29 January 1999

Shakespeare in Love (15 cert, 123 mins)

"HE was just like any other man, but that he was like all other men." Thus William Hazlitt on William Shakespeare, unwittingly pinpointing the peculiar problem of portraying him: to get a sense of a genius that was generic but that was housed within the mind of an ordinary man - a single sensibility that yet encompassed all sensibilities. To imagine Shakespeare is in some ways as tricky as putting a face and features on God, and John Madden's Shakespeare in Love, working from a script by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard, solves the dilemma by refusing to be reverent.

The Will Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes) we see is a jobbing actor and struggling writer, whose inspiration runs dry when his love life falters. He's working on a play, unpromisingly titled Romeo and Ethel the Pirate's Daughter, eagerly awaited by a penurious theatre owner (Geoffrey Rush). The marketplace then - and now - being what it is, Shakespeare is mainly appreciated for his fight scenes and gags involving dogs.

But one person sees his poetry for what it is and knows it by heart: the beautiful Viola De Lesseps (Gwyneth Paltrow), who dresses as a man and wins the part of Romeo in the writer's slow-gestating new work. Soon - disguise rumbled - she's also winning his heart, in a love that, with familiar echoes, has obstacles strewn in its way.

This thwarted love affair comes to dominate the later stages of the film. But until then the tone is light and racy. Norman and Stoppard's script flirts gaily with anachronism (a Stratford-upon-Avon souvenir mug sits on Shakespeare's desk), always aware of how much we are aware of its hero. Cleverly, the screenplay also keeps faith with Shakespeare's own wit and humour. The movie's surprisingly frank sexual high jinks are in keeping with Shakespeare's own bawdiness. And its punning dialogue reflect a writer a nd a time that prized wordplay as a form of refinement quite apart from humour.

Fiennes and Paltrow are more impressive as individuals than as lovers (huh?), but they hold the ensemble together. You have to believe with any actor playing Shakespeare that he actually wrote the plays. In Fiennes's hard, swift intelligence and loquacious infatuation with words, you get a hint that he just might have. Paltrow's haughty English accent has long been such that she could pass herself off as a duchess at Ascot. But, used to playing feminine guile and graft, she here adds a rueful self-mockery to her repertoire.

These two are supported by a cast that (like those in other heritage hits, such as Sense and Sensibility) is a tribute to the glory of English stage acting. Simon Callow is a harrumphing Sir Edmund Tilney, Master of the Revels, and a sort of censor of his day. Imelda Staunton gives her usual turn of self-effacing comic brilliance as Viola's nurse. Best of all is Judi Dench's Queen Elizabeth, a white-faced Gloriana tartly trumping her obsequious courtiers. Surprisingly, the only actor to give Dench a run for her money is Ben Affleck, whose Ned Alleyn is a small masterpiece of actorly vanity.

All these funny, frenetic performances make for an enjoyable romp, close to a classier Carry On film - "Carry On Will". But the movie does have a more serious subtext, often embedded within the jokes themselves. A running gag, for instance, of Shakespeare finding lines leaping out of everyday life for his plays (a preacher railing at the two local theatres, "A plague on both your houses") not only flatters the audience's erudition, it hints at the mysterious, magpie nature of artistic creation. Shakespeare drew thoughts and language from all around him, the film's point is, but for his deepest insights and emotions he had to draw from within himself, as exemplified by his ecstatic, agonised (and, of course, so far as we know, imaginary) affair with Viola.

Any work of art that has Shakespeare as its subject is going to find Shakespeare used as its yardstick - and, inevitably, fall short. And there are times that Shakespeare in Love comes over as middlebrow tosh beside the gravity and greatness of its subject matter. Its view of Romeo and Juliet diminishes the play by presenting as a monolithically romantic view of love a work that is multifaceted in its view. Affleck's Alleyn hilariously cavils at playing the relatively small role of Mercutio, but there is no sense in the film of Mercutio's own scoffing treatment of love and sex.

That may be to treat too earnestly a movie whose virtue lies in its lightness. I have seen Shakespeare in Love twice, in England and America (where it is a strong Oscar contender), and it continues to grow on me, revealing hidden details and subtleties. The Los Angeles audience I saw it with got few of the scholarly (presumably Stoppardian) in-jokes, but loved it all the same. In its marriage of farce and sentiment, there is an undeniable magic - a comic spirit that can fairly be called Shakespearean.