Review Richard Combs

"WORDS, WORDS, WORDS," complains young Will Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes), as well he might and one day will. Or rather he'll put those words into the mouth of his most famous protagonist, some seven years after the action and the play at stake here. For now he's worried about the words that won't come, about the writer's block that has damned up his latest composition, Romeo and Ethel the Pirate's Daughter, even while the moneymen are literally holding his producer's feet to the fire. This is a world where words have weight and artists aren't excused from the real.

So Will pours out his frustration to his local apothecary and "Priest of Psyche" (Antony Sher). Being a writer, of course, he does it in metaphor: "It's as if my quill is broken ... the proud tower of my genius is collapsed." The apothecary listens sympathetically -- while the sand runs through his hourglass, or his 50-minute glass -- and finds these expressions "most interesting." He's also a man ahead of his time (some three hundred years) and knows as well as a writer the meanings that can hide in a form of words. He asks Shakespeare if he's having any trouble with the other proud tower of his genius at the moment.

There's a dash and a theatrical brilliance to this opening, to its Shakespeare-mimicking-and-mocking, to the way it cracks its subject out of forms of words, that has carried the script to Oscar glory for Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard. The praise has almost automatically gone to Stoppard, since the conceit and the wit seem so characteristically his. He was the man, after all, who trumped the play-within-the-play of Hamlet with the play-outside-the-play of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead -- another conceit about reality being caught on the horns of a fictional dilemma. The difference is that there the dilemma could only be resolved by cancelling the protagonists. In Shakespeare in Love, the hero and heroine are allowed to go on to write themselves more glorious roles.

The apothecary's, and the film's, answer is that a cure in one department will raise Shakespeare's proud tower in another. And this being "Shakespeare," the solution will arrive hidden in another form, in drag. The aristocratic Viola De Lesseps (Gwyneth Paltrow), who is theater-mad and longs to "dream myself into a company of players," presents herself at auditions for Romeo and Ethel disguised as a man, Thomas Kent. Shakespeare is bowled over: he pursues flighty Thomas to offer him the role of Romeo, in the process running into Viola and falling in love with her.

If this were really Shakespeare, these complications would not be resolved until the last scene, with the dropping of masks, a magical harmony restored, and an acknowledgment both of fantasy's triumph and its real limitations. But this being a movie, or the kind of movie it is, the masks are dropped much earlier -- Will discovers that his leading man and his lover are one and the same -- and harmony is established through the magic of montage. Words now flow from Will's inky fingers, manuscript pages quickly pile up, and Will and Viola -- circled by the camera, light-dappled, naked in bed -- can exchange the same lovers' words "Thomas Kent" trades on stage with the male actor playing Juliet.

There are other complications on the way to a first-night triumph -- by which time, by various accidents and casual suggestions, the play will have found its proper subject and title. But the real obstacle to the real love story is that Viola is promised to another, to the Earl of Wessex (Colin Firth), who carries her off to his estates in Virginia after she opens and closes on stage, now playing Juliet to a real Romeo, Shakespeare himself. No matter -- she can live on in his fictional world, as Viola in Twelfth Night -- "Write me well," she says -- a shipwreck victim with "a new life beginning on a stranger shore."

It's the elan of all this, the theatrical flourishes dovetailing with the romantic floridness, that has made the film such a critical and popular success (along with a naive delight in its portrayal of Shakespeare not as an ivory-tower poet but a journeyman scribbler with money problems). But there's something amiss in this state of things, something lacking in a theatrical selfconsciousness that leads to such a simple vindication of "the show" -- so simple that even some protesting Puritans are caught up in the euphoria of the final performance. The problem is not that theater and film are in some essential way incompatible. In fact, the most interesting thing about Shakespeare in Love is that it reveals exactly the opposite. What makes it look most hollow as a film is its failure to explore itself theatrically, the kind of show it settles for in the end.

