It takes its liberties with aplomb, and exercises incredible self-awareness, cementing it as a classic. Shakespeare in Love is, above all, a work of fan fiction - beguiling, enchanting, and timeless fan fiction. Though the details of his life are fuzzy and his looks are greatly exaggerated (to my delight), the spirit of Shakespeare the man and the playwright shines through. Rather than indulging in a performance of enigmatic genius, this version of Shakespeare is just another person trying to make sense of the world.

He falls in love, he suffers from writer’s block, he competes with another colleague in his field. He struggles to balance his personal and professional lives. As such, she too falls in love with Shakespeare the. Shakespeare in Love portrays Shakespeare as a person. Shakespeare also learns that Viola and Thomas Kent, the young man who recently joined the company of the Rose, are one and the same, Viola masquerading as a man to infiltrate the theater world, a domain purely for the male sex, as she is in love with the written word, especially Shakespeares. It plays with Shakespeare’s most identifiable tropes and explores the concept of constructing an artist’s identity through their work. As Kyle Kallgren points out in his video essay about the movie, Shakespeare has a psychoanalyst centuries before Freud was even born, Colin Firth’s haughty villain has plantations in Virginia a decade before Jamestown, and the audition montage is distinctly modern.īut what the film lacks in historical accuracy, Kallgreen says, it makes up for in dramatic accuracy. The movie finds much of its humor in anachronisms. It’s witty, sexy, and a whole lot of fun. But despite the movie’s inaccuracies, it still has a lot of insight to impart about Shakespeare the man.Ģ0 years after its release, Shakespeare in Love holds up. Of course, that portrayal is wildly inaccurate (Shakespeare certainly wasn’t as smoldering as Fiennes made him out to be), and it situates Shakespeare in the middle of a romantic comedy rather than a researched biopic. Whilst the play features the meeting and falling in love of the two main protagonists, to say that love is a theme of Romeo and Juliet is an oversimplification.

Today, Joseph Fiennes’ take on the famous playwright remains our most commonly recognized cinematic portrait of William Shakespeare.

But despite his enduring impact, we know little about the foundational playwright.ġ998’s mega-hit Shakespeare in Love gave us the first, and still one of the only, portrayals of Shakespeare the man in film. Whether his work is being adapted ( Romeo + Juliet, Macbeth, Much Ado About Nothing), remixed ( She’s the Man, 10 Things I Hate About You, West Side Story), or just constantly quoted ( Westworld sure does like to remind us that “These violent delights have violent ends.”), Shakespeare has become ubiquitous in film and television. William Shakespeare has certainly left his mark on modern culture. 20 years after its release, this work of Shakespeare fan fiction approaches inaccuracy with aplomb.

Theme of shakespeare in love