Shakespeare in Love:
Topics for Discussion/Writing
The following is adapted from an actual assignment given to English students at Western Michigan University. Credit and thanks to Mr. David Cope.
Select one (or more) of the following topics. In two-page response, write about this topic using details from your viewing of the film. (Note: These are challenging topics; they are for your HONORS course and they are taken from an ACTUAL COLLEGE COURSE. Do your best.)
1. Textual adaptation and rereading:The script takes lines fromLove's Labor'sLost, Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night,and to a lesser extent,Hamletand other plays. One way to study the Norman and Stoppard script is to explore how they utilized Shakespeare's lines in the script they wrote, the greatest example being their use ofRomeo and Juliet.The Shakespeare play is presented not only as the centerpiece of the "playing" plot, but as a text evolving in direct relation to the evolving relationship of Will and Viola in the romance plot.
2. Characters as a source for study:(a) factual: Burbage, Henslowe, Tilney, Shakespeare (early life in Stratford or first years in London), Marlowe, Queen Elizabeth I (especially her relationship with the theatre). (b) fictional: Rosaline and the Nurse (fromR & J), Viola (TwN).
3. The play as a romantic comedy following Northrop Frye's plot pattern:the lovers must find their way around a blocking figure–here, Viola's father and Wessex, the rival lover–to bring their love to triumph, which usually signals a wedding or dance. The blocking character is either reconciled or cast out, and the lovers' triumph signals the maturation and acceptance of the younger generation. This script, however, undercuts the formula: the triumph is located in the performance ofRomeo and Juliet, while the wedding parts the lovers and portends sorrow and loss that necessitate their final gesture: another play, an ironic triumph to come.
4. Money as a theme:what the film says about money and empowerment. Note that Wessex needs money for his plantations and is willing to trade his title for capital gotten through marriage; Henslowe needs money to run his theatre and is willing to rip off his own playwright and actors to get it; Shakespeare needs £50 to free himself from Henslowe and join Burbage. Indeed, one could say that both plots grow out of the need for money: the conflict that separates Viola from Will develops from Wessex's need for money, and the "bet" which will lead to Will's success in the theatre grows from Will's need for money. Generally, students should look for ways in which characters are valued and commodified by economic forces beyond their control, but note too a countervailing example in Fennyman: the man who would burn a man's feet off for non-payment is, by the end of the play, transformed into one who realizes there are values beyond wealth: the magic of the theatre transforms him.
5. The problem of mounting a production:This plot is one of the two central plots in the play, and in some ways the struggle mirrors a perennial problem for all casts, while in others it represents some problems particular to the Elizabethans–notably the problem of the Master of Revels and his control over what the players might do, the problem of being a social outcast and yet in demand for court as well as public performances. Study involving this theme should concentrate on one of two areas: the Elizabethan Company or our own contemporary problems in mounting a production.
6. Disguise (cross dressing) as a plot device:as with Elizabethan and Jacobean come- dies (especially those by Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton & Dekker), cross- dressing is utilized as a gender-bending motif, but also as a practical device so that boy actors could impersonate women disguised as men. In giving cross-dressing roles to both Viola (as Thomas Kent) and Will (as Wilhelmina), Norman and Stoppard have employed this motif in a manner appropriate to both of these purposes.