Goofs

When Edward is talking to Southampton and Essex about 'bringing the mob' his right hand switches between resting on top of his cane and grasping the shaft when the shot changes from front to back.

Benjamin Johnson was released from prison then presented to his redeemer The Earl of Oxford. The Earl refers to his wife and Johnson and his companion (The Earl's man) bow towards the Lady. The camera changes to a long shot and we see only Johnson rising from the bow. His companion does not.

The playwrights in the movie are all astonished that Romeo and Juliet is written in verse, specifically iambic pentameter. In fact, English drama had been written in verse for hundreds of years, and mostly in iambic pentameter for about the previous 25 years. Prose drama, not poetry, was the innovation.

When Ben Jonson first arrives at the home of the Earl of Oxford after being released from prison the Earl is shown cutting, holding, smelling, and then referring to a white and red rose as "The Tudor Rose". "The Tudor Rose" is actually a heraldic emblem of England that is a combination of the white rose and the red rose of the House of York and the House of Lancaster, respectively. It is not, nor has it ever actually been, the actual bloom of a rose bush.

The play presented on the eve of the Essex Rebellion was William Shakespeare's "Richard II", not (as portrayed in this film) "Richard III".

In the movie, Ben Jonson is called the son of a glass maker. In fact, Jonson's father, who died a month before Jonson was born, was a clergyman, and his stepfather was a bricklayer.

Elizabeth I died in Spring, on March 24th 1603. It is unlikely that her funeral procession led over the frozen Thames.

The music at Oxford's wedding in 1571 is Mozart's Requiem, composed in 1791. However, at the time of protestant Elizabeth I, music was not performed at weddings at all. Furthermore, Mozart's requiem is reserved for solemn occasions such as funerals and would never be played at a wedding, protestant or otherwise. Regardless of these facts, it is simply part of the movie's soundtrack, and it is not implied that the musicians in the film are playing it.

The theater that burned in the movie was Ben Jonson's, not the Globe.

(at around 1h 50 mins) When Jonson is thrown out of The Globe, the Earl of Oxford's man's image is printed backward with the Earl's Crest reversed and on the right breast rather than the left breast and the buttons on the suit backward, because the image was flopped in editing.

In the scene where the young Earl of Oxford has dinner with Queen Elizabeth, he mentions that the Italian actors are called Commedia Dell' Arte. The name Commedia Dell' Arte was not coined until the 18th century by Italian playwright and librettist Carlo Goldoni.

The witches from Macbeth are seen performing on stage for a production during Elizabeth's reign. Macbeth was a play written for and when James I was on the English throne.

One character asks another "Can you spot me a few pence?" This usage of "spot" didn't appear until the 20th century.

After a successful performance of one of "his" plays, William Shakespeare takes a bow then falls into the audience where he crowd surfs. This is a 20th Century phenomenon as Joe "King" Carrasco appears in the first documented video of crowd surfing in the 1981 rock video "Party Weekend".