Anonymous is a 2011 period drama film directed by Roland Emmerich and written by John Orloff. The film is a fictionalized version of the life of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, an Elizabethan courtier, playwright, poet and patron of the arts, and suggests he was the actual author of William Shakespeare's plays. It stars Rhys Ifans as de Vere and Vanessa Redgrave as Queen Elizabeth I of England.
The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 11, 2011. Produced by Centropolis Entertainment and Studio Babelsberg and distributed by Columbia Pictures, Anonymous was released on October 28, 2011 in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, expanding to theatres around the world in the following weeks. The film was a box office flop and received mixed reviews, with critics praising its performances and visual achievements, but criticising the film's time-jumping format, factual errors, and promotion of the Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship.
Plot
In modern-day New York, Derek Jacobi arrives at a theatre where he delivers a monologue questioning the lack of manuscript writings of William Shakespeare, despite the undeniable fact that he is the most performed playwright of all time. Ben Jonson is preparing to enter the stage. The narrator offers to take the viewers into a different story behind the origin of Shakespeare's plays: "one of quills and swords, of power and betrayal, of a stage conquered and a throne lost."
Jumping to Elizabethan London, Ben Jonson is running through the streets carrying a parcel and being pursued by soldiers. He enters the theatre called The Rose and hides the manuscripts he carries as the soldiers set fire to the theatre. Ben is detained at the Tower of London to face the questioning of puritanical Robert Cecil. The writings by Edward de Vere that Robert Cecil thought Ben had are not found on him.
In a flashback of five years, an adult Edward lives, disgraced and banished from court, in the last years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. The queen is old and in failing health, but, as she has remained unmarried, lacks an heir. The elderly Lord William Cecil, the Queen's primary adviser, and his son Robert manage the kingdom's affairs. A growing group of malcontent nobles gather at court, led by Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, who is widely believed to be Elizabeth's bastard son. The Cecils have secretly been planning to solve the succession crisis by offering the crown to Elizabeth's cousin, King James VI of Scotland; the idea of a foreign king inheriting the crown of the Tudors angers enough nobles that they begin to muster support for Essex to claim the throne when Elizabeth dies. Edward's young friend, Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, is pledged to support Essex but Edward warns him against any rash action and that any move they make has to be managed carefully to avoid civil war.
When Edward and Henry visit a public theatre to see a play written by Ben Jonson, Edward witnesses how a play can sway people, and thinks that it can be used to thwart the influence of the Cecils, who as devout Puritans reject theatre as the 'worship of false idols', with Queen Elizabeth concerning her successor. After the Cecils declare Ben's play illegal and arrest him, Edward arranges for his release and instructs him to stage a play he wrote and act as the author. The play, Henry V, galvanizes the people and even Ben, who had contemptuously dismissed Edward's skill as a writer as the passing fancy of a bored nobleman, is impressed. At curtain call, however, William Shakespeare, an actor and "drunken oaf", steps forward to be recognized as the author of the play.