For most of his career Roland Emmerich became well known for his knack of blowing up the world real good. He is also one of the most critically loathed directors, with all but two of films receiving a Rotten rating on Rotten Tomatoes. I personally didn't mind his disaster films and even used his films The Day After Tomorrow and 2012 earlier this year as the subject of an essay I wrote as a submission to a film journal (the essay's available for viewing on the “film writing” page of this blog).
However, it seems that Emmerich has tired of disaster films and he has moved on to make this film based an a conspiracy theory stated William Shakespeare was not the real author of his famous plays.
In essence, the story of the film is that the 17th Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere (Rhys Ifans) was the real writer of the plays, which were somewhat based on his life. Because he was technically forbidden to write, the plays were credited to Shakespeare, who is shown in the film to be a drunken buffoon.