Marc Norman, co-writer of Shakespeare in Love, came to speak to my program the other day. He said that as a freelance writer, he had trained his kids from an early age to come up with ideas for him. This paid off big time when his son, who was in college studying theater, called him and said, “All right, here’s an idea. Shakespeare is a young, struggling playwright.” Norman says he knew instantly it was a great idea, but it took three years of hard work to figure out how to make a screenplay out of it. He was often tempted to give up, but couldn’t bear the thought of admitting failure to his son, so he kept at it. Things finally fell into place when he started thinking along these lines: Shakespeare is struggling to be a better writer. Shakespeare’s earliest plays (e.g. Two Gentlemen of Verona) aren’t very good. Out of his early great plays, the only one that’s familiar to most people is Romeo and Juliet, so use that. What inspires Shakespeare to write Romeo and Juliet? He meets a girl. But Shakespeare’s whole life revolves around the theater. He’s not as interesting a character if you take him away from the theater, and women aren’t allowed in the theater, so how can there be a romance? Well, what if the girl pretends to be a boy? Voila.
Very little is known about Shakespeare’s actual life, but there’s a wealth of information about his times, and Norman immersed himself in this. The more he studied, the more confident he became that he could write about the Elizabethan stage because he felt like, “I know this industry. I work in this industry.” Within about a ten year period, the Elizabethan theater developed all the accoutrements of the modern entertainment industry — agents, contracts, etc. The clincher came when Norman stumbled across the records of a court case in which a writer was being sued by a company of players. The writer had signed a contract to work for this company for one year and write three plays. He had only delivered one, and the company was suing him (for breach of contract) and demanding their money back. The writer’s defense was that his work had been interrupted by the outbreak of plague. Included among the records was a copy of the contract the writer had signed. The contract included provisions such as that the writer must not work for anyone else during this year, must be available to do rewrites of other writers’ work, and must be available to write jokes and such. Norman, who was working on a one-year studio contract at the time, said to his wife, “I’ve seen this contract before. I signed this contract last year.”
Then last night I went to an event sponsored by the newly-formed USC chapter of League of Women Voters. They screened Iron Jawed Angels, a quite good and very eye-opening drama about the struggle to pass the women’s suffrage amendment. I had no idea that the fight had been so brutal, and some of the parallels to contemporary politics were striking.
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