And unsurprisingly, the brilliant Stoppard is the screenwriter (with Marc Norman). 'Shakespeare in Love' uses a substantially similar conceit, though it's more emotional and less intellectual. They became increasingly aware they were being manipulated by a strange force toward an inescapable doom. Its setting was 'Hamlet,' but as observed from two minor characters' points of view. 'Romeo and Ethel.'ĭoes any of this sound a trifle familiar? Some 30 years ago, a young British playwright named Tom Stoppard made an international reputation on an item called 'Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,' a pure dazzler that emanated from a brilliant conceit. Everybody bathes regularly once a year, whether they need it or not.) (This ain't your Uncle Jack Warner's Elizabethan age it's a mudhole with a slum and lots of pigs in it. (Geoffrey Rush as a producer is particularly funny, as is Tom Wilkinson as a money man who becomes seduced by the theater.) When he's not devising energetic lies about his progress on the new play to cover up the despair that comes when he sits down with quill in hand, he's trying not to slip in the mud and dung. She is not to be trifled with, and so we find him, in his twenties, a gangling fletch of a man given to hanging about taverns, enjoying the rough company of other raffish, irresponsible theatrical types. In fact it appears that she may stand him up altogether, the woman's eternal prerogative. He's waiting for that damned muse to liberate him. He does what all writers do in such a fix: He writes his byline 600 times. They sit somewhere in his cranium, glued together with a sticky yolk of self-loathing, despair and the sloth that dare not speak its name.

Anybody who throws words at paper or screen will recognize the phenomenon: the clottage is general, like the snow falling on Ireland in the beginning of Joyce's 'The Dead.' No stinking words come.

Shakespeare is blocked is what Shakespeare is. He's still white, but that can't be helped, and he's still male, which is the thrust of the picture, if you know what I mean, and I'll bet you do.īut when the film opens, Shakespeare (the soulful Joseph Fiennes) isn't in love at all. Where to see, that is the question.Ī witty, romantic, even bawdy romp through the life of the Deadest, Whitest Male of them all, this film catches up with him before he was dead by about 30 years. With 'Shakespeare in Love,' to see or not to see isn't the question. Picture Actress (Gwyneth Paltrow) Supporting Actress (Judi Dench) Original Screenplay Art Direction Score Costume Joseph Fiennes and Gwyneth Paltrow take a twirl in 'Shakespeare in Love.'

'Shakespeare in Love': Get Thee to A Multiplex

Shakespeare in love 1998