A much better movie than I expected

Rating: 9/10 (1 December 2013)

I have been meaning to see this movie for a long time, and in fact at my video store, it is still on the over-night listings, but it is stuck in a corner where all of the older overnighters are kept. I guess I started putting it off when all of the hype over the awards that it won came out, but in my opinion, this is one of the few movies that deserved the awards that it won.
Shakespeare is suffering from writer's block, and the owner of the theatre that his plays are performed in owes a lot of money and is being forced to pay up. He gets some inspiration from an apocrather, but looses it again when he discovers that the woman he is having an affair with is having an affair with another man. So he loses his inspiration again, only to get it back when he falls in love with a noble lady who, unfortunately for her, is being married to a complete thug.
This movie is accurate in the traditions of the Elizabethan theatre where men were the only ones allowed to act, and in fact there was a preacher out the front of the theatre denouncing the evils of the theatre (such as now we have fundamentalists denouncing the evils of roleplaying). In fact, the woman to whom Shakespeare is in love with, wishes so much to act on the stage, that she disguises herself as a man and takes the role of Romeo, but when the deceit is uncovered, the theatre is shut down for debauchery.
Judi Dench plays Queen Elizabeth, and only was on screen for no more than fifteen minutes, yet pulled such a stunning and realistic performance that she won an Oscar for it (not that it really means anything to me). Tom Stoppard also wrote the screenplay, which gives the film much more credibility, especially since Stoppard is not only a brilliant playwright, but he knows his Shakespeare. In fact, in this movie we see ideas borrowed from other Shakespeare plays, such as women disguising themselves as men, character names, and of course a similar theme to that of Romeo and Juliet.
The play that Shakespeare ends up writing is Romeo and Juliet, though the name begins as Romeo and Ethal the Pirate King's Daughter. The play is performed at the end, and in fact I found that the bits of performance that we see in this movies is a thousand times better than the performance that we see in the movie Baz Luhrman's version. In fact, that is how I judge a Shakespeare movie, namely how powerful the acting comes out, and personally, Leonardo diCaprio's performance was nowhere near as good as the performance here.