Oh, To Be a Sun

I didn't go to see "Anonymous" expecting a documentary about Shakespeare.

Everywhere you turn, the Shakespeare scholars have been up in arms about the movie. Historical inaccuracies! Conspiracy theories! Bogus facts!

Who cares?

The movie was a spectacle and it would have been worth seeing solely for the exterior shots of London, at least to anyone who's been there.

And, yes, I know they were shot with some new technology and not actually fully recreated.

Who cares?

The cast was stellar and the casting of Vanessa Redgrave as the older Queen Elizabeth and her daughter Joely Richardson as the younger Elizabeth positively brilliant.

On the male side, it was a film that could have gotten plenty of extras right here in  RVA; everyone with a "Y" chromosome had facial hair of some kind.

And there was plenty of romance. The Earl of Oxford, when questioned by his lover, the Queen, about a dalliance, says, "How could you possibly love the moon when you have first seen the sun?"

It goes without saying that that line got him forgiven.

The group of writers in the play were a funny lot, begrudging each other's successes but also attending their plays and offering moral support in a period when writers did not have an easy go of it.

"Have you ever been arrested?" the king's guard asks the chained poet/playwright Ben Jonson.

"I am a writer!" Jonson says rhetorically. In today's parlance, he could have just as easily said, "Duh!"

Personally, I found the movie to be a rollicking romp through Elizabethan times with the added benefit of a good, if implausible, yarn.

Call me simple, but it's not important to me who wrote the plays I so enjoy seeing produced.

My movie-going companion and I had originally planned to see "My Fair Lady" until I asked if she'd prefer seeing "Anonymous" instead.

"Yea, I heard it was rad," she responded succinctly.

From where I sat, that's the perfect adjective to describe a thriller about Shakespeare being a fraud.

But don't take my word for it. I'm a writer!