Everyone credited except Shakespeare

Rating: Null/10 (17 February 1999)

This film suffers from multi-crediting, a syndrome in which film-makers have their own names appear repeatedly on the credits, depite the fact that they only did one job. For example, in Shakespeare in Love I think the director took three credits, one at the start and two at the end. The producers certainly had a couple apiece, as did the writers. I can visualise the delicate negotiations as each tried to ensure that it got maximum exposure - very like the actors who were so lovingly lampooned in the film itself.
In fact, the only name that was conspicuously absent from the credits was that of Shakespeare himself, presumably because he could not fight his corner along with Stoppard and co.
This is a pity, since a significant portion of the script is by Shakespeare, and the film frequently uses his original lines, pure and unadulterated, to get its emotional force across. Surely this would have been worth a nod in the credits.
It's also particularly unfair since, in my opinion, Shakespeare's lines were by far the best in the film. Unlike the scriptwriters' efforts, his words did not lurch from slushy romantic cliches ('a thousand times goodbye...') to archly modern witticisms ('I had Marlowe in my boat...'). The use of anachronism for its own sake is such a cheap trick. It will almost always get a snigger out of the audience, and it exists to do no more than that. It has the air of tacked-on laughs, rather than a sense of comedy inherent to the spirit of the whole film.