Exeunt Educated

Rating: Null/10 (28 January 2002)

You can't help wondering how Shakespeare managed it. In 26 years he produced 37 plays, three epic poems, and all those sonnets, on top of which he was an actor and prosperous businessman. I would be hard put to type everything he wrote in those years using a quill pen and pot of ink. The haste sometimes shows. His plots are often weak and derivative and suffer excessively from what Ebert calls the idiot plot syndrome, in which characters do the stupidest things just to keep the story hopping. When King Lear asks his daughters how much they love him, Cordelia's one-sentence answer is misunderstood and sets the whole tragedy in motion, though the problem could be solved with a few additional words. Whole chunks of dialogue in Julius Caeser are shamelessly ripped off from Plutarch. But the poetry is a different matter, resonant, finely constructed, and sometimes ethereal. Well, this movie is, in short, the story of how WS came to write Romeo and Juliet, chiefly it seems by integrating bits of his personal life into the mosaic of the play. He overhears someone on the street yelling, "A plague on both your houses," and so on. And the movie is filled with amusing anachronistic expressions. Actors say "break a leg" to one another, and they say things like "boobies" and "dip your wick" and "we'll be put in the clink." It's not jarring because none of this fairy tale is supposed to be realistic.
Basically there are two ways a movie about a period classic can go. (1) There is the elegant way. Everyone wears immaculate clothes and speaks a sort of perfumed English; vide Olivier. (2) There is the dirty way, the route this movie takes, in which characters may be sweaty and vulgar, get into slapstick brawls in the mud, use barely interpretable dialects, and bump into things. The actors here do a nice job along their naturalistic way. The dialogue is written in such a way as to suggest the author just finished reading the bard's collected works in one sitting. WS is clean cut and handsome, though he has inky fingernails. Paltrow, as Viola, uses an irreproachable English accent and impresses with her lanky body and her sharply boned, slightly asymmetrical face, although she too must brush her teeth and spit. One also looks forward to the appearance of even the most minor supporting players. And Judy Dench as QE I is a standout, coiffed like an escapee from Coppola's Dracula.
If there is a problem it's that it helps to understand the film if you are a fan of Shakespeare. I don't mean that you necessarily like the film more, just that you understand it better. Then you know why Marlowe is such a pain as far as WS is concerned, and why Burbage makes such a stir when he enters the theater for the first time, and why the rival theatrical troupes enact so realistically the Donnybrook between the Capulet and the Montague boys. I could tell there were a lot of allusions that were getting past me. No matter. There is verisimilitude enough that you finish viewing the film a more educated person than before.
What a place Elizabethan London must have been if you could somehow set aside the plague, the smallpox, the outhouses, the poverty and starvation and odor and other such quibbles. Along these streets, at the same time, strode people like Queen Elizabeth, Condell, Burbage, Thomas Kyd, Marlowe, Sir Francis Drake, Frobisher -- every English-speaking person who was anybody at the time, it seems. This film, a mixture of fact and plausible fantasy, is pretty enjoyable.