Has anyone else shared the misfortune of seeing this woeful tripe?
I went yesterday with my stepson (aged 16) - we saw the film in a Russian-dubbed version (actually the dubbing was magnificently done, and they had fine voice-actors for all the roles). Sadly it hasn't been given an original-soundtrack release in Moscow (although some films do).
What's hot:- an all-star cast of Britain's finest thesps playing all the main roles
- a luxury-budget period movie production - the costumes alone must have cost a king's ransom
- intriguing "virtual reality" scenery projections of Elizabethan England - rather well done, in fact
What's not:- The Earl Of Oxford ages forty years during the play, but Ben Jonson stays the same age?
- A string of historical gaffes - for example having Marlowe still alive in 1598, when he was murdered in 1593? The audience of "Richard III" mown down by cannon-volleys, after they riot during the performance (hello?) at the portrayal of Richard as a hunchback?
What's truly grot:- Making Shakespeare into a clueless illiterate clot who can't even read or write
- Cramming two plots into one film - one about the political shenanigans regarding Elizabeth's succession, the other about Shakespeare. It all takes 2+ hours to say nothing.
- A series of baseless assertions about the authorship of Shakespeare's plays which beggar all belief
- A plot which hinges on these baseless assertions, to suggest an authorship so absurd that the cinema audience burst out laughing when it was revealed - in a moment which the director evidently intended to be of Machiavellian dark intrigue ::) (I shall not reveal the plot, however, in case you have money to burn on watching this twaddle).
- Dialogue written with the leaden hand of a would-be dramatist, displaying utter inability to write screenplay.
- A sequence of dire anachronisms, including having the Earl Of Essex's marriage accompanied by Mozart's Requiem. Also having recorders and a lute acconpanying a play at the Rose Theatre - which wouldn't have been heard more than 8 feet away. Shawms, sackbutts and cornetts were the standard line-up.
But probably the most noxious nostrum in this coffee-table concoction is that William Shakespeare could never have written his own plays "because only a nobleman would have the background and education" (an opinion put into the mouth of one of Shakespeare's contemporaries, in the script). This nauseous nonsense appears even more absurd when presented alongside a cast that numbers Marlowe, Kyd, Jonson, Dekker - commoners all! - and seems to be nothing but empty sucking-up to the titled classes. In reality there is precious little respect for the merits of lineage or title in Shakespeare's works, and this whole theory has nothing but aristo-fawning to back it up. It's not
merely the elitist nature of this claim which irritates me (although it certainly does) - it's perhaps more that if this subjective guesswork, based on a sequence of modern-day assumptions about the class system in England, then the argument is truly built on the finest of sand ;)
