Shakespeare in Love
1998: John Madden

This is a completely fictional account of a slice of the life of William Shakespeare, written by the playwright Tom Stoppard, the author of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, who has engaged with Shakespeare in various ways for a couple of generations now. He seems fascinated by the spaces and silences in Shakespeare’s plays. Here he posits a fictional history behind the writing of Romeo and Juliet, and provides some fictional background about how Twelfth Night came to be written as well. None of it should be taken seriously as Shakespearean biography, and a lot of what is represented here is a backward projection of twentieth-century ethics and worldview. Nevertheless, in the bits around the side of the story, we see images of how the theater of the day worked, and those are imaginatively intriguing and well-realized.

In all seriousness, a student is unlikely to learn a great deal about Shakespeare this way, but the incidentals are rich and colorful. The movie does involve some nudity and sexual behavior that parents or teachers will want to assess before showing it to children.

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