At some point, I’m planning on a bunch of Shakespeare blogs, but this was on TV and wanted to watch it before it was no longer available. Streaming services are not the most reliable these days (by these days I mean summer of 2023 and time of the second major writer’s strike in my lifetime).
All is True is really Kenneth Brannagh’s and writer Ben Eltons’s vision of what it was like for William Shakespeare at the end of his career and life. I should point out that Elton was one of the writers who helped Andrew Lloyd Webber create Love Never Dies, so I’m sure he needs to do some sort of creative groveling for that crime against storytelling. Also, understand that this is NOT a debate about whether Shakespeare is the actual author of the plays, so none of that in the comments. Save that for a different film.
This is an almost an entirely fictional, trying to dramatize mysterious moments at the end of the playwright’s life.
The film starts with the Globe Theatre burning down and Shakespeare returning to the family he’s barely seen in 20 years. He has hallucinations of his son Hamnet who died at age eleven, an awkward relationship with his wife Anne (Dench), and accidentally worries his remaining children Susanna and Judith about their own futures. The bard holds on tightly to a belief that, had Hamnet lived, the boy would have been a poet like him. Meanwhile, he dismisses Susanna and Judith since they are women who never had a formal education (most historians agree that Susanna could read and write). Judith outwardly shows her disdain for her father and he asks why when he never gave her a cruel word. Anne responds, “You spent so long putting words into other people’s mouth, you think it matters what is said?”
Will uses his artistic past in an attempt to smooth certain things over in his town and with his family. For example, when a man accused Susanna of an affair and there is a suit of slander, Shakespeare informs the accuser that a well-built “Moor” who performed in his plays loved Susanna so that he would rush from London to kill any man who dishonored her. Anne points out that she met this actor and knew him to be a sweet man and Shakespeare insists she not tell the accuser that. *By the way, there really was a slander case, but the case never went through and was thought to be a result of a feud between the accuser and Susanna’s husband.
One of the big plot points is how Anne does not want to know more about Will’s life in London as everything he was rumored to have done or said effected her. The Earl of Southampton (Ian McKellen), who was Shakespeare’s patron for a time, arrives and it upsets Anne as rumors that he was her husband’s lover created problems in her life years earlier. And yet, these characters and moments are important because they reflect on how London saw fame for Shakespeare as a writer while his village only gossiped.
On the other side of the coin, you see how children are constantly told that their father the writer is genius and a celebrated poet can grow to feel less. There is a theme about the expectations of an absentee father and fame and how the two did not have to be mutually exclusive. Gender roles, societal expectations, and general personalities all play a role.
I think it was funny how William Shakespeare has a prepared speech for when people approach him with questions. “The best way to get started as a writer is to start writing. I don’t have a favorite play. I admire all my fellow dramatists equally. And, yes, I do think women should be able to perform the female roles as is the practice on the continent now.” Shakespeare does not give an answer as to why he no longer writes.
“If you want to be a writer, and speak to others and for others, speak first for yourself. Search within. Consider the contents of your own soul. Your humanity. And if you're honest with yourself, then whatever you write, all is true.”
