5. Anonymess
Many Shakespeare scholars may think that Roland Emmerich’s Anonymous (2011) is just so wrong, so bad, so pernicious that it is not worth mentioning, much less discussing. We agree. The film is bad. Yes, it is really bad. Nevertheless, Anonymous does something very interesting with anonymity, and the ways it which it does that something badly are what make the film especially interesting and worth critical scrutiny. Anonymous repeatedly refuses to witness Oxford’s authorship even when showing him holding a quill, dipping it in ink, and writing words In Emmerich’s film, anonymity is not merely, like pseudonymity, a subset of onymity and form of clandestinity; anonymity is something else, a mess of writing that lacks not only a signature but an “I” witness.[1] Anonymous authorship is not reducible to a hidden proper name, nor is it just a mask behind which a unified agency operates strategically within a network that lacks any kind of unconscious or media-related interference or static. We attend to Emmerich’s film in order to ask what happens to the archive, the witness, and the biobibliographical codes governing Shakespeare attribution and authorship studies when the word “anonymous” becomes both a title and a proper name.[2]
Signature Secretions
Anonymoushas been widely, and understandably, mistaken for a conspiracy thriller. “If nothing else, it’s the best Elizabethan conspiracy-theory action flick you’ll see this fall,” a New Yorker blogger writes.[3] Similarly, the Washington Post ran a review entitled “Anonymous and the Shakespeare Conspiracy Theory that Wouldn’t Die,”[4] and an anonymously written essay in the Daily Telegraph entitled “Shakespeare Conspiracy Theories,” listing the most widely known candidates other than Shakespeare, adds a line about the film at the end of its entry for Edward de Vere:
Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford was also the Lord Great Chamberlain of England and a courtier poet. There is little evidence that suggests he did write them, but some believe there are references in the plays to de Vere's life and that there are a series of codes in the writing that implicate the Earl as the author. This is the theory put forward in the new film Anonymous.
Actually, this is not the view put in the film, although it is an Oxfordian film (in ways that may put Oxfordians to shame, however). If Anonymous were a genuine conspiracy film, the title wouldn’t be “Anonymous.” The title would name or refer to a person such as Edward de Vere, or his title the Earl of Oxford. Emmerich could easily have adopted a variation of titles of Oxfordian books modeled on The Da Vinci Code such as Jonathan Bond’s The De Vere Code (2009), Virginia M. Fellows’ The Shakespeare Code (2006), and The Shakespeare Secret (2007), or precursors like Graham Phillips’ book entitled The Shakespeare Conspiracy (1994) and an Oxfordian film of the same title directed by one Michael Peer and narrated by Sir Derek Jacobi, but obviously chose not to do so.[5]
Unlike generic conspiracy thriller films such as The Da Vinci Code (dir. Ron Howard, 2004), Anonymous presents no mystery to be solved. Emmerich always makes it perfectly clear that Oxford, not Shakespeare, wrote Shakespeare’s plays. There is no detective figure in the film, and nothing like detective work gets done. There is no Oxford Code, no Oxfordian version of the Fibonacci sequence or the Sir Francis Bacon’s cipher, no tomb, no gravestone, not even an unmarked grave (a scene of Oxford’s funeral was cut from the film but is included as a deleted scene on the DVD).[6]
In our view,Anonymous is a disaster film, a disastorus disaster film, to be precis3, in line with Emmerich’s science-fiction, disaster blockbusters such as Stargate (1994), Independence Day (1996), The Day After Tomorrow (2004), 10,000 B.C. (2008) and 2012 (2009). Although Anonymous might seem, on the face of it, to differ from these earlier sci-fi films, one might almost predict that Emmerichwould make Anonymous since most of these earlier films concern the archive and its destruction.[7] Anonymous makes an advance on these film not only but turning the archive into a mess but by allowing itself to become a catastopic mess. We will not attempt to decide whether the film is, among other options, a brilliantly executed mess designed to succeed at failing or just a messily executed mess. Please feel free to make your own call.
Whowroteit
Anonymoususes the disaster film genre to figure anonymity as an archive, therebyscrambling the generic and forensic codes both of Shakespeare attribution studies and of the authorship debate.[8]Despite their sometimes vociferousy stated differences,Stratfordians and Oxfordians agree on just about everything aprt from the proper name of the author who wrote Shakespeare’s plays: both sides agree that everything is archived, that everything is readable, and that everything is to be read in relation to rules of evidence as established in detective fiction dating back to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. For Stratfordians and Oxfordians alike, the archive is fully opertational, without what Derrida calls “anarchivity,” a word he Derrida uses to mean “the violence of the archive itself, as archive, as archival violence,” the radical destruction of the archive and the remains of what can never be archived, the ash of the archive.[9]We maintain that Anonynmous is a radically “anarchivic” film in that it figures the archive as a total mess, a set of texts that always already there and yet that has also always already have been destroyed.[10] Imagine, if you will, Roland Emmerich as an avator Maurice Blanchot. Writing the archive is writing the disaster. Emmerich’s disaster film turns anonymity into a graphic mess that cannot be cleaned up: at a number points, it is not necessarily clear what may be recognized as a crux and even a cryptonym, as a graphic mark, nor is alwys clear where the film’s paratexts draws a line marking writing from drawing.
