On Screen

...After being cheated by a long-nosed moneylender (maybe John Turturro), our hero begins work on a ferociously antiSemitic play...

...How could the elusive Shakespeare, about whom history tells very little, be credibly drawn...

...Catholics and Protestants alike are shown as bloody monsters, eager to kill for the sake of their respective doctrines...

...It visualizes the interior of a great Tudor house and gives us a glimpse of the Queen's court...

...She can't occupy much more than five minutes of screen time, but she registers as one of the most fully developed characters, jealous of her power but eager to dispense true justice when it is called for...

...Since it is too late for the Bard to cancel the production, he does penance by inserting the "Hath not a Jew eyes" speech into The Merchant of Venice...

...A furious visit to Stratford-on-Avon fails to prevent their engagement and so inflames Shakespeare's oedipal jealousies that he writes Hamlet...

...It sails the Thames, ducks the plague and introduces us to Puritans protesting the damnable profession of playacting...

...Marlowe appears as an older contemporary, almost a father figure...

...Since the narrative demands that Romeo and Juliet be Shakespeare's first great work, remarkable early plays like Titus Andronicus and The Two Gentlemen of Verona are dismissed as trifles...

...Shekhar Kapur's Elizabeth, released around the same time as Shakespeare in Love, ought to have explored Dench's remark in depth...

...Ironically, it is the romantic fantasia, with its deep affection for Elizabethan word and custom, that seems more accurate, more real...

...the Queen is confined to domestic choices...

...After all, it was a film on the early life of William Shakespeare directed by the man behind the lugubrious Mrs...

...Best of all is Judi Dench's astonishing Queen Elizabeth...

...So I am somewhat humbled, but even more pleased, to report that Shakespeare in Love defeated most of my negative expectations...

...Or a shipwreck on a desert island with a group of colorful aristocrats (impersonated by the cast of Frasier) could inspire The Tempest...

...Accepted by the players and offered the role of the male lead, she reveals her identity to Shakespeare...

...Romantic comedies are under no obligation to be historically accurate, and many of the liberties taken here are for the sake of good humor...

...Only men and boys were allowed to perform upon the Renaissance public stage, but Lady Viola de Lesseps (a character invented for the movie) is eager to act in Henslowe's latest production, commissioned as Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate's Daughter, but soon to become Romeo and Juliet...

...Martin Clunes creates a boisterous Burbage...

...The film ends with Shakespeare beginning Twelfth Night almost a decade before he probably wrote it...

...The task of being faithful to the playwright and his language seemed insurmountably difficult...

...One of the film's delights is its profusion of plot devices that, if not exactly Shakespearean, pay homage to the Bard's comedies...

...Yet we feel that their affection for each other extends beyond their physical attraction...

...Geoffrey Rush's Henslowe alternatively snivels and schemes...

...Playing Wessex, Colin Firth is splendidly greedy and lustful, albeit perhaps a little too self-consciously villainous...

...Shakespeare was influenced by Marlowe and possibly considered him a rival, but the movie forgets that the two were both born in 1564...

...Brown, John Madden, starring clotheshorses Gwyneth Paltrow and Joseph Fiennes, written by Marc (Waterworld) Norman and the witty but unreliable Tom Stoppard...

...A game supporting cast helps as well...

...An accomplished filmmaker making his English language debut, he directs here like a kid fresh out of film school, always opting for a complicated setup when a simple one would suffice...

...Madden cast her brilliantly a year ago as Victoria in the otherwise dull Mrs...

...Cate Blanche«, terrific in last year's Oscar and Lucinda (where she played opposite Ralph Fiennes, Joseph's older brother), is fiery and intense in the title role...

...The movie would have us believe that Romeo and Juliet is a breakthrough because it is the playwright's first autobiographical work, a fictionalized version of his courtship and loss of Viola...

...Consider these potential future episodes: Following his father's death, Shakespeare receives news that his uncle Claudius (played by Peter ?'Toole or Anthony Hopkins) is paying court to his mother (say, Glenn Close...

...Shakespeare in Love thus cynically asserts that great art can only be produced when drawn directly from personal experience...

...Shakespeare in Love has been justifiably praised for respecting the beauty of the Master's language...

...It roams the streets of Elizabethan London, running into many of Shakespeare's contemporaries, among them the Master of the Revels (the censor of the day), theater manager Philip Henslowe, actors Richard Burbage, Ned Alleyn and Will Kempe, and fellow dramatists Christopher Marlowe and John Webster...

