Opinion By Ted Baldwin

A life at 46. I come home from "Shakespeare in Love", full of ideas, and observations. I inspect the apartment to see if its sanctity has been disturbed. It has not. I decide to eat before writing. I take a 99 cent Mexican dinner from the freezer, open it without caring what kind it is, and microwave. I know the time to heat without reading it. In my earlier years, I could not have heated the dinner without regard for its exact menu – nor could I have suffered not reading the directions. Growth.

     Shakespeare in love is a fine film. Accolades heaped upon it, best picture Oscar, best actress, supporting actress, costume design, writing of original screenplay, supporting roles, art/set decoration, original score, others. Lovely costumes, ridiculous wigs, excellent performances by the leads. A deserving Judi Dench. But it is not the best picture. Private Ryan was, of all that I saw last year. Nor do I place this one second best. Nor third. It is a failure for its depiction of the Bard, and what it coyly assumes we will accept.

     With an ever cynical eye, I examine why I despise the characterization of William Shakespeare as they hath wrought.

     Early on, I found I could not root for this boy in man’s clothing. Loud, obnoxious, demanding, jealous, self-centered, egotistical, rude, unfeeling, supremely selfish, unfaithful, impecunious, carnal, cloying, ruthless, disloyal, treacherous, sabotaging, a bearer of false witness, judgmental (as a few of us are), addicted to excitement, whining, self-pitying, aggrandizing, lying, thieving, plagiarizing, untrustworthy, beguiling, and the word that you use when you are trying to depict someone who plays other people off against each other. What is not to love?

     And if you are searching for a reason why this cad, this bounder, this unprincipled parrot with a single quill was taken to heart and adored, and fawned over at the greatest awards ceremony this art can bestow – then look no further, for it is only the very youth and guile of this scoundrel, the innocence, the precious innocence of one starting out so bravely to conquer the known world, tiger tail firmly in hand, this agelessness, this untraveled unlived-in soul, that is fetching them in droves. And their worship is pure.

     For he is desirable, and full of juice, and heroic in the sense he will let no one stand in the way of what he wants. He is Brando shouting for the new millenium with a leather frigging jacket five hundred years past. He is that commodity, that moment in time, that dear eternity of a struck match, the passing of a flaming meteor, the lightning captured in a jar and mantled for all time. He is the using, and he is the used. He will lie down to make fallow fields fertile again, he will plough through the gardens with his mighty thews and make life worth the living once more for those whose lives depend on it.

     He will use and use and use for that is what is expected, so he may take his station when the users are no longer satisfied by him, joining their ranks to revel in the using of the newness of another himself.

     But there can be no relationships where using is involved, and the capacity to see the value of relationships, in and of themselves, does not exist.

     Throughout the film, he uses people left and right to satisfy his selfish whims. On the pretext of searching for a muse. I regard it simply as justification. And he is not important enough to make the justification valid. There is no noble romance presented, no star crossed lovers hung by cruel fate. Only the chance meeting of two who fall in lust, disgorge their feelings, and betray the ones they love.

     He is alone. No confidant does he take to share his heart’s yearnings – he has no friends. No partners to assist in his endeavors – for the truth could not be countenanced by true friends. Friends would stand in the way of self-destructive behavior. Involve themselves needlessly with details and hinder prosecution of the chase. No. he must go it alone, and seal himself up in the perfect world that contains he, and the apple he espies. His needs need be met. Together against all others, fighting the fight humanity wrote five thousand years of rules against. Selfish, self destructive possessiveness.

     And when he loses that commodity, when his apple falls from his tree and is wrenched from his grasp? He merely wishes all who strove to follow the order and recuse her from his presence dead. Dead in a horrible fashion, gasping for air as a relentless and unforgiving sea closes in upon their frail bodies forever, so that he might have her alone. Add murder to the heart, the essence, of this knave.

