Sat, May 26 2012

Anonymous review

Fri, Nov 18 2011 09:00 CET

byWill Noble, The Prague Post

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Anonymous review

Anonymous director Roland Emmerich
Photo: Photo: Jack Oughton/flickr.com

A recent news story reported that in William Shakespeare's home county of Warwickshire, street and pub signs bearing the Bard of Avon's name, as well as statues in his honour, were being covered up in protest. Protest against what? Anonymous, a new film that offers the theory that Shakespeare was an illiterate drunkard who stumbled upon his legacy by chance.

But does Anonymous really warrant the malodorous name it has been given by Stratfordians?

Certainly, one gets the impression that Roland Emmerich wants to stoke contention. "Was Shakespeare a fraud?" teases the none-too-delicate tagline, and yet this is never actually in question. From the outset we're told, "Yes, he was a bloody fraud." The real Bard, claims Anonymous, was Edward de Vere (Rhys Ifans), Elizabethan aristocrat and Earl of Oxford.

This assertion alone has been the catalyst for sundry hissy fits in and outside of the literary community. And yet were any of Shakespeare's own works entirely historically accurate? Certainly not.

What matters is not whether Anonymous is faithful to history (and there is no way it is entirely), but how convincing – more so, entertaining – it is in putting its argument across. To see, or not see, that is the question.

Read the full story at The Prague Post.

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