Not surprisingly, Shakespeare in Love is a love story. Well actually, it starts out as a lust story. Will Shakespeare, struggling to distinguish himself in an Elizabethan London full of creative playwrights, suffers from a severe case of writer’s block. A quack apothecary/psychiatrist recommends Shakespeare seek a muse (i.e., a romantic/sexual partner) to remedy his writing problem. When his first choice of female inspiration and romantic attachment proves unfaithful to him, Shakespeare despairs of finding success in both his career and his love life. However, a chance encounter with the young and lovely Viola De Lesseps, who is obsessed with Shakespeare’s poetic writing, changes his mind. Viola, though, is anything but the typical high-class Elizabethan woman. She longs to act on the London stages (which is not permitted for women) and disguises herself as a man in order to win the part of Romeo in Shakespeare’s new play Romeo and Ethel the Pirate’s Daughter. It doesn’t take long for Shakespeare to discover “Thomas Kent” is indeed his new crush Viola, and the pair swiftly embark on an affair. And so the film gives us, its viewers, several promiscuous sex scenes between its two protagonists and expects us to rejoice with them in the fact that they have found one another to enjoy and that their fornicating, such as it is, will also meet their greatest perceived needs: his for poetic inspiration and hers for poetry.

Ironically, while Shakespeare in Love relishes tawdry and unnecessary bedroom scenes, it can’t get away from also presenting its audience with legitimate issues of sexual identity, gender disparity, and social inequality. Shakespeare himself (the real, historical one) frequently dresses his female characters as males and vice versa; and while his heroes and heroines would not typically deign to marry too far outside of their social classes, he constantly portrays barriers to their love (parental feuding, distance, confused identities, etc.), sometimes for the purpose of added conflict and other times simply for comic effect. But Shakespeare in Love‘s romance between a man and a woman disguised as a man (Will and Viola’s first kiss occurs while she is in her Thomas Kent identity) blurs the lines between comedy and what the film wants to imply about sexual identity.

Rather than promoting homosexuality or transvestism, though, Shakespeare in Love opts to support the attraction between Shakespeare and “Thomas Kent” by emphasizing the desperation of women in a world in which they are commodities to be bartered and breeders of heirs. Despite the fact that the most powerful person in England at this time is Queen Elizabeth I, women are still objectified and treated as second-class citizens. Several times the Queen intimates that there are things that only a woman can know or do, implying that women hold value just as men do. Plus, oftentimes men are shown to be not as perceptive as women. The Duke of Wessex in particular is a blatant idiot who is easily duped by Viola and her nurse and frequently ridiculed by Queen Elizabeth. At the close of the play, as Queen Elizabeth heads to her carriage, she pauses before a large puddle, waiting for one of the crowd of courtly men to throw his cape on the ground to keep her dry. When the imbecilic men don’t recognize the problem or their duty to their sovereign, the impatient Queen marches through the puddle with an exasperated “Too late, too late” thrown back at her so-called admirers. This short, funny exchange seems to once more emphasize the stupidity of men who think the world–and women–exist merely to serve them.

In Viola’s case, her father, a wealthy man with an inferior background, trades her off as bride to the Duke of Wessex, a jerk who has a good name, a colony in Virginia, and no money. The barrier to the continuation of Shakespeare and Viola’s love affair, then, becomes “the river,” a symbolic representation of the distance between them socially and the fact that the world in which they live demands Viola do her duty to her family and marry Wessex. Thus, the comedy of Shakespeare in Love seems for much of the film to be, in fact, a tragedy. Although Shakespeare insists that “love knows nothing of rank or river bank,” he and Viola both know that their relationship is impossible, and there appears to be no viable alternative to the imminent parting of Shakespeare and his muse. Their love affair, passionate and sad, inspires Shakespeare to transform his comedy Romeo and Ethel the Pirate’s Daughter into the beautiful and somber tragedy Romeo and Juliet.

As the couple’s romance comes to mirror the developing play, we the audience are led to feel sympathy for Shakespeare and Viola. However, as the characters themselves realize, their affair, while temporarily filling the voids in their lives, was ill-fated from the start. For one, it originated from impure motives–selfishness, not love motivates both Shakespeare and Viola in the beginning. Shakespeare needs to recapture his motivation and gift for writing or he will end up poorer yet and never be able to buy a share in the Chamberlain’s Men, and Viola wants her life to be full of poetry and not squashed by the constraints that come with being a woman in the sixteenth century. She later confesses to Will that she “loved a writer and gave up the prize for a sonnet.” Likewise, Shakespeare also admits the foolishness of their affair–namely, because Viola has discovered he is already married–and (sort of) apologizes for wronging Viola. Both swear they don’t regret their relationship because they have come to truly love each other. But now the film couple and their audience have a bigger dilemma: dealing with the tragedy of broken love that should never have been allowed to sprout in the first place.

Spoiler alert! After the success of Romeo and Juliet‘s debut–with Shakespeare and Viola wowing the crowd as the title characters (this scene is actually pretty stellar)–and upon the Queen’s recognizing Shakespeare’s genius and Viola’s successful foyay into the male-dominated world of playacting, the deflated Lord Wessex humbly asks Her Majesty how all this (his wife’s loving another man, etc.) will end. Elizabeth replies, “As stories must when love’s denied: with tears and a journey.” Their genders, stations in life, and time period force Shakespeare and Viola to part, but ironically the tragedy of their love morphs into a comedy (i.e., a story with a happy ending, not necessarily a humorous one). “You will never age for me, nor fade, nor die,” Will tells Viola. Inspired by the love he has experienced, he immediately commences writing his next play Twelfth Night with its heroine named Viola, a story that allows the real Viola to live (at least in Shakespeare’s mind and perhaps in reality) the free and adventurous life for which she longs.

For Me Then…

The best lines of Shakespeare in Love, in my opinion, come in the exchange between the hilarious Philip Henslowe, the owner of the Rose Theatre, and the moneylender Hugh Fennyman. When Fennyman panics after the Master of the Revels closes all the theatres, Henslowe reassures him: “Mr. Fennyman, allow me to explain about the theatre business. The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.” Fennyman, aghast, asks what they should do. Henslowe replies, “Nothing. Strangely enough, it all turns out well.” “How?” asks Fennyman. “I don’t know. It’s a mystery,” answers Henslowe. This is exactly what comedy is–apparent catastrophes or unworkable dilemmas resolving into the fulfillment and contentment of a good and satisfactory ending.

To me, the idea of things looking like doom and gloom but somehow working out in the end reminds me a lot of my experience with the Christian life. Romans 8:28 says, “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” Just how God works through everything to accomplish what is good for us is often a “mystery.” If you are like me, you probably think you know what you want out of life: what you should be doing, where you should be going (location-wise, job-wise…), how long it should take to reach certain life goals, etc. But God knows us better than we know ourselves, and He orchestrates our lives to perfection in order to bring glory to His name and to mold us into whom He wants us to be.

But the places between the low points of our lives when all seems dark and the times when we seem to be standing on mountaintops of victory can be awfully murky and rough. They require patience (that I usually don’t have) and faith (that I also don’t possess enough of)–faith that God knows what He’s doing and will “[work] for the good of those who love him” in His own perfect timing and way. How He does so is a mystery, but we who are believers can trust that our lives are comedies, and there will be a happy ending for us despite the difficult times we endure in this world.