The Everyday Genius of Shakespeare in Love

Earlier this year, Google introduced a chat application powered by artificial intelligence—an experimental competitor to ChatGPT and a tool that it hoped, per its marketing copy, would “be a home for your creativity, productivity and curiosity.” Understanding that some potential users might be less sanguine about a technology that blurs the line between the augmentation of human intelligence and the obsolescence of it, Google gave its new bot a canny name: Bard.

As a general term, “Bard” suggests the lyric capabilities, and the latent wisdom, of the human mind. As a specific one, it summons one of the most famous avatars of that art: William Shakespeare. Shakespeare is, at this point, his own kind of marketing message. His words double as incantations, invoked to confer legitimacy and a sheen of artistry on any he that utters them. The early modern poet has achieved that consummately postmodern strain of transcendence. He has become a brand.

Google’s release of Bard, as it happens, coincides with the 25th anniversary of the film that considered the origins of the great poet’s elevation. Shakespeare in Love—a whimsical imagining of the events that led to the writing of Romeo and Juliet—is remembered, today, as much for the stories that played out on its periphery as for the one it put on the screen: those controversial Oscar wins. Those plot-twisty reshufflings of writers, directors, lead actors. The involvement of Harvey Weinstein. But the tabloid-addled memories, apt as they are for a film about creativity’s vagaries, also undersell its insights. Shakespeare in Love, the comedy from the late 1990s that takes place in the late 16th century, managed to anticipate some of our era’s deepest anxieties. And it serves as a reminder that one of the questions new technologies have wrought—what will artificial intelligence do to the human version?—is, while unprecedented, not strictly new. The human brain versus the computerized one has always been a false distinction. Shakespeare in Love acknowledges that, indirectly but eloquently, as it gives shape to the messiness and randomness and muddled vitality of the creative process.

Shakespeare in Love, its tagline announces, is “a comedy about the greatest love story almost never told.” The line refers, most directly, to the writing of Romeo and Juliet. But the story in question is Shakespeare’s too, as the poet falls in love, and then turns that tumult into art. Relatively little is known about Shakespeare’s life during the brief span when the film is set—a few weeks in 1593, when Shakespeare was likely in his late 20s—and the film, with variable fealty to the historical record, gleefully fills in the blanks. When we meet him, the future Bard (played by Joseph Fiennes) is simply Will, a writer of great talent but middling renown, struggling for money and inspiration, worried that he’s lost his gift. This is the foundational joke of Shakespeare in Love: Even Shakespeare suffered from writer’s block.

[Read: The 400-year-old tragedy that captures our chaos]

But then Will meets Viola de Lesseps, the beautiful and headstrong daughter of a wealthy merchant. Viola (played by Gwyneth Paltrow, in the performance that won her her Oscar) is a regular audience member at the theater that produces many of Shakespeare’s plays. They fall for each other. All’s not well with their story, though, and very little can end well: Shakespeare is already several years into his marriage; Viola is betrothed to a vicious nobleman. Star-crossed lovers, their dreams made futile by the world’s callous realities: Romeo and Juliet is Shakespeare’s romance with Viola, told through thin allusion. It is autofiction. As the company debuts Romeo and Juliet, a series of twists means that the film’s lovers play the fated pair. Will and Viola, before a rapt audience, meet again and finally, with a kiss, part.

But Shakespeare in Love is, true to its tagline, a comedy—one that plays out through sly amalgams of Shakespearean dramatic devices: gender-swapping, slapstick, sexual puns, mistaken identities, melodramatic rivalries, balletic sword fights. It also features a hero who spends a decent portion of the proceedings laboring under a misconception. Will, unable to create, thinks he needs a muse. And he is convinced that the muse in question should take the form that it classically has: a beautiful woman. What will quickly become clear, though, to the film’s audience if not to the character, is that the inspiration he seeks has been there all along. It is not his casual lover Rosaline, as he initially hopes—nor, even, is it Viola. His true muse is the teeming city of London.

