SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE

           Shakespeare in Love is a flower of a movie, brimming with the lively poetic vibrations of Shakespeare himself. It never takes itself more seriously than it should, but makes the heart smile just the same. It’s just as well that it centers on an imaginary story behind the writing of Romeo & Juliet, a tragedy conceptualized as a comedy.

            It’s a lovely film and, yet, is produced as a celebration of theater. There is very little of the actual plays shown, but the whole movie feels like an elaborate stage production. For once, noticing the signs of production craft is part of the charm. The mock-up of the Rose Theater was such a thing of beauty that Judi Dench (playing Queen Elizabeth here as in 1998’s other hit Elizabeth) adopted the set with the hopes of turning it into a working stage. The role of Viola de Lesseps, the nobleman’s daughter disguised as a man as a way to enter the stage and ends up becoming the muse of Shakespeare himself, went to the then rising star Gwyneth Paltrow (after Kate Winslet turned it down and plans with Julia Roberts fell through), the LA blonde who was already building esteem for her portrayal of an English literary icon in Emma. Her natural take to Anglo parts (ironically, the adaptation of Great Expectations where she appeared alongside Ethan Hawke shifted local from London to the Florida swamps) only solidified with her move to England. Ben Affleck, his appearance a token of good faith with Miramax the studio where he got the start with Good Will Hunting the previous year, is harder to take seriously as thespian ham Ned Alleyn.

But Shakespeare in Love never asks to be taken seriously. It’s certainly doesn’t make any claims on accuracy or even a serious expose about William Shakespeare, though it does play with the often forgotten fact that a number of his sonnets (including some quoted in the film) were, in fact, written for a man, all 154 of them dedicated to a Mr. W.H., believed to be Henry Wriothesley, 3^rd Earl of Southampton. The movie doesn’t stress that Shakespeare may have been bisexual, as some historians have recently speculated. Viola first catches his eye, after all, in her natural feminine state at a ball in her father’s palace on the other side of the Thames. But when she auditions for his Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate’s Daughter (the play’s working title) as one Thomas Kent sporting a bushy moustache and a vagabond suit, she sparks something in him. Make of that what you will.

Shakespeare in Love is simply a feathery flight of fantasy, a charming bit of whimsy of the sort Shakespeare would have admired. The speculation, whatever truth there is to it, is not outrageous. Shakespeare composed Romeo and Juliet while essentially living like its two star-crossed lovers. Shakespeare, a struggling romantic with a wandering heart in 1593, falls for a woman of wealth on the other side of the river. Viola is out of his reach not only in a financial sense but is bound through custom to marry Lord Wessex (Colin Firth), a pompous over-dressed plantation owner. This romance may not quite end in the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, but makes for a bittersweet parting nonetheless. Dowry customs cannot be easily broken, not even by the Queen, and Viola sets off for the New World with her husband. Although the clearest shadow of her memory in the Shakespeare canon is, of course, Twelfth Night, the movie ends with Shakespeare remembering her first and foremost as the woman who inspired Romeo and Juliet, his most famous work, his love for Viola as impossible and dangerous as a love between a Montague and a Capulet.

Shakespeare in Love would not have been made without a love for Shakespeare and his work. It’s a different loving form of fan fiction brightened by an intelligent understanding not only of the writer’s canon but of Elizabethan theater as well. Director John Madden took this appreciation and, without changing time and place, made it accessible to the 90s, similarly (in part, at least) to what Baz Luhrmann did in William Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet.  

But Madden has something that Luhrmann lacked, a great cast of character actors behind the leads of the sort Shakespeare himself would have found funny. Geoffrey Rush almost steals the show as Henslowe, the uppity owner of the struggling Rose Theater, who lives in fear of burly financier Fennyman (Tom Wilkinson doing what he does best, playing a sadist in a gentleman’s suit), who starts out as an imposing menace, but turns into an oafish romantic when offered a part in the play. Simon Callow is seen all too little, but does have moments of glory as Edmund Tilney, the rowdy courtier to the Queen, and Rupert Everett makes for a likeable Christopher Marlowe, whose demise here could be best described as a comedy of errors.

There is even a nod to John Webster and the dark playwright he was to become. He is seen here as a young street urchin played by Joe Roberts with a love for brutality and the grotesque. He befriends mice to lure them into his clutches and then feeds them live to stray cats. His vindictive nature after Shakespeare scorns him suggests that, had he been old enough at the time, he would have been as serious a rival to Shakespeare as Marlowe and Cervantes.

The crown jewel, however, is Judi Dench as the saucy Elizabeth I. Her tone is just right for Madden’s take, never taking the Queen’s eccentricities too seriously, even allowing Her Majesty to loosen up and share the laughs.

Shakespeare in Love is an impeccably balanced film and a triumph of expert casting. As much as one is tempted to dispute its Best Picture win over Saving Private Ryan, there is no doubt it’s one of the best films of 1998. Madden's success at making Shakespeare cool for Generation X-ers ensured an audience for the following year's 10 Things I Hate About You, a burlesque of The Taming of the Shrew set in a contemporary preppy high school in California. Its acclaim didn’t come without a price, however, albeit one that quickly and quietly dissolved. Six days before the Academy Awards in 1999, American novelist Faye Kellerman filed a suit in the US District Court against Miramax, Universal City, and screenwriters Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard, claiming that the screenplay (then a contender for Best Original Screenplay, an award it would eventually win) was ripped off of her 1989 novel The Quality of Mercy in which a young Shakespeare falls in love with Rebecca Lopez, a young Jewish woman who masquerades as a man. The similarities are superficial, however. Beyond the cross-dressing, Kellerman’s novel goes in an entirely different direction than the movie, dealing with a murder mystery and the Spanish Inquisition. As Miramax spokesman Andrew Stengel said, “The two stories are so different that the idea that one was copied from the other is absurd.”

The controversy went away without a whimper, leading credence to Stengel’s assessment that the lawsuit was a mere publicity stunt. In truth, writers and artists have long tried to imagine the inspiration behind Shakespeare’s masterworks and the mysteries of his heart. Perhaps this is because the best of them, like Romeo and Juliet touch on so many of our fundamentally human elements such as love, sacrifice, passion, tragedy, and laughter. We will never likely find a way to explain the genius behind William Shakespeare, but Madden has a wonderful time trying.