Shakespeare in Love is an award-winning 1998 romantic comedy film. The film was directed by John Madden and co-written by playwright Tom Stoppard, whose first major success was with the Shakespeare-influenced play Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead.

The film is largely fictional, although several of the characters are based on real people. In addition, some of the characters, lines, and plot devices are references to Shakespeare's plays.

Shakespeare in Love won a number of Academy Awards in 1998, including Best Picture, Best Actress (for Gwyneth Paltrow) and Best Supporting Actress (for Judi Dench). It was the first comedy to win the Best Picture award since Annie Hall (1977) and no comedy has won the award since.

The film centres around the forbidden love of William Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes) and a noble woman, Viola de Lesseps (Gwyneth Paltrow). According to her, Viola hotly disagrees with the way men play females on stage.

To settle his debt to businessman Hugh Fennyman (Tom Wilkinson), Shakepeare's patron Philip Henslowe (Geoffrey Rush) offers Fennyman, a model of a sixteenth-century loan shark, a partnership in the upcoming production of Shakespeare's newest comedy, Romeo and Ethel The Pirate's Daughter. This play will later be renamed Romeo and Juliet and be reworked into a tragedy (but with some comical undertones with a few characters, like the Nurse).

Language: English
Subtitles: NONE