Hi, this is Dana Steven, Slate's movie critic, and I'm here with the Slate's spoiler special podcast on Anonymous, the new Roland Emmerich film about the Shakespeare authorship controversy.

Here with me in the studio is John Swansberg. Hey, John.

Hey, good to be here.

John is the culture editor for The New Yorker.com and also one of my favorite spoiler companions, and I'm really happy that we got to do this movie together.

I've been looking forward to this movie for a long time. Me too.

And one of my favorite spoilers we ever did was 2012, Roland Emmerich's last movie,

which is sort of, I don't know what you'd call it,

sort of the apotheosis of apocalypse movies that we deeply enjoyed

and had a lot of fun talking about.

So I thought the idea of him taking on something as crazy as the Oxfordian theory was going to be just nonstop

roiling fun. But I don't know about you. I was kind of disappointed. Yeah, I had the same

feeling. I wanted it to be the 2012 of Oxfordian theory movies. You know, I wanted it to be a kind of

fun. What if this were true? Let's make believe and kind of spin out a crazy story that suggests that

Edward Devere, the Earl of Oxford was the author of Shakespeare's plays and not Shakespeare himself.

The problem, I think, is very simple with this movie, which is that Roland Emmerich and indeed a bunch of the,

it seems, a bunch of the actors in the film truly believe Oxfordian theory.

This is not some flight of fancy. It feels like an attempt to prove to the audience that this is indeed

what happened, that the Earl of Oxford is actually the author of Shakespeare's plays.

You know, I don't believe that theory. Everything that I know about this, and you've, I think,

probably read more about it than I have suggests that there's nothing to this, that actually the man from Stratford-on-Avon wrote those plays. But I would have been very willing to go along

for the ride of this movie if it was sort of tongue-in-cheek and kind of playing it for amusement

instead of sort of wagging its finger at me saying, you've got to believe that this is the case.

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