1. Introduction
[1.1] Roland Emmerich's Anonymous (2011) met with controversy in Shakespearean circles from the moment it was released. The film dramatizes the Oxfordian theory of authorship, the "sacrilegious thesis" (Lefait 2015, 242) that Edward de Vere (1550–1604), the Earl of Oxford, is the true author of William Shakespeare's plays and poems. In response, on October 26, 2011—the date of the UK theatrical release of Anonymous—the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust orchestrated a "public relations stunt" that involved shrouding statues, pub signs, and road signs bearing Shakespeare's name and likeness in and around Stratford-upon-Avon, an act of protest against the film (Edmondson 2013, 230). In the years that have followed, Shakespearean critics have either ignored the film altogether or sought to dismantle the pillars of its thesis by drawing attention to its flawed logic, its disregard for historical facts, or its misrepresentation of artistic creation in general or of writing plays in particular. As both an expression and target of antifandom, Anonymous thus embodies a complex dynamic of disdain in which multiple antifan discourses intersect.
[1.2] Anonymous expresses and is the target of three distinct forms of antifandom. First, the film is regularly approached as a "bad object," a text regarding which antifans have reached a consensus that it is bad and is thus deserving of derision (Gray 2019, 28). Such bad object antifandom is expressed most vocally by Shakespeare scholars who hatewatch Anonymous in order to attack the film's thesis. Second, although the film embodies Emmerich's anti-Shakespeare antifandom in its championing of de Vere, it goes well beyond a good faith argument in favor of an alternative author. Instead, Emmerich engages in the debate by actively trolling Shakespeare and the playwright's Stratfordian defenders. In this form of antifandom, the director antagonizes his opponents by juxtaposing a brilliant de Vere with an unflattering depiction of William Shakespeare who appears in the film as a greedy, illiterate, and untalented fool, provoking Shakespeareans in order to elicit a reaction. If this is the case, then by offering detailed refutations of Anonymous, Shakespeareans have broken a commandment of popular culture: Thou Shalt Not Feed the Trolls. As I will argue, however, this reciprocal antifandom is both paradoxical and mutually supportive, inspiring an infinitely productive cycle of trolling and hatewatching that enables both factions to experience the pleasures of antifandom.
[1.3] Third, and quite separate from the antifandom at work in the shots fired at each other by Stratfordians and anti-Stratfordians in metatextual discourse, the film also expresses another variety of antifandom: Anonymous is also broadly antifan. Emmerich and screenwriter John Orloff traffic in pejorative stereotypes of fandom itself, depicting the majority of fans as excessively emotional, uncritical, and easily manipulated consumers. The brilliant Oxford is compelled to seek an audience for his dramatic artistry and let Shakespeare publicly take the credit, but the fan's sole job is to buy a ticket, feel what the artist wants them to feel, and beg for more, with only a tiny fraction of that audience capable of truly appreciating the artistic and political craft of the plays. Whereas Shakespeare, the buffoonish pretender, laps up the crowd's adulation, Oxford, the visionary artist, must suffer this deflected fame in order to magnify his message and ensure that it reaches its intended target, using the unwitting fans as his tools in this process. Unlike the paradoxically symbiotic relationship that emerges from the interplay between hatewatching and trolling, the antifan sentiment in Anonymous instead offers a unidirectional contempt for the vast majority of fans on whom commercial and popular success relies and expects blind adulation from them in return.
2. Hatewatching Anonymous
[2.1] The extant work on Anonymous follows a few perceptible threads that offer considerable insight into Emmerich's depiction not just of the authorship controversy specifically but of the status of the author-artist and of the process of artistic creation more generally, the ground on which the bad object antifandom is built. Shakespearean critics often point to the deification of the author in the film as one of its central faults. Oxford's process of inspiration and creation is wholly self-generated (Geal 2014; Sherman 2013). As such, this mythologized author-god is entirely removed from the collaborations with other playwrights, poets, and actors that shaped the real Shakespeare and everyone else who worked in the Elizabethan theaters, and Oxford writes dozens of perfect stage plays without ever having so much as visited a public theater (Lanier 2013). Consequently, Douglas Lanier argues that the film does not aim for historical accuracy but rather for a problematic "'feeling' of historical accuracy" through the use of "cinematic pastiche" that conveys a sense of "postmodern truthiness" (2013, 215–16, 224). By contrast, a film like Shakespeare in Love (1998)—while speculative and anachronistic in its own right—depicts Shakespeare as a collaborator, drawing inspiration from the world and people around him while engaged in a continual process of revision and editing.
