Anonymous - 2011 political thriller set in Elizabethan England
If you haven’t seen the trailer for ‘Anonymous’ yet then it’s worth the few minutes!
Set in Elizabethan England, the movie explores the question that has baffled academics for hundreds of years – was Shakespeare the author of the works attributed to him?
Directed by Roland Emmerich (The Day After Tomorrow, Independence Day), written by John Orloff and starring Joely Richardson as the Princess Elizabeth and Vanessa Redgrave as Queen Elizabeth I, this movie looks unmissable!
The amazing shots of Elizabethan London are enough to ensure my attendance.
The film will be released in the US on September 30.
Fast Tube by Casper
Wow! I alredy see the trailer, but i didn’t know that Vanessa Redgrave was play Elizabeth! She was played Anne Boleyn in A Man for all Season, in 1966!
Shakespeare is done to death in the British Secondary school curriculum. I remember going to a lecture from a man who claimed one of his aristocratic ancestors wrote Shakespeare’s plays and he was the illegitimate son/lover of Elizabeth I and so was suffering from an oedipus complex! Although he did not have a particularly strong argument, in my view, for why he was him, there are undoubtedly some mystery surrounding the elusive playwright. For example, the records at Stratford upon Avon that suggest the man who lived in that area could not write, and the detail such as that in the Merchant of Venice which suggests he was well-travelled (and therefore probably aristocratic and not the Shakespeare of Stratford), are all difficult to push down. I think it is one of those things we will never truly know, and which conspiracy theories won’t solve.
I think I will go and see the film when it is released in the UK, because it looks really good, even if the story seems a little far-fetched! Perhaps I will write a blog post about it on http://www.theyorkhistorian.blogspot.com/