Review Link Anonymous:

I haven’t done a very good job about withholding my rage at the very idea ofAnonymous, Roland Emmerich’s Shakespeare-was-a-fraud movie, ever since I hear about it and the many months of ads and news “stories” haven’t done much to quell my rage. But I did try to go into the movie with an open mind and I found that, even discounting the historical dubiousness of it all, it’s still not every good. Here’s my review. 

So what’s so awful about the anti-Stratford crowd? Well, the whole notion’s premised on the idea that a man of Shakespeare’s humble beginnings could go on to become the greatest writer in the English language. That’s pure snobbery. And it runs counter to so many other examples. Some people are born into art and culture and learning. Others see them from a distance and want them for themselves. Without that instinct we wouldn’t have Keats’ “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer,” to name just one. (Or Keats, for that matter.)

How could someone of Shakespeare’s background write about nobility so well? Let me counter with this: Could someone of noble background have written of nobility so sharply? Maybe. But it also makes sense as the perspective of an outsider who could see nobility and all its trappings from another perspective.

Above is a clip from the Troilus And Cressida, the most unsparingly anti-heroic of Shakespeare’s plays. Someone with a vested interest in letting the crowds think heroes and noblemen their betters might have written it, but I doubt it.