[2.2] These Shakespearean critics have enriched our understanding of both the problems and possibilities of Anonymous, particularly regarding the film's relationship to biofiction and the filmic interpretation and representation of history. Fan studies and antifandom, however, offer further insight into our own relationship to the film as Shakespeareans as well as into Emmerich's depiction—and frequent disparagement—of audiences whose affirmation is simultaneously longed for and scorned by the artist, be he playwright or filmmaker. In its relationship with many Stratfordian audiences, however, Anonymous is a perfect film, a gift to Shakespeareans that serves as an endless source of pleasure through the practice of hatewatching, a pleasure and practice that ultimately validates and encourages the trolling evident in the film.
[2.3] Emmerich has clearly achieved the goal of trolling the diligent researchers and inspiring them to respond and react, with much of the writing on and reviews of the film gleefully and wittily pointing out its narrative inconsistencies and historical inaccuracies. According to Jonathan Gray's recent taxonomy of antifandom practices, the Shakespearean's approach to Anonymous can best be understood as a bad object antifandom, "based on a widespread agreement—whether moral, aesthetic, affective, or political—about what is inappropriate in the media world" (2019, 28–29). Having reached a consensus that the film is unworthy of praise, we are authorized to mock and deride it, often by hatewatching Anonymous. Anne Gilbert defines hatewatching as "viewing a television program or film despite disliking it…usually in order to point out its flaws," and she identifies the criteria for hatewatching as "judging a text to be of poor quality, continuing to watch, delighting in doing so, and having no reservations about perpetuating these behaviors" (2019, 63). Although one's personal, affirmational fandom can exist in isolation from the fandom as a whole, hatewatching is necessarily a social performance of "taste and superiority" that requires a communal audience of like-minded antifans (Gilbert 2019, 71). Gray emphasizes the paradox of such "'visceral hatewatching," that pleasure can arise from any affective response, positive or negative (2019, 38). This pleasure is perhaps heightened in an educational context where students often feel—rightly or wrongly—that academic discourse is dominated by sterile, obtuse rhetoric wherein even admiration for a text must be expressed in erudite terms and tones. Hatewatching offers the potential for communal and cathartic social bonding, in no small part by legitimizing critiques big and small.
[2.4] The pleasures of hatewatching are clearly evident in the published criticism on the film, as Shakespearean scholars commonly offer wittily crafted, arch takedowns of the film's historical inaccuracies and general misunderstanding of Elizabethan politics and culture that were marketed by Sony Pictures and promoted by Emmerich as viable alternative facts, "compel[ling] any honest critic to examine Anonymous's so-called history" (McDonald 2012, 109). This is, I believe, a key element that invites and authorizes hatewatching the film: it is the filmmaker's apparent honest effort to pursue truth and accuracy—that is, to produce a good film grounded in historical research—but failure in accomplishing this goal that renders it comically absurd and thus legitimizes disdain. Unlike a campy or purposefully bad film, Anonymous is seemingly earnest and lacking in critical self-awareness, with the director confidently but obliviously offering it up to critical scrutiny without a sense of tongue-in-cheek self-awareness.
[2.5] Returning to the communal, performative aspects of hatewatching, Gilbert emphasizes that the "performance of hatewatching is one that is meant to accrue and display cultural capital" (2019, 71), elevating the hatewatchers above the less discerning popular audiences below them and especially above those deemed to be fans of the object in question. While some of the features of hatewatching that Gilbert identifies are arguably inherent to scholarly writing in general, produced by highly educated individuals possessing enough cultural capital to ensure that their commentary carries weight, the defining characteristic of hatewatching is its tone and subsequent terms of engagement. As is evident in the work done by Gray (2005) and Mark Andrejevic (2008) on the now-defunct website Television Without Pity, where users frequently posted snarky takedowns of television series and episodes, purposefully reading back against the intended emotional tone or mocking the faulty logic at work, "sarcastic criticism" (Gray 2005, 846) appears more effective and appealing—and is more fun—when the text is revealed to be intellectually inferior to the critic whose writing serves a recuperative function, redeeming the experience of the bad object through intellectual analysis.
