Anonymous

The film ignores some solid facts in order to get a better story. Marlow was dead well before most of Shakespeare's plays appeared (unless he was secretly alive and wrote them). Macbeth was produced for King James, who believed in witches. Shakespeare had had a grammar school education and so would have been able to write. The play associated with the Essex Rebellion was Richard the Second. And illegitimate children could never inherit. It's also confusing at times, jumping about a lot and with several blond men who are easily confused with each other. It is still a fun story.

Incomprehensible, stopped viewing before the end. Don't waste your time with it. Too much swopping of time periods, too much overacting.

Aside from those with a (naturally) vested interest in Stratford-upon-Avon's £multi-billion tourism industry, as well as what few Americans are left that actually believe in the stories of Merrie Olde England, there are nowadays comparatively few who accept, for a moment, that the greatest body of literary work in the English langiuage was authored by an illiterate obscure Warwickshire wool merchant who never kept a journal (always assuming, he could actually write one), is highly unlikely to have travelled as a free spirit through the courts and kingdoms of Europe, and who, on his death, left a Last Will & Testament that makes no mention -- at all -- of his published work or the value thereof (which even by that time, was considerable.) William Shakespeare? C'mon. It's all a. . . Fraud. A necessary fraud though, given the actual authorship of the plays and the poems, of the provenance of writing so literate, so accomplished, so considered of narrative and structure. For the true author -- and at least, 'Anonymous' manages to get that right -- was alive in times of intrigue and vendettas and the highest of high Court conspiracies (of which, it's increasingly looking like, his very birth was one such.) All of this is not so much touched upon as twisted, manipulated, and unfathomably then lost in this hapless mish-mash of fiction, history-as-it-never-was, and some of the worst cinematography there's yet been: one grows truly weary of this idiotic vogue for filming everything Tudor-ish in hues of brown. Hey, guys: the sun did shine back then. The colors of the spectrum were indeed all in existence. Not helped in any way at all by Derek Jacobi's prefaratory appearance -- he did exactly the same thing, though thankfully, to greater effect, in the outstanding TV documentary-investigation into the 'real' Shakespeare, of which this rubboish is but a pale, pale imitator -- 'Anonymous' might've been saved by a truly regal, and excellent performance, from Rhys Ifans -- a performance that, with uncanny felicity, continually reminds one of the all-time greats of American stage and screen: the late Jason Robards Jnr. But Ifans' performance isn't enough to rescue this rambling, confusing, conceited mess: two minutes of Rafe Spall's clowning Shakespeare is enough to sink 'Anonyous' beneath the waves (of hysteria.) That it seems never to have occurred to writer and producer and director of this gibberish that, whatever Shakespeare may have looked or sounded like, he definitely could never have resembled Spall's character otherwise his head would've been cut off before the authorship fraud had even begun, is as inexplicable as a plot which seems to have culled some bits of history from Wikipedia and then lost the will, or the Will, to actually string 'em together with any kind of coherence or credibility. The story of England -- as it was, as it happened -- is very much the story of the Great Shakespeare Fraud. Nowadays, it's also the story of vast fortunes, vast egos, and a global tourism industry founded on the kind of lie the true author of the works of wool tradrer Shakespeare would appreciate with a chuckle. No chuckling for any audience having to suffer through this though. 'Anonymous' is the title, and anonymous it deserves to remain.

This is a joyless film and extremely longwinded just alot of egocentric actors trying to prove a pointless point. Yawn

Lamentable. Cut so fast and loose with basic facts of chronology that it was hard to take its premise seriously. For example, the film has Macbeth being performed in the reign of Elizabeth, when it was written after her death - that may sound pedantic, but the film is littered with similar inaccuracies and so it becomes very hard to give any credence to the film's central argument - that the Earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare's works. Whilst I don't blame Spall for playing it for laughs, his performance was at odds with the rest of the film which was taking itself oh so seriously. There might have been a comedy about Shakespeare that could have worked, there might have been a political thriller that could have worked, but welding these two strands togetehr here just did not work at all. Only bright note was Vanessa Redgrave's performance. This film is rubbish, don't waste your time.