After fire consumed London’s Globe Theatre in 1613, its most famous stakeholder, William Shakespeare, retired to his home in Stratford-upon-Avon. Director Kenneth Branagh borrowed the title of Shakespeare’s final production at the Globe, All is True, for his intelligently endearing film about the Bard’s last years in Stratford.
Branagh stars as Shakespeare, playing him as an older man who decided to leave the game while still a winner. He is a bit tired, his exertions are measured, yet his wit is undimmed. “I’ve never let the truth get in the way of a good story,” he quips.
As All is True tells it, the Globe fire sent Shakespeare home for the first time in many years. “Good husband,” his wife Anne (Judi Dench) says curtly as they climb the stairs to the bedchambers. “To us you’re a guest and a guest will have the best bed,” she insists, pointing him to the spare room. The Bard bears the wifely slight with a resigned shrug.
That’s not the end of it. Family conversations are punctuated by semicolons of grievance and long dashes of silence. Anne accuses her husband of neglect, a charge he accepts. “I’ve lived so long in an imaginary world, I think I’ve lost sight of what’s real,” he admits ruefully.
Shakespeare loves his daughter Susanna (Lydia Wilson) but dislikes her husband John Hall (Hadley Fraser), a priggish Puritan with a Puritan’s desire to drain life of its color until black alone remains. Something of a hypocrite, Hall schemes over inheriting the fortune his father-in-law earned in a profession the Puritans deemed sinful, theater. Shakespeare’s other daughter, Judith (Kathryn Wilder), is unwed and unhappy. She despises her own reflection and resents her father for favoring her late brother, Hamnet (Sam Ellis). As in many of Shakespeare’s plays, there is a ghost; Hamnet speaks with his father, asking to hear the end of the story. “I’m done with stories,” Shakespeare replies firmly.
Ian McKellen has a delightful cameo as the Earl of Southampton, for whom Shakespeare may have written his love sonnets many years earlier. “The beauty I inspired in you will be forever young,” Southampton says. He also mentions, with a smile, “the whiff of popery” clinging to Shakespeare. The Bard may have necessarily kept many secrets. In Reformation England, homosexuality and Roman Catholicism could send a man to the rack and the chopping block.
All is True is a deliberately ironic title for a film that constructs a rich and believable life around a bare skeleton of facts. Screenwriter Ben Elton composed the dialogue in archaic cadences but without the unfamiliar Elizabethan vocabulary. All is True always sounds conversational without stooping to sound modern.
The scope of Shakespeare’s art encompassed the world and yet, All is True insists, he was still a man of his time. The idea that Judith could be a poet never occurs to him until the evidence is irrefutable. For all his knowledge of the geography of the human soul (the film maintains the mystery of how he learned so much), there were still continents of experience that remained closed to him.
