The Sound and the Fury: Roland Emmerich’s “Anonymous” and the Crisis of Historical Knowledge

I’ve been wanting to watch Anonymous, Roland Emmerich’s foray into Shakespeare and the Oxford theory of authorship of his plays and poems, ever since I saw the trailer way back in 2011. I’m a sucker for a costume drama, and this one seemed to have all of the delicious drama that I love about the genre.

However, one thing and another intervened, and I never really got around to doing so until now. Having now seen it I’m…very conflicted about the overall film. Setting aside for a moment the explosiveness of the film’s central argument — that Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, was responsible for writing the works of Shakespeare — it still feels as if Anonymous is actually two films smashed together. One is the costume drama, full of backroom dealings and schemings, fatal bloodlines, incest, and blood. The other is arguably the more high-minded literary thriller, about the nature of creativity and artistic intelligence, about the sacrifices that we’re sometimes asked to make for the good our art.

Unfortunately for all of us, Anonymous doesn’t do much to bring these two halves together in any sort of cohesive whole, and they continue to pull against one another, undercutting whatever coherence the film might have otherwise achieved. This problem is exacerbated by two…