Mess this Mss Around: In the Name of the Title
We may begin to grasp concretely how Anonymousscrambles the generic and forensic codes of attribution and authorship studies by attending to the film’s confusion of the referent of the title, film or play. The opening title sequence conspicuously shows only the film’s title, not the stars and the director as opening title sequences tyically do.[11] Roland Emmerich’s name appears only at the end of the film in the second to last shot. The last shot scrolls the rest of the credits.
The opening title sequence also makes the referent of the film’s title momentarily uncertain. The title first appears on a theater marquee we see shortly after Derek Jacobi hastily gets out of a New York city taxi, presumably near Times Square. (Perhaps in a humble fashion the film does not say if the theater is on 42nd Street or somewhere off-Broadway or perhaps even off-off-Broadway.) The exterior shot of the theater marquee then fades to black while leaving the same white letters in place. This dissolve may produce at least momentary semantic confusion for some viewers: Is Anonymous the title of a play and the title of a film? An adaptation of an off-Broadway play you’ve never heard of before and wonder if you missed? In addition to this momentary confusion, some viewers may notice that the title on the marquee is a digitally produced special effect. The letters have a kind of spectral effect, the referent having been effectively blacked out in a way that is similar to black and white splotches on the film poster. Perhaps even more anarchivically, “Anonymous” becomes something like a proper name.[12]
Anarchivity of Anonmity
The anarachivity of the title sequence, which we one take to be a crux, is writ large in Anonymous. The film’s narrative is by a paradoxical archive structured with by two polar opposites: on the one hand, the archive is fully intact; on the other, and the archive is also destroyed. This opposition between the complete, preserved archive and its apocalyptic destruction, an opposition that self-deconstructs, as we will see shortly, neatly captured by two sets of archival scenes in the film, the first being de Vere’s library and wonder cabinet where nearly all, or apparently of his plays have been written and stored, and the second Ben Jonson’s rediscovery, near end of the film, of the singed mansucripts intact, not the more apparently opposite scene near the beginning of the film that shows these mansucripts apparently burning up along with the Globe tehater, an inference strengthned when Jonson shortly thereafter tells Cecil, while being tortured, that the manuscripts all burned.
We will examine the library scene first. Jonson visits de Vere after Shakespeare claims, after a widly popular production of Henry V, that he is “anonymous.” Oxford takes several manuscripts down before settling on Romeo and Juliet and handing it to Jonson.
the plays he gives to Jonson and later to Shakespeare to perform on stage have already been written. When deciding which play to give Jonson, de Vere pulls several notebooks off the shelves of a bookcase, opening each in turn to reveal a manuscript contained inside it. (See figure).
The title of each play de Vere holds is shown in close up. (see figure). The anarchivity of de Vere’s archive is fgured by the mess that fills out the mise-en-scene. To be sure, de Vere’s manuscripts, like the writings on his desk and rolled up in bowls, form an apparently highly disorganized archive, de Vere, may nevertheless have organized it, in the fashion of many practicing academic scholars, in a way that only he knows. The limits of the archive’s anarchivic disorganization are not clear, however. Perhaps it is unreasonable to expect that the film would give us an idea of the contents of de Vere’s archive, but we never get an index of, only a later montage of Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and the manuscript of a play he does not take down form the shelf, namely, Hamlet. The film does care to establish whether Hamlet has already been written or was written after this scene. Moreover, De Vere appears to be a rather poor librarian when it comes to the information management of his own works. The manuscripts are enclosed in identical leather folders, none of which is labelled. After quickly glancing at the title pages, he throws the discarded manuscripts on a desk behind him instead of reshevling them, and it is not clear he has a back up copy of the Romeo and Juliet manuscipt he hands over to Jonson. We can’t tell if the order of the plays de Vere pulls off the shelf is also the in which Vere composed then, nor can we tell if de Vere was searching for Romeo and Juliet from the start or settles upon it after looking at the other manuscripts and discarding them one by one as unsuitable—who knows why--for perfomance.
We take both poles of the opposition the film draws between complete archive and its anarchivic deconstruction to be so unstable that the opposition is always already, if we may be permitted to use an archaic critical phrase, self-deconstructing, or to update always under construction. Kind of like NYU. De Vere’s messy sapce we call, perhaps messily, an archivallibrary approaches a paradoxical state: it appears to be complete, the manuscripts collected and shelved such that de Vere may easily access and retrieve them; and yet it also appears to include work progress, writings that dispersed and that await being discarded or preserved. The anarchivic force driving these questions about the archive are registered in the titles of plays. Just before de Vere examines the manuscript of Romeo and Juliet, the camera cuts to Jonson peering over de Vere’s manuscripts and dropping on the title page of Twelfth Night. The shot is parallel to the close up shots of the title pages of the manuscripts, making it seem to be one of a series and hence comparable to the completed manuscripts of which we also see only the title page. Has Twelfth Night been written? Or is yet to be written? If it is in progress, is it any further than the title page? (We will return to the writing on this particular page.)
