50 Thoughts I Had While Watching "Anonymous"

1. The onscreen titles look surprisingly like the font “Papyrus”, the worst font, worse than Comic Sans.
   
   
2. The film starts in New York. New York, New York, famous for its associations with the English Bard.
   
   
3. DEREK JACOBI IS IN THIS AND I DO NOT APPROVE. 
   
   
4. Okay, Jacobi, I know you are a sceptic and support the authorship question Jacobi, but you were amazing in Doctor Who, The Last Tango in Halifax and In the Night Garden. You do not need this gig. 
   
   
5. And now we’re getting sweeping, running backstage shots of a busy theatre. All this makes me do is realise how much I miss Birdman.
   
   
6. Derek Jacobi casually strolls up to the theatre, clearly unprepared, and launches into a prissy rant about how someone with a “Grammar School” education couldn’t possibly write words, clearly unaware at how ruthlessly challenging and comprehensive a grammar school education was in the late fifteenth century, but I’ll let that slide.
   
   
7. Actually, I won’t let that slide. Fuck this film already and its classist attitudes.
   
   
8. Why is suddenly there rain on stage? Dramatic effect? A pointless effect. I am mad at this film and its pointless effects.
   
   
9. Okay, so that transition into Jacobean London was seamlessly done. I give Mr Emmerich credit where it is due. But I can’t get the image of a bored Derek Jacobi standing underneath a really obvious garden sprinkler out of my head. 
   
   
10. ACTION SEQUENCE. Ben Jonson is running from the guards with some paper tucked under his arm. He hides in the Rose Theatre, so the guards burn a giant building down without even legitimately trying to look for him. Logic!
    
    
11. Small point – Jonson’s father is apparently a “glassblower” in this adaptation. If his family comes from humble beginnings and he didn’t have a university education (though Wikipedia states Jonson wanted to but didn’t) then why is it totally fine for him to be able to write amazing literature but not Shakespeare? Technically, Jonson is also a bit of a pleb and by rights shouldn’t be a genius, but the film’s not about him.
    
    
12. Edward, Earl of Oxford, is introduced walking the streets of London with a hankie to his nose, tiptoeing on a wooden plank to avoid the mud like a sissy. Already I think he’s a nonce. 
    
    
13. Please tell me that’s not Shakespeare.
    
    
14. Oh. Wow. I normally very much respect Spall but we’re going for the whole “let’s make Shakespeare a complete bumbling cad” thing in the style of The Shakespeare Code in Doctor Who, just to make dead sure the audience know he’s too dumb to write plays. Cracking. This lazy casting won’t grate on my nerves at all.
    
    
15. Wait, wasn’t Marlowe dead at this time? What year is this? Is the film deliberately not telling me what year it is so I can’t fact check its historical accuracy? I think it is. Sneaky. I see what you did there, Roland.
    
    
16. “Since when did words ever win a war?” says Essex. Well, there’s the famous Tilbury speech, for starters, which YOUR OWN BLOODY QUEEN performed years ago prior to this scene. Also you won’t have heard of Martin Luther King Jr, Ghandi or any other famous men-of-words throughout the ages yet, but as an Elizabethan nobleman, your education would have included lessons dedicated specifically to rhetoric and language, so either you weren’t paying attention or I’m supposed to hate you.
    
    
17. Now for the first appearance of Queen Elizabeth. At least she looks appropriately withered and aged here. She also looks absolutely delighted by people pretending to be fairies though, so I’m suspect as to what I’m supposed to think of her.
    
    
18. “It’s by… Anonymous,” whispers the mysterious dwarf. TITLE. BOOM. MIKE DROP.
    
    
19. In an unnecessary flashback, the Earl of Oxford has written his first play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream aged NINE. So not only is Roland Emmerich retconning the recognised Shakespeare canon by putting Midsummer first, but he’s also, essentially, suggesting that the plot, language and structure of one of the most famous and beloved comedies in English literature is so basic that a nine-year-old could write it.
    
    
20. Forty years? Five years? I don’t know what year it is in the first place so these constant flashbacks-within-flashbacks have no context for me. Please stop with the flashbacks.
    
    
21. Back to the older, wiser, Rhys Ifans, who is lecturing Ben Jonson: “I am the Earl of Oxford, that’s my wife, who’s the daughter of my very esteemed adoptive father William Cecil, because my parents died, which means you should feel sorry for me even though I’m being a bit of a git, and this is my big house, and these are my flowers, and I like poetry, and I am an Earl, and I am important and I am giving LOTS OF EXPOSITION in a very droll voice, because I am upper class but also mysterious and important.”
    