This is another joke embedded in Shakespeare in Love: The assorted mundanities of Will’s daily existence—the names of people and places he encounters; wan observations from the people he interacts with; bits of home decor—make their way, eventually, into his art. He has a skull in his room. The theater that stages his plays is named the Rose. “A plague on both their houses!” a preacher yells as Shakespeare runs by, in a condemnation of “immoral” playhouses that will soon be alchemized into one of drama’s most well-known lines. Everything is copy, goes the writer’s rationalization and lament. Shakespeare in Love expands it into giddy absurdity.

This approach—all those allusions and Easter eggs—might have been merely clever. But Shakespeare in Love is not merely making references. It is also making arguments. Pop culture, typically, portrays the literary genius as a solitary figure: alone at a desk, perhaps, searching his mind, confronting the blank page. The cliché assumes the same thing that Shakespeare does at the beginning of the film, as he seeks his muse: that inspiration is introspective. But Shakespeare in Love rejects that premise. It is not solitude that leads Will to his greatest poetry; it is being with other people, learning from them, interacting with them. The world is his writers’ room. Over the two hours’ traffic of the film, its audiences become privy to the hectic alchemy of genius. Art, in its vision, is not the stuff of one mind catching fire, but of many minds and many flames. It is an ongoing dialogue. Shakespeare, the film suggests, is simply better able than most to translate the conversation.

That argument is particularly straightforward when it comes to Will’s dramatization of his relationship with Viola. Romeo and Juliet begins its life, in the film, as a comedy—a concession Will makes to the producer, who is convinced that slapstick is the genre that will best attract audiences and their ticket money. (The work is named, delightfully, Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate’s Daughter.) At one point, as he tries to persuade a famous actor to join the cast as Romeo’s close friend, Will announces its title as … Mercutio. But his doomed relationship with Viola convinces Shakespeare that his play is, finally, a tragedy. His art imitates his life. Will and Viola have a balcony scene, and a dancing scene. Viola tells her nurse, at multiple points, “Anon!” We get two people who will become, despite their best efforts, fortune’s fools.

The tragic fusion—Shakespeare and his work, indistinguishable from each other—helps give the film its modern currency. The symbolism of “the Bard,” over the centuries, has encompassed not just authorship, but also readership. Shakespeare has been a focus for scholarly discussion about the proper way to engage with literature, about the relationship between the author and the text. How should contemporary readers account for the historical contexts from which authors emerged? To what extent should their writings stand alone? Is the author, effectively, alive or dead?

Shakespeare in Love brings eloquence to the muddle. The film is, most obviously, reading Shakespeare through history’s sharp lens: Its Bard is made of flesh and blood, by turns anxious and lusty and dashing and jealous and drunk and frustrated and funny and hopeful and wrong. He is also so infused with his surroundings—with London, with the stage, with the art he is creating—that he becomes effectively interchangeable with them. Where does Will Shakespeare end, and the work of Will Shakespeare begin? It would be impossible to say, the film suggests, and it would be pointless to try. Yes, Shakespeare is a dead author. He is also one who is, still, undeniably alive.

Shakespeare’s historical era was, in its outlines, deeply akin to our own. Many of the anxieties that shaped it emerged from the printing press—an invention that, like the internet in ours, brought people new access to the world’s existing ideas, and then generated many more. New technologies, the theorist Clay Shirky has suggested, don’t become interesting until they become boring: Their social power won’t reveal itself until the new capabilities have settled into the grooves of everyday experience. Shakespeare came of age as an artist roughly 100 years after Johannes Gutenberg adapted a wine press into a text-making machine, in that moment of heady mundanity. He wrote at a time when all the pamphlets and tracts and books that spread information in ways never before possible had worked themselves into the rhythms of people’s lives. He created his new texts within the flurry of other people’s words.

