Vanessa Redgrave and Joely Richardson play the older and younger versions of Queen Elizabeth respectively. In real life, they are mother and daughter.
Roland Emmerich self-financed the entire movie. The past financial earnings of his previous movies allowed him the money and total control of this movie without studio interference.
Derek Jacobi (Prologue) and Mark Rylance (John Condell) are supporters of the Oxfordian theory (on which the film's plot is based) in real life.
When a reporter on National Public Radio pointed out to screenwriter John Orloff that this movie is full of historical inaccuracies (for instance, the playwright Christopher Marlowe, who appears as a character in this movie, actually was dead by the time these events supposedly "took place"), he responded that he wrote these inaccuracies into the screenplay deliberately as an homage to the way that Shakespeare himself took dramatic liberties in his history plays.
John Orloff wrote the script back in 1998, but the project never took off at that time because of the release of the other Shakespeare-related movie, Shakespeare in Love (1998). The project was then restarted back in 2005, when Roland Emmerich saw the script, but it only got the go ahead in early 2010 after additional research and revision.