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Roland Emmerich's 2011 film, Anonymous, is inspired by the same theory that fascinated Sigmund Freud during the last dozen years of his life - namely, the hypothesis that “William Shake-Speare” (as Ben Jonson once spelled the name) was the pseudonym of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford (1550-1604). The film has generated much debate, some of it acrimonious. Why should this be?
This film challenges widely accepted “truths.” And those ostensible truths are intertwined with an idealizing transference to the bard. Freud observed that we know so little about the traditional author that we can imagine he was every bit as great as his works are.
The film won six German Film Awards. The acting in the film has won praise from many critics. Vanessa Redgrave portrays the older Queen Elizabeth most convincingly, while her daughter Joely Richardson is the younger Elizabeth. Rhys Ifans departs from his past film roles to become the older Edward de Vere. He brings to life de Vere's intensity, his passion for writing, his reckless impulsivity, and his resigned awareness that he would not receive credit for his politically polemical works.
Anonymous chooses one among many possible narratives as to the how and why of de Vere's ostensible choice of the businessman William Shakspere of Stratford to serve as his front man. It depicts the theory that the offspring of de Vere's affair with Queen Elizabeth was the Earl of Southampton. This was the earl to whom Shakespeare's two long poems of 1593 and 1594 were dedicated. Many Shakespeare scholars believe that Sonnets 1-126, the so-called “Fair Youth” sonnets, address Southampton. It is plausible to conclude that both de Vere and Southampton were bisexual, and that they had a love affair with each other. “Oxfordians” believe de Vere, Earl of Oxford, wrote Shakespeare's works. I do not agree with the minority of Oxfordians - possibly influenced by their conscious or unconscious intolerance of the likelihood that de Vere was bisexual - who instead