Intelligent and witty comedy

Rating: 8/10 (24 September 2008)

This film is based around a fictitious episode in the life of William Shakespeare. The year is 1593 and Shakespeare, at the age of 29 a rising young star of the Elizabethan theatre, is working on his latest play, a comedy provisionally entitled "Romeo and Ethel the Pirate's Daughter". Or rather, he would be working on his play were he not suffering from a bad case of writer's block, much to the dismay of his theatre manager, Philip Henslowe, who is heavily in debt and badly needs a successful Shakespeare play to ease his financial situation.
Shakespeare's creative powers return when he falls in love with the beautiful Viola de Lesseps, the daughter of a wealthy City merchant. Although the law at this period prevented women from acting on stage, and all female parts were taken by adolescent boys, the stage-struck Viola has ambitions to become an actor and has disguised herself as a boy in order to join Henslowe's company. When Shakespeare discovers her imposture, the two begin a passionate affair, and "Romeo and Ethel" gradually becomes the tragedy we know today as "Romeo and Juliet".
"Shakespeare in Love" combines the conventions of the period costume drama with those of the romantic comedy. As is normal with rom-coms, there are several obstacles to the happiness of the young couple. Quite apart from the difference in their social status, there is the fact that Shakespeare is already married (although his wife does not actually appear in the film). Moreover, Viola is betrothed to the deeply unpleasant Earl of Wessex. (An unlikely title for a sixteenth-century nobleman. The Saxon Earldom of Wessex had been abolished after the Norman Conquest, and the expression "Wessex" had largely fallen into disuse; it was revived by the Victorian novelist Thomas Hardy to designate south-west England).
There are some similarities between this film and the more recent "Becoming Jane" which also dealt with an imagined romantic affair in the life of a great writer and with the effects of that supposed romance on her writing. In both cases the affair ends unhappily for the lovers, as the writers clearly did not want to rewrite the history books too much. After all, history records that Jane Austen died unmarried and that William Shakespeare was married to Anne Hathaway, not Viola de Lesseps. "Shakespeare in Love" is the better of the two films, largely because it has a better script. "Becoming Jane" is a middling period romance, whereas "Shakespeare" is an intelligent and very witty comedy, as one might expect from the pen of Tom Stoppard, one of Britain's wittiest and most intelligent playwrights. Stoppard and his co-writer Mark Norman have produced a script that is not only amusing but also very perceptive, both about artistic creativity and about love. There are a number of in-jokes for scholars of literature, including a new theory about the murder of Christopher Marlowe. Another famous dramatist, John Webster, makes an appearance, "much possessed by death" (in Eliot's phrase) even as a boy.
The film, which stars numerous leading lights of the British acting profession, is not only well written but also well acted. My old history teacher used to complain about "Bardolatry", which he defined as "the belief that Shakespeare is the second-best thing to God". He would have been pleased by Joseph Fiennes' interpretation of the role, not as the semi-divine Immortal Bard but as a very recognisable human being- young, ardent, passionate, but also with some very human flaws. Geoffrey Rush is excellent as the much put-upon Henslowe, as is Colin Firth (cast against type as a villain) as the odious Wessex.
The film won a number of Oscars, not all of which I would agree with. "Best Writing, Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen" was well-deserved, but I cannot see that Judi Dench really deserved "Best Supporting Actress" for her brief eight-minute cameo as Queen Elizabeth I. Perhaps the Academy were trying to make up to her for having overlooked her much more substantial role as another monarch, Queen Victoria, in "Mrs Brown" the previous year. Gwyneth Paltrow, who won "Best Actress", makes an attractive and lovable heroine, but this was not really an Oscar-class performance when compared to Cate Blanchett in "Elizabeth" or Emily Watson in "Hilary and Jackie". As for "Best Picture", my vote would have been for a film that, in the event, was not even nominated. "Shakespeare in Love" is a good film, but Peter Weir's "The Truman Show" is a truly great one. 8/10