Occam's Opposite: ‘Anonymous’ and the authorship of Shakespeare

For a bit of a laugh, I decided to watch Roland Emmerich’s film Anonymous, half-expecting to turn it off in the first ten minutes. But as the film progressed and the end credits rolled, I found myself enjoying it tremendously. From its cleverly staged time-shift to its impressive recreation of Elizabethan London, the viewer cannot help but be drawn into its cesspit of intrigue, danger, romance, politics, and theatre. As you may have gathered by now, I am a Bardolator, a staunch Stratfordian, and I don’t think for a minute that anyone other than the William Shakespeare of Stratford-Upon-Avon wrote those thirty-seven plays, one-hundred-and-fifty-four sonnets and five narrative poems that are often cited as being the first modern works of literature in the Western canon. I’m not going to spend much time or space here on the illogicality and implausibility of Emmerich’s film or the scholarship that informed it, nor do I want to stand on my soap-box and wax lyrical about the genius of Shakespeare, because it is boring and has been done before, and it’s not what this is about. All I want to do here – all I aim to do, as with everything else on this blog – is to write about my thoughts on the film.