I’m usually not a huge fan of romantic movies and I watched Shakespeare in Love several times so far. I didn’t quite like it but, I decided to give the movie another shot. I really did love the concept of the movie in that it portrayed William Shakespeare as a man with a real life instead of the great literary master that he is. Although we don’t know quite a lot about him concerning his private life, I think this movie was a great way to show how he came up with his ideas, just like everyone else. The movie depicted Viola as Shakespeare’s muse in writing Romeo and Juliet. It’s lovely how the movie foreshadows the doomed romance of William and Viola and I like it when movies don’t necessarily have a happy ending. The bittersweet ending kind of made the story better even if it was purely fiction.

Viola’s character made me wonder how many women would have dressed up as men to venture into the theatrical world. In fact, there must have been a lot of women who dressed as men to do things they would not be allowed to do. For some odd reason, Deborah Sampson comes to mind each time I think of a crossdressing women and then I think of dear old Mulan. Regardless, both of the women I have mentioned were in the military and it’s striking to think of which occupations did women have to disguise themselves in.

Shakespeare in Love is a movie that made me remember why, after 400 years, we are still reading, enjoying, watching and reciting the words of The Bard. The premise of the movie is that Shakespeare’s experiences, in this case with love, gave him inspiration to write his plays. Here, his love for Gwynth Paltrow’s character is his inspiration for Romeo and Juliet. Paltrow’s Oscar-winning performance is riveting as her precise pronunciation keeps the audience hanging on every one of Shakespeare’s words.
Sara asked us to ponder possible inspirations behind the writing process, and to consider whether or not a script can truly express the feelings of love to its audience. In this case, I believe the answer is a resounding YES! The layers of the true actor, playing the stage actor who is Shakespeare, inspired by falling in love and playing Romeo, to convey love to his stage audience as well as to the movie audience, stretches the concept a bit far. However, it enforces the idea that the conveyance of the meaning of love to the audience really comes from the viewer’s interpretation through his/her own emotions and experiences, much like Shakespeare’s character in the movie conveyed his experiences through his writing. In his own words, “Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind.”
Lastly, the movie did leave me wondering if all of Shakespeare’s plays were inspired by real events or people in his life. If so, his must have been a crazy life!

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?

Last Friday I viewed the film Shakespeare in Love. In the movie, Shakespeare is in the process of writing  the play Romeo and Juliet. This movie was completely fictional but hypothesized where Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet originated. In the beginning of the movie, Shakespeare unknowingly casted a woman for the part of Romeo, due to the fact that she pretended to be a man, at the time known as Thomas Kent. It later turned out that Thomas Kent was in fact Viola de Lesseps, a woman of the upper class that Shakespeare would have a love affair with.  At this time, the play started to shadow his interactions with Viola. Later in the movie Viola had to marry Lord Wessex, creating an end to their affair. During the final scenes of the movie, Shakespeare had to play Romeo while his love interest, Viola played Juliet. As they thought these were their final moments together they expressed their love for each other in the play. Unlike in Romeo and Juliet, Viola and Shakespeare had a happy ending in comparison. Neither of them died, but Viola did marry Lord Wessex. Overall, I thought that this movie posed an interesting question to where Shakespeare’s idea for Romeo and Juliet had originated. It is possible that these events did occur, but it is unknown. I thought this movie did a wonderful job in portraying the Elizabethan era, I for one was disgusted by the majority of everyone’s teeth during that time period. The movie did a good job highlighting the cast differences and explaining a potential hypothesis on the origin of Romeo and Juliet, as it was not thought that a love like Romeo and Juliet’s could be caught on screen.

I have heard plenty of mysteries regarding the identity of the famous Shakespeare. Many people believe that Shakespeare was a lower-class fellow because writing was not a respected profession back in Elizabethan times. Others believe that the degree of education held by this master of playwrights could not be obtained by anyone other than nobility. That is to say, Shakespeare could have been a mere alias to a nobleman looking to save face. Yet I never considered the origin and inspiration of his stories to have relevance in identifying the man behind the works until I watched Shakespeare in Love at this week’s Rose Movie Night.

Whether he was a solitary genius or a man of social experience was not a question that had crossed my mind, but I believe that in order to get inspiration for masterful poetry and other forms of expression, a person must be emotionally driven or inspired by experience. While I realize that the movie was fictional, it brought to consideration a valid point. Shakespeare must have drawn inspiration for his numerous sonnets from something, even if it was mere observation of his surroundings and the interactions between others. He may even have been a confidant amidst the drama in the life of others. Yet, there is a very likely possibility that he drew from his out heart-wrenching, emotional experiences in order to concoct his masterpieces. Like the Shakespeare portrayed in the movie, Shakespeare in the real world could have used writing as an escape from his internally conflicting emotions about what was happening around him, without actually having lived through struggles similar to his characters’.

