Charming but unoriginal

Rating: 5/10 (17 February 2003)

This over-rated film owes most of its good ideas to the novel "No Bed for Bacon" by Caryl Brahms and S. J. Simon. The politics and economics of running the Globe Theater, the role of Shakespeare as "the hack", the young woman who pretends to be a boy so as to play female roles at the theater, the emotional relations between her and Shaikespeare, even the little joke-scene in which he practises different spellings for his surname - all this is a straight lift from Brahms and Simon. With that removed, there remains the running joke about John Fletcher, the soft-porn sex, and the clumsy sub-plot about Marlowe.