This Dork Reporter is not ashamed to admit being in love with Shake­speare in Love, and not just for the gen­er­ous dis­plays of Gwyneth Paltrow’s lovely young bubbies.

Full of Amer­i­can actors affect­ing Eng­lish accents with vary­ing degrees of out­ra­geous­ness, it only partly qual­i­fies as Europ­ud­ding, and is in fact more in the vein of “let’s put on a show!” the­ater farces like Noises Off and Wait­ing for Guff­man. Shake­speare in Love suc­ceeds beau­ti­fully, but the for­mula is not iron­clad; Becom­ing Jane obvi­ously attempted the same stunt by warp­ing the bio­graph­i­cal details of Jane Austin’s life onto her nov­els, but rather failed to cap­ture her dry wit and par­tic­u­lar brand of prac­ti­cal passion.

Oi, get yer bub­bies out!

Co-screenwriter Tom Stop­pard, already an expert at play­ing fast and loose with Shake­speare in his play Rosen­crantz and Guilden­stern Are Dead, lays more than a few easter eggs for Eng­lish majors and other enthu­si­asts of Eliz­a­bethan drama. Bloody play­wright John Web­ster cameos as a dis­turbed young lad. Many favorite Shake­speare clichés appear not just in the play-within-the-movie, but also in the body of the movie itself: ghosts, cross-cross-dressing, and a “bit with a dog.” But per­haps the movie’s biggest achieve­ment is to human­ize per­haps the most revered writer in the Eng­lish lan­guage, and yet still illu­mi­nate the unmatched pas­sion and achieve­ment of his work. A Shake­speare beset with writer’s block strug­gles to find a hook for the unwrit­ten “Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate’s Daugh­ter” reminds us that he was prob­a­bly no unearthly crea­ture tak­ing dic­ta­tion from beyond, and that cre­at­ing such art was, sim­ply, hard work.

Judi Dench in full Queen Bitch mode

Shake­speare in Love thank­fully doesn’t let his­tor­i­cal accu­racy get in the way of a good gag. Will makes weekly vis­its to an apothe­cary prac­tic­ing psy­chother­apy a few hun­dred years early. The con­tem­po­rary the­ater world is shown more than once as a pre­cur­sor to today’s movie biz. In order to bankroll the pro­duc­tion of a new play, financier/kneecapper Hugh Fen­ny­man (Tom Wilkin­son) sug­gests Globe The­ater owner Philip Henslowe (Geof­frey Rush) pay actors with a por­tion of the prof­its, when of course there never are any. Bril­liant! One won­ders if Mira­max hon­chos Har­vey & Bob Wein­stein per­ceived the irony.

But the movie is some­times more accu­rate than one might think for some­thing that is admit­tedly a slightly fluffy farce. For exam­ple, it is in fact plau­si­ble for Shake­speare to fear he may have been indi­rectly respon­si­ble for rival play­wright Christo­pher Marlowe’s death. Mar­lowe died in 1593, which accord­ing to the all-knowing Wikipedia, was about the time Romeo and Juliet was written.

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

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