I enjoyed Shakespeare in Love. It was a decent feel-good movie. Even though William Shakespeare and Viola de Lesseps were unable to stay together, it didn’t feel too sad because both knew that it was impossible to live together, and it felt like both were simply making the most of their time together. I liked how the movie featured Romeo and Juliet while also making reference to Twelfth Night. I was not familiar with the latter play, so I did a bit of research, and it turns out that there’s also a character named Viola in the play that disguises herself as a man. The way that the movie interwove elements of both movies was clever in hindsight.

The historical introspection that Shakespeare in Love gave was also interesting. The way theater in the Elizabethan era was produced was interesting to me–no females were allowed to perform and it felt that Shakespeare was under heavy pressure from the theater owners to produce material. It seemed that the owners themselves had sole rights on producing a writer’s work. Furthermore, the competition between Shakespeare and Marlowe was often comedic to experience–Shakespeare seemed to go out of his way to inconvenience him. I was very impressed by the actors’ accents in the film. They were exactly spot on with my expectations of what speech might’ve sounded in that time. I wonder if that’s actually an accurate representation of how people talked back then. How would we know about the kinds of accents that people spoke with in the 16th century?