive. 

After the break, excerpts from the four. First, though, SBAN blog correspondent Ted Alexander was in attendance at last night's screening and had the following to report: 

    I loved the movie as did my wife and daughter. Crowd liked it too. No standing O but sustained applause.
    I think the movie succeeded spectacularly as entertainment. The actors were superb in their roles; the story was interesting and I thought,well-told; the cinematography, costuming, CGI, etc were all great. I really enjoyed all the bits of the various Shakespeare plays that they staged in the film (really enjoyed the Henry V, Mark Rylance does a wonderful job with the opening chorus).
    Now as to the historical accuracy of the movie, there are a lot of things wrong, especially chronologically and a lot of things that are highly speculative. I'm not a proponent of the PT theory but it does serve the plot well and makes the story more interesting. We don't know anything about what sort of relationship Ben Jonson had with the author but the way it is portrayed in the film feels like what I imagine it could have been or at least what I would have liked it to have been if that makes any sense. I really liked the Jonson character in the film. He has one of the best lines in the film to de Vere's wife when leaving their home near the end of the film.
    All-in-all I think the writer and the director have done a masterful job of creating an entertaining film that is still enlightening in some significant ways while taking liberties with the facts. Bravo! Can't wait to see it again.

(Mr. Alexander also took a handheld video of the audience Q&A with director Roland Emmerich, five members of the cast and the screenwriter John Orloff.)

**EDITED on Sept. 13 to add correspondent Kathryn Sharpe's brief review after attending the other public screening to date of Anonymous -- this year's Shakespeare Authorship Studies Conference in Portland, Ore.:

I loved it. Emmerich says it's his story of Shakespeare--a darker story. He changed the known history when necessary to convey an "emotional truth" just as Shakespeare did with his history plays. The changes will bother people who know what actually happened, but it's not unlike seeing your favorite book made into a film. Things will change for the sake of the art form. The most memorable scene for me? The interior of Oxford's study, with shelves piled high with leather-bound manuscripts, those precious manuscripts. And Hank Whittemore said that he does not mind that the movie will be picked apart and compared to the historical record, because it is not a pure fantasy (as was Shakespeare in Love), it is about real people, real literary works. Real politics and real power.

"Shakespeare" the Venetian: Why Titian matters

Following up on the previous post -- which finds Hamlet using dialect peculiar to East Anglia, where Edward de Vere grew up -- it's worth remembering that the Shakespeare canon is also brimming with evidence that the author knew and wrote about Italy from first-hand experience. 

In a few cases, it's even possible to date when the author must have been there -- or, at least, communicated with someone who was in Italy at the time. 

The Shakespeare epic poem Venus & Adonis provides one such clincher. It contains lines that suggest the author was in Venice -- and was capable of gaining entrée to a prestigious Venetian artist's studio -- sometime before August 1576, when the artist died. 

Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, traveled in Italy using Venice as his home base from May 1575 through March 1576. When de Vere traveled to La Serenissima, the city of canals had one superstar celebrity who arguably eclipsed all other cultural figures in town: The painter Tiziano Vecellio, a.k.a. Titian (c. 1488/1490 - 26 Aug. 1576). 

When the king of France, Henri III, had visited Venice in 1573, the king insisted on meeting Titian at the master's Venice studio. The octogenarian artist, former arch-rival of Michelangelo, had met and in many cases painted most of the leading intellectual, cultural, religious and political figures of the century. 

An Italianate English lord -- an emissary from Queen Elizabeth's court -- visiting Venice would have almost been expected to pay homage to the city's greatest living cultural icon. To have neglected to do so could have verged on the impolitic. 

If de Vere did indeed meet Titian, for starters, he could have heard a first-hand account of the life and the grisly death of one of Titian's patrons, the Duke of Urbino. The dearly departed Oxfordian scholar Andrew Hannas long advocated that Titian's portrait of Urbino, pictured here, was arguably the pictorial inspiration for King Hamlet's ghost, cap-a-pie, as Horatio says: 

A figure like your father,
Armed at point exactly, cap-a-pie [head-to-toe],
Appears before them, and with solemn march
Goes slow and stately by them: ...

On the Elsinore battlements, we hear again about the ghost's armor, his pale complexion and his "countenance more in sorrow than in anger." Check, check and check. The apparition does, the soldiers say, have a grey beard. (Titian's Urbino doesn't.) Then again, aren't all ghosts supposed to look grizzled? 

Anyway, Hamlet's play The Mousetrap stages Urbino's murder. Titian's patron was poisoned by a courtly rival named Gonzago. In the ear. (Hamlet says of the murderer, "His name's Gonzago: The story is extant, and writ in choice Italian.")

