I’ll admit it.  Shakespeare makes my head spin.  To read it is to ache in head as the hammers of a thousand smithies pound the sense of it into that which author may have intended.
To hear it is to succumb at once to wicked deafness of babble uttered in tongues unbeknownst.   And yet, here before me, delivered by postal emissary, lies NetFlicky’s tale of choice, “Anonymous“.

I have oft heard many question the truth of Shakespearian authorship.  A man, a mere actor of severely limited education, with illiterate children, would not, yea could not, have had the wherewithal to pen such volumes of exquisite composition.  Yet, his name remains on the stuff most call exemplary literary genius.   This new tale of fiction blasphemously declares there is another, more likely, truth to be heard, if not believed.

Anonymous is a work of words, deftly crafted into dreams of plausible reality.  Was this man Shakespeare a mere opportunist taking full advantage of the censorship of his day?  Was this other, regally educated, man who should be king, obsessed by the power of his words, to seduce, to incite, to raise up the common man the real author of our literary legacy?

I, for one, took great comfort from this tale, not because it disparages Shakespeare, but rather because it explains the noble motivation for these many words.  It reveals the source of the energy and drive that it would take to generate such a body of work.  So be it Edward De Vere, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Johnson, William Shakespeare, some other anonymous author or a collection of many that quilled these words to hurt the head,  Anonymous doth breathe life itself into the hearts of those who write and, per chance, those who dream.