Thursday, March 4, 1999
By Robert Knox

Shakespeare's a big hit on South Shore movie screens. If you're one of the many local people who've plunked down money to see Shakespeare in Love, you probably enjoyed it more than the play from which it ultimately derives, Romeo and Juliet.

The film received 13 Academy Award nominations - more than any other film this year - including best picture, best screenplay, best director, best actress and best supporting actress. It's an unusual sort of picture to score so highly with the Academy, considering its roots in a classical literary text, its script (co-written by a playwright noted for daring theatrical works) and its cast, peopled by stage-bred English actors.

The Oscar-nominated director, John Madden, is rooted in live theater. Supporting actress nominee Judi Dench is making a career out of portraying English regents; Elizabeth in this film, she was Queen Victoria in last year's Mrs. Brown, a film relegated in America to art houses.

The lead is played by Joseph Fiennes, an actor much less well known than his brother Ralph. The title figure is a literary giant of whom so little biographical fact is known it's spooky. The film's success with the Academy may in part be due to its subject, Shakespeare, who for whatever reason appears to be having his millennial hour of popular fame. He was recently voted England's "Man of the Millennium." Last year Harold Bloom wrote a book crediting him with inventing the modern western personality.

Whatever the reason, Shakespeare in Love escaped the fate of art house-only distribution. It came to Independence Mall in Kingston almost a month ago (shocking some observers) and is still playing.

But if a contemporary fascination with Shakespeare helps account for the movie's resonance with the public, the roots of a film with enough substance to it to make it worthy of both audiences and critics go back to a 16th century aesthetic mystery. How did a play which begins as if intends to be a romantic comedy turn into the tragic paradigm of star-crossed love? In Shakespeare in Love, writers Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard offer a fanciful and highly fictional, but artistically satisfying answer.

The film relies on the post-modernist technique of reframing pieces of an earlier literary work in a new work of art. Snippets of Romeo and Juliet are quoted in the film as our leads - Shakespeare (Fiennes), the young Elizabethan playwright trying to make a name for himself; Viola De Lesseps (Gwyneth Paltrow), the aristocratic young woman who dresses like her brother and lands the role of Romeo in the new play - enact fragments of scenes, speeches and snatches of speeches in the guise of rehearsing for the opening performance. It's a brilliant device. You can see the connection between it and Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Hamlet, told from the point of view of two minor characters) and his other plays, such as the recent Arcadia, in which contemporary events bring a drama from the past back to life.

These snatches of the play within the movie are absolute valentines to Shakespeare lovers, Romeo and Juliet lovers and romantics in general. They work in a humble and primitive boy-meets-girl way. Falling in love at first sight, Romeo wangles a dance with Juliet and they exchange the famous lines which form a sonnet and lead to a kind of formulaic kiss ("you kiss by the book," she tells him). Since the people rehearsing those lines are falling in love in real life (i.e., the movie), their emotions hit us with a kind of double charge. Intellectually we know they're just actors too, but the classic love story is stepped up - peeled back to its core - when it also becomes the story of young Will Shakespeare and the wealthy young woman who's way above his station and already betrothed by her family to a cynical, crudely unromantic lord (played with requisite flippancy by Colin Firth).

There are also clever variants on some of the famous moments in R&J. In one of these variations (a kind of historical outtake) we have Shakespeare shimmying up to the balcony only to come face to face with Juliet's suddenly appearing nurse - both recoil in shock, loverboy plunging back down unromantically on his keister. Since the woman he's in love with is pretending to be a boy, when Will kisses her for real for the first time she's wearing a moustache.

Before seeing the movie, I had mixed feelings about the idea of portraying Shakespeare - the mystery man of English literature - as a character in a movie. I was afraid it would be like putting God on screen in a Biblical epic - awkward and tacky. In fact the result is highly entertaining. It's not Shakespeare; it's Stoppard, a kind of literary resurrectionist whose double-focused approach made for lively art on stage and now on film. Professional scholars may have the same sort of problems with this film they have had with popular, audience-pleasing film versions of Shakespeare's plays, like Kenneth Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing, seemingly forgetting that Shakespeare wrote for a popular audience. Shakespeare's Elizabethean theater was intended to get in your face. Shakespeare in Love does that too.

In addition to enjoying beautiful line readings by Paltrow (given the chance by the film's ups and downs to play both Romeo and Juliet at different points), Fiennes and supporting cast members, we get to enjoy the movie's comic sen-se, its Elizabethan jokes and jokes on Elizabethaness, its deliberate, post-modernist anachronisms - like the tavern waiter who recites the evening's yuppie-sounding specials - and well-timed reversions to the contemporary vernacular. After Shakespeare explains the play's devastating ending to the cast for the first time (he's writing it even as they rehearse), the producer dourly comments, "Well, that'll leave them rolling in the aisles."

We also get to enjoy the way the film develops a premise out of what in graduate school is termed the play's "aesthetic problems." The chief problem for the scholars is that there are lots of elements of romantic comedy in the play's first two acts. We begin with a young man mooning over his unrequited love for a girl he forgets in two seconds when he sets eyes on Juliet ("Oh, she doth teach the torches to burn bright": Bloom may be right, nobody will ever top that line). We begin with a self-involved, posturing young man, playing at the role of despairing lover. We have Juliet's funny-crude, jokey nurse; and her even cruder servant-clown. We have a masked ball (as in Brannagh's Much Ado), the balcony scene deceptions, and the mad, manic, frenetically jovial Mercutio. All this sounds like a comedy-satire on the excesses of romantic posing, like As You Like It. But these elements are torqued in another direction. We don't get romantic comedy; we get cruel reality instead. For centuries audiences have loved Romeo and Juliet and hated the way it ends. We love falling in love; we hate dying. Shakespeare in Love gives us an explanation - whole cloth imaginative fiction though it is - for why Shakespeare took his play in that direction. The course of true love doesn't run smoothly for the playwright either.

It's also fun to watch Stoppard and Norman turn another of the great literary mystery-tragedies, long a traditional source of conspiracy theories - the tavern fight death of Christopher Marlowe - into a plot device. A great innovator, it was arguably Marlowe who showed Elizabethans what the theater could do, and Shakespeare who did it. In the film we are given a scene in which Marlowe tosses out characters and plot motifs which Shakespeare (then struggling to get his own play started) quickly gathers in to turn "Romeo and Ethel, the Pirates' Daughter" into "Romeo and Juliet." "He has a friend named Mercutio," Marlowe suggests. "Mercutio," Fiennes replies, eyes glowing, "is a good name." The writers' insight into the quirky ways art sometimes proceeds makes this stuff more than jokey.

The movie also imagines a young John Webster (author of The Duchess of Malfi and other Jacobean tragedies) as a sadistic theater brat. Webster wrote plays notable for their violence and decadence, which fed the Puritans' attack on the English theater. The film gives us men dressed all in black with homely caps who harangue the crowd against the vanity and devilry of the theater. These are Puritans, of course, who did succeed in closing the theaters in the 17th century. One of them is swept unwillingly into the opening performance of Romeo and Juliet. At the play's end we see him join unreservedly in the crowd's weeping, thunderous demonstration of satisfaction with the play. He's given only a few seconds on film, but his actions illustrate the film's underlying message: the ultimate triumph of art.