The Fictive World
In assessing the entirety of the fictive world of the 1998 film, Shakespeare in Love, it must first be understood that this is a world in which fiction and reality coexist. Certainly, there was a William Shakespeare and there was an Elizabethan England, so the film’s foundation is grounded in the real. At the same time, the story is based on fantasy, so the two realms must complement one another, and the fictive must to some extent be true to the known history. There is a further dimension to this production, however; by virtue of the era’s being so distanced from the modern, it takes on a quality of fable, or the unreal. The film is, again, set very much in the actual period of the late 16th century, and in the city of London. Nonetheless, there remains an atmosphere of fantasy to it, chiefly because the story is an elaborate romance/comedy.
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This being the case, Shakespeare in Love presents both the familiar and the strange, a process enhanced by that distance of time between the action and the modern era. The characters are real, in terms of many of them being known figures in history and the English theater. Shakespeare, Will Kemp, Richard Burbage, and Queen Elizabeth herself were very real, and they occupy their proper roles in the film. If England had no Lord Wessex – and it did not – the character and the title are acceptable creations, so the reality of the class system as it existed for the young Shakespeare is authentic. The movie in fact takes advantage of the “lost years” of Shakespeare’s life, when it is known he was working in London but had not yet achieved fame as a playwright. There is also the comic usage of a reality of the era. Actors and theatrical companies were essentially considered no better than vagrants, and the law was harsh on them. This in fact encouraged the practice of companies turning to an aristocrat for protection; to be a member of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, or be invited to play before the Queen, legitimized the trade (Hallaway 42). In a sense, then, the film enjoys the advantage of a reality as exciting as any fictive one, as the players and street people interact with the nobility. This also allows for a thematic subtext of commonality; in this world, royalty and beggars alike know what it means to want what cannot be had.
What most marks the fictive/real quality of the film is a driving intensity. Passion, and of many kinds, fuels the story, just as it relies on the traditional – and very Shakespearean – props of disguised gender. The characters are fiercely driven by love and ambition, and the almost musical quality of Tom Stoppard’s script enhances what may then be called a “heightened reality.” There are forces here holding the characters to the solid ground, as in Shakespeare’s having a wife and Viola’s being obligated to marry a peer. Conflicted, then, the characters behave in ways that are both stylized and raw; excess of feeling is the primary motivation, whether the feeling is love or the desperation behind the need for a new and great play. Simultaneously elegant and rough, the film takes reality itself to an extreme plane, consequently rendering the real Elizabethan Age a fantastic environment in which excess is the norm. It is a general effect that carries the movie along on a successful, engaging momentum.
Theatrical Means
The director certainly makes the most of the reality of Elizabethan London, turning it into a virtual circus of frenzied activity. There is good reason for this; in the London of the era, the prosperity of the new middle class was creating a chaos of commercialism. Markets spilled into the streets, with meats and produce competing with horse and foot traffic, and unlicensed sellers filled the alleyways (Bell 276). The film indulges in using this kind of urban sloppiness, which stands in contrast to the elegance and ceremony of Elizabeth’s court and the restrictions of Viola’s privileged life. The production values are consistently in keeping with the fantastic environment. There is a real sense here, for example, that bathing was rare, and the audience can almost smell the horses in the crowded streets. The costumes are also alternately rich and shabby, and they all share the quality of seeming like “costumes”; everything flows and flies as the actors move, and the actors are virtually always in motion. The same effect is true of the lighting, music, sound effects, and sets. Everything works in unity to create an ordered chaos, or at least a chaos in which the audience may follow the main story and enjoy the many misadventures.
The casting perfectly suits the general tone of the film, with Fiennes bringing a deliberately overdone obsessive quality to Shakespeare. He is frantic and calm, crazed and reflective, and he plays it all as the realistic behaviors of a genius under these bizarre conditions. Conversely, Paltrow’s Viola goes to another extreme; she is hyper-feminized, yet equally manic, and her performance reflects the gender confusion the film celebrates in Shakespeare’s work. Deeply in love with Shakespeare, her femaleness then takes on a force equal to the madness of the actors struggling to survive and play. “All woman,” she is nonetheless one of the strongest characters in the film. Judi Dench’s Elizabeth, rarely appearing, nonetheless grounds the excesses of the other leads. She maintains a cynical and calm regality that provides an authority over all that is happening. The casting also allows for direction emphasizing the passions of the main characters in the form of Firth’s Wessex. He is, unlike Dench, only stodgy and “still,” adding another layer to the force of the characters as representing states of being and feeling.
In terms of general impression, Shakespeare in Love succeeds on all levels because it sets the standards itself. That is, in fusing the real with the hyperbolic or fantastic, it is accountable only to its own expectations, and it works in satisfying the audience because its controlled mania celebrates love above all else. Certainly, a good deal of this success is owed to the richness of the Elizabethan language, either in Shakespearean poetry or in the musicality and wit of street talk. This gives the film added credibility, which is in keeping with the pivotal fact that the film centers on the greatest English poet of all time. It may be, moreover, that the film succeed so well because it is, not a play within a play, but multiple plays within an exaggerated reality. Ruses are everywhere, from small lies to escape debts to false pledges of love, and the core romance of the story is very much based on deceptions well. It then must be reiterated that Shakespeare in Love, and through virtually every element of its production and thematic presentation, is an exceptional film because it creates its own world between the real and the unreal.
- Bell, E. The Traditional Shops and Restaurants of London: A Guide to Century-old Establishments and New Classics. New York: Little Bookroom, 2007. Print.
- Hallaway, Michael. Elizabethan Popular Theatre: Plays in Performance. New York: Psychology Press, 2004. Print.
- Shakespeare in Love. Dir. John Madden. Perf. Gwyneth Paltrow, Geoffrey Rush, Joseph Fiennes, Martin Clunes, and Judi Dench. 1998, Universal. Film.