    
    
22. Also, the roses in Oxford’s garden are LITERALLY Tudor roses. I’m not a botanist but I’m quite sure that it’s genetically impossible for roses to be two colours like that, and that the “Tudor Rose” is just a symbolic coat of arms to combine the two noble houses of York and Lancaster rather than an actual, living plant. Unless Rhys Ifans has servants who literally spend their day *ahem* painting the roses red, in which case, The Earl of Oxford is the original Queen of Hearts and I approve of this mashup.
    
    
23. The only notable thing in this film so far is an obviously Italian servant who clearly seems to speak mostly good English apart from a few words random of Italian out of nowhere, just in case you occasionally forget he’s Italian. 
    
    
24. Flashback again. this time The Earl of Oxford is now that guy from the Mortal Instruments: City of Bones. It’s a testament to how much I hate this character already that he wants to study poetry for pleasure, is refused this request, and I’m secretly pleased.
    
    
25. As I’ve already mentioned, rhetoric, latin, grammar and the like were not thought of as necessarily evil, and poetry was a celebrated high art form in the Elizabethan court. Nobles like Thomas More wrote Utopia during Henry VIII’s reign, for instance. Celebrated courtiers such as Spencer and Syndney wrote extensive poetry sequences which pleased the queen enormously and were thought of as exemplary works of art. The Cecils, uncharacteristically, call poetry Unchristian. I can only presume that we’re supposed to hate the Cecils.
    
    
26. Oxford literally throws a sword at the young Robert Cecil, a crippled boy who is playing chess with himself because he has no friends. Edward can clearly see this and calls Robert a loser right in his lonely crippled face. As a reminder, we are supposed to like the Earl of Oxford.
    
    
27. Oxford gets all high and mighty about his poems and stabs a servant through a curtain Because Reasons. I wonder if this is a cack-handed symbolic literary reference? (Hint – it MASSIVELY IS). You can hear Roland Emmerich basically jumping up and down behind the camera screaming “IT’S LIKE HAMLET, GET IT?” in order to give credence to this ludicrous plot. 
    
    
28. The young Earl of Oxford straight up killed a servant for no reason. He was following orders and hid because he was scared of Edward. I presume that is because the Earl of Oxford’s reputation for being a bullying dick precedes him. Edward thinks it’s totally unfair that he might be punished for killing an innocent man. I repeat, we are supposed to like the Earl of Oxford. 
    
    
29. Flashforward – and yes, that is Mark Rylance. MARK RYLANCE! What are you doing here? I know you and Jacobi are talented Shakespearean actors who support the authorship question, but why are you in an Emmerich film?
    
    
30. We now jump cut to Edward, Earl of Oxford and Queen of Hearts, practising signing “Shakespeare” in different styles and spellings. I assume this is supposed to give credibility to the theory that Shakespeare didn’t write his own plays because he never signed his name in a consistent way. Spelling in the Elizabethan period was notoriously fluid and malleable, and signing your name with different spellings was not uncommon, so this is a moot point.
    
    
31. We learn that, Because Reasons, the Earl hasn’t been a very good landlord and estate holder and his family are very poor, in spite of his fancy house and earldom. He is a tight bastard and won’t give his daughter a decent dowry. He is cold to his wife. When she accuses him of “playing the flute while estate burns”, he corrects her mid rant to say that the correct phrase is “Nero fiddles while Rome burns” because he is a stickler for idioms. In the modern day 21^st century, The Earl of Oxford would be the kind of guy who gets angry when a toddler misspells “happy anniversary” in a card.
    
    
32. And lo! Suddenly, in yet another flashback, a wild sex scene between Queen Liz and Edward appears. And lo again! A post-coital sonnet miraculously and efforlessly appears. Rather than making me feel moved, all this does is make me miss Shakespeare In Love.
    
    
33. Flashforward, and the most glaring howler in this montage of plays is that MacBeth is here apparently written before King James’ ascension to the throne, despite the fact that a) it is a play set in Scotland dealing with witchcraft, specifically written for James’ tastes and patronage and b) it contains specific references to King James’ lineage which would make absolutely no sense to talk about while Queen Liz is still on the throne.
    
    
34. Now Hamlet is being performed in front of Elizabeth. The stabbing through the arras scene is being performed (in case we didn’t get the reference earlier), and Elizabeth is seemingly turned on and is massaging her breasts for no apparent reason, which is disturbing. 
    
    
35. “You know he’s illiterate,” says Ben Jonson. As I’ve already mentioned, a grammar school education was extremely comprehensive and Shakespeare’s extensive learning would have included reading, writing, Greek, rhetoric, Latin etc as standard. This is just lazy.
    
    
36. Now, for no reason, Edward’s fencing partner tries to kill him. Francesco, the Italian guy I mentioned earlier – who in case you forgot, signor, is most definitely Italian - runs to his aid. Everyone in this film is either a douchecanoe, or gets stabbed, or if you’re Chris Marlowe, both.
    