The opposite number of the archival library scene is not, as one might reasonably expect, the anarchivic destruction of de Vere’s manuscripts the viewer is meant to think were burned along with the Globe theater but Jonson’s recovery of the manuscripts, an event we see in the second narrative frame of the film; the most anarchivic scene is paradoxically the one in which which the second narrative returns near the film, the scene in which Jonson recovers intact the de Vere manuscripts he’d stored in a fireworks box he emptied out while hiding underneath the stage of the Globe theater while evading Cecil’s guards.
Figures
Jonson opens the box, the lid reflecting light on face, as is he were looking at a computer screen, or perhaps as if he were opening the ark recovered by the Nazi archaeologist at the end of in Raiders of the Lost Ark. on top of Oxford’s singed but intact manuscripts Jonson finds Henry V. The recovery of the manuscripts leads to the immediate reanimation of Henry V, the first play we see performed in the film in the form of a montage, albeit that the Prologue’s voice rather than music provides the continuity between shots. The extinguised fire in the globe ctaches flame in the words “muse of fire. ” As when we first saw the play, the Chorus speaking the first lines of the prologue Henry V, dressed just as he was before; the newly crowned King James watches the play being performed at court and engages Robert Cecil in a conversation about theater as the Chorus continues in voice-over to recite the prologue sotto-voce, including a shot of Shakespeare back stage watching James watching Henry V.
While this montage sequence effectively renanimates de Vere by repeating the “same” play, it is somewhat confusing. The shot of the Chorus appears initally to be a shot of him in the Globe; only after we see King James do we realize that the Chrous is performing on stage. Furthermore, the montage leaves some holes in the totally recovered archive unfilled. For example, we are left wonders how Jonson or someone else—the printer, perhaps?-- lost them, especially since de Vere personally gave Jonson the manuscripts and told him to watch over them. Moroever, Jonson’s reliability is put into question by Cecil’s false conclusion that Jonson “speaks the truth” when saying the manuscripts were burned. Since Jonson immediately goes to the theater in search of the manuscripts, he must have been lying, however. And Jonson only creates further problems in witnessing the recovery of the manuscripts. The Prologue had pointed out in the first narrative frame that Shakespeare left no manuscripts behind. Yet since there are no manuscripts for any of the plays and poems in the Shakespeare canon, we may wonder how and these manuscripts went missing. (Of course, it is possible that Emerich thinks the manuscripts are extant.) We will discuss this scene in greater detail later.
We need first to clarify how our focus on the radical anarchivity of anonymous authorship in Anonymous involves two different ways in which the film is anarchivic, thematically and generically, on the one hand, and structurally, on the one other. First, we will focus on scenes in which the film figuring the archivein thematic and generic ways, as more or less messy kinds of writing we saw in the messy library scene we discussed above: these figures include the proper name and the title, with respect to the medium of paper, the circulation of handwritten manuscripts and published works, and the medium of stage performance, witnessing, wills, and legacies. These archival figures appear in the film’s representations of Oxford composing, reciting works, signing his work. We will focus on these thematic and generic features through a deconstructive lens in order analysis the formally anarchivic messiness of Anonymous itself: various kinds of formal repetitions to show how the film disturbs any timeline on which one could clearly and easily place the events as the film narrates them. Excessive formal repetitions constitute a specific kind of messy anarcharcity, an anarchivity that disrupts the capacity of Anonymous itself to serve as an archive of de Vere’s authorship. For Derrida, the archive is oriented to the fuutre, not the past. Anonymous uses repeated shots, text giving the time, not the date, during which the action is set, and flashbacks in ways that disrupt the coherence of all grammatical tenses. The linear narrative the film tells, or tiries to tell in non-linear fashion through the use of flashbacks, is contantly disoriented by cinematically incoherent shifts in time. While certain kinds of formal repetitions in Anonymous—the two narrative frames that bookend the film; the same shotused to begin flashbacks different characters have, among others--may be characterized as obsessive, they are not compulsively repetitive in that the Emmerich’s self-deconstructing archive, in Freud’s words, is neither fully “Fort” nor “Da,” neither here nor gone.[13] The Emmerich archive is not set to the Freudian death drive; rather, the film commits cinemacide by producing a remarkably incoherent, even incomprehensibly bad film. We draw a distinction between these two kinds of anarchivicity for the purposes of exposition, but thematic kinds of anarchivity are laso inscribed in the anarchivic repetitions of the film wihtout the one ever containining the other. There is no meta-anarchivity in Anonymous, in which the film would frame one kind inside another. Indeed, the film’s use of two narrative frames is one of its most anarchivic features in that it so strongly fuses together theme, genre, and structure.