REVIEW: "Shakespeare in Love"
R **** {Splendid}

With glittering shows of erudition and playfulness, Shakespeare in Love mixes history, fiction, comedy and romance to create a pure joy of a movie. It's the second exquisitely imagined Elizabethan movie of the winter season, but it comes not a moment too soon.

Directed for maximum gaiety by England's John Madden, who last year wowed art-house audiences with the more sedate but not dissimilar Mrs. Brown, Shakespeare in Love credits Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard as screenwriters. Anyone who remembers Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, though, will recognize his distinctively acute way with comedy in general and Shakespeare - the man, the work, the era - in particular.

The more you know about The Bard's milieu and early writing, the more fun you'll have with Shakespeare in Love. Yet the film gives you everything you need to enjoy the ride to the hilt. Add thoughtfulness to its impressive roster of virtues.

At the start, Geoffrey Rush's scuzzy theater owner howls for mercy as his creditors hold his feet to the fire - literally. The bit is so theatrical that you figure it has to be, well, theater. You are wrong. That's an outrageous comic scene from life, one of many that compare, contrast and build bridges between art and experience in this movie.

Rush finally gets a bit of time from the loan sharks by swearing that he has a terrific new play ready to go, a surefire hit by one Will Shakespeare, his most talented pen-for-hire. It's a play that's got everything, Rush proclaims: pirates, swordplay, violence, a dog that won't behave on stage.

Cut to Joseph Fiennes' young Shakespeare, laboring over Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate's Daughter and getting nowhere. His quill seems to be broken, he laments to his analyst. Right.

The year is 1593. Christopher Marlowe is all the rage in London theatrical circles. A young writer fresh up from Stratford, who has left his wife and young children back home, is desperately looking to find his place professionally - and emotionally.

His girlfriend is openly unfaithful. Rush, his boss, wants a blockbuster - not art - and on deadline. Even the hack work comes hard. Enter Gwyneth Paltrow's spirited young patrician, Lady Viola, right on cue.

Although custom and mores bar women from the stage, Paltrow yearns to speak the words of her idol, Will Shakespeare. She disguises herself as a boy and lands the part of Romeo.

From there, the film tracks the parallel development of an urgent real-life romance between playwright and player and of a romantic tragedy called Romeo and Juliet that marked the start of the Bard's ascent to theatrical glory.

Shakespeare in Love also takes deliciously wicked pleasure in imagining the Elizabethan roots of modern showbiz venality and vanities. One of its heartiest laughs considers the genesis of today's tortured movie credits.

The editing is quick and deft. The words, which include generous stretches from Shakespeare's text for Romeo and Juliet as well as his love sonnets, become suddenly fresh again and thrillingly accessible as they are applied equally in the offstage love story and in the play-within-a-film.

This makes for the headiest of romantic comedies, complex in texture but luminously clear and lit by an all-sparkler company.

Finally Paltrow gets a part that testifies fully not only to her beauty but also to her high-spirited intelligence and delicate way with comedy. Fiennes follows an unspectacular turn in Elizabeth with a fabulously soulful comic account of the young Will Shakespeare. Trim and assured, he also has the most melting brown eyes in movies.

Consistently impressive Rush, an Oscar-winner for Shine and a strong, mysterious presence as the Queen's adviser in Elizabeth, kicks out the comic jams as the producer who's part buffoon, part weasel and, finally, very much a man of the theater.

Others worth special applause: Ben Affleck, as a puffed-up actor who agrees to play Mercutio only after being assured that the name of the show is Mercutio, and Dame Judi Dench, Madden's Queen Victoria in Mrs. Brown and here a formidable if briefly seen Queen Elizabeth I.

From concept to costumes, the film just shimmers. Think of it as a witty, winking valentine to both Shakespeare and showbiz and you'll have it about right.