[2.6] The critical response to Anonymous reflects the intersection of many of the various forms of hatewatching described by Gray, indicating that hatewatching can be multifaceted. Shakespeareans approach Anonymous through a combination of monitorial hatewatching, cynical hatewatching, and antifans antifandom. Monitorial hatewatching involves those audiences who feel "as though he or she must watch the show," and this could include liberals watching Fox News or (in our case) Shakespeareans who feel a professional obligation to view new adaptations of the playwright's life and works (Gray 2019, 36). In addition to being monitorial, however, this hatewatching is also often cynical, where "the 'pleasure' lies in the criticism," a cynicism that is largely motivated by disdain for the premise of the film and its expected fans, signaled by Anonymous's promotional campaign (Gray 2019, 37). This is, it seems, an Oxfordian film for Oxfordians, a group that Shakespeareans have been antifans of since they emerged, ensuring that the Shakespearean will approach the film from a position of cynical hatewatching from the outset. This cynicism thus begins well before Sir Derek Jacobi's prologue in which he offers to tell us "a different story, a darker story" about Shakespeare than the one we are used to, and this cynicism only deepens as the film progresses.
3. Trolling and counter trolling
[3.1] To this point, I have been discussing the hatewatching of a film that appears honest in its efforts to tell an alternative version of history, an appearance of sincerity that inspires or—as is evident in some critics' responses—necessitates the hatewatching of an unintentionally bad object. What if, however, this honest effort is less than honest? What if Emmerich is trolling Stratfordians rather than seeking to convince them? In This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things, Whitney Phillips (2015) goes into considerable detail to analyze the prevalence and varieties of trolling, discourse that is typically expressed anonymously in a variety of online spaces. In the most general terms, trolls express controversial or even offensive opinions in order to frustrate, annoy, or upset their targets whose expressions of sincere belief are seen as an invitation to trolling. Importantly, "Trolls don't mean, or don't have to mean, the abusive things they say. They get to choose the extent to which their statements match their personal beliefs; they get to establish that they're just trolling…Targets of trolling, on the other hand, are expected to take trolls at their word, and are only trolled harder if they resist" (2015, 26). Such resistance often comes in the form of responding to the troll's words and actions, and the more detailed and sincere the target's response is, the greater the payoff for the troll. In Anonymous, Emmerich ultimately trolls us and goads us to overrespond while remaining joyfully indifferent to the content of the response, and in so doing the film serves as the impetus for communal, social pleasure. Paradoxically, we end up in a mutually supportive scenario wherein each side operates as antifans of the other, enabling both to simultaneously feel victorious.
[3.2] In my assessment of Anonymous, particularly by describing it as a film that seeks to troll Shakespeare and Shakespeareans, I am making a fairly significant assumption: Emmerich is not wading into the authorship controversy in good faith, as there is little evidence in the film that the director is embracing or promoting the nuances of the Oxfordian theory of authorship. Indeed, by his own admission, the director was unaware of the authorship controversy prior to reading Orloff's initial screenplay: "I was not familiar with the idea that Shakespeare might not have been the author of [the plays]…and I was instantly intrigued" ("A Conversation with Roland Emmerich" 2012, 90). In trolling us, Emmerich has little concern for the veracity or verifiability of his arguments; like all trolls, his primary goal is to evoke irritation, frustration, anger, and outrage. Regardless of your own personal opinion on the various strands of the authorship controversy—whether in support of Edward de Vere, Christopher Marlowe, Francis Bacon, or another as the true author of Shakespeare's plays—many of the anti-Stratfordians have clearly done their research in order to offer viable authorial alternatives, often going to extreme lengths to reconcile the historical record and published texts with their theories. Consider, for example, Edwin Durning-Lawrence's Bacon is Shakespeare (1910) and The Shakespeare Myth (1912) in which the author discovers and then cracks an elaborate cypher contained in the First Folio that hinges on the importance of the number "53" and the appearance of the word "honorificabilitudinitatibus" in Love's Labour's Lost in order to offer incontrovertible proof that Francis Bacon wrote the plays. While Emmerich endorses some of the broadest strokes of the controversy, his flippant approach to history—its "pile-up of factual errors," as Lanier (2013, 215) puts it—suggests that his goal is not actual persuasion.
[3.3] The arguably most egregious example of historical inaccuracy comes near the end of the film when, in order to encourage political instability, Oxford quickly writes Richard III in 1601, contributing to the Essex Rebellion by employing the play's Richard as a propagandistic caricature of Robert Cecil, the film's villain. This despite the fact that Richard III was most definitely first published in 1597 and first performed a few years prior. The film also omits the fact that Shakespeare's Richard III was undoubtedly a caricature of none other than Richard III himself, part of a rich Tudor tradition of such depictions. Nor does the film acknowledge the existence of the three Henry VI plays that preceded Richard III earlier in the decade. Rather, Oxford's Richard appears out of thin air in 1601. Likewise, Emmerich makes little attempt to address the fact that Oxford died in 1604, but Shakespeare continued to write plays for another decade, plays that clearly address the transition of power from Elizabeth to James in 1603. Oxford has shelves of play manuscripts ready to be sent off to the playhouse at a whim, manuscripts that he bequeaths to Ben Jonson on his deathbed, but we can only assume that Edward de Vere had access to some very accurate knowledge of the line of succession to have written Macbeth or Measure for Measure prior to the turn of the seventeenth century. In many cases, the film's errors and historical distortions are thus tauntingly obvious.
