More and more, scholars from the haunts of literature are sinking their teeth into cinema. What happens when a multi-Oscar winning film like "Shakespeare In Love" is dissected academically, asks AKHILA RAMNARAYAN.

IN the Hollywood film "Shakespeare in Love", the first impression of the playwright's art is through a disrupted, discontinuous showing of "The Two Gentlemen of Verona" at a London playhouse, The Curtain. In the scene leading to it, a young and dashing Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes) strides through the streets of London, followed by the anxious Philip Henslowe (Geoffrey Rush) of another playhouse, The Rose. En route, Will complains about writer's cramp and goes to bargain with Richard Burbage about a new romantic comedy he has not begun writing.

The film combines the conventions of tragedy, romance and farce, assembling fact and fiction in its representation of Shakespeare for a mainstream western audience. You see it as the film's heroine makes her debut as a starry-eyed theatre goer. The camera closes in on a laughing Viola De Lesseps (Gwynneth Paltrow) watching the play, being watched in turn by suitor Lord Wessex and the playwright himself. Viola silently mouths a lovelorn Valentine's lines in Act Three, Scene One: "What light is light/if Silvia be not seen? What joy is joy, if Silvia be not by ...?"

The lines recur in the play, most notably when a cross-dressing Paltrow auditions for the part of Romeo in the forthcoming play from the bard, "Romeo and Ethel The Pirate's Daughter", later to become "Romeo and Juliet".

The promise of unfiltered authenticity occurs, among other things, through Shakespeare's fictional love interest, presented as a montage from intimate and public space. Shakespeare's work constitutes the authentic moment of high culture that is unavailable in complete form. The deliberately disrupted narrative makes for partial identification with the speaking subject (Fiennes) as he struggles with true love and the writing of his play. Will cannot stay together with Viola (the film maker has to negotiate the historical account of Shakespeare's marriage to Anne Hathaway) as she has been given to Wessex. As the realisation dawns, the play he is writing evolves into a tragedy about two young lovers.

In the film, writing seems to imply control, something the frustrated bard can create according to his own terms. The viewer has this point of entry into the symbolic realm instituted by the camera. As fetish object, Paltrow becomes the privileged audience member and the object of the bard's poetry, as she speaks his lines back to him, in bed and on stage. She is the rich heiress with lowly antecedents. Lord Wessex reminds her when she objects to his attentions, that her father is a mere shopkeeper who wants his grandchildren to wear a coat of arms.

While Paltrow is the spectacular object of male desire, her station makes her an object through which the viewer can penetrate high culture. Her affair with the theatre and with Shakespeare become an identifying point for the American spectator. As Viola, she reflects high cultural aspirations consonant with democratic principles, not tied to birth or rank.

An American actor from Hollywood, Paltrow is set up as fetish object for Fiennes. She is also the chief means by which the life and the work of the bard are fetishised for a consumer audience in the Nineties. She is the object of the male gaze as Shakespeare's beloved. She is sighted and hotly pursued by him while she is disguised as aspiring actor Thomas Kent, as Romeo in male drag, and as Viola, the object of Will's passion and poetic musings.

Thus Paltrow performs the traditional, iconic function. The narrative and the medium preclude that she be a silent muse, so she is also the speaker of Shakespeare's lines. The conflation of the two roles - beloved and play actor - occurs when Fiennes finds her out. The affair is consummated while the new play is composed, not to mention the sonnet "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"

As a participant in action, Paltrow represents to the spectator the glory days of the English theatre. She is the object of Shakespeare's love and of audience nostalgia for high culture. English theatre, and by association, English culture in the 16th Century, are mediated through Paltrow, identifiable as a popular icon with high cultural pretensions for a mainstream audience. Even if the audience cannot distinguish Shakespeare's lines from Stoppard, they know Paltrow.

The search for the authentic in the presence of the familiar becomes the search for Shakespeare's plays in the absence of much knowledge about them. The economics of film making dictate the "Hollywoodisation" of Shakespeare. This means effacing the playwright and his works in the transition from the verbal image to the visual, and then scattering the film with "authentic" visual images. James Madden's film presents a deconstructed and decontextualised "Romeo and Juliet", in which actual fragments of the play (mostly famous lines), intersperse the script by Tom Stoppard and Marc Norman.