Whoever the real Shakespeare was, he could not have been a lonely man without friends or family to depend on. His life remains much of a mystery, but his poetry contains universal struggles and messages applicable to people of different time periods, heritages, and social classes, that would be overlooked by someone solitary and without personal experiences. Maybe Shakespeare wasn’t being threatened for stealing a forbidden heart, but I truly believe he must have had his own real-life Juliet.

Last week I went to the Flora Friday Film night where we watched the 1998 film Shakespeare in Love. The movie was pretty much a polar opposite from last week’s film, Fight Club. Shakespeare in Love was a romance full of lighthearted jokes, fun, and non-controversial topics, very different from the violent themes of Fight Club. I don’t know if this was done on purpose, but I loved seeing the two dramatically different styles of film-making so close to each other. These two movies were also made within one year of each other, making them an even better comparison between the two film styles.

I liked Shakespeare in Love because the movie knew what it was. It knew it was a romance, and did not attempt to do much else. It instead focused on telling the romance story between Shakespeare and Viola well, giving time to develop the characters so that the audience is invested in the story. With that said, I was surprised at how much erotic content and nudity was included in the story. Perhaps sex was useful tool to convince the audience of how much Shakespeare and Viola are in the love with each other, but it excludes a large audience by restricting the movie rating to R. Since the rest of the movie was so innocent and would have catered well to a younger audience, I’m surprised the director decided to include the sex scenes.

Another plus of this movie was the stories’ similarities and references to the works of its subject, William Shakespeare. Many of Shakespeare’s comedies involve ridiculous situations with deceit and miscommunications. The plot of Shakespeare in Love captured this style by having Viola’s to be husband think he killed Shakespeare, and by having Viola dress as a man so that she could become an actor. Both of these scenarios would not be out of place in an original Shakespeare play. This movie was not a masterpiece, but it was a good homage to Shakespeare and a perfect choice for Valentine’s day week.

Genius is usually seen as something you are born with. It’s an innate quality you simply possess. It’s just what you are. Our narrative of genius essentially posits that either you have it, or you don’t. You cannot claim genius, no matter how hard you work, or become a genius. Genius is conceived of as effortless.

“Shakespeare in Love” is not the sort of movie I would chose for myself. Romances of any sort are not my speed. But, it is interesting in the way it conceives of genius. As “Shakespeare in Love” tells it, genius is not so much an innate characteristic as something which happens to you-genius, it seems to say, arises from brilliant experiences, rather than originating in the self. In the film, the young playwright William Shakespeare draws heavily upon his lived experiences while writing Romeo and Juliet. As the film tells it, the great love story in “Romeo and Juliet” is so meaningful because it is inspired by the real life love between Shakespeare and Viola de Lesseps.

While the actual movie is somewhat tacky, its narrative of the creative process and of the nature of genius is compelling. It is far more democratic than the traditional narrative. Of course, you can tell yourself you are a genius-but there are a lot of other people in the world, all of whom are free to tell you that you’re wrong. But, no one can really stop you from seeking out brilliant experiences. If genius is experiential, anyone can be a genius. You can try and fail, and fail a lot, and still be a genius, once you find the right story (or idea, or experience, etc..).

All said, I enjoyed this movie. It presented a unique take on the creative process, and on the nature of genius. It was also a fairly effective love story.

So, I am not really the greatest fan of Shakespeare. Oddly enough though, “Romeo and Juliet” is one of my favorite stories because of its extreme absurdity and corny-ness. (Fun fact: I own about 7 different versions of the play, including one written almost entirely in emojis!) I think that, like “Romeo and Juliet”, “Shakespeare in Love” also does not really do much to bring justice to the the intricate complexities of “love” and instead just takes a one-sided static viewpoint of “love” and exaggerates it to a point that is almost comical. Even with that being said, I enjoyed the film , for that reason, and I can understand why it sold so well with many audiences.

Shakespeare in Love takes a playful and delightful turn on the creation of Romeo and Juliet. A rather steamy, inventive, and somewhat parodic take on William Shakespeare’s approach to writing one of the greatest classics of all time, screenwriter Tom Stoppard energetically blends the drama and fiction of playwriting with the constructed fiction of the screen, doing so both through language (the whole film is written in iambic pentameter) and through parallel stories (the fictional biography of Shakespeare and the actual play). The fluidity between these parallel universes speaks to a larger conversation on the relationship between art and life. This is something Stoppard visually plays with during the brawl scene on stage when Lord Wessex challenges Shakespeare to a duel; during a suspenseful moment when Shakespeare is about to pierce Wessex through the heart, his choice of sword fails him and undermines his attack, bending as it humorously pokes at Wessex but also at us, the audience, and the spectacle of theater and of film-making. The film is able to so brilliantly convey a William Shakespeare as an everyday man that reminds us at most that he was a populist writer above all, something we oftentimes forget when we approach his work and place it on a pedestal.