Shakespeare In Love
It's funny - "Romeo And Juliet" is a king-hell bummer, full of miscommunication, murder, suicide, and love ground under the heel of circumstance. They don't call it a tragedy for nothing. But when thinking about the play, it's invariably the balcony scene everyone remembers. It's not that the lovers died, but that they loved so intensely which captures people's imagination. This is a play written by a man who knew passion. What might have inspired him to write such a profound rumination on love?
Shakespeare In Love, one of the wittiest, most romantic and entertaining movies to hit the theater in months, offers a possible scenario. We tend to put Shakespeare on a pedestal, The Big Bad Bard with the oblong forehead and clown fringe around his neck who scribbled out a massive chunk of the Great Western Literary Canon. Shakespeare In Love portrays him as a horny, talented young playwright and poet struggling to make it in the rough and tumble world of Stratford-on-Avon's bustling theater scene.
The film plays fast and loose with the facts of Shakespeare's life, giving him writer's block as he tries to put together a new play for the Rose Theatre. He's writing a comedy with the title "Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate's Daughter", and competition is fierce. The Curtain Theater across town has a playwright named Christopher Marlowe who is getting most of the local press, and the Rose Theater needs a hit.
"Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate's Daughter" isn't going well until Shakespeare meets Viola De Lesseps, a noblewoman's daughter with such love for theatre that she has the audacity to dress as a man to try out for Shakespeare's new play. (Women were not allowed on the stage in Elizabethan England; the female roles were played by boys whose voices had not yet changed.) She gets the role as Romeo; she and Shakespeare begin an illicit backstage romance, and Shakespeare writes the play as the rehearsals go along.
The romance is illicit because she is betrothed to a slimy opportunist who wants to whisk her away to the colony of Virginia, and marry her to inherit her family's fortune. Gweneth Paltrow, who has not particularly impressed me until now, is radiant and perfect in the role of Viola, and makes it easy to understand why Shakespeare's longing for her could inspire him to write the most lyrically romantic lines of his (or anyone else's) career. As the young Shakespeare, Joseph Fiennes captures the kind of personality that would have to be behind the Bard's work: bawdy, philosophical, impulsive, introspective, starry-eyed and poetic by turns.
Shakespeare and Viola's relationship becomes the template from which "Romeo and Juliet" would be drawn, balcony scene and all. This curious doubling - the reality of his life and the play whose plot we all know - lends itself to endless in jokes and clever twists as his life begins to play itself out on stage. It helps to be familiar with not only "Romeo and Juliet" but the rest of Shakespeare's work to get all the jokes, as his friends and colleagues often spout lines that you'll recognize as appearing in other plays. Well seasoned scholars will love the attention to detail paid to period costumes and especially the Rose Theatre itself, but even the Shakespearean neophyte will understand enough to get a kick out of the witty script.
Very much like a Shakespeare play itself, the film works on every level. The humor is alternately intelligent and lewd, the scenes deeply romantic and touching. Shakespeare In Love is bought to you by the same scriptwriting team who did Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, a similar twist on "Hamlet". That film was dark and at times devastatingly clever, with serpentine dialogue and wordplay that Shakespeare himself might well have written - Shakespeare In Love shares the best attributes of that, but is much more accessible and sweetly romantic.
There are stellar performances all around, including those by seasoned actors Judi Dench as the indefatigable Queen Elizabeth and Geoffrey Rush as Henslowe. The casting of Ben Affleck as Ned Alleyn was the only misstep - the shock of recognition detracts from the tone, but after that wears off he does a fine job as well.
This is a rich, immensely enjoyable film, hitting all the right notes. It works as a gratifying romance, a sharp comedy and a studied homage to the Bard - it's simply flat-out entertaining. I heartily recommend it.
- Jared O'Connor
MOVIES
All Content © 1997, 1998 Jared O'Connor and Michael Baker