Sight and Sound (UK), p. 53
February 1999
By Philip Kemp
Donated by the author himself

Shakespeare in Love is a hodgepodge – or as the Elizabethans might more pungently put it, a gallimaufry and an ollapodrida. The main plot-line (well-born young woman named Viola dresses up as a boy, joins Shakespeare's troupe and has an affair with the playwright) is pinched straight from Simon and Brahms' classic comic novel "No Bed for Bacon" – as are some of the gags, such as Will practising multiple variants of his signature at moments of stress. ("Shakspaw, he scribbled viciously.") The stagestruck heavy is a blatant lift from Woody Allen's "Bullets Over Broadway", and the scene-setting pays homage to the Monty Python school of scatological reconstruction: Henslowe, striding through the London streets, treads in a heap of dung and is narrowly missed by the contents of a pisspot.

We get romance, slapstick, bedroom farce, satire, jocular anachronisms "I 'ad that Christopher Marlowe in my boat once," observes a chatty ferryman), star-crossed tragedy, a shipwreck, a full-on swashbuckled swordfight and enough sly literary allusions to sink a concordance.

Which is perfectly fine since the heterogeneous mixture, a rich but satisfying plum-pudding, works splendidly, absorbing its borrowings and negotiating its switches of mood with little sense of strain. (There's only one serious lapse, a jarring descent into Carry On inanity when Will puts on a squeaky voice and pretends to be Viola's female cousin.) Besides, style and subject are ideally matched, since we're dealing with the greatest magpie genius of all time.

Shakespeare was notoriously disinclined to devise his own plots, preferring to snaffle them from Plutarch, Holinshed or whatever dog-eared chapbook came to hand; he cared nothing for unity of mood, tossing dirty jokes into high tragedy in a way that gave the Augustans the vapours; and several of his plays ("Richard II", for example), contain great chunks written by someone else. "Shakespeare in Love" may fall short of the Bard's exalted standard, but it's a film after his own heart.

Tom Stoppard, co-scripting, can likely be credited with some literary gags that may bypass the groundlings (a bloodthirsty small boy, given to eating live mice, gives his name as John Webster) and some of the cod-fustian dialogue: "If you be a man to ride her, there are rubies in the saddlebag".

But the chief delight of "Shakespeare in Love", along with its gamy exuberance, is the acting. The chemistry between Gwyneth Paltrow (reprising her faultless Brit accent from "Sliding Doors") and Joseph Fiennes inspires relief that the original casting (Julia Roberts and Daniel Day-Lewis) fell through. Around them cavort star turns from Imelda Staunton (born to play the Nurse), Colin Firth sending up his arrogant Darcyesque image, Ben Affleck (a nostril-flaring Ned Alleyn), Judi Dench having a ball as Queen Bess, the increasingly superb Geoffrey Rush as the harassed Henslowe, and others too numerous to list.

And the final triumphant premiere of Shakespeare's first true masterpiece, while edging dangerously near luvvie-ish self-regard, conveys something of what Nabokov called "shamanstvo" – 'the enchanter-quality' of great theatre. As Rush's Henslowe remarks, smiling beatifically as the whole shambles comes magically together, "It's a mystery".