Love Shakespeare
Katherine Harding

It's entertaining, charming, and even witty, but Shakespeare in Love, unlike the press it has been receiving, is not one of the best movies of the year.
Film critics across the board hailed Shakespeare in Love as a 'sure bet' and Siskel and Ebert both included it on their '98 Top Ten Movie Picks.
The problem with this movie is that despite its all-star cast (Geoffrey Rush, Gwyneth Paltrow, Judi Dench and newcomer Joseph Fiennes), lavish cinematography and novel script, it often falls flat and becomes just another uninspiring Hollywood production.
To the movies credit however, it imaginatively put a delicious spin on how one of the greatest playwrights of our time created the greatest love story ever told, Romeo and Juliet.
Although Shakespeare's works have been studied, performed and argued about for over three centuries in all corners of the globe, little is known about the manís personal life and motivations.
Conspiracy theories and suggestions of hoaxes and false identities abound, but have resisted proof for centuries. No documentation of his life between 1585 and 1592 exists, lending these 'lost years' to great conjecture and controversy.
He re-emerged as a public figure in 1592, working in London as an actor and playwright. Throughout 1593, Shakespeare published several sonnets, but it was in 1594 that he had a career breakthrough, coming to the fore with his great work of romance and tragedy - Romeo and Juliet.
It is at this time of Shakespeareís life that we are introduced to the movieís fictious account of what served as the bard's inspiration.
The curtain rises for this film in the summer of 1593 and quickly introduces the audience to the rising young start of Londonís theater scene, Will Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes), facing a paralyzing bout of writer's block with his latest creation - Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate's Daughter.
While the great Elizabethan age of entertainment unfolds around him, Will is without inspiration or material.
What Will needs is a muse, and in an extraordinary moment in which life imitates art, he finds and falls for a woman who draws him into his own adventure of star-crossed love.
It all begins when Lady Viola (Gywneth Paltrow), desperate to become an actor at a time when legally, women were forbidden from such depravity, disguises herself as a man to audition for Will's play. Soon the guise slips away as their passion ignites.
The movie, like any good Shakespearean play, is dripping with scenes of mistaken identity, comic relief, and misbegotten desires.
Shakespeare in Love is also saved by entertaining performances by Rupert Everett as Shakespeare's literary rival Christopher Marlowe, Judi Dench as Queen Elizabeth, and Geoffrey Rush as the owner of a London theatre house.
However, the casting of Ben Affleck as Ned Alleyn , a theatre actor, was poor and unbelievable. He stuck out like a sore thumb in every scene he graced and I almost gagged when his character thought up the title "Romeo and Juliet".
Seeing Shakespeare in Love would no be a total loss. For a period piece it does an exemplary job of transporting you back to an exciting time in Elizabethan England but it still lacks a certain genius that could have made this movie a classic.