After 400 years of being merely the greatest of all writers, Shakespeare is suddenly an adorable guy and a pop icon. In the wonderfully clever screenplay by Tom Stoppard and Marc Norman, Will is a grungily romantic Elizabethan playwright who hasn’t had his big hit yet and is stalled by writer’s block. It feels like ““trying to pick a lock with a wet herring,’’ he tells his analyst (Antony Sher). Analyst? Stoppard is having supremely literate fun, bouncing anachronisms and faux Freudianisms around the teeming, charmingly cruddy streets of 16th-century London. Played with mercurial Elan by Joseph Fiennes, Shakespeare gets unlocked when he meets Viola de Lesseps (Gwyneth Paltrow, sizzling with sensual intelligence), a stage-struck young aristocrat who disguises herself as a boy so she can act in the males-only Elizabethan theater. With perfect rhythm, director John Madden hurtles through the whirligigs of love and the intrigues of 16th-century showbiz.
The movie is, of course, not a biography but a fantasia on the theme of Shakespeare. Many ““facts’’ are known about the Bard (just about the only ones in the movie are that he’s married and that his theatrical rival is Christopher Marlowe), but connect these dots and you get not a life but a presence. This situation has allowed both wackos and worthies to develop elaborate theories–such as the notion that Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare’s plays. As for his sexuality, well, as one academic put it ironically, Shakespeare ““was almost certainly homosexual, bisexual or heterosexual.’’ (Scholars believe he wrote many of his sonnets–including ““Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day’’–to a fair-haired young man.) In the movie, Will is as straight and potent as one of his pentameters. What’s so terrific is that, fact or fantasy, the vital sense of the man and the milieu comes through. Many scholars and academics who’ve seen the film love it (box). James R. Andreas, a professor at Clemson University in South Carolina, has the perfect comment: ““As far as the biographical accuracy in “Shakespeare in Love,’ who cares? Shakespeare was a pop phenomenon in his own age. Now, thanks to our modern media, he’s becoming the real king of pop he always was.''
A remarkable Shakespeare renaissance is occurring in Hollywood. Young stars from Ethan Hawke to Calista Flockhart want to film his plays; they and a number of directors see him as a spiritual contemporary. They’re restoring the broad appeal of an artist who spoke directly to all sectors of his own vibrant and motley society. Not every Shakespeare project may work, but a sense of adventure is returning, displacing the pious decorum of the ““Masterpiece Theatre’’ mode. The flash point was Kenneth Branagh’s ““Henry V’’ in 1989, a critical and commercial success. Since then there have been films like Ian McKellen’s setting of ““Richard III’’ in the British fascist movement of the ’30s, Branagh’s ““Much Ado About Nothing’’ and Franco Zeffirelli’s ““Hamlet,’’ with Mel Gibson.
Perhaps the most significant was Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 ““William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet,’’ with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes playing the star-crossed lovers in modern Verona Beach, Fla. This movie, shot in jackhammer MTV style, drew a youthful audience who related strongly to the film’s violent energy and the young stars’ passionate performances. Professor Andreas thinks that the outbreak of on-screen Shakespeare reflects his continuing social and political pertinence. ““Plays like “Othello’ and “The Tempest’ raised issues about miscegenation and integration. And who can watch “Othello’ today without thinking of spouse abuse and murder?''
Every generation creates its own Shakespeare. Coming up are perhaps the most fascinating attempts yet to absorb Shakespeare into our own time. Julie Taymor, the brilliant stage director who created the immense Disney success on Broadway, ““The Lion King,’’ has just finished shooting her film version of ““Titus Andronicus,’’ with Anthony Hopkins, Jessica Lange and Alan Cumming. ““It’s set in Rome, we begin at 1 A.D. and end it at 2000. Titus is a great general, he could be Colin Powell or Norman Schwarzkopf. The play deals with the machinations of power, race, greed. And there’s black humor. Coming from the very young Shakespeare, it has a kind of “f–k you’ attitude.’’ Scheduled for this spring is ““A Midsummer Night’s Dream’’ with ““Ally McBeal’s’’ Calista Flockhart, Michelle Pfeiffer and Kevin Kline. ““Calista is really well trained,’’ says the director, Michael Hoffman. ““People who see her as Ally don’t realize the range of her technique.''
Ethan Hawke wanted to tackle ““Hamlet’’ for the usual actor’s reason: ““I don’t want to wake up at 65 not having done it,’’ he says. But his version, with Sam Shepard as the Ghost and Bill Murray as the old blowhard Polonius, is set in the contemporary corporate world. Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, and stepfather, Claudius, says Hawke, are ““in a kind of Ted Turner-Jane Fonda situation.’’ Playing Ophelia is 17-year-old Julia Stiles, who’s a one-teen Shakespeare explosion by herself. She’s appearing in ““Ten Things I Hate About You,’’ based on ““The Taming of the Shrew’’ and set in a modern high school. She’ll also be a Desdemona-like character in ““O,’’ a takeoff on ““Othello’’ set in the world of college basketball.
Meanwhile Branagh has formed the Shakespeare Film Company, which will make three films in three years, to be distributed by Miramax. The first is a musical version of ““Love’s Labour’s Lost,’’ with Alicia Silverstone and Nathan Lane, set to classic songs by Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern. After that, Branagh will do ““Macbeth’’ with the Scots fun couple as a power-thirsty duo on Wall Street after the millennium. And finally, ““As You Like It,’’ set in Kyoto, Japan. ““Producers and financiers are much more savvy about this stuff,’’ he says. ““Going into a room and saying “Hey, guys, I’d like to make a musical version of an obscure Shakespeare comedy’ isn’t as hard as it used to be.''
The movies’ fine frenzy about Shakespeare is astonishing–and a bit scary. Is the greatest of all writers becoming a film franchise, like the ““Friday the 13th’’ movies? This cinematic soliciting cannot be good, cannot be ill. But we’re probably going to have Shakespeare till the last syllable of recorded time. He went into a new century, dreaming of things to come. There’s something touching and gallant about all these young people wanting to take him into their new century. O brave new world, that has such movies in it!