[3.4] In other words, rather than attempting to speculatively fill in the gaps and silences of the historical record in order to make a case for Oxford, Emmerich largely ignores the fact that the historical record exists at all. By contrast, the director takes a comparatively subtle approach to the historical record as it relates to Elizabeth I, the depiction of whom is as frustrating to early modernists as is the depiction of Shakespeare. Emmerich's Elizabeth, however, resides more comfortably in the archival gaps and silences, and he exploits those silences along similar lines as a fanfic author working to reconcile a missing scene fic with a canonical narrative. Nevertheless, the director admitted that his treatment of Elizabeth was likely to upset anti-Stratfordians, too: "I knew that not even the Oxfordians would necessarily embrace the movie as it introduces the Prince Tudor idea [i.e., the theory that the queen and Oxford had a secret child], which is too controversial even for the majority of them" ("A Conversation with Roland Emmerich" 2012, 92). As expected, the film's cavalier interpretation of history annoyed the likes of John M. Shahan, a prominent anti-Stratfordian who wrote of the film "To the extent that Anonymous increased awareness of the controversy, we are pleased it was made. Speaking for myself, however, I wish the film had not included so many historical inaccuracies [which have] rendered Anonymous vulnerable to attack." (2013, vi).
[3.5] In trolling institutional Shakespeare through his cursory and superficial treatment of history, Emmerich offers low hanging fruit to dedicated Shakespeareans in order to encourage an intense reaction. In this regard, Anonymous has been a resounding success. In addition to protesting the film's release by covering up Shakespearean statues and signs, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust also released a free ebook by Stanley Wells and Paul Edmondson, Shakespeare Bites Back: Not So Anonymous (2011), which was followed closely by a collection of scholarly essays, Shakespeare beyond Doubt: Evidence, Argument, Controversy (2013), also edited by Wells and Edmondson. The film thus establishes a rhetorical paradox that is commonplace in popular culture. Trolling is a form of play in which pleasure is derived from making offensive or controversial statements in order to elicit an angry and honest response from those who have been offended or annoyed. Trolls may express points of view that they do not believe in or deploy so-called facts that are easily disproven, encouraging their opponents to offer pointed and detailed refutations, but debating in good faith is not the point. Pleasure arises from annoying or upsetting other people and from the ultimately fruitless labor involved when those people compose a response, a pleasure that "celebrates the anguish of the laughed-at victim" (Phillips 2015, 27). The more work we do to earnestly make our case, the more successful the troll, who can then gleefully mock, dismiss, or ignore our responses. We know that the most effective response to trolling is to ignore it, but sometimes the temptation to engage is too great. In this regard, Edmondson and Wells, two of the world's leading and most respected Shakespeareans, fall prey to the troll in Shakespeare Bites Back, a well-intentioned but polemical defense of Shakespeare that characterizes Anonymous's attack on Shakespeare as akin to "sexism, racism, or homophobia" (2011, 34), precisely the kind of outraged overreaction that Emmerich playfully seeks to elicit.
[3.6] In its gleeful trolling of a Shakespearean audience, Anonymous is the spiritual successor to Lloyd Kaufman's Tromeo and Juliet (1996), a purposefully trashy and antagonistic adaptation of Romeo and Juliet made in Troma's characteristic low-budget, shocking style that revels in bad taste humor and imagery, the countercultural antithesis to Baz Luhrmann's glossy and safely edgy Romeo + Juliet (1996). Tromeo and Juliet concludes with an actor dressed as Shakespeare laughing at the audience directly into the camera after a jubilant vandalization of the play and trolling of an imagined Shakespearean audience. At the end of the closing credits, a voiceover proclaims, "Hey, now I don't have to read the play!" Although Anonymous is a very different film from Tromeo and Juliet, Emmerich's depiction of a buffoonish Shakespeare serves a similar function, designed to raise the ire of Stratfordians in an act of joyful sacrilege. Everything about Emmerich's Shakespeare is there to offend and irritate. Although a number of Shakespearean critics have emphasized the faulty logic of a playwright so helplessly illiterate that he cannot form a single letter and yet can read well enough to learn lines as an actor, the fact that critics would be bothered enough to make the point in the first place would be the primary goal of the troll. Emmerich's Shakespeare is not just of inferior skill to Edward de Vere; rather, he has no skill as a writer whatsoever. He is a greedy, lustful, fame-obsessed, work-averse loser who jumps at the chance to take credit for the plays when the more morally centred Jonson hesitates to do so. Following the incredibly successful first performance of Henry V, the audience clamors for the unknown playwright to step forward, and Will seizes the opportunity by grabbing a script, dipping his fingers in ink to signify his studious writing, and strutting onto the stage with arms spread in glory. He basks in the audience's acclaim and adoration, full of false humility as he hushes the spectators, offering his version of an awards season acceptance speech, declaring "I want to thank my actors…it was great, great acting…brought my words to life due to their most wonderful acting." He is so comically stupid that we often see him wearing a confused expression, and when he does speak, the gap between the eloquence of the plays and the vapidity of his speech is put on full display.
