anonymous

i dont know all that much about shakespeare, i've read a few of his plays and watched a bunch of movies based on his work, but as for the man himself? i know very little.  it is with this relative ignorance that i come into this move.  it is a movie that puts forward a theory that the man we know as shakespeare didnt actually write any of the work that is attributed to him.  the film instead insists that it was actually a duke of oxford who wrote the highest regarded works in the english language.
the film itself is a bit of a mess, it jumps around from the present, to 1601, three years earlier, and then 40 years before that.  often times, the jumps are hardly even addressed, we are just expected to know what is going on.  its a jumbled mess for the first half hour or so, but after that the story falls in to place and is actually quite compelling.  there is a lot of interplay between the duke, the actors of the plays, and queen elizabeth.  the twists and turns along the way get a bit muddled due to some poor casting (so many of them look alike i had a hard time keeping them straight!) and a bunch of time jumps, the the main drive of the story remains fairly clear.  the most impressive part of the film, though, was the visceral quality of the imagery.  all of the scenes at the theatre were quite spectacular  the staging of the plays that were performed, the audiences responses, and the dark dingy reality of life at this time.  they do a great job of set and costume design, showing the reality of dirty fingernails, ink stained fingers, and poor dental hygiene.  the theory of who the real author of the shakespeare plays is an interesting one, but the visuals alone for the film make it worth watching!