Wit, style, passion enliven frothy 'Shakespeare in Love'

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By Karen Hershenson
Contra Costa Times
Published: Wednesday, December 23, 1998


Even Elizabethan playwrights knew the importance of a "bit with a dog,"
as we learn in "Shakespeare in Love."

That's just one of many show-biz tidbits in this exuberant romantic
comedy that whips up a frothy fiction about young Will Shakespeare and
the penning of "Romeo and Juliet."

The setting is 16th-century England, with two theaters warring for
patrons against a backdrop of bawdy behavior and bad sanitation.
Shakespeare has a healthy commission, but when he applies quill to
parchment, only dreck spills forth. He's calling it "Romeo and Ethel,
the Pirate's Daughter."

Gaggest thou with a spoon.

But then this blocked bard encounters his muse, Viola, through
convoluted circumstances, and wisely drops the pirate angle - and the
dog bit - to complete his play of plays.

Of course, it didn't happen this way, but the movie weaves truths about
this rollicking era with musings about the young writer's life to create
an immensely amusing tale. Although facts about Shakespeare's personal
life are sketchy, many of the characters in the film did exist.

Emerging heartthrob Joseph Fiennes ("Elizabeth") plays young Will as a
wide-eyed romantic with the gangly enthusiasm of a big dog and sexual
appetites to match. Gwyneth Paltrow is his Lady Viola, a high-born
beauty drawn to perform on the common stage, at a time when all female
parts went to blushing boys.

She appears at the shabby Rose theater dressed as a lad, vying for a
part in Shakespeare's new pirate comedy. But soon the perceptive
playwright discovers her ruse and is tumbling in her bedsheets most
heartily. He knits details from their liaison - her overprotective
nurse (Imelda Staunton) and brutish suitor (Colin Firth) - into his
play, which is quickly evolving from a rank comedy into a tragedy of
epic proportions.

Fiennes and Paltrow head up a four-star cast that includes Geoffrey
Rush as a producer with appallingly bad teeth, and Judi Dench camping it
up as a theater-smitten Queen Liz. Ben Affleck is the arrogant actor,
and Tom Wilkinson a moneylender thrilled when Shakespeare casts him in
his new play.

Director John Madden fiddled with British history before in the arthouse
hit "Mrs. Brown," which also starred Dench as a monarch. The
screenwriters are Marc Norman ("Cutthroat Island," go figure) and
playwright Tom Stoppard, whose screenplay credits include "Brazil" and
"Billy Bathgate."

"Shakespeare in Love" is the movie-lover's movie. It's got wit, style,
energy and passion. Already it's showing up on Oscar prediction lists,
and rightfully so.