Shakespeare in Love Movie Review: All the World’s a Stage

There is something brave about Shakespeare in Love, a movie that takes the most revered figure in English literature and turns him into a lovesick young playwright scrambling to finish a play. Rather than treating William Shakespeare as a serious genius, director John Madden and screenwriters Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard imagine him as a talented but frustrated young man whose personal life unexpectedly provides the inspiration he needs to create Romeo and Juliet. The result is a romantic comedy that is clever, warm, and considerably more substantial than its playful premise might suggest.

Joseph Fiennes plays Shakespeare as an appealing mixture of confidence and insecurity. He knows he is talented, but he is also broke, suffering from writer’s block, and desperate to find an ending for his latest play. His life changes when he meets Viola de Lesseps (Gwyneth Paltrow), a wealthy young woman who dreams of becoming an actor at a time when women are forbidden from performing on the English stage. Disguised as a man, Viola auditions for Shakespeare’s play and wins the role of Romeo. Inevitably, Shakespeare discovers her identity, and their professional relationship becomes a forbidden romance.

The movie’s greatest pleasure is the way it continually blurs the boundary between Shakespeare’s life and the play he is writing. His relationship with Viola begins to resemble Romeo and Juliet, while events surrounding the production keep finding their way into the script. Shakespeare’s fictional tragedy becomes a kind of emotional record of his own experiences, giving the familiar play an amusingly intimate origin story. The movie never insists that this is what actually happened. Instead, it uses historical speculation as a playground.

The supporting cast is superb. Geoffrey Rush is hilarious as the anxious theater owner Philip Henslowe, who is always trying to satisfy creditors and keep his production alive. Colin Firth has great fun as Lord Wessex, Viola’s humorless and possessive fiancé, while Ben Affleck gives an unexpectedly funny performance as the swaggering actor Ned Alleyn. Judi Dench, appearing briefly as Queen Elizabeth I, practically steals the movie with a handful of imperious looks and perfectly timed lines. The ensemble gives the film the bustling energy of a backstage comedy.

What keeps Shakespeare in Love from becoming merely a clever exercise is its genuine romantic appeal. Fiennes and Paltrow have convincing chemistry, and the film gradually shifts from broad comedy toward something more bittersweet. Their romance cannot have a conventional happy ending, and the movie understands that the separation of the lovers is precisely what gives Shakespeare the emotional material to finish his greatest play.

Beautifully photographed and well staged, Shakespeare in Love is a rare period film that never feels weighed down by its historical setting. It is playful without being frivolous, romantic without becoming syrupy, and literary without being stuffy. Most importantly, it finds a charming way to make Shakespeare feel human, whether or not one believes a word of its imagined history.