Mick Hartley

At CiF there's an open thread under the title "Is it OK for a film to rewrite history?" on the subject of Roland Emmerich's new film Anonymous, which – as everyone is now probably aware – argues the case that Shakespeare's works were in fact written by the Earl of Oxford: a suggestion first mooted by the appropriately named Thomas Looney some 90 years ago. 

The CiF piece compares Anonymous to such historically dubious films as Braveheart. A major difference here though is that Sony has actually been distributing material to literature and history teachers to support Emmerich's case, which takes this beyond a mere case of rewriting history in the cause of entertainment. These guys are serious. James Shapiro in the NYT highlights the problem that, apart from a total lack of historical evidence, and the class-based snobbishness that underpins it ("only an aristocrat could have written such works"), the Oxfordian thesis does profound damage to the nature of the plays themselves:

The most troubling thing about “Anonymous” is not that it turns Shakespeare into an illiterate money-grubber. It’s not even that England’s virgin Queen Elizabeth is turned into a wantonly promiscuous woman who is revealed to be both the lover and mother of de Vere. Rather, it’s that in making the case for de Vere, the film turns great plays into propaganda.

In the film de Vere is presented as a child prodigy, writing and starring in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in 1559 at the age of 9. He only truly finds his calling nearly 40 years later after visiting a public theater for the first time and seeing how easily thousands of spectators might be swayed. He applauds his art’s propagandistic impact at a performance of “Henry V” that so riles the patriotic mob that actors playing the French are physically assaulted. He vilifies a political foe in “Hamlet,” and stages “Richard III” to win the crowd’s support for rebellious aristocrats.

De Vere is clear in the film about his objectives: “all art is political … otherwise it is just decoration.” Sony Pictures’ study guide is keen to reinforce this reductive view of what the plays are about, encouraging students to search Shakespeare’s works for “messages that may have been included as propaganda and considered seditious.”

But one comparison that the CiF piece misses in terms of historical inaccuracy – and also, as it happens, of distortion in a decidedly Anglophobic direction – is much closer to home: Emmerich's 2000 film The Patriot, starring Mel Gibson. British redcoats are here portrayed as brutal sadistic killers. The film was, as Jonathan Foreman noted, a supposedly authentic historical epic that in fact radically rewrote the known history of the American War of Independence:

It does so by casting George III’s redcoats as cartoonish paragons of evil who commit one monstrous — but wholly invented — atrocity after another. In one scene, the most harrowing of the film, redcoats round up a village of screaming women and children and old men, lock them in a church and set the whole chapel on fire. If you didn’t know anything about the Revolution, you might actually believe the British army in North America was made up of astonishingly cruel, even demonic, sadists who really did do this kind of thing — as if they were the 18th century equivalent of the Nazi SS. Yet no action of the sort ever happened during the war for independence, but an eerily identical war crime — one of the most notorious atrocities of World War II — was carried out by the Nazis in France in 1944….

By transposing Oradour to South Carolina, and making 18th century Britons the first moderns to commit this particular war crime, Emmerich and [screenwriter] Rodat — unwittingly or not — have done something unpleasantly akin to Holocaust revisionism. They have made a film that will have the effect of inoculating audiences against the unique historical horror of Oradour — and implicitly rehabilitating the Nazis while making the British seem as evil as history’s worst monsters….

If the Nazis had won the war in Europe, and their propaganda ministry had decided to make a film about the American Revolution, “The Patriot” is exactly the movie you could expect to see — minus the computer-generated effects, of course. (Doubters should take a look at Goebbels’ pre-Pearl Harbor efforts at inflaming isolationist Anglophobia.)

So yes: the man has form.