Shakespeare in a Divided America
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A compromise on how to end the film was eventually struck. “After much discussion,” Madden recalls, “Harvey conceded to our insistence that the film must end the way it was always intended, but Tom and I agreed to re-examine the final scene.” Stoppard then “wrote an amazing scene built on the principle that Viola somehow coaxes out of Will’s misery the beginning of his new play . . . becoming in the process both his inspiration, and the model of all the heroines to come.” Stoppard himself adds, “I think John protected me from much of the pressure he was being subjected to on the issue of the boy getting the girl and living happily ever after. It seemed obvious to me that if we expunged Will’s wife from history we’d look like idiots and be rightly punished for it.”
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IN THE COURSE of arriving at a final script, the filmmakers kept bumping up against one of the more uncomfortable issues for Americans at the end of the twentieth century: adultery. The United States remained steadfastly puritanical on the issue, at least in theory: in 2001, only 7 percent of Americans polled by Gallup thought that having an extramarital affair was morally acceptable, a percentage that hardly budged—to 8 percent—when the same question was again asked in 2015. To give some sense of Americans’ disapproval of infidelity, no other behavior that was polled was considered less morally acceptable—not even human cloning, suicide, or abortion. Far more Americans considered gay or lesbian relations morally acceptable: 40 percent in 2001; 63 percent by 2015. Perhaps the most reliable contemporaneous figures are those provided by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago; in 1994 it concluded that roughly 15 to 18 percent of married partners in America had cheated on their spouses (with 3 to 4 percent doing so in any given year). The data seems to suggest that more than half of those committing adultery disapproved of their own behavior. Those making the film had to decide how far to push the boundaries of what was considered permissible. In the end they played it safe.
However unhappy William Shakespeare’s marriage to Anne Hathaway might have been, however powerful the attraction between Viola and Will, and however much test audiences wanted their love to last, it was decided that the story could not end with the lovers still romantically involved. In the film, more than an hour passes before Will tells Viola that he is married, long after they have slept together. Moviegoers, though, have been told about Will’s marriage early on, during his therapy session with his astrologer and therapist, Dr. Moth, where Will speaks of his marriage bed as “a cold one” and of his “banishment” from his wife as a “blessing.” Banishment seems an odd word to use here, but it’s one that subliminally echoes the prince’s fatal decree exiling Romeo from Verona, and transposing that exile to Will’s marital state prompts Dr. Moth to say that Will is therefore “free to love.” It’s a backstory introduced to clear a path to his love for Viola, but it is a muddy path, with banishment a stand-in for a modern-day separation; and before meeting Viola, Will is promiscuous, having had unrewarding sex, mostly with prostitutes with names like “Black Sue,” “Fat Phoebe,” and “Aphrodite.”
The path was further muddied by current events. The very month that the principal actors had begun rehearsing before filming began in February 1998, a major news story broke in the United States connecting Romeo and Juliet with an adulterous affair, one for which Americans would show far less sympathy. On the previous Valentine’s Day, an ad had run in the Washington Post, addressed to “Handsome” and signed “M”:
HANDSOME
With love’s light wings did
I o’er perch these walls
For stony limits cannot hold love out,
And what love can do that dares love attempt.
—Romeo and Juliet 2:2
Happy Valentine’s Day
M
The famous lines quoted here are spoken by Romeo in Act 2, scene 2 of the play, where he declares to Juliet that true lovers cannot be kept apart. The ad had been placed by Monica Lewinsky, a 23-year-old White House intern, who here assumes the man’s part, quoting Romeo’s lines. The “Handsome” to whom it was addressed was President Bill Clinton. Their clandestine relationship had begun in November 1995. Lewinsky refused to let the “stony limits” of the White House keep her from the man she desired. Shakespeare’s words had their intended effect. Two weeks after the ad ran, the two reunited and had a sexual encounter in the Oval Office, for the first time in nearly a year—a union that resulted in the incriminating stained blue dress. According to Lewinsky, when they met, “the President said he had seen her Valentine’s Day message,” “talked about his fondness for Romeo and Juliet,” and gave her a book of poetry. The ongoing drama, and the detailed revelations that came out in the Starr Report in September 1998, preoccupied and distracted the nation, and shadowed the film. Eight days after Shakespeare in Love opened, the House of Representatives began impeachment proceedings against President Clinton, the charges grounded in Paula Jones’s accusation of sexual harassment. At a time when the Starr-crossed lovers were front-page news, Miramax might well have been anxious about promoting a film that seemed to celebrate an adulterous affair. But the two stories were never linked by critics or journalists.
In the final negotiated version of the script, which appears in the published edition of the screenplay, the affair ends with Viola as Shakespeare’s inspiration and collaborator. She is bound for Virginia with Wessex. In the lovers’ final minutes together, they map out Shakespeare’s next play, Twelfth Night, after Viola tells him that “the Queen commands a comedy, Will . . . for Twelfth Night,” and Will asks her, “What will my hero be?” Viola proposes that he be a duke, and Shakespeare then imagines that his heroine will be “Sold in marriage—and half-way to America.” The contours of Twelfth Night—and of Viola’s fate—begin to take shape:
VIOLA: Let’s see then: a voyage to a new world.
