Was Shakespeare really so straight?

Rating: Null/10 (19 February 2002)

This film annoys me - and not just because it feels like a smug, obvious, feature-length episode of Blackadder. What winds me up is its shallow, lazily populist heterosexism, so out of keeping with the subversive play of gender and sexuality that Shakespeare's comedies celebrate. The subtext of the film, though it's hardly sub, is that the relationships within the theatrical group (where boys play girls) are only pretend, unsatisfactory, incomplete - and that for genuine romantic love, only true heterosexual relationships will do. The film charts Shakespeare's supposed education in this. The irony of the suggestion that Gwyneth Paltrow's character ultimately inspires Shakespeare to create Viola in Twelfth Night, perhaps the most gender-bending of all Shakespeare's plays, seems lost on the movie.

This crass reduction of Shakespeare's daring, inclusive art, and its translation of of a sexually complex playwright's life into something quite the opposite of what he stood for, is all the more surprising coming from the scriptwriter: Tom Stoppard. Stoppard wrote a fantastic play about A E Housman called 'The Invention of Love' which is as subtle and sympathetic an examination of sexuality as you're likely to find.