As a Shakespeare aficionado, I am constantly pained by the fact that almost no proper dramatizations of the Bard's life have been made. There is Shakespeare In Love, which is a great movie - a great comedy - that I have rated a 10 out of 10, and then we now have this, A Waste of Shame.
This is a beautiful production. Well-acted, and with a good soundtrack. Willingly did I waste my time watching it! That almost all the prostitutes were made up to look like Elizabeth I, "the virgin queen", was quite funny and outrageous, although its historical veracity is doubtful.
However, I think it also has many, many problems. First, it does not present Shakespeare as a poetical and pensive type of person, but simply as someone who reacts to the events around him. Shakespeare's poetry is much bigger than that, and he put much more than that into it. This is not reflected here at all.
Second, I am personally convinced that both the fair youth and the dark lady are poetical constructs and not actual individuals. They are distillations of particular stock characters from the plays, used for mysterious poetical purposes - not real people from Shakespeare's private life. Shakespeare's entire life was poetry! His works are not just casual side remarks on whatever ordinary, boring stuff was going on in his "real" life! At least, I will never believe that.
Also, it is not to be believed that Will himself wrote the introduction to the sonnets - that opening page is signed by Thomas Thorpe! Obviously, the "only begetter" mentioned there is the poet, who created the poems, i.e. Shakespeare himself. Anything else is reaching, but Shakespeare scholars do so love to reach.
But, let's say for the sake of argument that the fair youth and the dark lady were real people. When, in this movie, Will presents the Countess of Pembroke with the first batch of sonnets about the fair youth, he hasn't even met him yet! That's ridiculous! It totally defeats the point the movie is trying to make! How could he have written inspired sonnets about the fair youth before he ever met him? Nonsense! And of course, it stretches credibility a great deal indeed to have both of Will's special idols secretly end up together, by pure coincidence. Not convincing.
One of the previous comments say that it seemed to him that William Herbert was supposed to be an ersatz son for Shakespeare, who then idolized him as a son, rather than as a potential lover. Well, maybe so, but I didn't get any such impression at all. His son's role was much too small. I thought Will's attraction to Herbert was supposed to be genuinely (if somewhat repressed) homo-erotic desire - not that I agree that any such thing actually happened, or has anything to do with the sonnets.
I would like to see the sonnets treated as proper poetry. All the speculation about the individuals they were addressed to is pure populism, and many of the more whimsical Shakespeare scholars are entirely in its throes. If you want to read a proper analysis of the sonnets, get Stephen Booth's "Shakespeare's sonnets" (Yale University Press, 1977), where the sonnets are analyzed soberly and factually. For instance, he has a very brief paragraph on Shakespeare's alleged homosexuality, which states:
"William Shakespeare was almost certainly homosexual, bisexual or heterosexual. The sonnets provide no evidence on the matter." And the rest is merely parenthetical.
The truth is that the speculation about the possible historical addressees of the sonnets bars the mere commencement of more serious scholarly analysis of the sonnets, and this state of affairs truly is a great wasteland of shame for Bardic scholarship.
This is a beautiful production. Well-acted, and with a good soundtrack. Willingly did I waste my time watching it! That almost all the prostitutes were made up to look like Elizabeth I, "the virgin queen", was quite funny and outrageous, although its historical veracity is doubtful.
However, I think it also has many, many problems. First, it does not present Shakespeare as a poetical and pensive type of person, but simply as someone who reacts to the events around him. Shakespeare's poetry is much bigger than that, and he put much more than that into it. This is not reflected here at all.
Second, I am personally convinced that both the fair youth and the dark lady are poetical constructs and not actual individuals. They are distillations of particular stock characters from the plays, used for mysterious poetical purposes - not real people from Shakespeare's private life. Shakespeare's entire life was poetry! His works are not just casual side remarks on whatever ordinary, boring stuff was going on in his "real" life! At least, I will never believe that.
Also, it is not to be believed that Will himself wrote the introduction to the sonnets - that opening page is signed by Thomas Thorpe! Obviously, the "only begetter" mentioned there is the poet, who created the poems, i.e. Shakespeare himself. Anything else is reaching, but Shakespeare scholars do so love to reach.
But, let's say for the sake of argument that the fair youth and the dark lady were real people. When, in this movie, Will presents the Countess of Pembroke with the first batch of sonnets about the fair youth, he hasn't even met him yet! That's ridiculous! It totally defeats the point the movie is trying to make! How could he have written inspired sonnets about the fair youth before he ever met him? Nonsense! And of course, it stretches credibility a great deal indeed to have both of Will's special idols secretly end up together, by pure coincidence. Not convincing.
One of the previous comments say that it seemed to him that William Herbert was supposed to be an ersatz son for Shakespeare, who then idolized him as a son, rather than as a potential lover. Well, maybe so, but I didn't get any such impression at all. His son's role was much too small. I thought Will's attraction to Herbert was supposed to be genuinely (if somewhat repressed) homo-erotic desire - not that I agree that any such thing actually happened, or has anything to do with the sonnets.
I would like to see the sonnets treated as proper poetry. All the speculation about the individuals they were addressed to is pure populism, and many of the more whimsical Shakespeare scholars are entirely in its throes. If you want to read a proper analysis of the sonnets, get Stephen Booth's "Shakespeare's sonnets" (Yale University Press, 1977), where the sonnets are analyzed soberly and factually. For instance, he has a very brief paragraph on Shakespeare's alleged homosexuality, which states:
"William Shakespeare was almost certainly homosexual, bisexual or heterosexual. The sonnets provide no evidence on the matter." And the rest is merely parenthetical.
The truth is that the speculation about the possible historical addressees of the sonnets bars the mere commencement of more serious scholarly analysis of the sonnets, and this state of affairs truly is a great wasteland of shame for Bardic scholarship.