Orloff [the writer of the movie --N.] brushes off such criticism of his movie as a knee-jerk response to an “academic subversion of normality.” “When you learn it’s not fact, it’s a bit unsettling,” the screenwriter said. “Why not question everything you’ve been taught?”Well, yes, in that situation I can see how that would happen, although as far as I know Orloff hasn't begun questioning the moon landing or the traditional dates of Ancient Egypt's Second Intermediate Period.
The studio plans to concurrently release Last Will. & Testament, a documentary about the authorship debate, through First Folio Pictures (a production shingle whose president is none other than Roland Emmerich) and has been providing materials to educators that encourage teachers to “make this thought-provoking new film part of your class plan.”And this worries me. I think teaching class materials based on Anonymous is a bad strategy: it's giving kids an inaccurate and incomplete picture... because Anonymous didn't go far enough. It's true that conventional views of Shakespeare are completely false. But not in the way most people think. Let me elaborate.
* * *
When I heard about Roland Emmerich's Anonymous, I was excited. Finally, a movie that wasn't afraid to take on conventional scholarship and challenge long-held beliefs about Shakespeare. But then I saw a photo of Shakespeare from the movie:
Apparently the film thinks so little of Shakespeare that he doesn't even know which direction to bow in
I'm sure you see the problem here.
You see, Anti-Stradfordians (people who don't believe Shakespeare wrote the plays) often say that we don't have any evidence that Shakespeare ever read a book, and that we don't have anything that shows he wrote the plays besides copies of works that were allegedly by him and had his name attached to them on the cover somehow, and some obviously mistaken contemporary accounts.
But that brings us to an urgent, basic issue that needs to be sorted out before we can begin questioning identities:
