Shakespeare in a Divided America

by James Shapiro

  How will the uninspired comedy of Romeo and Ethel the Pirate’s Daughter get transformed into the timeless tragedy Romeo and Juliet? Can Will, who is under pressure from his financial backers to give his play a happy resolution (and if possible, toss in a crowd-pleasing clown and a dog), come up with the right ending in time for an opening that cannot be postponed? And will Viola and Will end up as star-crossed lovers, or can they somehow escape their loveless marriages?

  As the film progresses, the multiple strands of the plot get woven together ever more tightly. At the film’s climactic moment, Viola steps into the role of Juliet and performs her part opposite Will’s Romeo, as life and art magically converge—at least until the performance ends with their characters’ tragic suicides. This debut performance of Romeo and Juliet is so moving that Shakespeare wins a fifty-pound wager with Wessex—the bet overseen by Queen Elizabeth herself—having proved that a play can show the truth of love. But as the story draws to a close, Will and Viola live on, the fate of their own love, unlike that of Romeo and Juliet, as yet unresolved. This was where American test audiences, the studio bosses, the screenwriter, and the director found themselves at odds.

  Comedies demarcate what a society considers permissible, and, since they usually end in marriage, turn on who ought to bed whom. Will audiences root for somebody of one race or ethnicity marrying someone from another? A man in love with another man, or a woman with a woman? What about someone who is separated falling in love with one who is engaged to be married? At stake in what sort of union is deemed acceptable is how tolerant a community imagines itself to be. Comedies tend to be more socially conservative than tragedies. Shakespeare’s genius in ending his comedies was grounded in his ability to deliver “what you will” while raising larger questions which are then left unresolved. If you want to know what a culture is truly anxious about, look at what kinds of unions make its audiences uncomfortable. That’s certainly the case with so accomplished a romantic comedy as Shakespeare in Love, confirmed by the ambivalent responses of test audiences to early versions of it. The various endings that were written and discarded in the course of the production provide unusual insight into what sorts of issues had to be quietly suppressed or cleverly evaded.

  The origins of the film can be traced back a decade earlier to 1988, when the Hollywood screenwriter Marc Norman was encouraged by his son to write about Shakespeare as a struggling young playwright. It took Norman, who had done postgraduate work in English at Berkeley, a few years to work up a script that would be the basis for what eventually won him, as well as Stoppard, an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. In 1991 Norman pitched it to his friend and neighbor, the producer Edward Zwick, who planned on directing it himself, and they sold it to Universal. The box-office star Julia Roberts read it, loved it, and was committed to making the film.

  Those who have seen the 1998 film will likely be surprised by how much more progressive Norman’s 1991 version of the love story had been. The heroine, originally named Belinda, is adventurous, sexually liberated, and fiercely independent. She is discovered by Will Shakespeare while acting for a boys’ theater company, passing herself off as a young man named Thomas. Thomas’s “dark hair,” “adolescent moustache,” and “graceful gestures” catch Will’s eye, and he invites the young actor to audition for the role of Romeo. They rehearse the shared sonnet—with Will playing Juliet—that the lovers recite when they first meet, and which ends with a kiss. It’s love at first sight. As they part, Will’s heart is “thumping in his chest,” though “he has no idea why.”

  Will, who considers himself straight, is in a panic, and confides in the theater manager Philip Henslowe that he thinks he is falling in love with a man. When Henslowe suggests it must be brotherly love, Will replies: “It’s not brotherly. I have brothers—I don’t want to kiss their neck where it joins their shoulder,” then blurts out that the attraction is “erotic.” Over the course of the first quarter of Norman’s screenplay Will’s confusion about his sexual orientation intensifies. He walks London’s streets at night, talking to himself: “It’s a boy. . . . And if it is? Then you’ve lived thirty years of your life and never known who you really were. Will Shakespeare? Oh yes—minor playwright, likes boys.” Another night, after a few drinks, Will tries killing himself by throwing himself into the Thames—but it turns out to be a comic scene, as the tide is out and he lands in the mud. Will decides at that moment that “It can be. You love him—and you must follow love.”

  Will summons the courage to declare his love to Thomas, and seeks out the young actor’s advice on a romantic scene between two men. The two improvise, Will playing a page’s part and Thomas the “master,” when Will confesses: “There is no play. It’s you. I love you.” He chases Thomas around a tree, pins him, and “presses his mouth against the boy.” Thomas struggles at first, but “slowly melts—he kisses Will back.” It is only after Thomas’s fake mustache falls off that Will discovers that Thomas is in fact Belinda de Lesseps, a young woman he had earlier glimpsed at court. They fall into bed, an uninhibited Belinda stripping naked first. When she asks Will whether he would “have still loved me if I were a boy,” Will replies that he prefers that she’s a girl, “Only because it allows us to make love face to face.” Will later goes to a “gay” tavern where he buys a round for all, proposing a toast to “the soul of love.”

  In challenging heterosexual norms, Norman drew heavily on As You Like It, especially the scenes in which Rosalind instructs Orlando about what men don’t understand about women. As part of Will’s education, Belinda and Will stroll about town both dressed as men and later as women. The effect on Will’s writing is extraordinary, and he acknowledges that Belinda is his “muse.” There is lots of unconventional sex, as the pair “made love on rooftops, in cemeteries, always searching for the path to the very soul of love.” By now Belinda is carrying Will’s child. Will, for his part, never tells her that he is married and fantasizes about running off with her.

  But it is not to be. Belinda agrees to marry Wessex if she is allowed to act once in Romeo and Juliet, and if he promises not to have Will imprisoned or close the playhouses. And Shakespeare becomes a shareholder in the Chamberlain’s Men. The former lovers only catch sight of each other once more, from a distance, at a court performance of one of Will’s plays. Henslowe provides a final voiceover, in which we learn that Wessex “died in a duel two years later,” and that Belinda, who remarried, raised her son by Will, and the boy “came out fine.” The screenplay then ends awkwardly, as if unnerved by its own daring, retreating into a heritage vision of an aging Shakespeare, now in retirement in Stratford, at a picnic with his wife and dutiful daughters, as “grandchildren gambol at their feet.”

  Even in this last-minute reversal, Norman’s screenplay reflects the uncertain moment of its creation. Americans in the early 1990s remained deeply divided when it came to gay and women’s rights. The beginning of the decade had witnessed the awful national spectacle in which Anita Hill was publicly vilified in Senate hearings, and her crude sexual harasser, Clarence Thomas, given a seat on the Supreme Court. Books like Susan Faludi’s Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (1991) captured that contentious era while exposing the ways in which Hollywood couldn’t deal with independent women. At the same time, playwright Tony Kushner was bringing gay sexuality mainstream in his Angels in America, which premiered in 1991. Norman thought it vital to his story “that Shakespeare made this commitment to follow love wherever it took him.” Unfortunately, he added, “there were people involved in the production that were disturbed with that idea,” and he “was overruled.”

  At this point the Czech-born British playwright Tom Stoppard was brought in to take over the screenwriting. After looking over Norman’s script, Stoppard wrote to Universal’s Barry Isaacson, a producer for whom he had worked before, explaining that “even for a whimsical romantic comedy the present story is just too embarrassingly cavalier about the historical
context.” Stoppard added that he “had to strip things back to the extent that I am using almost none of the original superstructure, and not much of the foundations either. Be assured, however, that I have not abandoned the true objective here—a romantic comedy for J. R.”—that is, Julia Roberts. Stoppard, good as his word, radically overhauled what Norman had written. In successive drafts the story line became more historically accurate and informed. Stoppard also sharpened the plot and dialogue, and introduced into the plot a pair of playwrights, Christopher Marlowe and the young John Webster. But his Belinda is far more demure, and what Stoppard calls Norman’s “gay angle” would almost entirely disappear, replaced by a more traditional heterosexual romance.

