Anonymous

From its opening frames Anonymous feels portentous and didactic. In a questionably necessary scaffolding story, the Shakespearean stage actor Derek Jacobi appears on a modern-day stage for some scene-setting defamation of the Bard?s name: ?What would you think if I told you that Shakespeare never wrote a single word?? Flashback to a heavily CGI-augmented version of sixteenth-century London, where all manner of aristocratic trickery is afoot.
?
The hunchbacked high courtier Robert Cecil (Edward Hogg) has arrested the playwright Ben Jonson (Sebastian Armesto) for sedition. Cecil suspects that Jonson has a secret he?s not telling, and he?s right?Jonson knows that the Earl of Oxford, Edward De Vere (Rhys Ifans), is secretly the author of the popular plays attributed to William Shakespeare. Because his works critique those in high places?and because, apparently, of the shame conferred by inky fingers?De Vere has chosen to hide behind a pseudonym. He tries to convince Jonson to be his beard, but in a moment of spontaneous opportunism, Shakespeare (Rafe Spall), a barely literate dolt in the company that performs the plays attributed to ?Anonymous,? seizes a copy of a play after a performance and passes it off as his own.
?
In a dreary subplot?really more of a co-plot, since it takes up almost half the movie?two young noblemen, the Earl of Southampton (Xavier Samuel) and the Earl of Essex (Sam Reid), lead an attempted rebellion against Queen Elizabeth (Joely Richardson as a young woman, her mother Vanessa Redgrave as an older one). There are reasons for this rebellion that involve succession disputes and the Stuart dynasty in Scotland, but honestly, life?s too short to get into them here. All you need to know is that Elizabeth?s reputation as the Virgin Queen is, shall we say, unearned?for years, the court has been shipping off the bastard children born of her affairs to be raised by families unaware of their royal provenance.
?
The movie?s middle section is a blur of doublets and double-crosses, so overstuffed with character and incident that it soon becomes impossible to keep up with the multiple time frames (we see De Vere played at three separate ages by different actors). The playwright Christopher Marlowe is mysteriously murdered. The queen takes a lover. Traitors are beheaded, legacies questioned, and scandalous truths revealed. Once in a while we get to see a fragment of a Shakespeare play?Bottom?s song from A Midsummer Night?s Dream, the St. Crispin?s Day speech from Henry V?that reminds us why we cared about this story in the first place. (Royal Shakespeare Company veteran Mark Rylance, an authorship skeptic in real life, plays the actor Richard Burbage, and, in the brief glimpses we get of him on stage, he?s sensational.) Vanessa Redgrave, working with way sub-Shakespearean material, does invent some brilliant bits of business for Queen Bess?in one scene, alone with her closest adviser, she plonks herself unceremoniously down on the base of the throne, reminding us that even sixteenth-century monarchs must have had their moments of unfiltered intimacy.

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=a979c13916afa980838a896013106f3e

sportscenter pay per view floyd mayweather fsu fsu defiance acc