[3.7] Emmerich's Shakespeare is also a terrible friend and colleague, offering nothing in the way of collaboration or commiseration with his fellow playwrights at the Rose, happy to extort both Jonson and de Vere for more money as soon as he discovers the identity of his noble benefactor. In perhaps the greatest affront to the Shakespearean critic, this Shakespeare murders Christopher Marlowe—around 1600, no less, about seven years after the actual Marlowe was killed—once Kit discovers Will's secret, making Shakespeare personally responsible for cutting short one of the greatest literary careers of the Elizabethan period. In short, the William Shakespeare of Anonymous is a caricature absent any vaguely positive qualities, clearly designed to trigger outrage among the purveyors of institutional Shakespeare. That the inaccuracies of this portrayal can be easily refuted is, ultimately, irrelevant—the troll trolls not in the service of a heartfelt argument but in order to evoke sincere anger. Anonymous is not the first time that Emmerich has trolled institutional authority and the supposed gatekeepers of culture in his films. In his Americanized reboot of Godzilla (1998), one of the film's chief antagonists is Mayor Ebert who is supported by his assistant Gene, characters serving as impossible to miss—both in name and in appearance—caricatures of the well-known film critics Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel, complete with a few thumbs up or thumbs down gags. Powerful yet mean and incompetent, Godzilla's Mayor Ebert in particular anticipates the lampooning of smug intellectual authority that appears in Anonymous via the depiction of Shakespeare. For their part, Ebert and Siskel responded not with anger but by making their own jokes in their reviews. Ebert wrote that the filmmakers "let us off lightly; I fully expected to be squished like a bug by Godzilla. Now that I've inspired a character in a Godzilla movie, all I really still desire is for several Ingmar Bergman characters to sit in a circle and read my reviews to one another in hushed tones" (1998). In Thomas Pendleton's review of Anonymous, the author suggests that the film offers so many "varieties of the implausible, improbable, or impossible…that one is well advised not to engage them seriously" (2011, 41). Whereas Siskel and Ebert succeed in trolling the troll by laughing off the insult, shrouding statues and offering detailed rebuttals arguably feeds the trolls by engaging them seriously and demonstrating that their jibes have achieved their intended effect.
4. Anonymous's antifan discourse
[4.1] Beyond the reciprocal antifan discourse evident in the relationship between Shakespearean audiences and Emmerich where both serve as mutually supportive antifans of the other, another form of antifandom is apparent in Anonymous, one directed at fans more generally than at Shakespeareans specifically. Rather than the playful exchange of hatred with the expected Shakespearean film audience, this antifan discourse focuses on the relationship between cultural producers—individual artists, film studios, and the like—and their audiences or fans in the general public. Anonymous includes many scenes and discussions focused on the playgoing public, with de Vere persistently fascinated by the potential for drama to shape the public's opinion and guide their actions. In the process, the film expresses the long-standing stereotype of fans as uncritical, easily manipulated, and often feminized consumers who, at best, can serve as an extension of the artist's will and, at worst, are a necessary but contemptable burden that must be borne by the artist in order to achieve success (note 1). Even Queen Elizabeth is reduced to a pejorative fangirl stereotype in order to demonstrate the power of the artist over his audience. Paradoxically, however, Emmerich's obvious disdain for the overwhelming majority of fans as simpleminded lemmings is complicated by their simultaneous representation as flawless readers capable of interpreting the artist's message perfectly.
