Under normal circumstances, this deserves a RAVE - it was well-directed, beautifully-shot, and superlatively-acted (particularly by Rhys Ifans).
But these aren't normal circumstances - Shakespeare is one of the basic pillars of education, and not just in England.
Even though I thoroughly disliked Shakespeare when I was 12 years old, being forced to read Julius Caesar along with the class, and dragged along on school trips to see Richard III at the movies, as I grew older I realized how important these works are to our lives.
I'll stop there, because I don't want to come across as a card-carrying, old school educationalist.
But, to have someone attempt to tell a different tale than the one I learned at school, and a German director at that, is too much for me. It's like learning England did not win the World Cup in 1966, or that The Beatles mimed all their songs, with Milli Vanilli doing the actual singing.
Maybe I should have picked more contemporary comparisons, but you get the drift.
Roland Emmerich - the offending German director - claims that because we don't have any original scripts that can be compared with other (non-existent) examples of William Shakespeare's handwriting, we should spend 90 minutes watching some cock and bull story about Edward De Vere, Duke of Oxford, and ex-lover to Queen Elizabeth (the first two badges are real, the third only alleged) was driven into poverty in his pursuit of the ignoble art of writing plays that were indirectly ascribed to Shakespeare.
If that wasn't enough, the film portrayed the real Shakespeare as an illiterate, drunken buffoon.
All too much for me. The film's first hour was entertaining enough, but I kept nodding off during the last 30 minutes.
I think I'll spread some rumors about Johann Wolfgang Goethe's books and poems having been penned by a pig farmer in Bavaria.
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