Shakespeare in Love

In 1593 London, William Shakespeare is a sometime player in the Lord Chamberlain's Men and playwright for Philip Henslowe, owner of The Rose Theatre. Suffering from writer's block with a new comedy, Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate's Daughter, Shakespeare attempts to seduce Rosaline, mistress of Richard Burbage, owner of the rival Curtain Theatre, and to convince Burbage to buy the play from Henslowe. Shakespeare receives advice from rival playwright Christopher Marlowe, but is despondent to learn Rosaline is sleeping with Master of the Revels Edmund Tilney. The desperate Henslowe, in debt to ruthless moneylender Fennyman, begins auditions anyway.

Viola de Lesseps, daughter of a wealthy merchant, who has seen Shakespeare's plays at court, disguises herself as a man named Thomas Kent to audition. "He" gains Shakespeare's interest with a speech from Two Gentlemen of Verona, but runs away when Shakespeare questions her. He pursues Kent to Viola's house and leaves a note with her nurse, asking Kent to begin rehearsals at the Rose.

Shakespeare sneaks into a ball at the house, where Viola's parents arrange her betrothal to impoverished aristocrat Lord Wessex. Dancing with Viola, Shakespeare is struck speechless and ejected by Wessex, who threatens to kill him, leading Shakespeare to say that he is Christopher Marlowe. He finds Viola on her balcony, where they confess their mutual attraction before he is discovered by her nurse and flees.

Inspired by Viola, Shakespeare quickly transforms the play into what will become Romeo and Juliet. Rehearsals begin, with "Thomas Kent" as Romeo, the leading tragedian Ned Alleyn as Mercutio, and the stagestruck Fennyman in a small role. Shakespeare discovers Viola's true identity, and they begin a secret affair.

Viola is summoned to court to receive approval for her proposed marriage to Wessex. Shakespeare accompanies her, disguised as her female cousin, and persuades Wessex to wager £50 that a play can capture the true nature of love, the amount Shakespeare requires to buy a share in the Chamberlain's Men. Queen Elizabeth I declares that she will judge the matter.

Burbage learns Shakespeare has seduced Rosaline and cheated him out of payment for the play, and starts a brawl at the Rose with his company. The Rose players repel Burbage and his men and celebrate at the pub, where a drunken Henslowe lets slip to Viola that Shakespeare is married, albeit separated from his wife. News arrives that Marlowe has been murdered, and a guilt-ridden Shakespeare assumes Wessex had Marlowe killed, believing him to be Viola's lover. Viola believes Shakespeare has been murdered but he appears at her church, terrifying Wessex who believes he is a ghost. Viola confesses her love for Shakespeare, but both recognize she cannot escape her duty to marry Wessex.

John Webster, an unpleasant boy who hangs around the theatre, spies on Shakespeare and Viola making love and informs Tilney, who closes the Rose for breaking the ban on women actors. Viola's identity is exposed, leaving them without a stage or lead actor, until Burbage offers his theatre and the heartbroken Shakespeare takes the role of Romeo. Following her wedding, Viola learns the play will be performed that day, and runs away to the Curtain. She overhears that the boy playing Juliet cannot perform, his voice having broken, and Henslowe asks her to replace him. She plays Juliet to Shakespeare's Romeo to an enthralled audience.

Tilney arrives to arrest everyone for indecency due to Viola's presence, but the Queen reveals herself in attendance and restrains him, instead asserting that Kent's resemblance to a woman is "remarkable". Powerless to end a lawful marriage, she orders Kent to "fetch" Viola to sail with Wessex to the Colony of Virginia. The Queen tells Wessex, who followed Viola to the theatre, that Romeo and Juliet has won the bet for Shakespeare, and has Kent deliver his £50 with instructions to write something "a little more cheerful next time, for Twelfth Night".

Viola and Shakespeare say their goodbyes, and he vows to immortalise her, as he imagines the beginning of Twelfth Night, in character as a castaway disguised as a man after a voyage to a strange land.

