More Shakespeare in Love stuff: Shakespeare was one of the few Elizabethan playwrights who wasn’t college-educated. Most playwrights had been sent to Oxford or Cambridge by their wealthy families to prepare them to enter the ministry or the military, but had rebelled and decided instead to come to London to work in the theater. At college they had studied Aristotle, and they mostly composed their plays according to Aristotelian principles. Aristotle taught that there were two dramatic genres: tragedy and comedy. Tragedies were about great men who defied the gods and died in a cathartic fashion. Comedies were about ordinary people, were funny, and ended with a wedding. Romeo and Juliet starts out following all the conventions of comedy, with Romeo prattling on about Rosaline, but then shifts genres and ends as a tragedy. The audience of the day would have been startled, and would have felt that this Shakespeare guy really had something interesting going on here. Norman also talked briefly about the character Marlowe. Apparently Marlowe is a much more interesting historical personage than Shakespeare, and Norman was afraid that if Marlowe were included as a character, he’d overshadow Shakespeare, so Norman used Marlowe very sparingly.
Shakespeare in Love was ready to go into production in about 1992, with Julia Roberts playing Viola, but they couldn’t find a satisfactory actor to play Shakespeare. They wanted someone British, and he had to be handsome, be able to do both comedy and drama, and you had to be able to believe that he was an artistic genius. Julia Roberts wanted Daniel Day-Lewis, and when he turned down the project, she walked off, and the picture was shelved for years until they found Joe Fiennes. Most people on the project felt that he was a nice kid but that he lacked the gravitas to play Shakespeare. But the director believed in him, and convinced the studio to go ahead with him.
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