Week 1: Shakespeare in Love (John Madden 1998)



Shakespeare in Love poster + movie trailer link

  

Director John Madden has taken the work of a writer, dead for centuries and seen widely as incomprehensible, and sculptured it into a movie that cleverly parleys a balance between past and present that my uneducated ignorance can not only enjoy, but can relate to. I was taken on the journey of Will Shakespeare, and the life he may have led, writing the best know romantic tragedy as a reflection of his own tragic love affair, and watched as the sights and sounds of the daily life of 16^th century England brilliantly end up as some of his best lines in the play (Boot & Burt, 2003).

Through the barriers and obstacles that hold Will and Viola back from happily ever after, we are reminded of the injustices of Elizabethan England. The valu of love in a time of arranged marriages in the course of Will and Viola's desirous and almost lustful love affair. Duty to family, the Church and the Queen through Viola's letter to Will stating her betrothal to Wessex as consented and commanded by the Queen, signed as 'a daughter's duty.' 
Gender inequality is demonstrated in the illegality of women playing women’s roles on stage. Illustrated by Viola’s irritated statement that 'stage love will never be true love while the law of the land has our heroines being played by pipsqueak boys in petticoats', and displayed ingeniously in a line from Queen Elizabeth regarding the inequality even in the highest class, 'I know something of a woman in a man’s profession. Yes by god I do know about that.'

Social structure is also an underlying theme, with the impossibility of a high born lady marrying a lowly playwrite. Viloa: 'What will you have me do? Marry you instead?' Will: 'To be the wife of a poor player? Can I wish that from lady Viola, except in my dreams?' 

These thems are delivered to us in a 16th century setting, however they are delivered in a contemporary context that we can relate to even today.

In conclusion, I had to remind myself that although I commend Madden on a modern day film about 16^th century life and the origins of Romeo & Juliette, the brilliant undertones and the relevance of injustices of class, sexuality and duty were already laid out for him to retell 400 years later by none other than William Shakespeare.

Discussion Question: Queen Elizabeth turns up on stage at the end of Shakespeare in Love and says, “I know something of being a woman in a man’s profession.” Yet, she makes no order for this to change nor does she more than mildly rebuke those who think that a woman on the stage is the ‘beginning of the end’. Bearing this comment in mind, explore the issues of gender as it is portrayed in the film.

Social structure is also an underlying theme, with the impossibility of a high born lady marrying a lowly playwright. Viola: ‘What will you have me do? Marry you instead?’ Will: ‘To be the wife of a poor player? Can I wish that from Lady Viola, except in my dreams?’

I think the gender inequality is demonstrated in the illegality of women playing women’s roles on stage. Illustrated by Viola’s irritated statement that ‘stage love will never be true love while the law of the land has our heroines being played by pipsqueak boys in petticoats’, and displayed ingeniously in a line from Queen Elizabeth regarding the inequality even in the highest class, ‘I know something of a woman in a man’s profession. Yes by god I do know about that.’