WILL: A storm. All are lost.
VIOLA: She lands on a vast and empty shore. She’s brought to the Duke . . . Orsino.
Will then embraces Viola and says, “You will never age for me, nor fade, nor die.” Viola assures him, “Nor you for me,” and in her final words to him, adds: “Write me well.”
We then watch Will pen the opening lines of his new play, Twelfth Night, and hear him in voiceover as we witness onscreen the tumultuous events he describes, as Stoppard builds on the version of the ending he had first hit on back in 1992: “My story starts at sea . . . A shipwreck. The wild waters roar and heave. The brave vessel is dashed all to pieces. And all the helpless souls within her drowned.” But there is one survivor, a “lady whose soul is greater than the ocean, and her spirit stronger than the sea’s embrace.” He imagines for her “a new life beginning on a stranger shore. It will be a love story. For she will be my heroine for all time. And her name will be Viola!”
Yet there were still difficulties with how to conclude this ending, in which America, and Shakespeare’s influence on it, figure so prominently. What follows is an extended closing shot in which Viola walks along a windy beach on the American coast toward the woods in the distance as the film credits begin to roll. But this screened version replaced yet another, based on Stoppard’s draft, that had been filmed, then cut. In that unused sequence (which can be viewed as an outtake on the DVD), Viola approaches two men on the beach. It’s shot from a distance, so it’s hard to know for sure, but one appears to be Native American, the other dark-skinned, perhaps African. It comes as something of a shock, underscoring that we’ve only seen white faces for the past two hours. When she asks them—here quoting the line spoken by the heroine, Viola, of Twelfth Night—“What country, friends, is this?” (1.2.1), one of the men replies, “This is America.” Viola then says in response, “America . . . oh, good,” before resuming her long walk up the beach to the wooded horizon. Stoppard still wanted to end with the final image of the modern Manhattan skyline. Madden was also drawn to this and hoped to film it
, but given the mad rush to revise the ending and finish the film they ran out of time to work out what they felt to be this stronger conclusion, with that image of Manhattan’s skyscrapers, as Madden memorably put it, “there for those to see who wanted to see it, and not for those who didn’t.”
At least as early as 1992 Stoppard wanted the story to end in America. Perhaps he sensed that the real trajectory of the story was not toward either union or separation, but toward America. Even so, why conclude an Elizabethan romantic comedy set in 1593 with the heroine striding toward what appears to be the modern Manhattan skyline? Madden offered a hint when he explained that they wanted the closing shot to convey the feeling that “Viola was walking away into history.” Marc Norman, now one of the producers, “always had a problem” with what he calls the “bizarre ending in which Viola is shipwrecked and she comes ashore on the coast of America and there is New York City with the Twin Towers and the Empire State Building.” He was relieved that, from his perspective, “they finally got the ending right in the cutting room.” In the end, the movie’s closing sequence left out the larger and implicit frame of the story having to do with Shakespeare and America.
A century earlier, the American novelist Willa Cather had insisted that “Shakespeare belongs to two nations now.” She was right, but how he was shared and valued remained up for grabs. This collaborative film—with an American and an English screenwriter, a British director, a cast made up of both British and American stars, and Hollywood money and producers—bears that out. Stoppard’s ending offers the fantasy that Shakespeare’s influence on America was present from its founding, through the mediating presence of an inspiring Viola.
In suggesting that Viola serves this role, Stoppard was partaking of an old and persistent myth. During the American Civil War an unknown journalist had circulated a “fake news” story that an Englishman who had known Shakespeare personally and subsequently emigrated to America was buried in Virginia. The Englishman’s tombstone reportedly told a long and detailed story:
Here lies the body of Edward Heldon, Practitioner in Physics and Chirurgery. Born in Bedfordshire, England, in the year of our Lord, 1542. Was contemporary with and one of the pall-bearers of William Shakespeare of the Avon. After a brief illness his spirit ascended in the year of our Lord 1618—aged 76.
The story was popular enough to inspire a wonderful poem, Frederick Wadsworth Loring’s “In the Old Churchyard at Fredericksburg” (1870), as well as, years later, a terrific piece of investigative journalism, Moncure Conway’s “Hunting a Mythical Pall-Bearer” (1886), that debunked the legend.
But many, from the 1860s to the 1990s, found a version of this myth attractive; whether Shakespeare and the New World were linked through one of his pallbearers or through his muse and lover, the fantasy spoke to the desire to forge a physical connection between Shakespeare and America, the land, they believed, where his inspiring legacy came to rest and truly thrived. It was a myth that the American entertainment industry embraced and that mirrored the backstory of the film itself: the rough-and-tumble entertainment business, which saw its origins in the Elizabethan playhouses, reached its apogee in America, symbolized by that majestic New York skyline (one that also appears on Miramax’s logo, with which Shakespeare in Love began).
