10 Things I Hate About Anonymous

I should be happy that Anonymous turned out to be such a laughably incoherent botch of a film. One that should make the purveyors of the pernicious Shakespeare “authorship” conspiracy theory hide their heads in shame.

But, alas, they won’t. They have no shame. The conspiracy theorists who waste time trying to browbeat the credulous into thinking that the works of William Shakespeare were actually ghostwritten by Someone Else (in Anonymous, it’s the Earl of Oxford) can’t stop. They have invested too much of their lives in the chuckleheaded fantasy to give it up now, despite how ridiculous the film reveals it to be.

It’s kind of sad. They were all atwitter, the “Oxfordians,” when they when they heard that Roland Emmerich would be making this film. Emmerich, of course, is the auteur who brought us that super-distinguished film based on an equally bogus theory, 2012. “Ooh, Hollywood is paying attention to us!” the poor Oxfordians exulted.

Indeed, the Oxfordians are so excited about their turn on the big screen that I recently have been bombarded with email missives from an Oxfordian who, just by happenstance, is also editor of Fluoride Journal. (Remember the fear that the commies were poisoning our “precious bodily fluids” with fluoride? Birds of a feather.)

Believe me, I didn’t want to see the movie, or write about it. My position has always been that what matters is what Shakespeare wrote, not who he was. That life is short and you essentially have a choice between immersing yourself in the dizzying astonishments of his language or spending that precious time spinning idiot conspiracy theories about who wrote those words. I tried to avoid the subject entirely in my book The Shakespeare Wars, which was about genuine controversies regarding the way to read and play the plays. I didn’t want to dignify the film with any coverage or comment.

Read the entire article in Slate