The New Republic
Stanley Kauffmann
Dec. 14, 1998
In The Genius of Shakespeare Jonathan Bate says that, contrary to the general impression, "We know a great deal more about Shakespeare's life than we do about the lives of his fellow-dramatists and fellow-actors." We know it from official documents, says Bate. "But ... we do not learn very much from them about his character as it affects what we are interested in: his plays." Luckily for the gaiety of nations, this point hasn't hindered Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard, co-authors of Shakespeare in Love (Miramax).
Stoppard said recently on TV that Norman, an American who had written such items as Cutthroat Island and Waterworld, did the first draft of this screenplay; then he was called in. Who wrote this or that scene in the final version is of course indecipherable to us, but the result is clearly the work of people who know a good deal about the Elizabethan era and theater, so much so that they can play games with the material. This picture plays some diverting ones. With most historical films the informed viewer scrutinizes in order to cluck at errors. (There are books full of such cluckings.) With Shakespeare in Love, the more one knows, the more one can enjoy the liberties taken.
John Madden, the director, aided by Martin Childs, the production designer, and Sandy Powell, who did the costumes, crams the London of 1593 with the hubbub and bustle and squalor and panoply that history justifies, and it's all centered on a Bankside theater, the Rose, owned by the hard-pressed Philip Henslowe. This is factual: then comes the fantasy. Young Shakespeare, actor and playwright attached to the Rose, is trying to write a play for his company, and so far he has little but the title: Romeo and Ethel, The Pirate's Daughter. No Elizabethan or Jacobean play's title has that sort of formulation; thus, all that remains is to find out how we get to Romeo and Juliet.
To begin with, Shakespeare gets advice from his coeval and rival, Christopher Marlowe (a brief, incisive appearance by Rupert Everett). But the true inspiration for the plot of his play, even for scene structure, comes from the happenstance that Shakespeare falls in love - with the daughter of a wealthy family. The fact that he has a wife and children back in Stratford doesn't hobble his passion, and the young lady, who hasn't yet learned about his family, responds. Her name is Viola, another Shakespearean promise. (Her last name is de Lesseps. Is it some sort of private joke that the authors chose the family name of the man who, 300 years later, built the Suez Canal and attempted one in Panama?)
Materials for the play, as Shakespeare keeps trying to meet his deadline, come from his experiences with Viola: her father's objection, her aristocratic fiance, duels, a balcony scene complete with nurse, and more. I haven't seen such close correspondence between experience and art since a play about Wagner, in the 1930s, in which he is struggling to compose Tristan, embraces a new mistress one evening, cries "I have it!" then rushes to his piano and whams out the Liebestod. I was too young then to be anything but outraged; in Shakespeare, I thought it was an entertaining parody of the creative process, all the more entertaining because of its heat.
The screenplay also uses, with a swirling hand, a familiar Shakespearean device, the woman disguised as a man. Viola, mad for the poet, uninterested in the fiance who has been arranged for her, transvests to become an actor in Shakespeare's theater (women of course being prohibited on the stage). This leads to a device that asks for our generosity. When we first see Viola, she has flowing blonde hair. When she appears in the theater, she has close-cropped brown hair, and we think that she has had herself shorn and dyed. But then we see her back home with the honey locks again. This back-and-forth hair-changing goes puzzlingly on. Oh, well, a fig for explanations. It's so incredible that, like Shakespeare's writing of his play (which is eventually called by its familiar name), we shrug because what's happening generally is so pleasant.
Other plot strands counterpoint the central story -Henslowe's woes with his creditors, the harrying of the theater by the Master of the Revels, the news of Marlowe's death and its effect, the presence of a 12-year-old gamin named John Webster who hangs around the theater teasing people with live mice (a hint of the man who would write The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi). Queen Elizabeth herself is the dea ex machina, solving all problems at the end insofar as they can be solved. Her last line is a request to Master Shakespeare for a comedy, perhaps a play for Twelfth Night. He sets right to work; he already knows the name of the heroine.
John Madden's last film was Mrs. Brown, in which he deployed the relationship of Queen Victoria and John Brown with stateliness and wit. Here he has seemingly swilled some of Falstaff's sack and has had robustious, fiery fun. Judi Dench, who was his Victoria, is Elizabeth here, and no one else could be tolerated in the part. Madden's most impressive achievement, amidst all the hurly-burly, is an intimate, almost internal one. He gets a full, feeling performance from Gwyneth Paltrow as Viola. Up to now I've never seen Paltrow do anything but present the shape and exterior of roles, from Jane Austen's Emma to A Perfect Murder. With Madden's help, she puts a full-bodied, aching young woman inside her costumes, not only justifying Shakespeare's hunger for Viola but promising much for Paltrow.
Shakespeare is Joseph Fiennes, younger brother of Ralph. Joseph, more slender and dark and willowy than his brother, has had some small parts in films and some large ones in the London theater, including the Royal Shakespeare Company. Now he is (gulp) the bard himself. This is hardly the first time that Shakespeare has been a character in a dramatic work. (Even Bernard Shaw used him - in a one-act play, The Dark Lady of the Sonnets, where he implores Elizabeth to found a national theater.) Still, it can't be a role an actor steps into blithely. His best advantage is that, as Bate tells us, little is really known about the man's character. Ben Jonson said he was of "an open and free nature," then added that he had "gentle expressions, wherein he flowed with that facility that sometimes it was necessary that he should be stopped.... His wit was in his own power; would the rule of it had been, too." But this semi-generous description, one of the few accounts that survive, isn't of much relevance to an actor who wants to play a Shakespeare who is a model for his own Romeo.
Fiennes carries the day. He is lithe, strong, hot, with an attractive voice. The part isn't widely varied, so his performance isn't, either; but he moves through this film with the surreal effect of a flashing rapier. His Shakespeare puts the seal on the pact between us and the film. "Very well, this is not fact," we concede. "Then let it be gratifying fiction." And it is.
