Wouldn't it be fun to think that the Bard suffered from writer's block, that he received a shove from "Kit" Marlowe to get the old plot-ball rolling, that he stole lines from soap-box orators, that he was rewriting his deathless dialogue daily during rehearsals, that one of the actors in the troupe could suggest off the top of his head a better title for the work-in-progress than Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate's Daughter, and that a barrier-bashing proto-feminist who infiltrates the cast disguised as a man would be just the muse our dramatist needed in order to complete the current play and to launch forthwith into the next one, Twelfth Night, with its art-imitating-life motif of cross-dressing? Here we have an answer. No. It would not. Joseph Fiennes in the title role has approximately one expression (a sullen smolder), or one fewer than Gwyneth Paltrow (eyebrows knitted, eyebrows sundered), and Ben Affleck is a flounder out of water, especially conspicuous on the same shore as such happy ducks as Geoffrey Rush, Colin Firth, Tom Wilkinson, Simon Callow, and Judi Dench. Tom Stoppard had a hand in the script -- a second hand after Marc Norman -- which enables the long-ago author of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead to extend his high-brow knockabout beyond Shakespeare's characters to their creator himself. Extend it, and lower it. Studenty types, teachery types, and stagy types may be glad of a chance to show their erudition (the bloody Jacobean playwright John Webster is here a ghoulish guttersnipe feeding mice to cats for entertainment), but audible laughter would seem an unfitting, a forced, expression of it. Directed by John Madden. (1998) — Duncan Shepherd
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