  Yet Stoppard still couldn’t figure out how to bring what was now a far more conventional love story to a close. His first go at it, in which the lovers part amicably and Will contemplates a new play about Cleopatra, was unsuccessful. In his next draft, he tried keeping the lovers together, with Wessex rejecting Belinda on the grounds that he could never be “betrothed to an actor.” Will joins the Chamberlain’s Men, and, having seen her act, Richard Burbage thinks that Belinda has a future in the entertainment business, telling her, “I think I can make something of you.” In this version’s final, romantic scene we watch Will and Belinda “being rowed through the summer evening, by London Bridge,” as Will describes to her the plot of Twelfth Night. But this ending also didn’t satisfy Stoppard; it wouldn’t do to keep Belinda around as Will’s mistress and an occasional actor.

  In his next draft, Stoppard tried flipping things around: this time Wessex is so impressed with seeing Belinda act onstage that he happily marries her. As Will watches the love of his life ride off with Wessex, Burbage joins him, “and the two of them go back to the Curtain, like Bogart and Rains at the end of Casablanca.” At this point Stoppard had the inspired idea of taking Belinda’s journey one step further in an epilogue. As we hear Will in voiceover describing a shipwreck and the opening of Twelfth Night, we see Belinda “washed ashore” alone in America, where she will “meet her brave New World.”

  This Casablanca ending, coupled with Belinda’s arrival in America, was finished by the autumn of 1992 and would be the basis of the film in which Julia Roberts was to star. Costumes were sewn and sets built at Pinewood Studios near London in anticipation of the start of filming, when production was halted in October and the film was shelved. Roberts, who retained the right to choose her costar, only wanted to do it with Daniel Day-Lewis as Will, and he refused, even after she flew over to make the case in person. Universal was out a few million dollars, and put a hefty price tag on the film to prevent another studio from making it. Edward Zwick sent the script to Miramax, where Harvey Weinstein badly wanted it, though it wasn’t until 1997 that he was able to wrest the film from Universal for $4.5 million (the most, Weinstein later said, that he’d “ever paid for a script or a project or anything else”).

  By 1997, Julia Roberts had been replaced by a young actor groomed for stardom by Miramax, Gwyneth Paltrow. Mirroring the unspoken story of America’s love for Shakespeare that undergirded the film, a British actor had to be paired with her as the male lead, and Joseph Fiennes was eventually chosen to play Will. Stoppard was brought back to fine-tune the screenplay, by John Madden, who had replaced Edward Zwick as director. But Stoppard was handed a very different version than the one he had last submitted. It turned out that in the interim, Zwick had given Stoppard’s script to a studio writer. Stoppard wrote to Zwick, now one of the producers, telling him that he was “taken aback to find scenes interpolated, re-arranged, edited and omitted; and, of course, a lot of new dialogue.” Madden recalled that in this doctored version, “things that might be thought to be questionable for an American audience, such as the fact that the whole movie concerned an affair while this man was married and had children, was sort of swept under the carpet.” Stoppard was ready to walk away, making it clear that he would not work from a sanitized script. If they weren’t willing to go back to his previous draft, Miramax should stick with their studio screenwriter “from here on, in which case you would have my amicable best wishes—but not, please, my name; at least not in its present authorial presumption.”

  Stoppard got his way. But times had changed, and the resolution of the version from five years earlier would no longer do. This time around, at least in his early drafts, Stoppard’s heroine, now renamed Viola, is much bolder. In one draft she even asks Will to marry her. But Will evasively turns her down, unwilling to admit that he already has a wife. It’s only later that Viola learns from others that Will has a family back in Stratford. Will confesses as much to her, a bit defensively: “My love is no lie. I have a wife, yes, and I cannot marry the daughter of Sir Robert de Lesseps. It needed no wife come from Stratford to tell you that. And yet you let me come to your bed.” To get past this obstacle, and to make it not feel like a sordid affair, Stoppard then tried something new: a mock wedding in which Viola places on Will’s finger a grass ring she has been plaiting. Viola tells Will that she “will go to Wessex as a widow from these vows, as solemn as they are unsanctified.” In Norman’s version, a deeper understanding of love, stripped of the constraints imposed by gender and convention, releases in Shakespeare a torrent of creativity; in Stoppard’s, the love of his life cures Will of “writer’s block.”