The ending in which Viola encounters a Native American and what looks like an African man had to be cut. Their appearance introduced associations that threatened to undermine an uplifting ending. Native Americans were to be eradicated or removed to reservations, and the dark-skinned man called to mind the slaves who harvested the tobacco that the Earl of Wessex planned to ship to England, which in turn sent goods to Africa, which completed the triangle by shipping more slaves to the Americas to harvest that tobacco. In his DVD commentary on the film, Madden says of Viola’s encounter with these two men that “it seemed to take us somewhere we didn’t want to go.” He doesn’t explain where but it’s not hard to guess. It proved easier, and very American, to erase these men and the stories they embodied, leap over time, and look ahead to that iconic Manhattan skyline.
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IT WAS ONE THING for Shakespeare in Love to flirt with adultery; it was another to raise the possibility, as Marc Norman had so boldly done in the initial draft, that an unhappily married Will would find himself falling in love with another man. Unlike adultery, intimations of same-sex love were hardwired into the circuitry of many of Shakespeare’s comedies. Viola’s cross-dressed namesake in Twelfth Night, the play Shakespeare turns to at the end of the film, is loved by a woman who thinks she is a man at the same time that Viola is in love with a man who seems to be increasingly attracted to her as another man. And in As You Like It, Orlando, though professing love for his absent Rosalind in the forest of Arden, falls in love with a youth named Ganymede, only to belatedly discover that Ganymede is Rosalind, disguised as a young man. In both plays, the conservative rules of comedy, in which young men marry young women, prevail. But comedies like Twelfth Night and As You Like It have long allowed audiences uncomfortable with same-sex relationships to entertain, though fleetingly, the possibility that men can fall in love with men and women with women, or even something more fluid and in-between.
Stoppard’s Viola and Will still cross-dress, so a hint of Norman’s original idea was kept, but only a hint. All that the final version of the film retains of a cross-dressed Will is a campy comic bit in which he appears as a laundrywoman attending Viola at court. And while we watch Will dash off “Sonnet 18”—“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”—any trace of its likely origins as one of the sonnets addressed to a young man, “the Master Mistress of my passion,” is erased, as the poem is here inscribed “For Lady Viola de Lesseps.” Those creating and marketing Shakespeare in Love clearly felt that a gay or bisexual Shakespeare was not something that enough Americans in the late 1990s were ready to accept, even if four hundred years earlier contemporaries who read his sonnets tacitly had been, and even if surveys showed that by the end of the twentieth century 40 percent of Americans didn’t think that same-sex relationships were morally wrong. Shakespeare could be an adulterer, but he had to be a heterosexual one in a loveless marriage if the film was to navigate these troubled waters and emerge as a box-office success.
In retrospect, it’s easy to see why, at the time, those behind Shakespeare in Love recoiled from Norman’s openness to Shakespeare’s interest in another man. Homosexuality had only been removed from the World Health Organization’s International Statistical Classification of Diseases in 1992, and the US military had recently instituted a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. As the release date of the film in 1998 approached, progress toward greater acceptance of homosexuality went into reverse. In 1997 President Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act into law, defining marriage as exclusively a union between a man and a woman. And in October 1998, Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old gay University of Wyoming student, was beaten, tied to a fence, and left to die, a hate crime that galvanized some and shamed others but failed to shift public attitudes toward gay rights, or lead, in the short term, to any legislative changes. Shakespeare in Love, in retreating from the possibility of Shakespeare accepting that he might be in love with another man, proved to be a film of and for its time—and on the wrong side of history.
Of course, when Will first meets Viola when she auditions for one of his plays, she is dressed like a young man, Tom Kent, wearing a doublet and hose and a fake mustache. So the film still had to negotiate the moment when Will discovers that “he” is a she. This brief scene takes place as Will and Tom are rowed across the Thames, and, the script reads, “she kisses him.” It happens very quickly, and when the boat lands and Master Kent dashes off, Shakespeare is immediately told by the boatman that Tom is really Viola and rushes after her. Moments later we see them embrace again. But in the few seconds that they were apart, Master Kent is safely transformed: the fake mustache is gone and her long go
lden tresses have replaced her close-cropped wig.
John Madden, who discussed this scene in his comments on the DVD, was clearly unhappy with the choices he made here, acknowledging that “I would have preferred, and the intention of the scene originally was, that she should be dressed as a boy at this point.” The reason he didn’t, Madden explains, had “to do with the extraordinary makeup requirements . . . but I wish I hadn’t done that.” It’s a fair excuse, though it certainly sounds like special pleading. Adding another level of complexity, Paltrow herself told an interviewer that in playing Master Kent she thought of herself as a gay man: “I’m not very manly, so when I cross-dressed I tended to think of myself as this gay Elizabethan guy who wants to be an actor.”
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