Audience Construction in "Anonymous"

Coming off of this Thanksgiving break, and knowing that you are all English people, I feel required to recommend that you all go see the movie Anonymous, if you haven’t already. At risk of sounding like a complete nerd, I am not embarrassed to say that I left the theatre, sat down in my friend’s car and immediately said that I needed to blog. The film presents the life of Shakespeare in an alternate view, contrary to the way the majority of us were taught (I’m assuming). Of course there has always been talk of William Shakespeare not being the truth author of the many famous works; however, at least for me, I have never been presented with so much factual evidence in such an entertaining manner.

Anyway, as the movie began and characters appeared, right away I was struck by the way in which the director chose to construct the audience. The scene is set with you, the viewer, as an audience member in a circle theatre. So, essentially, you’re going to be watching a movie of people watching a play; however, it is structured so that the first sililioque is directly received. Flashback: I feel that this is a great example of Ong’s theories of audience construction and distinguishing the implied and actual audience. In this case, the implied audience would be those in the Shakespeare theatre, but the actual audience were those of us in the movie theatre. This continues throughout the entire film until the conclusion where the same actor addresses his audience and the camera remains filming while the people in both theaters perform the same actions: stand up, speak to their neighbor, get their coats, and proceed out of the building. Ong states, “A history of the way audiences have been called on to fictionalize themselves would be a correlative of literary genres and literary works, and indeed culture itself” (Ong 12). In this case, I feel that this could be an accurate explanation for why the audience was constructed as such. Because the director wanted to portray a certain feeling, or atmosphere, he was able to create his audience into the same type of person, with similar interests; while also drawing attention to the most important aspect of the film: Shakespeare’s works, and most notably his plays.

What’s more, after watching the movie and considering the claims that were made, it was interesting to me that my opinion of the works changed based on who I thought created them. Ong also mentions that, “If the writer succeeds in writing, it is generally because he can fictionalize in his imagination an audience he has learned to know…in their imagination” (Ong 11). So, when applied to the facts presented in the movie with regards to the actual author, in a way, it changes the learned meanings of the poems or plays because they first presented with a different author, and therefore a different imagination and intended audience. I guess that kind of leads us back to our first paradox, does the author have agency over the way in which his or her texts are interpreted? How much of that interpretation is tied to the reader’s prior knowledge of the author? Just something to think about, and not a bad way to spend dollars if you feel the urge.