[4.2] The Richard III example embodies the filmmaker's simultaneous regard for the artist and disdain for the audience as Emmerich offers up a fantasy of impactful drama. The on-screen audience has never seen this play before—in fact, it is fresh from Oxford's quill, not pulled from his extensive manuscript library, so we bear witness to the very first performance of this new play. Critics of the film regularly point out that another play was performed on the eve of the Essex Rebellion, but it was Shakespeare's Richard II rather than Richard III, one of the more egregious historical inaccuracies in the film. For his part, Emmerich emphasizes that the substitution was intentional: "In this instance we deliberately changed the plays and allowed ourselves some dramatic license. Using a hunchback on stage prior to the uprising was simply a lot more visual and…allowed the audience to understand Oxford's underlying plan more easily" ("A Conversation with Roland Emmerich" 2012, 91). Rather than framing this as a debate between creative license and historical accuracy, I believe the switch reveals something very important about Emmerich's perspective on audiences and fans. When the real Earl of Essex's supporters commissioned Shakespeare's company to perform Richard II at the Globe immediately before their planned rebellion, it was because of the play's reputation as politically subversive and the parallels between the justified overthrow of Richard II in that play and the hoped-for overthrow of Elizabeth. The play was controversial enough that the earliest printed editions excluded the scene—present in performances of the play—in which Richard abdicates the throne amid a succession debate. In other words, Essex's supporters presumably chose this specific play for its intended effect, hoping for a similar abdication to take place when they forced an audience with Elizabeth the next day.
[4.3] By substituting Richard III into his adaptation of the Essex Rebellion, Emmerich makes the political impact of art near instantaneous. Fewer than thirty lines into the performance and just before Richard's opening soliloquy has concluded, the audience is so moved that they begin to riot, acting on their newfound hatred toward Robert Cecil and storming out of the theater in a poetry-fuelled frenzy, ready to overthrow the powers that be. As Pendleton wryly observes, "Oxford seems at least uneconomical to have written the second longest play in the canon when just the first twenty lines or so do the job" (2011, 41). Robert Pirro reads Anonymous as "foreground[ing] the challenge of a creative artist attempting (and failing) to exercise political agency through his art" (2013, 404). While this failure is partly true given that the revolution that Oxford hopes to spark through his plays is cut short when it confronts other more powerful and well-connected political figures, the obvious power that the playwright wields mitigates any absolute sense of failure. As Lanier notes, Oxford succeeds in transforming the audience into his puppets, a near perfect extension of his will (2013, 224). That the rebellion fails is a consequence of Oxford's puppets confronting a better-prepared and better-equipped force, not due to his inability to inspire them to action.
[4.4] This audience is also apparently incapable of distinguishing between the fictional world of the stage and the real world, throwing fruits and vegetables at the actor playing Richard as if he were actually Robert Cecil in the flesh. Likewise, during the first performance of Henry V, the audience takes to the stage to fight the French after having collectively reached forward in the hopes that Henry would bless them with a touch, seemingly receiving the actor as if he really were the titular king. During this initial performance, Oxford watches the audience more so than his own play, clearly impressed with how easily the masses can be controlled by his skilled hand. The audience is, as Oxford and others describe them, "the mob." In this depiction of the relationship between cultural producers and cultural consumers, Emmerich endorses the long-standing stereotype of fans as uncritical sheep waiting to be told what to think and feel by the artist who very much stands apart from them. While this stereotype is largely pejorative in the sense that it does not grant fans critical agency, the audience in the film also functions as an ideal audience for cultural producers: they only want more of the object of their fandom, not more from it (Pugh 2005), as they are content to ravenously consume whatever dish is placed in front of them by the tastemakers. As Lefait notes regarding the film, "the artist draws his power from his audience's lack of aesthetic distance on the performance," and the plays simultaneously "become instruments of control" (2015, 253). Although the audience lacks critical distance from the plays, they serve as perfect mirrors to the artist's intentions: "He's Cecil, isn't he?" one exclaims upon Gloucester's appearance at the beginning of Richard III. Likewise, when Oxford writes Venus and Adonis as a message to Elizabeth, she interprets—and yields to—his intent perfectly, much to the frustration of Robert Cecil. Emmerich's readers and audiences are thus simpleminded enough to be easily manipulated by the skillful artist but sophisticated enough that they can unpack allegories and access the true meanings hidden within the lines. Audiences in Anonymous are thus a paradoxical mash of gullible and clever, the embodiment of a cultural producer's ideal of fandom as grateful without resisting the will of the producer.