  There are two more inventive turns in Stoppard’s revision of the script in late 1997. The first is indebted to Norman’s earlier draft. As the lovers bid one another farewell and Viola boards ship with Wessex, she whispers to Will, “I’m carrying your child to the new world,” leaving him “stunned, in tears,” as she “runs aboard.” In the second, returning to the contours of his own earlier ending, Viola survives a shipwreck and washes up on shore in America, where she “braces herself and walks on to meet her brave New World.” In the next draft Stoppard takes this idea even further—putting a comma after “World” and appending to the typescript a surprising and inspired coda in longhand: “where, beyond the forested foreshore, there rises the ghostly shimmering outline of the skyscrapers of modern Manhattan.” Stoppard continued to revise and sharpen the dialogue before submitting his final draft in 1998, and filming began.

  But the producers were unhappy with the ending. According to Madden, “after some research screenings, Miramax still had concerns about the film’s commercial potential, and a ferocious argument began to develop between myself and Harvey about the way the movie concluded.” Weinstein’s relentless pressure for a happy ending became a running joke. Madden even included in his DVD outtakes a parodic scene in which Will is asked by Henslowe, who is worried about its appeal, what his new play is about: “What is the story? How does the comedy end? . . . Let us have pirates, clowns, and a happy ending, and you will make Harvey Weinstein a happy man.” There’s laughter and applause in the background as Madden then steps in front of the camera and says, with a broad smile, “Cut, cut, cut.” The clip was sent to Harvey Weinstein.

  Weinstein had his own ideas about how to leave the lovers. According to Madden, “Harvey had been hankering for an ending whereby Viola somehow stayed a part of Will’s life; the idea seemed to be that we would see her performing in disguise in Twelfth Night or something.” What Weinstein proposed—essentially relegating Viola to the role of Shakespeare’s mistress, one for whom he can occasionally find a role in one of his plays—offended Madden, and he balked at the idea: “I always maintained that this was kind of meaningless and left an odd taste because it meant she was some sort of bit on the side that Shakespeare would have for the rest of his life, and ignored that whole idea that she became his muse in favor of one where she became his mistress.” Presumably, Stoppard did not share with Weinstein that early draft from 1992 in which he had mapped out a similar ending, where Burbage, who is in charge of the company, tells a promising young female actor, “I think I can make something of you.”

  Weinstein’s role in shaping the ending of the film, and
the fate of Gwyneth Paltrow’s Viola, appear a lot differently in hindsight. Three years earlier, he had arranged for the 22-year-old Paltrow to play a lead role in a film version of Jane Austen’s Emma. At that time, according to Paltrow, Weinstein had invited her to his hotel room for a work meeting, then surprised her by putting his hands on her and suggesting that “she give him a massage.” Paltrow, blindsided, refused his advances, and when she told her boyfriend, the actor Brad Pitt, about it, he confronted and physically threatened Weinstein, saying something along the lines of “If you ever make her feel uncomfortable again, I’ll kill you.” Paltrow also said that Weinstein warned her “not to tell anyone else about his come-on.” The incident did not stop Weinstein from reportedly lying to other women he later tried to seduce, allegedly telling them that he had in fact slept with Paltrow and that it was “the best thing you can do for your career now.”

  A stream of accusations about Weinstein’s behavior around the time that Shakespeare in Love was being filmed suggests that this was far from an isolated incident. Robert Lindsay, a British actor who had been cast for the film, claimed to have been removed from it by Weinstein after he confronted him about his mistreatment of a fellow actor, Molly Ringwald. Those who subsequently accused Weinstein of sexual assault or misconduct around this time include actors Ashley Judd, Rose McGowan, Asia Argento, Zoe Brock, Angelina Jolie, Uma Thurman, and Tara Subkoff, as well as Weinstein’s assistant, Zelda Perkins, who warned him about his conduct and threatened to go public. Lawyers negotiated a settlement with her to buy her silence, as they did when Weinstein assaulted a colleague of hers at the Venice Film Festival in September 1998. In retrospect, it’s hard not to conclude that Weinstein’s solution to the problem of Will and Viola’s relationship was to propose something not unlike what he seems to have imagined for himself and Gwyneth Paltrow and other young women like her: keeping her around as a mistress or plaything who might serve the sexual needs of a married man, in exchange for promoting her career.