One thing it might be criticized for is rehashing that old biopic standby, the psychodrama in which the famous artist plays out and resolves his real life through his art. Shakespeare in Love is wittily self-aware enough to keep those cliches at bay, though perhaps what it really does is to refresh them. So life only sparks off art in a comically haphazard way: Shakespeare picks up the odd recyclable phrase here and there, and Christopher Marlowe (Rupert Everett) sketches the plot of Romeo and Juliet for him in a couple of offhand sentences. But sneakily, after the fact, the film applies a reality test. So Shakespeare has to fall for Viola before he can write the classic work of romantic love, the one play that up to then, according to reigning opinion -- i.e., Queen Elizabeth's (Judi Dench) -- shows us "the very truth and nature of love."

Elizabeth's role in settling all these issues is quite striking. No wonder, brief as the part is, the Supporting Actress Oscar gravitated to Dench. She sees through all artifice and every disguise. She knows when Shakespeare appears at her court dressed as a laundrywoman, and she knows when Viola has been deflowered -- and not by her intended, Wessex. She knows because she is the biggest role player and drag artist of them all -- "a woman in a man's profession." This might make her one of Shakespeare's magician (or fool) figures, who know when to doff the masks and dissolve the fiction. But she isn't. She's an authority figure who in the end knows what is really what.

Without the magician or the fool, however, where is all the theatricality -- all the play on seeming and being the film picks up on from Shakespeare -- to go? The answer is that unless it passes into the real love story, or becomes useful copy for future fictions, it goes nowhere. But this ignores the extent to which Romeo and Juliet, though hardly one of Shakespeare's comedies, like them parodies its own form. Its tale of star-crossed and romantically doomed lovers is also a story of a pair in love with romantic doom. Apart from claiming, in his lovelorn distraction, not to be where he is, to be "some other where" (and at this point he hasn't even met Juliet), Romeo is prey to constant self-dramatizing self-abnegation. Both lovers define themselves through the fragility, instability, inconstancy that they fear in the other.

When the play begins, Romeo is already head over heels in love with a character whom we never see -- an attachment that he switches without blinking to Juliet. He is someone who is in love with the idea of being in love, which has also been said of Duke Orsino in Twelfth Night, pining over an unrequited passion when Shakespeare's next Viola is washed up on his mythical shore. The difference here is that ideal solutions are available -- love's labours sorted out -- because the special conditions of comic fantasy operate. Beyond these, "the rain it raineth every day."

Shakespeare's playfulness, his theatricality, operates between these double perceptions, inside this double structure: the parody of romantic doom within which lovers live out their romantic doom; the magical resolution of reality's problems that is clearly limited by reality. Where "reality" in effect means mortality, where the fiction-making is an escape from, a cheating of, a transformation of mortality, and at the same time is cruelly curtailed by it, then Shakespeare's theatricality has much in common with the self-conscious novel of the 20th century.

In Partial Magic (University of California Press, 1975), an analysis of the self-conscious novel, Robert Alter defined its double structure, its way of operating in the face of death: "All serious novelists must confront the arbitrariness, the necessary falsification of the worlds they invent through words," and "It is the tension between artifice and that which annihilates artifice that gives the finest self-conscious novels their urgency in the midst of play."

The best exposition of this in terms of Shakespeare is undoubtedly Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guilden-stern Are Dead. This is the touching tale of the two courtiers in Hamlet, minor actors in the major drama, who are plucked from their context in the play and spend their time idling and arguing through the obscure machinations going on around them. It's their detachment that gradually allows them to sense that they are bending for an extinction very different from the kind of impermanent death colorfully enacted on stage: "You can't act death.... It's just a man failing to reappear, that's all -- now you see him, now you don't. That's the only thing that's real: here one minute and gone the next and never coming back -- an exit, unobtrusive and unannounced, a disappearance gathering weight as it goes on, until, finally, it is heavy with death."

If this is the essence of "the show" in Shakespeare -- an insubstantial pageant, fleeting feelings, arbitrary attachments, a series of flourishes covering an ineluctable exit -- then Stoppard and Marc Norman and director John Madden have reversed it for Shakespeare in Love. Here reality doesn't trouble the fiction -- the fiction helps make reality more real: the montaging together of the lovers on stage with the writer and his star romping in bed. The playwright perfects his craft in overcoming and remaking adverse reality, such as the whisking away of his loved one to America. And it's all tied up with a theatrical flourish that is positively regal, Queen Elizabeth's arrival to point out the masks and to sew everything back into a seamless package.