      From this fertile heap of trash sprang the ability to speak noble love? If all that he wrote is the antithesis of his personal life, then maybe, at stretch, you can imagine this brat spewing forth lines that will live for untold ages. Maybe if you squint you can see the merest outline of a great mind. Perhaps if you whistle a tune and draw in the sand you can convince yourself that he has what it takes to empathize with his actors, to broadly portray the keenest of sensitivities through the centuries – characterizations of truest, most tragic love.

     But I cannot see it. Without the personal sacrifice, without the denial, without a subduement of the basest instincts and true self-searching, there can be no appreciation for the meaning of love, life, loyalty, trust, faith and hope. It is not possible to fake it, and young screenwriters today wonder why they cannot write with depth.

     The Shakespeare I wanted to see, the one I wanted to root for, the one that I wanted to cherish and hold dear as a mentor, an apparitor of insight and a piercing harbinger of truth, to meet as a struggling artist, was instead presented to me as a roughian, a charlatan, a man who’s imagination is infertile, who must grasp what he can from street preachers and shopkeepers, then use them shamelessly, credited as his own invention. He was an Oliver of the stage, picking the literary pockets of all he met, double dealing, and saved not by with or cunning or virtue, but by an amused old queen.

     I will grant no such respite. For I am not an old queen, nor am I amused.

     What passes for truth in the belittlement of such an icon? What inspired this so-called telling? The ravages of time? The deconstruction of W.S.? Re-inventing him to make us feel better about how we have squandered our noble heritage? Not for the uniqueness of his "rebel" spirit. Pathetic men/boys such as he was portrayed are ten cents per dozen today.

     Perhaps the revisionists found chinks in his armor. Perhaps he never existed at all. Perhaps he did and he was homosexual? Never fear, the re-revised made-safe-for-home-consumption (for the consumptive set) raging lust in this film was suitably sanitized. 100% heterosexual. And lest you think otherwise, his passioned pleas told to a young man for his ladylove, whereupon he is kissed (Cruel Joke!) on the lips full and long by the young man – In his shock to discover it were her all along! He no passion expressed such for a man, truth be told, you see! A mix up it were, and his chastity of the rougher sex be preserved after all! Comedy in the best Shakespearean tradition. Barf.

And in the denouement of his tragic double dealings, when he is confronted by the fear that his treachery led to the death of a much maligned friend-to-him, he makes a pious journey to the church and begs forgiveness. Too little, and not nearly late enough. His soul has not learned anything yet, and this lesson fades fast from his heart. As it does with all young men who have not had enough "fun".

     Now take a moment, and read a little of what the PBS (God help them) documentary on the life of Shakespeare told:

Shakespeare is buried in the church floor. On the wall nearby is a monument to him. He wrote four poems, one hundred fifty-four sonnets, and thirty-eight plays. And many believe he told us more about ambition and royal intrigue and suffering, and about love and death and human nature, than anyone before or since.

And what pray tell, do young cocksmen know of such things? Nothing. Until they have seen the unending sorrow of betrayals in their loved one’s eyes, until they have dreaded the face in the mirror - sickened by the sight, until they have fallen hopelessly on their knees before God and asked forgiveness, until they have seen the blessed sunrise alone for the ten thousandth time and can appreciate every subtle breath drawn around them, until they know the meaning of emptiness and the interminable sins they committed to carve out huge chunks of their souls - they will not have the right, the human right, to walk in Shakespeare’s shadow.

I eat my dinner and reflect on what I have written.

I claim to know little of Shakespeare. True, I cannot recite his works. I barely can tell you the names of the players in the last adaptation I reviewed. But I know the heart that says this is the cruelest of all worlds, I know the suffering in Juliet’s soul, I feel the rapture of undying loyalty and the hell of unrequited love. And I feel a kinship with a man that can write "What Fools these mortals be", spoken by a woodland spirit to a hushed and silent house.

(An ironic aside: W.S.'s portrayer, Joseph Fiennes was denied a best actor nomination - I felt his performance was deserving, even though he was written so distastefully. Norton over this guy? A nod to social awareness only. No one in S. in L would have had a chance without the perturbations of the seamy Fiennes. He is good. Guilty pleasurers show their true feelings towards his persona - "Not in polite company, thank you".)