SHAKESPEARE COMES OF AGE

Rating: Null/10 (1 October 1999)

"Shakespeare in Love" is ostensibly made for the MTV generation. Plodding and cloying, this shaggy dog comedy panders to the quasi middlebrow audience: it goes out of its way to reward those who are able to identify anything that resembles an Elizabethan in-joke. Call it a self-esteem booster or plain I- know-something-you-don't-because-I-took-English-Lit-101. Whatever the case, the film readily sacrifices wit for farce, and assumes an ill-fitting disposition that calls for tentative and clumsy attempts at bowdlerizing Shakespeare for the common age. It is little wonder that Joseph Fiennes plays Shakespeare like an irascible buffoon--a device that will firmly keep him in the Hall of Fame alongside Porky and the entire cast of Animal House.