There are any number of precedents for the kind of show-business verve that is celebrated here, in fact a whole genre of "the show must go on" comedy (as one of the film's cornier jokes signals). But is there something particular to the English cinema -- so inextricably tied to theatrical performance and tradition -- in the way the theatrical effect, the magisterial gesture so effortlessly produced by Dame Judi, can seal off and close down a movie subject? If the stage love story and the real love story can be so easily intertwined, then they don't so much support as nullify each other, making Shakespeare in love least of all a love story.

There's something similar at work, a duplication of effect and a flaunting of show, in the way the film pairs its theatrical consciousness with a kind of movie knowingness. An opening pan around the gallery of the Rose Theatre finally comes to rest, on the sod and straw of the groundlings' pit, on a playbill for The Moneylender's Revenge, just as we hear entrepreneur Philip Henslowe (Geoffrey Rush) being roasted by his impatient financial backer. Later, there's a run of jokes -- about creative artists sharing in profits that never materialize, about the number of possessive producers' credits on Romeo and Juliet, about "He's nobody, he's the author" -- that pairs commercial Elizabethan theater with the contemporary commercial cinema.

Again, though, the duplication tends to be rather self-cancelling, and the jokes have an insistence and a literalness while never building to a theme, never adding up to a real movie structure. The literalness and obviousness marks Madden's direction throughout, and at times his scene-setting might be read as a series of study notes. One note concerns the blood-boltered Jacobean drama to come in the glimpses of John Webster as a scruffy boy torturing mice. But this should have been a sideline joke in one scene, not the focal point of three separate scenes.

The theater so sonorously played out here is not the theater everywhere -- not, that is, in the cinema that can accommodate any number of theatrical uses and metaphors. Filmmakers as diverse as Jean Renoir, Alfred Hitchcock, and Mike Nichols have employed the proscenium arch, the "staged" event, the theatrical presentation of character to sound thematic effect. Interestingly enough, so does Shakespeare in Love's current period companion, Elizabeth, in which the queen's final appearance, drawing on the mask and the persona of the Virgin Queen, takes Dench's "a woman in a man's profession" line in a different direction, not at all to do with theatrical oneupman(or woman)ship.

The coincidence of the two films might also suggest something else, or at least the need for something the English cinema has never really attended to -- has shuffled out of sight, in an embarrassed way, behind the stage scenery. What it lacks are foundation myths, a way of catching, if not the conscience, at least formative elements in the history of the people and their society. Costume drama is often attacked as the bane of British cinema, but there's no intrinsic reason why this shouldn't be as useful a genre as any other. Costumes can be used to reveal a subject as well as to overdress one. And the Elizabethan era, with its confluence of political drama and literary evolution, the formation of an ever-more-powerful state and an identity-shaping literature, would be the richest source for this kind of myth.

Shakespeare in Love begins to move towards this, to the extent that it combines its portrayal of Shakespeare with a sketch of that other prime consciousness of his age, Christopher Marlowe. The film adroitly spins their relationship off on a joke -- Shakespeare claiming to be Marlowe when he is threatened by Wessex (which subsumes the centuries-long conspiracy theory that Shakespeare wasMarlowe). But reality and fiction end up blocking each other again: Shakespeare later assumes he is responsible for Marlowe's murder, he becomes a haunted figure extravagantly repenting in church, then whatever significance this has is cancelled by his discovery that he isn't responsible. Perhaps the time is now ripe for Marlowe himself to move center stage in the national mythology: playwright and, reportedly, spy for the state's burgeoning secret service, victim perhaps of its internecine intrigues, a writer who combined the drama of statecraft with the blood and thunder of stagecraft.

That the acclaim for Shakespeare in Love should have mostly focused on Tom Stoppard is not unreasonable. But given the way the subject has been developed, a question arises as to how the film should be defined, both absolutely and within the Stoppard canon. Can it be more than a collection of footnotes to his stagework proper, a sort of Little Book of Stoppard's Themes and Motifs? In which case, is it more an auteur film, an arthouse package with groundling appeal, or a kind of vanity publishing?