    
37. For some reason, the film is very hung up on Shakespeare designing his own genteel coat of arms. Everyone in the pub laughs at his efforts. This was a fairly ordinary, though not necessarily common, procedure for men on the rise in Tudor and Stuart England who wished to be welcomed as a gentleman. If anything, the laughter just makes all of the characters seem like snobs.
    
    
38. Ben Jonson, angry drunkard, now challenges Shakespeare to write the letter “I”, to prove his illiteracy. I briefly forgive the film, because I realise that if Shakespeare comes across as a git in Anonymous, then Jonson comes across as ten times more of a git.
    
    
39. The film also features as its subplot a cack-handed treatment of the Essex Rebellion. In a plot to stir rebellion against naming James I as successor, and to protect his illegitimate son the Earl of Southampton from being defeated, Edward pens Richard III as propaganda against Robert Cecil, in spite of the fact that Richard III was one of the first few plays that Shakespeare wrote.
    
    
40. Also the film here decides to not even try to be historically accurate twice-over, because Essex famously commissioned Shakespeare’s men to put on Richard II, not Richard III, which would make more sense in light of a military coup. My theory is that Roland Emmerich briefly glanced at the Wikipedia page of the Essex rebellion, wilfully misread Richard II as Richard III, decided that the likeness between Richard III the hunchback and Robert Cecil the hunchback was too delicious not to take up, and decided to sacrifice historical accuracy for “art”, or something.
    
    
41. I sense that Mark Rylance’s agent might be a genius for getting him this role in Anonymous; it allows Rylance to be part of a film that’s sceptical about play authorship, but by playing an actor who just performs Richard III, rather than  actually being involved in the Oxford drama, I can’t technically fault Rylance for being part of the ludicrous plot. This portrayal of Richard III might also have been a sneaky backdoor audition for his performance at the Globe Theatre a year or two later. Someone needs to give Mark Rylance’s agent a raise.
    
    
42. "Snubbed from the Pub" Jonson decides to rat on the upcoming Richard III production. When the censor asks Robert Cecil if he wants the play that’s lampooning him to be stopped, Rob shrugs it off and lets the it go ahead. Edward is trying to pick on a lonely cripple and the cripple brushes it off like it’s no big deal. As a reminder, we are supposed to like Edward, not Robert.
    
    
43. While the play is being performed, The Italian Guy who is Very, Very Italian, AKA Francesco Mario Pizza Garlic Bread, is in the audience. Jonson feels bad for ratting him out and tries to warn him of his impending doom, but just the first few opening lines of Richard III are enough to make the Globe groundlings  go full Les Miserables and his voice is lost in the crowd. The film cannot decide whether Jonson is a good guy or a bad guy, and I think it doesn’t matter, because everyone in this film is terrible.
    
    
44. “How does it end?” asks a crowd member. “No doubt tragically” says another.  This is the first good line in the entire film and I want to high five the screen.
    
    
45. Francesco Luigi Mozzarella Meatball dies heroically saving a bumpkin-prostitute/country-wench from the evil soldiers shooting civilians. His death is shot in bloodless slow-motion. Jonson cries a bit. I think we’re supposed to care.
    
    
46. Edward, Earl of Oxford, stares out of the window sadly at the carnage of the failed Essex rebellion below. His expression is one of shock and dismay. I can only conclude that Rhys Ifans has suddenly realised he is wasting his talent in a silly Roland Emmerich film that he is contractually obliged to finish. He resolves inwardly to do better next time. Unfortunately, his next major cinematic on-screen presence is as The Lizard in The Amazing Spiderman. Keep trying, Rhys.
    
    
47. Now Robert Cecil, badass huncback, the only character I have rooted for so far, is a bit mean. He points out Edward’s accidental incest, revealing Elizabeth as his mother. But Robert saves the awkward situation by coldly joking that this plot is a little like a Greek… Tragedy. LITERARY BURN. 
    
    
48. With that punning revelation, Rhys Ifans has now truly comprehended the depth of silliness the film has reached and can take it no more. He collapses into the courtyard, in the rain, taking no notice of the surrounding extras that are being offed in a rare act of mercy by Emmerich’s henchmen/camera crew.
    
    
49. Uncharacteristically for a man whose lovely dulcet tones provide warm narration for In The Night Garden, Jacobi performs a brief, bitter monologue, walks offstage like an arrogant sod, and the curtains close. This film has made me hate Derek Jacobi, which is certainly a feat.
    
    
50. I can’t help but notice no one in the fictional audience clapped at the end of Jacobi’s bit. They all get up to leave in dead silence and disapproval as the Papyrus credits roll. How apt.