For it offers a ludicrously reductionist view of England’s greatest writer, William Shakespeare, and a grotesquely offensive portrait of its most celebrated monarch, Elizabeth I.
The film is German director Roland Emmerich’s first non-action movie and he never lets the facts get in the way of a good story nor, indeed, a bad one.
Royal ruse: German director Roland Emmerich's new project attempts to show that Shakespeare did not write the plays credited to him
Controversial: The plot centres on the fact that it would have been a disgrace for an earl to be associated with writing or the stage
In his earlier film The Patriot, he depicted the British during the American War of Independence as sneering psychotics.
His new project attempts to show that Shakespeare (played by Rafe Spall as an illiterate buffoon) did not write the plays credited to him and that they were the work of Edward De Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, played by two actors (one of whom is Rhys Ifans, who has a remarkable lack of aristocratic finesse).
The plot centres on the fact that it would have been a disgrace for an earl to be associated with writing or the stage and so he used Shakespeare as his stooge.
However, this hardly holds water, for the real Earl of Oxford, in fact, held the lease of the Blackfriars Theatre in the mid-1580s, sponsored various theatrical companies and produced entertainments at court.
He also published mediocre poems under his own name, which bear little similarity to Shakespeare’s.
Star: Actress Joely Richardson attends the after party for Anonymous, in which she plays Elizabeth I
In Anonymous, it is claimed that De Vere wrote the part of busybody Polonius in Hamlet as an insult to his former guardian, Sir William Cecil, and Richard III was a satire on the ambitions of Sir William’s son, Robert. Yet there is no historical evidence for this.
There are too many inaccuracies to name them all. It is horribly apparent that the film-makers have less knowledge of Shakespeare’s verse and Elizabethan history than many literate 13-year-olds.
Far-fetched conspiracy theories come thick and fast, all based on the notion that Elizabeth I (played first by Joely Richardson and in her senility by her real-life mother Vanessa Redgrave) was an incestuous slut who bore the first of many illegitimate children at the age of 15. So much for the Virgin Queen!
Here is a classic example of propaganda being paraded as truth. Heaven knows if there are any more sinister intentions behind it than to make money out of the gullible.
You don’t need A-levels in history and English to recognise that Anonymous is preposterous.