[4.5] Some segments of this audience are also pejoratively feminized, with their emotional and sexual responses to the plays overlapping. Although powerful, Queen Elizabeth is depicted as something of a theater fangirl, filled with childlike wonder while, mouth agape, she giggles and claps at nearly every performance. For their part, the Cecils have spent the better part of four decades trying to keep plays away from the queen. As the villains of the film, the Cecils view all theater as morally degenerate. Since this version of Elizabeth is easily manipulated and often obliviously simpleminded, the Cecils exert a masculine rationality to keep her feminine susceptibility in check. Elizabeth literally gets hot under the collar at one point, unpinning her bodice in full shocked view of the court during a performance of Hamlet, her emotions overtaking her as if she momentarily forgets—or does not care—that the courtiers and politicians around her are always watching her. Part of the Cecils's anxiety about Elizabeth's consumption of theater, then, is that it causes her to forget her role at court and in the nation. The monarch is at least temporarily subsumed by an emotive and sometimes gushing fangirl whom they find more difficult to control.
[4.6] Elizabeth combines the delusional sexual obsession of the stalker-fan Mandella in 10 Things I Hate About You with the overdetermined emotional investment of Viola de Lesseps in Shakespeare in Love who falls in love with Shakespeare's writing first and the man second. During a flashback to one of their romantic encounters in Anonymous, Elizabeth tells Oxford "You're Puck," alluding to the role he wrote and performed as a ten-year-old boy when they first met (according to the film, Oxford apparently wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream sometime around 1560). This raises the uncomfortable possibility that their sexual relationship was inspired by the queen's admiration for the boy actor and the role he created, a relationship that itself results in the birth of an illegitimate child that threatens to pull England into a state of civil war in the present day of the narrative. In Anonymous, the stakes could not be higher; the unregulated sexuality instigated by the queen's fangirling might destroy the nation, a fact that she seems entirely unaware of. Unlike the Cecils, Oxford, and a select few writers such as Jonson, the queen—along with the mob—lacks the masculine critical distance necessary to separate her emotional responses to art from her intellectual responses, an immaturity that makes her easily influenced and thus politically unstable. As a result, the powerful men in the film wage their political proxy war with one another in large part by recognizing how easily Elizabeth can be manipulated through her fandom and seeking to control her by either writing plays and poems (as Oxford does) or by restricting her access to those same plays and poems (as the Cecils do). These men take the same approach to the mob that, like the queen, seems oblivious to the fact that they are being manipulated and told what to think.
[4.7] The film ultimately draws a stark line between the masculine critical distance of a select few cultural producers and consumers and the uncritical and often feminized consumption performed by a majority audience incapable of controlling their emotions. The film treats the mob as an undifferentiated mass of spectators and fans in the cheap seats, occasionally singling out notable spectators in the box seats. One such spectator is a young Thomas Dekker—historically, a noteworthy playwright himself—who becomes a source of perpetual comic amusement in Anonymous as a result of his visceral responses to the plays. As he watches the plays, Dekker's face seems frozen in a state of orgasmic bliss as he is enraptured by the performance and the power of the writing, a parallel but less constrained fan response to the queen. During Henry V, Dekker leaps to his feet and chants "Down with the French!" as the audience storms the stage to fight alongside their player king. By contrast, the other playwrights largely stay seated, looking around the theater in amazement at the effect the play is having on the audience. Dekker again rises to pump his fist and call out "Freedom!" with the crowd during Julius Caesar while his seatmate, Thomas Nashe (another playwright), shakes his head in disapproval at Dekker's outburst. We observe Dekker comically weep, hanky in hand, during Hamlet as well as involuntarily grasp Nashe's hand during Romeo and Juliet, to Nashe's visible discomfort. Similar to Elizabeth, Dekker seems to lose any sense of self-control or self-awareness when he watches these plays, so engrossed in the performance that he loses sight of the boundary between fiction and reality as he is overtaken by his emotional response. By contrast, the discerning audience of Jonson and others remains engrossed in and obviously impressed by the plays but without stooping to Dekker's unselfconscious giddiness. These spectators spend as much time watching the audience and making eye contact with each other as if to say "are you seeing this?" They are clearly aware of the fact that they are watching a performance, but also appreciate it on a more sophisticated level than the mob.
