Vanessa Redgrave, David Thewlis, and Rhys Ifans are set to star in a new movie about Queen Elizabeth, the Essex Rebellion, and Shakespeare. Although I’m not too excited for yet another Queen Elizabeth movie (or a movie about Shakespeare not being the real author of his plays), the plot looks interesting in that it’s taking place later on in Elizabeth’s reign rather than at the beginning.
2012 director Roland Emmerich has revealed to Empire magazine that his William Shakespeare film be titled Anonymous and announced the first cast members.
Emmerich previously said that the film is about “how it came to be that William Shakespeare was not the author of his plays. It’s not Marlowe, it’s De Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. It’s kind of like a political thriller. It’s about who will succeed Elizabeth and the cause of that thriller, the Essex Rebellion, we take on and we learn how the plays were written by somebody else.”
He told the magazine: “We have Vanessa Redgrave as Queen Elizabeth; David Thewlis as William Cecil, old and young; and Rhys Ifans as The Earl Of Oxford. It’s a true English cast and I’m really proud of it. There’s 12 main characters and 20 or 30 other characters, and each of the characters is really good.”
Emmerich added that “It’s the Tudors on one side and the Cecils on the other, and in between [the two] is the Queen.”
