Sometimes a film is bad because of its execution, but some special films are bad from the moment the idea takes form And sometimes a bad film springs fully formed from a director's mind to push a bogus conspiracy theory onto an audience who promptly and aggressively refuse to accept it, thus creating a failure on every level.

Anonymous is a 2011 film directed by disaster movie mainstay Roland Emmerich. It enjoyed a mixed critical reception, was restricted to a limited release, and flopped hard at the box office. The film is a historical drama that depicts the historical conspiracy theory known as the authorship question. The film cuts between a monologue explaining the theory to a crowd and multiple periods of Elizabethan London. Structurally, it's a mess, which needlessly cuts events out of order just to shoehorn in a stage presenter who exists only to verbally explain the film's conjecture to the audience.

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Piecing together the plotlines, they tell the tale of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, a troubled noble who secretly wishes only to write poetry. Edward must write his works in secret, sending them anonymously to playhouses and troupes so that they may be performed without identifying him. An actor and comedic drunk named William Shakespeare takes credit for the plays and blackmails Edward to claim the success for his own. Meanwhile, Edward deals with a tumultuous marriage, involves himself in royal politics, begins a torrid affair with Queen Elizabeth, learns of his true lineage, and dies with his legacy well hidden. By the film's end, Edward is portrayed as the soul of the age and the most important figure in English history, cruelly unrecognized for his divine greatness.

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The script of Anonymous is full of very simple mistakes, from shifting around the date of Kit Marlowe's death to randomly reordering the stagings of Shakespeare's plays to suit the narrative to slandering a number of historical figures. Historical inaccuracies are to be expected in most film, it's not a documentary after all, but the changes to the facts are not just choices made to aid the pacing or suit the film's themes. The historical changes are intentional and necessary to support the conspiracy theory that it's built around. It's barely a drama, it's more of an apocryphal visual demonstration to bring across a point. The film is best compared to a high-budget version of a History Channel dramatization, except most of the history is wrong and it's delivered in a format that seems designed to confuse. Sony commissioned actual high school and college lesson plans to encourage students to question Shakespeare's claim to his own work. While the studio claims the lesson plans do not assert Oxford as the writer of the works, the film certainly does.

The theory behind Anonymous is called the Oxfordian theory, the belief that the Earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare's great works. Conversely, most people are Stratfordians, believing that William Shakespeare from Stratford upon Avon wrote all the plays with his name on them. A number of famous figures believed that Shakespeare was not responsible for his works, from Sigmund Freud to Mark Twain and many more. Not every Anti-Stratfordian believes the same writer is actually behind the famous works, but they find cohesion as long as they agree it wasn't Shakespeare.

Though intellectuals debated the authorship question since the mid-nineteenth century, the specific source and connection to Edward de Vere was coined by J. Thomas Looney in 1920. He cited as evidence that Shakespeare would have been lower class and poorly educated, while most of his heroes were aristocratic. The theory goes, therefore, that only an aristocrat could have had the skill and experience to write Shakespeare, and the man from Stratford was simply too low-born. Looney's theory gained some prominence after release, but dropped off almost entirely for decades, before being revived by a certain director's big Hollywood film. Against all odds, the Oxfordian theory found a new audience.

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Roland Emmerich, Jim Jarmusch, John Hurt, Sir Derek Jakobi, several Supreme Court justices, and even Keanu Reeves have all expressed support for the Oxfordian theory. Jarmusch and Hurt collaborated on a film that suggested Kit Marlowe was the real soul behind Shakespeare, even claiming he was assassinated to prevent that secret getting out. Some of the most beloved celebrities claim that a man like Shakespeare could never write art like what he laid claim to. So why do so many seemingly smart, creative, talented, and decent people support this unfounded conspiracy? The tragic answer is classism, and skeptics need look no further than Anonymous.

The basic thesis of Anonymous, as well as of the theory that informs it, is that Shakespeare's works are too perfect to be crafted by someone who was not themselves perfect. The film portrays Shakespeare as a bumbling drunken loser, while taking every opportunity to show Edward as a noble hero. Edward, a rich, elegant noble with a direct line to the divinely appointed monarchy must be the soul of the age, goes the claim, because only the right kind of person could create great art. The idea that Shakespeare could be any one of us, that any person born in even the least impressive circumstances could craft something that will be remembered forever is actively disgusting to some people.

William Shakespeare wrote the plays his name is attached to, there is no evidence to suggest otherwise, and Anonymous is a terrible film. The classist cultural myth that the film represents is a cruel argument against one of the most important aspects of humanity, that anyone can create something great.

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