[4.8] The power relationship and imbalance between creator and audience is central to Anonymous in a way that denigrates fans like Elizabeth, Dekker, and the adoring audiences of mass culture that they frequently represent. Lanier notes that Anonymous "conceives of Oxford the author as an aristocratic puppet-master, manipulating the (heart)strings of the commons with populist sentiments" (2013, 222). This puppet-master metaphor is effective and has significance beyond the Oxford–audience relationship because his case becomes an object lesson in control for others. Oxford may be the puppet master, but part of the awe or fear shared by other observers such as Jonson and the Cecils—all men—arises from the fact that they, too, can see the strings even if the mass audience cannot, evidenced by the knowing glances that they share with each other. Peter Kirwan rightly argues that the presentation of Dekker in particular works to "legitimise and give personality to the mass reaction" that is expressed by the mob (2014, 17), but "legitimise" is perhaps the wrong word; through this gesture, Emmerich condescendingly aligns the adoring audience with the often misogynistic stereotype of fandom that fan studies has been working against for decades. As Kristina Busse notes in her discussion of the disdain leveled at the Twilight fandom by other fandoms for essentially liking the wrong thing and going about it in the wrong way, these fans are seen as being "too obsessive, too fanatic, and too invested" in "negatively connotated fannish activities [that] are considered specifically female" (2017, 177–78; see also Duffett 2013). Additionally, Scott emphasizes the fact that fangirling is an emotive form of engagement that does not have to be limited to female-gendered bodies (2017). Rather, it is the excessive expression of a love and devotion that is devoid of reason that is commonly interpreted as feminine; fandom is a lot, but fangirling is too much, even for other fans. As Scott notes in Fake Geek Girls, mainstream authentic fandom is regularly coded as masculine, whereas fangirling is either marginalized or displaced onto appropriately feminine fan objects—like Twilight or boy bands—deemed unworthy of an authentic fandom (2019, 10–11). In Anonymous, the value of the fan object is not in question; whether through depictions of an audience's admiration (Jonson), jealousy (Marlowe), or fear (the Cecils), it is universally clear that the plays have rightfully earned a passionate fandom, so we can be confident that Hamlet is not an early modern Twilight.
[4.9] Instead, fans are parsed into two unequal but ultimately necessary categories in Anonymous—the discerning few and the obsessive masses—who agree on praising the fan object but for different reasons. For the discerning few, the plays are significant. These texts have a political, artistic, and literary value that is rare, maybe never seen before or never to be seen again (hence the political intrigue and cover-up that propels the plot), an intellectual and rational assessment for an intellectual elite. For the much larger body of adoring fans, the plays matter because of their emotional or even physiological impact that makes them feel happy, angry, or even aroused. These audience members do not care that they are being manipulated and they are not looking for or even necessarily aware of the puppet master's strings; they are chasing the visceral highs evoked by the plays. Dekker, Elizabeth, and much of the mob itself are depicted as excessively emotional, too invested in what they watch and what they read and often seemingly unable or unwilling to distinguish between fantasy and reality, incapable of containing themselves. They are the fangirls that Oxford snaps into existence in order to be manipulated once he starts writing plays and who become the butt of humor and mockery throughout the film. By contrast, the jealous Christopher Marlowe and astute Ben Jonson appreciate the artistic skill of the plays with appropriately masculine distance, a reminder that the plays are not just for lonely queens and easily delighted, squeeing fools who will feel how you tell them to feel. They are also powerful and singular works of political and artistic genius regardless of who wrote them, despite the palpable scorn the film levels at the popular audience that must also be courted. Additionally, in the depiction of critical jealousy and respect from Oxford's peers and the Elizabethan intellectual or political elite, Emmerich seems to have refashioned the trolling caricature of critics that was evident in his lampooning of Siskel and Ebert in Godzilla. In Anonymous, he presents a fantasy in which the discerning few are now firmly on his side.
5. Conclusion
[5.1] Emmerich's playful trolling of institutional Shakespeare in Anonymous that paradoxically demands a response while ignoring that response is accompanied by a more earnest expression of antifan antifandom that represents fans as a necessary but emotional mob that serves as a conduit for the artist's masculine power. Occupying three distinct registers of antifandom, the film embodies the complex ways in which antagonism and negative affect can serve as sources of both fannish pleasure and frustration. Apart from the pejorative depiction of fandom, however, Anonymous—through its simultaneous trolling of Shakespeareans and its status as an object of antifandom that necessitates hatewatching by those same Shakespeareans—serves as a nearly perfect intersection of oppositional strands of antifandom that prove to be mutually supportive rather than antithetical. Although hatewatching a bad object can produce the results desired by the troll, such as anger and the nontrivial effort required to respond to trolling, hatewatching a trolling text ensures that both discourses are conducted for the entertainment of separate audiences—other trolls and other hatewatchers, respectively—that do not necessarily overlap. As such, these discourses feed each other and encourage each other to proliferate even as they maintain their own integrity by refusing to give ground to or be truly offended by their rhetorical opponent. In this instance, hatewatching ensures that both the troll and the hatewatcher experience the communal or individual affective pleasures of antifandom.
6. Acknowledgments
[6.1] I would like to thank Kavita Mudan Finn for her feedback and support throughout the research and writing of this article. Thanks as well to the anonymous peer reviewers for their insightful suggestions.