Anonymous. That’s the name of a new movie that just opened in about 200 theaters across the US—and one that Christian theologians are calling out for its leftist politican spin that attacks Christianity.
Set in the Elizabethan Age, the movie proposes that William Shakespeare didn’t write all those plays and sonnets. It posits that the real alleged writer, Edward de Veere, the Earl of Oxford, was the secret son of Queen Elizabeth I and unknowingly became her lover. It also alleges that their son was the top co–conspirator in the 1601 rebellion.
“If that’s all Anonymous did, it probably would be just another unimportant museum piece of 21st century pop culture,” says Dr. Ted Baehr, founder of Movieguide. “Not content with just trashing William Shakespeare, however, the movie attaches a leftist political spin to its historical mimesis.”
Not only does Anonymous trash the professional life of William Shakespeare, it also accuses him of deliberately murdering the playwright Christopher Marlowe, when it’s a solid historical fact that Marlowe was killed in self-defense during a tavern brawl by another fellow entirely. Baher calls this a lurid, mindless speculation that is combined with an accusation that the queen’s chief advisor, William Cecil, was a kneejerk Puritan snob who hated art, beauty and theater.
As Baehr sees it, Anonymous not only has extremely ludicrous revisionist history, it has a confused combination of Romantic ideas with humanist political ones. Both types of ideas, however, fit in with the movie’s apparent attack on Christianity, wherein the movie makes its two biggest antagonists Puritan Christians. Of course, Baehr notes, attacking Christianity is the primary reason for all left-wing politics, including the movement toward political correctness, which stems from a group of Marxist activists in the last century.
“You don’t have to be a Shakespeare snob to be outraged by all of this. All you have to be is a fair-minded, thoughtful person who takes seriously God’s commandment not to bear false witness against other people (Exodus 20:16),” Baher says. “Just because a person is dead doesn’t nullify this commandment.”
You can read the full review of the movie and an insightful article by Dr. Ted Baehr and Dr. Tom Snyder on this movie at www.movieguide.org.
