Anonymous: Rhys Ifans - makes you want to believe?
Hilarious. That’s the verdict on Anonymous, the film that purports to tell ‘the truth’ about Shakespeare. The Oxfordians must be beside themselves with glee that the film-makers bought the notion that a man who died before many of the major plays were even performed was the real author. (There’s an added frisson in the cameo appearance of Mark Rylance, the former artistic director of the Globe theater who was one of the most prominent deniers of the ‘Man from Stratford’.)The Oxfordians have to get around their hero’s inconveniently early death, and they do so by claiming that the plays were composed in isolation and performed years later, rather than written as part of a business, in collusion with other writers, responding to specific contemporary events, and with particular actors in mind. It’s rather as if 400 years into the future people will think that Coronation Street was scripted in its entirety by one person sitting in a study.
It’s rather as if 400 years into the future people will think that Coronation Street was scripted in its entirety by one person sitting in a study.
Having said that, Rhys Ifans almost makes you want to believe. He imbues Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, with a soulful intensity that finally blows away memories of the many goofs and wastrels he’s played in the past. With long, elegant, ink-spattered fingers, he taps out the rhythms of iambic pentameter as he sits in his theater box, watching his own plays being hijacked by the upstart crow, Will Shakespeare. Shakespeare, engagingly played by Rafe Spall, is somewhat unusually presented as being illiterate (though he can read). So much for the superlative grammar-school education that Shakespeare shared with the similarly plebeian Marlowe (and Marlowe was one of the best latin translators around).
Ben Jonson is superlatively played by Sebastian Armesto, but it’s unfortunate that he isn’t given the status he deserves, that of a giant of theater in his own right. I thought I heard an anachronistic blast of Mozart, which is entirely appropriate as the narrative takes on a distinct flavor of Amadeus, with Jonson as Salieri. And though Vanessa Redgrave gives a wildly funny and eccentric portrait of Elizabeth I, it’s a shame that this gifted and shrewd monarch is reduced to a ninny; and (in the earlier scenes with Joely Richardson as Elizabeth) a sex-obsessed ninny at that.
There are complicated subplots involving the Cecils and illegitimate children, confusing time-shifts and about a tablespoon of historical truth to each pint of fantasy and conjecture. But it’s fabulously enjoyable, even as it becomes ridiculous, as when Oxford casually mentions he’s also been writing rather a lot of sonnets. Who’s the Dark Lady then? What about all the homosexual references? How can any of this be squared with the story we’re supposed to be following?
I interviewed Charles Nicholl for his Shakespeare book The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street and briefly brought up the so-called ‘Authorship Controversy’, just for a laugh. Nicholl was having none of it.
For a fuller picture of Shakespeare’s writing practice (and yes, despite what Oxfordians and Baconians would have you believe, we know a lot about it), please read Stanley Wells’s fascinating Shakespeare & Co and James Shapiro’s eminently sane Contested Will. In addition, Tony Tanner’s Prefaces to Shakespeare and the RSC series of individual plays, with their excellent notes, will give you abundant insight into the thought processes of the Man from Stratford.