The original idea for Shakespeare in Love was suggested to screenwriter Marc Norman in the late 1980s by his son Zachary.[5] Norman wrote a draft screenplay which he presented to director Edward Zwick, which attracted Julia Roberts, who agreed to play Viola. However, Zwick disliked Norman's screenplay and hired the playwright Tom Stoppard to improve it (Stoppard's first major success had been with the Shakespeare-themed play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead).[6]

The film went into production in 1991 at Universal, with Zwick as director, but although sets and costumes were in construction, Shakespeare had not yet been cast, because Roberts insisted that only Daniel Day-Lewis could play the role. Day-Lewis was uninterested, and when Roberts failed to persuade him, she withdrew from the film, six weeks before shooting was due to begin.[7] The production went into turnaround, and Zwick was unable to persuade other studios to take up the screenplay.[6]

Eventually, Zwick got Miramax interested in the screenplay, but Miramax chose John Madden as director. Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein acted as producer, and persuaded Ben Affleck to take a small role as Ned Alleyn.[8] Kate Winslet was offered the role of Viola after the success of Titanic, but she rejected it to pursue independent films.[9]

Principal photography began on March 2, 1998, and ended on June 10, 1998.[10]

The film was considerably reworked after the first test screenings. The scene with Shakespeare and Viola in the punt was re-shot, to make it more emotional, and some lines were re-recorded to clarify the reasons why Viola had to marry Wessex. The ending was re-shot several times, until Stoppard eventually came up with the idea of Viola suggesting to Shakespeare that their parting could inspire his next play.[11]

Among the locations used in the production were Hatfield House, Hertfordshire (for the fireworks scene), Broughton Castle, Oxfordshire (which played the role of the de Lesseps home), the beach at Holkham in Norfolk, the chapel at Eton College, Berkshire, and the Great Hall of Middle Temple, London.[12]

Much of the action of the film echoes that of Romeo and Juliet. Will and Viola play out the famous balcony and bedroom scenes; like Juliet, Viola has a witty nurse, and is separated from Will by a gulf of duty (although not the family enmity of the play: the "two households" of Romeo and Juliet are supposedly inspired by the two rival playhouses). In addition, the two lovers are equally "star-crossed" – they are not ultimately destined to be together (since Viola is of rich and socially ambitious merchant stock and is promised to marry Lord Wessex, while Shakespeare himself is poor and already married). There is also a Rosaline, with whom Will is in love at the beginning of the film. There are references to earlier cinematic versions of Shakespeare, such as the balcony scene pastiching the Zeffirelli Romeo and Juliet.[13]

Many other plot devices used in the film are common in Shakespearean comedies and other plays of the Elizabethan era: the Queen disguised as a commoner, the cross-dressing disguises, mistaken identities, the sword fight, the suspicion of adultery, the appearance of a "ghost" (cf. Macbeth), and the "play within a play". According to Douglas Brode, the film deftly portrays many of these devices as though the events depicted were the inspiration for Shakespeare's own use of them in his plays.[14]

Christopher Marlowe is presented in the film as the master playwright whom the characters consider the greatest English dramatist of that time – this is historically accurate, yet also humorous, since the film's audience knows what will eventually happen to Shakespeare's reputation. Marlowe gives Shakespeare a plot for his next play, "Romeo and Ethel the Pirate's Daughter" ("Romeo is Italian...always in and out of love...until he meets...Ethel. The daughter of his enemy! His best friend is killed in a duel by Ethel's brother or something. His name is Mercutio.")[15] Marlowe's Doctor Faustus is quoted repeatedly: "Was this the face that launched a thousand ships/ And burned the topless towers of Ilium?" A reference is also made to Marlowe's final, unfinished play The Massacre at Paris in a scene wherein Marlowe (Rupert Everett) seeks payment for the final act of the play from Richard Burbage (Martin Clunes). Burbage promises the payment the next day, so Marlowe refuses to part with the pages and departs for Deptford, where he is killed.[16][17] The only surviving text of The Massacre at Paris is an undated octavo that is probably too short to represent the complete original play. It has been suggested that it is a memorial reconstruction by the actors who performed the work.[18]

The child John Webster (Joe Roberts) who plays with rats is a reference to the leading figure in the next, Jacobean, generation of playwrights. His plays (The Duchess of Malfi, The White Devil) are known for their 'blood and gore', which is humorously referred to by the child saying that he enjoys Titus Andronicus, and also saying of Romeo and Juliet, when asked his opinion by the Queen, "I liked it when she stabbed herself."[19]

When the clown Will Kempe (Patrick Barlow) says to Shakespeare that he would like to play in a drama, he is told that "they would laugh at Seneca if you played it", a reference to the Roman tragedian renowned for his sombre and bloody plot lines which were a major influence on the development of English tragedy.[20]

Will is shown signing a paper repeatedly, with many relatively illegible signatures visible. This is a reference to the fact that several versions of Shakespeare's signature exist, and in each one he spelled his name differently.[21]

After the film's release, certain publications, including Private Eye, noted strong similarities between the film and the 1941 novel No Bed for Bacon, by Caryl Brahms and S. J. Simon, which also features Shakespeare falling in love and finding inspiration for his later plays. In a foreword to a subsequent edition of No Bed for Bacon (which traded on the association by declaring itself "A Story of Shakespeare and Lady Viola in Love") Ned Sherrin, Private Eye insider and former writing partner of Brahms', confirmed that he had lent a copy of the novel to Stoppard after he joined the writing team,[22] but that the basic plot of the film had been independently developed by Marc Norman, who was unaware of the earlier work.

