Review: Shakespeare In Love (1998)
Because of our current heat wave and my not wanting to really run the AC in my apartment — it only affects the bedroom, so having a climate controlled living room TV session would require heroic efforts on the part of my two little fans and severe damage to my Con Ed bill — I went to the local 2nd run movie house this Saturday. Choices: “Twin Dragons” or “Shakespeare in Love”. Not wanting to see a bad Jackie Chan, I saw “Shakespeare”. About 30 minutes into the showing, I was kicking myself for not seeing it when it first came out
The fanciful conceit is that Shakespeare is going through a severe case of writer’s block. Called on to produce a comedy with at least some pirates and a dog, he starts “Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate’s Daughter” but doesn’t get very far. Things start clicking when he meets Viola De Lesseps. The comedy is transformed into the tragedy “Romeo and Juliet”. This new play reflects and is reflected by Will and Viola’s brief affair: scenes are borrowed from Shakespeare’s courtship of the lady; she disguises herself as a man and acts as Romeo in the production; passages from the draft inspire their lovemaking. The film is very good at visually entwining the play and the affair, intercutting between rehearsals scenes and bedroom scenes.
There’s, of course, trouble, or else “Romeo and Juliet” may well have ended up as a comedy with a dog in it. Fundamentally, Viola is the prize in a marriage alliance. Her wealthy merchant family intends to marry her off to destitute nobility to secure a title for themselves. The nobleman in question, of course, is a bastard (figuratively) more interested in cash and dowry than in the anachronistically feminist Viola, who goes to great lengths to break the taboo of women as actors; young boys had played the women’s roles. It’s for the love of poetry and prose and the stage that she dons the wig and mustache and binds her breasts.
The film’s writers, Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard (Stoppard having that high-brow cachet going for him), laced their script with scholarly Elizabethan references. I know a couple of them mainly because I’ve read reviews on the film a while ago — the boy fascinated with stabbings is apparently a playwright from the period who specializes in gore, the George Romero of his day. The disguise of Viola as a boy is in the long tradition of Shakespearean women dressing up as young men, with “As You Like It” and “Twelfth Night” as prime examples. There’s also the Superman/Clark Kent eyeglasses-as-disguise thing going: Shakespeare doesn’t recognize Viola, even though her boy disguise is ridiculously thin. This happens often in his plays. I’m sure other reviews can fill in on these touches.
Shakespeare’s phrases are woven so thoroughly into the fabric of our language that we’re surprised when we look through Bartlett’s and find that many of the common sayings and clever quotes that we toss off come from Shakespeare. One wonders how Shakespeare must have looked brand new. One wonders how the first audience to see “Romeo and Juliet” may have reacted. This film should get bonus credits for evoking these bits of wonderings.