Titian could have told de Vere all about the gruesome deed his patron fell prey to and the insider politics behind Hamlet's play-within-a-play. 

Titian also had in his studio at the time a masterpiece that would become a prime inspiration for the first work ever published under the name "Shakespeare," the 1593 epic poem Venus and Adonis. 

"Shakespeare" the East Anglian: Hawks, Handsaws & Hamlet

In 2006 Greg Hancock, a reader from Coburg, Ontario, sent an email to the "Shakespeare" By Another Name Bulletin sharing his revelation that Hamlet's enigmatic line "When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw" actually derives from hawking lingo popular in East Anglia -- where Edward de Vere was born and spent part of his childhood.

Today, Mr. Hancock sent an update on this fine little nugget. Thanks to Google Books, he uncovered a fuller explanation of what Hamlet is talking about.

"Harnsa" (phonetic spelling) was East Anglian slang for a heron. When a hawk chases a "harnsa," the heron often flies with the wind to escape its predator. When the wind is from the south, the sun is at the hunter's back, so he can easily differentiate between his bird and his bird's prey. (By contrast, when the wind is from the north, the hunter might have to squint into the sun -- and would have a harder time telling the difference between the two birds.)  

What the commentator (from H.H. Furness's 1877 edition of Hamlet) doesn't say, however, is that the gloss only holds if the author of Hamlet's line knows East Anglian regional dialect -- and, presumably, has some experience hawking in that part of the country. De Vere, yes. Will of Stratford? Another misfit. 

In Mr. Hancock's words:

Basically the important point is that a heron or hernsew is pronounced "harnsa" in Norfolk and Suffolk, which together constitute East Anglia.  East Anglia is only about 150 miles from Stratford on Avon, but even in 2011 it is culturally and linguistically in a different country. ... It was presumably the same in the 16th century.

The Earl of Oxford was of course brought up in Suffolk, so he would have understood.  It is very unlikely Stratford Shakespeare would have been familiar with Suffolk dialect, or would have [understood] written references to it.

It is pleasing to me that the reference to a handsaw had been correctly identified as being a "harnsa" or heron before 1877 by a Fellow of Trinity Hall Cambridge, and as such gives a little more academic credibility to the theory.

His original email to the SBAN Bulletin is below, after the jump. 

This. Looks. Big. (pt. 2)

Sony Pictures released its second Anonymous trailer last week. US & UK release dates are still set for Oct. 28. (Other worldwide release dates are here.) 

[Aug. 17 addendum: The movie's international trailer was also recently released: More dialogue snippets, less short-attention-span smashcutting between visual baubles. (Ahem, not the most flattering commentary about American audiences, no?) Clearly providing more hints about the movie's storyline. Facebook discussion about all the above here.]

Anonymous questions: Did Queen Elizabeth have children?

[Aug. 9, 2011 EXCLUSIVE: See below for a crucial clarifying point from the screenwriter of Anonymous.]

In our sexually enlightened (obsessed?) times, discovering that a female monarch was once celebrated as "the Virgin Queen" immediately calls the pronouncement itself into question. Doth the lady protest too much?

The chaste public image campaign of the (ostensibly) childless spinster Queen Elizabeth I -- selling her to English Catholic revolutionaries as something like a royal, secular Virgin Mary -- was a piece of pure agitprop. And a brilliant one at that, engineered in no small part by her political genius of a chief counselor, William Cecil, Baron Burghley.

Queen Elizabeth was a woman with her own private sexual appetites. And no doubt like anyone else, some were fulfilled, some not. But, as portrayed considered in the movie Anonymous (and stated as fact by a host of Oxfordian and even Baconian books over the decades), the story of the Bard is allegedly one of almost unspeakable Elizabethan desires: Royal incest. Elizabeth, these claims state, was mother to "Shakespeare" and lover of "Shakespeare" who then produced a child by "Shakespeare."

The movie's director Roland Emmerich (2012, The Day After Tomorrow, Independence Day) has never been known to let the facts get in the way of a blockbuster storyline. The man has a track record for getting millions of butts into movie seats all over the planet. So let me not here be guilty of pettifogging a tub of popcorn.

On the other hand, the latest book that does unequivocally assert the royal incest theory of Oxford, Elizabeth and Southampton  that, by all accounts I can find, inspired the royal incest storyline in Anonymous is Charles Beauclerk's Shakespeare's Lost Kingdom. That's a book purporting to present a lost history of the Elizabethan court. That's fair game for more serious debate.

Nowhere have I seen a more thorough consideration of SLK than in Christopher Paul's review [PDF] in the 2011 edition of the online journal Brief Chronicles. Anyone interested in the so-called "Prince Tudor" debate would be well advised to familiarize themselves with Paul's characteristically cogent analysis.