Here is Shakespeare sanitised for the film medium, an undertaking not without its problems. Scholars have noted that while theatre and cinema seem superficially similar, they are distinctive in their reliance on aural(verbal) and visual sense-making respectively. The tension set up between the two genres complicates their joining. There are other contradictions. Cinema seeks to render two-dimensional space as three-dimensional, it does not afford the sense of visual abundance that theatre does. The collective public for the motion picture has a different response task than a theatre going public, a task characterised by passivity and fetishism that comes from knowing that the gaze is controlled by the camera. The relationship between the directorial/production eye and the camera, disempowers the subject even further.

Madden's orchestrated account of Shakespeare that moves from play to playwright and back again, opens up a kind of televisual and carnivalesque shopping space, in which the audience can look but not touch. It promises an exclusive virtual recreation. The spectator gets a ringside view of life in the city through Fiennes as Shakespeare, as he roves to and from garret and playhouse, alehouse and brothel, and Paltrow's mansion across the river. These locations and sets, the characters inhabiting them, all contribute to the spectator's sense of getting the real thing. The film incorporates scenes with horses and wagons, sacks of meal and preachers, English lasses in bonnets, thugs, brawls in alehouses, ferry by moonlight, dances and duels, glimpses of royalty and other high places. The opening credits roll to the scratching of Fiennes' quill as he autographs Shakespeare's name.

The film privileges, in no particular order, Shakespeare's encounters with other historical figures like Burbage, Edward Alleyn (Ben Affleck), Henslowe, Queen Elizabeth (Judi Dench), Christopher Marlowe (played, ironically by gay British actor Rupert Everett) and little John Webster. The spectator is a tourist/voyeur who drinks it all up, from the voice reciting in the tavern, "The special today is roast pig with a juniper berry sauce on a bed of buckwheat pancakes", to the playwright's coffee mug in the first scene which bears the legend "A Present from Stratford-upon-Avon".

How is the spectator to alleviate anxiety and unpleasure that arise from Viola's unmasking as a woman in man's clothes in front of all the players, and from the prospect of loverly separation?

As the narrative progresses, her status as etherealised fetish object is gradually eroded. She changes from love object atop the balcony to touchable flesh and blood, a person with whom the speaking subject has an actual connection. This is transgression with disastrous consequences to both.

Viola is meant to be the focus of Will's desire. He can look upon her, but dystopic culture teaches that he never bridge the gap by touching. The last shot sequence in the playhouse reinstalls Viola as the fetish object. Just married and bound for Lord Wessex's tobacco plantation in Virginia, she has run to Burbage's playhouse, The Curtain, to see the first production of "Romeo and Juliet" starring Will as Romeo. She gets to be Juliet because the boy-actor's voice breaks minutes before the start of the show. Existing in borrowed time and space, the two lovers make ritualised gestures of love.

The spectatorial gaze fixes on Viola, while ranging through virtual space, the play's audience, behind-the-scene shots, profiles, tracking shots and pans. Will gazes upon the now untouchable Viola as Juliet, as they perform in public, lines (ostensibly) composed while lying in her bed. A sense of voyeurism coupled with a sense of loss help restore Viola to her former status. Control is regained with her taking up the female character. Refashioned as Juliet, Viola is placed firmly where she belongs in the male symbolic order.

The final threat to her status from the master of revels who alleges her womanhood, is averted by the intervention of the Queen. She maintains the fiction of Thomas Kent, orders that Paltrow deliver the wagered sum of œ50 to Will from Wessex for depicting true love, and commands a comedy for twelfth night. The married couple must now leave for Virginia. In her farewell to Will, Viola whispers, "Write me well". The audience is led to infer that she is the inspiration for "Twelfth Night".

In "Shakespeare in Love", the film audience is brought into the circle of theatrical and romantic convention, the Elizabethan playhouse, and the boudoir, through modes of representation that offer no perspectival avenues beyond the self-referential film text. Material from theatre and history are merely a backdrop to the fictional romance. The bard himself is a kind of ghost writer who shadows Stoppard and Norman. The psycho-analytic and the sociological converge at desire along class and gender lines. The sense of time suspended provided by the film's fetishism means that it functions as consumer space. What we shop for is the Shakespearian experience without Shakespeare. Our desires are based on unfulfilment.