Yeah, I'm shocked that I haven't done this one either.
[intro music]
Okay, a man walks into a Hollywood office and says,
"Hey, I got a pitch for you."
[voiceover] Young Will Shakespeare is having a bad year.
The last thing he needs right now is a nasty case of writer's block.
This is the actual trailer for it, isn't it?
Shakespeare in Love
Anyway, Shakespeare in Love is the story of a young, struggling, broody,
sexy, sexy, slab of intense but nonthreatening masculinity named William Shakespeare.
Who still has a full head of hair. Huh.
He hasn't found his stride yet, he's badgered by employers,
he's overshadowed in popularity by that smug bastard Christopher Marlowe.
And it's the story of how he finds his muse, Viola,
played by future human kale shake Gwyneth Paltrow,
who loves plays but hates that all the female roles are played by men in womanface.
Viola: Stage love will never be true love while the law of the land
has our heroines being played by pipsqueak boys in petticoats!
#RepresentationMatters
#StopManWashing
So, she pretends to be a man so she can act,
writer and fangirl fall in love, Viola lives her dream,
Will gets his groove back and writes a smash hit that will help him on his path to becoming
an author quoted by...
Yes, I'm still doing this gag!
Everyone.
"These violent delights have violent ends."
Everyone.
"Once more unto the breach, my friends! "
Everyone.
"Milk of human kindness."
"Strong will find milk."
"Strong will drink milk."
"Strong will have secret power of humans."
I will never run out of stuff to show!
For as many adaptations of his works that exist,
the character of Shakespeare himself hasn't gotten much of a spotlight.
Mostly because we don't know much about his personal life.
It's mostly a blank slate.
So this relatively light romcom is the most widely known depiction of Shakespeare the man.
But it's not accurate.
Like, it has a lot of anachronistic gags.
There's a very modern auditioning process.
"I would like to give you something from Faustus, by Christopher Marlowe."
"How refreshing."
It's centuries before the birth of Sigmund Freud and Shakespeare basically has a therapist.
"It's as if my quill is broken."
"As if the proud tower of my genius has collapsed."
"Interesting."
Colin Firth, lord of antagonism, has plantations a decade before Jamestown.
"You will like Virginia. My fortune lies in my plantations of the tobacco weed."
Like, did no one tell him about the Roanoke colony disappearing, or uh?
And, of course, Shakespeare didn't write the story of Romeo and Juliet.
No! Go away! Go away!
I've said it before, I'll say it again:
The story of Romeo and Juliet existed decades before Shakespeare did his version.
I mean, it's not like he was going through a torrid affair in real life and thought,
"This would make a great play!"
"And so Juliet takes his dagger...
and kills herself."
"Well, that will have them rolling in the aisles."
Like, imagine a scene with Christopher Nolan sitting down with Warner Bros. and saying,
"Hey, get this, what if Bruce Wayne's parents...
were murdered!"
-"Murdered?!" -"YES!
When he was a child! Right before his eyes!"
"Nolan you genius, have all the money!"
See, Shakespeare in Love has very modern ideas about the role of the artist,
that the artist is a tortured genius who immortalizes his own experiences through poetry and prose,
instead of, you know, just another skilled laborer working in a stigmatized field.
You know, that attitude that doesn't do creative workers any favors at all?
[overlapping voices] -You get paid in experience, right? -Will you accept this exposure as payment?
-Isn't doing it for the love of the art enough? -But what's your REAL job Will?
Like what I do? Check out my Patreon page!
But really, look at the word.
Playwright.
Not playwrite, playWRIGHT.
Like shipwright or cartwright,
he was a person who wrought plays, he was a craftsman.
Shakespeare lived and worked before the romantic notion of the tortured artist took hold.
It's a fiction created by people who had very specific ideas about the role of the artist in society,
a role that Shakespeare the man couldn't play.
It's the reason why the authorship question even exists.
"Are you the author of the plays of William Shakespeare?"
I have some ideas about that-- Get out.
And as for the "in love" part, Shakespeare the romantic is the Shakespeare that people want to believe in,
that the man who wrote these words had the grace and wit to match them.
"I heard you were a poet."
To have him be otherwise would be disappointing.
"But a poet of no words."
As this film's co-author once wrote,
That co-author being Tom Stoppard.
The author of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.
And someone who knows his Shakespeare.
Obviously.
John Madden directed, Marc Norman had the concept,
but for me, this is Stoppard's movie.
It's one thing to quote Shakespeare.
It's another thing to convincingly mimic him.
"I am unmanned, unmended, and unmade."
"Writer, is he?"
"Row your boat!"
But it still has Stoppard's skepticism.
Skepticism expressed by, of all people, Queen Elizabeth I.
"Playwrights teach us nothing about love."
"They make it pretty, they make it comical, or they make it lust."
"They cannot make it true."
"Oh, but they can!"
The tension between the vividness of lived experience and its representation in fiction.
Stoppard's written about this before.
"I'm talking about death, you've never experienced that."
"You die a thousand casual deaths and come back in a different hat,
but nobody gets up after death!"
"There's no applause!"
There's an interview with the LA Times where Stoppard and Norman suggested
that the film was in part a deconstruction of the way Hollywood treats genius.
Kirk Douglas's Van Gogh, Charleton Heston as Michelangelo, Tom Hulce as Mozart.
[laughter]
Well, okay, that's a subversion.
But unlike Lust for Life, or The Agony and the Ecstasy, or even Amadeus,
Shakespeare in Love isn't about reconciling this flawed human with their beautiful works.
It's about creating a person through their fiction.
Shakespeare in Love isn't historically accurate, but instead it's very dramatically accurate.
It toys with the tropes of Shakespeare's plays;
misunderstandings, sword fights, hidden romances, crossdressing,
a deus ex machina in the form of a royal interference.
"But I know something of a woman in a man's profession."
"Yes, by God, I do know about that."
Great job, Judi, have ALL the Oscars.
So instead of those films, let me compare it to another film made within the same decade.
David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch.
[typing sounds]
Hear me out.
The novel Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
was an incomprehensible work of avant-garde Beat writing
given shape and form by the biography of the author.
Shakespeare in Love has the opposite problem.
Shakespeare's personal life is shapeless
and so receives shape and form from the author's works.
Yes, I just compared Shakespeare in Love to a movie about centipede heroin and bug anuses,
so good job me!
"A writer lives the sad truth like anyone else."
"The only difference is, he files a report on it."
Point is, that auteurist impulse is present in both works.
Go through fiction to find the man;
go through the man to find the fiction.
Shakespeare in Love's very unfactual, but it's still probably more factual to imagine Shakespeare
as a struggling, flawed human trying to hit a deadline and please a crowd,
rather than God's word incarnate.
So even if it doesn't show the facts of Shakespeare,
it still shows Shakespeare's truth.
So if you haven't seen it lately, yeah, Shakespeare in Love holds up pretty well.
It's okay by me.
By all means, have all the Oscars.
Except for the one that should have gone to Saving Private Ryan, because, c'mon.
[music]