Shakespeare in Love exemplifies that chaos. The printing press created a revolution, and revolutions are never straightforward in their effects. The film evokes that fact, as well. The new machine was potential and threat at the same time. It made people’s ordinary environments bigger, less superstitious, more varied, more individualist, more confusing. Shakespeare in Love filters all that change into its comedy. “It is a new day,” Viola’s nurse informs her, as the sun begins its rise over the Thames. “It is a new world,” Viola corrects her.

All that novelty is embodied, in the film, through London itself. Cities are proxies for the kind of connection that new technologies tend to promise: In them, people’s exposure to each other begets small transformations, and big ones. Trends proliferate. Languages develop. Ideas spread, and interact, and evolve. Shakespeare’s London—typically rendered, in the film, through quick-cut shots that channel instability—is muddy and dangerous and pulsing with possibility. In the film, the man so often associated with a town on the edge of the Cotswolds (A Present From Stratford upon Avon reads a souvenir mug in Shakespeare’s writing room) is, instead, a creature of urban possibility.

Shakespeare’s great talent, in this context, is not mysterious, nor is it muse-reliant or stoked by solitude or any of the other things that the mythology of genius might have us believe. Instead it is a fusion of the poles that are typically invoked when people discuss the repercussions of our own technological revolution: the capabilities of the human, versus those of the computer. The Shakespeare of the film is thoroughly, vividly, deliriously human. His intelligence is, as well. But his world also resembles, in its way, the workings of generative AI. His London is a corpus of data. His art comes to him, eventually, with a reliability that is almost algorithmic. The film does not just invent an origin story for Romeo and Juliet; more specifically, it imagines the series of inputs that led to its creation. Shakespeare’s wisdom is as synthetic as it is singular: He takes in the information, processes it, analyzes it, reworks it, makes new sense of it—and in so doing, writes the poetry that would become symbolic, for many, of poetry itself.

The screenplay of Shakespeare in Love, appropriately enough, was also the result of collaborative creativity. Its story came from the screenwriter Marc Norman (who was reportedly inspired by his son, who was in turn inspired by a college Shakespeare class). Much of the rest came from the playwright Tom Stoppard. The script the two developed offers a teasing blend of historical reality and a whimsical dismissal of it. “Are you the author of the plays of William Shakespeare?” Viola asks him, her line wryly acknowledging long-running debates about whether the plays in question were produced by a sometime actor named William Shakespeare. We get a winking reference to the fact that Shakespeare used different spellings of his own name—fuel for wanton theories that the great poet was illiterate. We get the real-life details of the initially unsolved murder of Shakespeare’s rival, Christopher Marlowe: its location (the London neighborhood of Deptford), its setting (a public house), its method (stabbing).

But then there are the historical liberties that led Stoppard to remind viewers, soon after Shakespeare in Love’s release, that “this film is entertainment, which doesn’t require it to be justified in the light of historical theory.” There are many of these, but the most obvious involves the story’s very premise: Contrary to what the film suggests, the historical Shakespeare didn’t actually conjure the famous tale himself. Instead, Romeo and Juliet was, like so many others of Shakespeare’s plays, a reworking of prior art. He adapted it from The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet—a work that was itself an adaptation: It was translated from an Italian story that was first composed in the early 16th century.

You could read that omission as whimsy run amok, speculative fiction tipping over into willful dismissal of history. You could also read it, though, as an error that conveys a broader truth. Shakespeare in Love, instead of directly acknowledging Shakespeare’s indebtedness to other artists, infuses the debt into its story. Romeo and Juliet, in its vision, is written by William Shakespeare but created, effectively, by Will and Viola and their fellow actors and a preacher who yells about houses and plagues. In the film, too, it’s Will’s rival who lays out the basic plot for Romeo and Juliet. Marlowe gives the idea to Shakespeare freely and generously—this was before standardized copyright laws, with all their radiating consequences—and Shakespeare makes it his own.

There’s poetry in that. There’s also insight. The film does not question the remarkable fact of Shakespeare’s genius. But it also offers a reminder that the Bard could not have existed, as he did, without all those other bards. His genius was singular. It was communal. It was both at the same time.