How others will see it. This energetic production has magnificent art direction and cinematography. Add a torrid romance and a good measure of scandal, physical peril, financial ruin, treachery, etc., and it is plain why the film was such a crowd pleaser at the art houses. Academy Awards include Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress, Best Screenplay, and two that were actually merited, Best Art Direction and Best Costume Design. Few viewers will care about my criticisms of the film, which follow.
How I felt about it. Shakespeare in Love is an eminently marketable title. Much more so than the what the title should be, A Bogus Biography of Shakespeare. As it is a comedy, I suppose, liberties should be allowed. Yet the movie never seems credible, and those few with questioning souls may even find themselves rolling their eyes at the outrageousness of the situations.
Where do we begin? Let's start with Shakespeare himself. Almost certainly, when he wrote "Romeo and Juliet," the task involved three weeks of solo preoccupation at a desk with ink and paper. Alas, such a depiction, though credible, is uncinematic.
Instead, we are to pretend, Shakespeare had a torrid romance that took place completely within the time frame of writing the play. The play was rehearsed by the company while it was being written. Between nights of hot sex and days of rehearsal, one wonders where he found the time to sleep, much less write a great, lengthy play.
Further, we are to believe, his famous romantic lines from the play were lifted directly from his soliciting dialogue with the woman he is in love with, yet he can't recognize her when she's on the same stage with her, or even when she's a foot away from him on the same three-man boat.
What kind of scoundrel is Shakespeare as presented here? He has abandoned wife and child and is conducting an affair with a woman he knows will soon have a queen-sanctified marriage to another. Her lover is acting in his play with his approval, although he knows it is jeaporizing both the production and the company. (He even has sex with her in one of the theater's dressing rooms without blocking the windows.) He accepts money from a theater owner for the play, yet gives the play to a competing theater. When her lover's fiance threatens his life, he claims to be playwright Christopher Marlowe, presumably in the hope that the noted fencer will instead slice up his leading rival, the same man who had just saved his play by suggesting the setting and plot, and even some of the character names. (The actual English language source for the play, per wikipedia.org, was Arthur Brooke's poem "The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet," published in 1562. So much for "Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate's Daughter.")
Preposterousness peaks when the Shakespeare is duelling on the stage with his lover's fiance, by remarkable coincidence at the same time as the big duel scene in the play. (Shakespeare wins the duel, even though his opponent is an expert swordsman, and Shakespeare has a prop sword.)
Further, in 1593, there were no English colonies in Virginia. The Roanoke colony was wiped out in 1587, and Jamestown, the first permanent settlement, was founded in 1607, after Queen Elizabeth's death (hence the name). Tobacco wasn't grown in the colony (or any other) until the 1610s.
It is highly doubtful that Queen Elizabeth attended the first public performance of "Romeo and Juliet," much less interrupted it to proclaim as a man a 5' 10" woman playing 13-year old Juliet, and to settle a fifty pound wager. If you buy all that, then it almost becomes plausible that Paltrow's character can permanently memorize pages of dialogue by simply reading them out loud, or that she can fool a company of players by wearing a paper-thin fake mustache. Or that Fiennes can pass as a woman by impersonating the voice of Mickey Mouse while dressing up like the stereotype of a white-sheeted Muslim woman.
You are probably among the sizable majority that protests, "Who cares about all this? It's just a fun movie!" But films can be judged by more than their subjective entertainment value. They can also be judged by their level of bogusness. Shakespeare in Love doesn't pass the smell test.