The film's plot can claim a tradition in fiction reaching back to Alexandre Duval's "Shakespeare amoureux ou la Piece a l'Etude" (1804), in which Shakespeare falls in love with an actress who is playing Richard III.[23]

The writers of Shakespeare in Love were sued in 1999 by bestselling author Faye Kellerman. She claimed that the plotline was stolen from her 1989 novel The Quality of Mercy, in which Shakespeare romances a Jewish woman who dresses as a man, and attempts to solve a murder. Miramax Films spokesman Andrew Stengel derided the claim, filed in the US District Court six days before the 1999 Academy Awards, as "absurd", and argued that the timing "suggests a publicity stunt".[24][25] An out-of-court settlement was reached, but the sum agreed between the parties indicates that the claim was "unwarranted".[26]

The film is "not constrained by worries about literary or historical accuracy" and includes anachronisms such as a reference to Virginia tobacco plantations, at a time before the Colony of Virginia existed.[27] A leading character is a member of the House of Wessex, which died out soon after 1125. Queen Elizabeth I never entered a public theatre, as she does in the film. Between Romeo and Juliet and Twelfth Night, Shakespeare wrote ten other plays over a period of six years.[28] The biggest historical liberty concerns the central theme of Shakespeare struggling to create the story of Romeo and Juliet as he simply adapted an existing story for theatre. The Italian verse tale The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet had been translated into English by Arthur Brooke in 1562, 32 years before Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.[29]

Janet Maslin made the film an "NYT Critics' Pick", calling it "pure enchantment". According to Maslin, "Gwyneth Paltrow, in her first great, fully realized starring performance, makes a heroine so breathtaking that she seems utterly plausible as the playwright's guiding light."[27] Roger Ebert, who gave the film four stars out of four, wrote: "The contemporary feel of the humor (like Shakespeare's coffee mug, inscribed 'Souvenir of Stratford-Upon-Avon') makes the movie play like a contest between Masterpiece Theatre and Mel Brooks. Then the movie stirs in a sweet love story, juicy court intrigue, backstage politics and some lovely moments from Romeo and Juliet... Is this a movie or an anthology? I didn't care. I was carried along by the wit, the energy and a surprising sweetness."[15]

The performances of (left to right) Gwyneth Paltrow, Judi Dench, and Geoffrey Rush garnered critical acclaim and were nominated for Academy Awards, with Paltrow and Dench winning.

Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a 92% approval rating based on 139 critical reviews, with an average rating of 8.3/10. The website's critical consensus states: "Endlessly witty, visually rapturous, and sweetly romantic, Shakespeare in Love is a delightful romantic comedy that succeeds on nearly every level."[30] On Metacritic, the film holds a score of 87 out of 100 based on 33 critical reviews, indicating "universal acclaim".[31]

Shakespeare in Love was among 1999's box office number-one films in the United Kingdom. The U.S. box office reached over $100 million; including the box office from the rest of the world, the film took in over $289 million.[4]

The Sunday Telegraph claimed that the film prompted the revival of the title of Earl of Wessex. Prince Edward was originally to have been titled Duke of Cambridge following his marriage to Sophie Rhys-Jones in 1999, the year after the film's release. However, after watching Shakespeare in Love, he reportedly became attracted to the title of the character played by Colin Firth, and asked his mother Queen Elizabeth II to be given the title of Earl of Wessex instead.[32]

In the wake of sexual abuse allegations against Weinstein, many of the cast and crew began to distance themselves from the producer and his past behavior. Madden, while condemning Weinstein, stated that the producer "craved power and had power and, as we now know, he was using it in ways that are repugnant and should be utterly condemned".[33]

In November 2011, Variety reported that Disney Theatrical Productions intended to produce a stage version of the film in London with Sonia Friedman Productions.[51] The production was officially announced in November 2013.[52] Based on the film screenplay by Norman and Stoppard, it was adapted for the stage by Lee Hall. The production was directed by Declan Donnellan and designed by Nick Ormerod, the joint founders of Cheek by Jowl.

The production opened at the Noël Coward Theatre in London's West End on 23 July 2014, receiving rave reviews from critics. It was called "A joyous celebration of theatre" in the Daily Telegraph,[53] "Joyous" in The Independent,[54] and "A love letter to theatre" in The Guardian.[55]

• BFI Top 100 British films

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• Official website for stage adaptation