...As she prepares for her role, she rehearses Romeo's lines in bed with her sweetheart, who in turn speaks the part of Juliet...

...It is fun to catch charwomen and orange sellers shouting out phrases that an eavesdropping Shakespeare will one day immortalize in his works, but it is also disappointing to hear Henslowe, Marlowe and Viola feed him simple story lines he appears incapable of formulating on his own...

...As for Kapur, he seems to have gotten lost in his camera angles...

...Like many a Shakespearean heroine, Viola disguises herself as aman...

...Of course he dashes off Sonnet 18 ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day"), the most famous of a sequence that is in fact dedicated to a young man...

...We learn with her that she must recreate herself in order to lead the country...

...But scenarist Michael Hirst never allows us to appreciate her strength of character and political savvy...

...When Viola, the players and the Londoners of the day later gasp with pleasure as Romeo and Juliet is rehearsed and performed, the movie audience melts with them...

...At one point, musing over Viola's predicament, she remarks that she knows something of being a woman in a man's profession...

...Still, I could have done without some of the more glaring errors and concessions to cuteness...

...The Queen herself, the work's moral consciousness, meanwhile claims to be bewildered by the "small question of religion" that rocks her nation...

...On Screen RENAISSANCE RIVALRY By Raphael Shargel Although I had heard nothing but praise for Shakespeare in Love, and was impressed when it garnered 13 Academy Awards nominations—an honor accorded Gone With the Wind, From Here to Eternity and just a few others—I put off seeing it for as long as my critical obligations would allow...

...In the same vein, conscription into the Army could lead him to write the history plays...

...This film covers another chapter in the fascinating life of the monarch...

...Should their initial success prompt the proponents of this theory to dramatize the story behind the composition of every Shakespeare masterpiece, he will be seen to have had an extremely bizarre career...

...She spends most of her time toying with a variety of suitors, while the affairs of state are handled almost entirely by the male characters...

...Simon Callow personifies a Master of the Revels as obnoxious to the players as he is obsequious in the presence of nobility...

...At one point he puts aside his play to compose a poem for Viola...

...Shakespeare in Love and Elizabeth, offer intriguingly divergent views of Renaissance English life...

...Will's "psychotherapy" session at the beginning of the movie is more cloying than amusing...

...While not a masterpiece, it is a charming romantic comedy that actually rewards lovers of Shakespeareana...

...Shakespeare in Love took liberties with the historical record, but none of them were as repugnant as Elizabeth's...

...True, Fiennes plays Will as if he were a humorless GQ model, his eyes smoldering intensely for the camera...

...Shortly before it hits the boards, however, abenevolent Jew (Dustin Hoffman) saves his life...

...It is also a pleasure to watch the playwright at work, obsessively spitting on the ground and rolling his quill between his hands before he sits down to write...

...Silliest of all is the writers' reliance on the old Shavian saw, still professed by high school teachers and ignorant scholars, that Shakespeare did not invent any of his plots...

...I assumed the project, no less than most recent movies concerning great literary figures, would be a winking, self-consciously ironic fiasco...

...Such extraordinary reversals abound, the last allowing the couple to switch parts again, he portraying Romeo, she Juliet, in the play's first public performance...

...This film expresses open hostility toward its Christian practitioners...

...The candid bitterness in her voice makes this line the most serious and resonant in the film...

...Anyone hoping for a revisionist tale of a woman's empowerment will be disappointed...

...But unlike its comic cousin, Elizabeth is a dark, humorless, slow-moving movie that covers its subject's early career, beginning in the reign of MaryTudor, her older sister and immediate predecessor, and concluding with her decision to become the Virgin Queen...

...Whole scenes are photographed from above, shot through colored scrim, captured by a camera circling around dizzyingly The result is a movie so impressed with its own pyrotechnics that it obscures the actors and their performances...

...It too stars Fiennes as the heroine's lover and Rush as a versatile conniver, and was nominated for a passel of Oscars...

...It offers a backstage peek at two Renaissance theaters where we witness rehearsals and performances...

...Kapur and Hirst are welcome to their atheism, but by refashioning historical figures as nonbelievers who cannot comprehend the seriousness of their country's divisions, they make complex and still timely debates appear petty...

...Brown, and her performance now, as England's other great female monarch, is indelible...

...The two fall in love despite the class barrier between them and Viola's obligation to marry the wealthy Lord Wessex...

...And Paltrow, while better here than she has ever been, gives the impression of being a lanky windup toy...

...Fortunately, the principals of Shakespeare in Love do manage some chemistry...

...Or a brief obsession with witchcraft might produce Macbeth...