Though it's hard to imagine something new being said about or done to the Bard of Avon after all these centuries, the delightful Shakespeare in Love proves that when talented people work this vein, there's still plenty of gold left. I had high hopes going into this film, since it was written by the brilliant Tom Stoppard (author of "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead," and a host of other witty plays that utilize a postmodernist approach to classic literature, for laughs as well as for more serious matters), and directed by another Britisher, John Madden, who gave us the very well-done Mrs. Brown two years ago. These talented men do not disappoint.

The central conceit of this occasionally profound and frequently hilarious film is that William Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes) was once a young, unknown playwright, an ink-stained wretch fully engaged in the day-to-day struggle to make a buck, working on a play called "Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate's Daughter." The theater manager (the ubiquitous Geoffrey Rush), wants him to work as many crowd-pleasing pratfalls and funny dogs into his opus as possible, but Will just can't get the words down. Along comes the ever-lovely Gwyneth Paltrow in the person of Viola, a rich but bourgeois young woman who is slated to marry a piggish, impoverished but heavily titled duke, but who would rather embark on an acting career, despite the period's strictures against women on stage. Not surprisingly, romance flares between the Will and Viola, and Stoppard has a grand old time interweaving the plot of their love story with the emerging masterpiece, now happily re-titled "Romeo and Juliet."

Madden keeps the editing and movement at and beyond an MTV pace, accompanied by a nonstop flurry of sight gags and restrained slapstick, and my guess is that this film is going to be popular among high-school English teachers searching, as ever, for ways to make the Bard relevant to their image-addled, print-challenged charges. The director also gets a lot of comic mileage out of the cross-dressing that was an unexceptionable feature of the Elizabethan stage. Stoppard's luxuriant, richly comic language cascades and washes over you, and, for once, more than keeps pace with the sprightly pictures. The constant, purposeful anachronisms, both verbal and visual, are wonderful and the usual problem with mounting Shakespeare--how to handle the famous bits of dialogue--is here wittily milked for its rich comic potential. The playwright also indulges himself in some in-crowd jokes (for example, having John Webster, the notorious author of some very grotesque plays, pop up throughout the film as a sicko teenager who likes "the bloody parts"), but that's just added pleasure for the cognoscenti that others won't even notice.

Fiennes, Ralph's younger brother, is convincing and utterly charming as the feckless but promising playwright, though he needs to do something contemporary if he's not to be typecast as an Elizabethan (he was Elizabeth's lover in the recent film about her early days as monarch). Paltrow, on the other hand, has such a classic physiognomy and beauty that she seems more at home in period than contemporary roles. Here, she's fine as Viola, but when she actually acts Shakespeare (sporting a cute, pasted-on moustache) she is less than convincing. The same can be said for Ben Affleck -- who plays an egocentric actor whom Will Shakespeare entices into the role of Romeo's famously slain kinsman by telling him that the play is to be called "Mercutio" -- but his American-bred robustness and affability carry the day anyway.

The action does drag a bit on occasion, and the film could have been nipped and tucked here and there, but when Stoppard and Madden contrive to make a happy ending out of a sad one, by segueing magnficently from "Romeo and Juliet" into the Bard's next play, "Twelfth Night," you know that Shakespeare is not the only master on display here.