Meanwhile, Shakespeare is cuckolded by his younger brother Richard, who stayed behind in Stratford, as proposed in the “Scylla and Charybdis” episode of Joyce’s Ulysses, and whom Shakespeare discovers here in bed in flagrante with Anne Hathaway.-PG She is seduced by Shakespeare’s foppish friend, patron, and occasional lover, the Earl of Southampton, catches syphilis from him, and imparts it to Shakespeare himself. Notorious Elizabethan prostitute Lucy Negro is cast as Shakespeare’s East Indian mistress, a former Muslim originally named Fatjmah, and the Dark Lady of his sonnets. Life in contemporary London is presented in vivid, lavish detail as equal parts chaotic, squalid, and spectacular. Burgess uses snippets from Shakespeare’s own plays as well as slang, some historical, some invented, to evoke Elizabethan English. Its most salient feature is the extravagant chaos of its prose, presented as Shakespeare’s own stream of consciousness the novel is written in an exuberant, head-spinning, sometimes-distracting style, modeled on Joyce’s Ulysses. It plays with the Elizabethan comic conventions of cross-dressing and mistaken identities, but in the end the wrong couple get married: Viola is whisked off to the New World by her brutish husband Wessex, and Shakespeare gets to write his famous plays.This highly-fictionalized, slightly seedy pseudo-biography of Shakespeare is presented in a frame story as a bravura exposition of sonnet 147, “My love is as a fever,” etc., by a drunken professor, “Mr. Much of the pleasure of this show derives from its ingenuity: the idea, for instance, of marrying the absurdity of Shakespeare’s comedies with the poignancy of his tragedies. Meanwhile, the hapless theatre entrepreneur Henslowe (John Leary) is having problems with his investor Hugh Fennyman (Adam Murphy), who is dunning him for debts, and Lord Tilney (Francis Greenslade), the Master of Revels, who is threatening to close his theatre. There are the rival thespians Richard Burbage (Aaron Tsindos) and Ned Alleyn (Chris Ryan), who literally go to war over Shakespeare’s script.
#Shakespeare in love book series#
Their clandestine affair is the lyric counterpoint to a series of comic subplots. And so the comedy Romeo and Ethel the Pirate’s Daughter transforms into the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet.Ĭlaire van der Boom as Viola de Lesseps with Deidre Rubenstein. Not even Queen Elizabeth (played by a magnificent Deidre Rubenstein) can put asunder those whom God has joined. Of course, their love is doomed – Viola is to be married to the impoverished aristocrat Lord Wessex (Daniel Frederiksen) and taken to his estates in Virginia. Kent turns out to be a woman in drag, the stage-struck daughter of a rich merchant, Viola de Lesseps (Claire van der Boom).Īs Will and Viola inevitably fall in love, he finds both his muse and his Romeo.
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A striking young man, Thomas Kent, auditions for the part of Romeo. When we meet him, young Will (Michael Wahr) is struggling to write his new comedy, Romeo and Ethel the Pirate’s Daughter, which is overdue and has also been sold to two rival theatres, the Rose and the Curtain.
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As was the case at the time, the abiding genius of the London stage is a certain Kit Marlowe (Luke Arnold), who here functions as Shakespeare’s mentor: but we all know what happened later. None of its various writers pay much heed to historical accuracy, although its jokes draw from a solid knowledge of Shakespeare’s plays and Elizabethan England, with knowing winks at the present. Shakespeare in Love is a nonsensical fan fiction with a plot that stretches past implausibility to the absurd.
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Adapted by Lee Hall from the Oscar-winning romcom co-written by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard, it works so well on stage that you wonder why it was a film in the first place. This is the MTC’s major production for 2019, and it’s undoubtedly going to be a popular hit.