SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE: A SCREENPLAY By Marc Norman & Tom Stoppard, Miramax, $ 9.25 In 1587, Philip Henslowe leased a Bankside brothel called the Rose and built a playhouse in its yard. ?Rose? was one of the pleasanter Elizabethan names for a female sex-worker. The Rose by any other word would have smelt the same, but Henslowe stuck to the name to the presumable relief of pimps and punks. Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard set the action in the cruel summer of 1593. London was hit by the plague and the playhouses were closed since the autumn of 1592. The Rose was a free house till 1594, although the troupe playing there most frequently was the Lord Admiral?s company. Their star actor was Edward Alleyn, who married Henslowe?s stepdaughter. Alleyn merged his troupe with that of Lord Strange, and took his plays to the provinces. Back in London, his wife was paraded in an open cart through the streets, the routine punishment for prostitutes. We do not know whether Henslowe and Alleyn were seriously upset. The plague is invisible in the screenplay, which recalls history more in the forgetting. The plague years were bad for brothels and theatres, but Henslowe had stakes in mining, real estate, and starch-manufacture, and was most certainly a usurer, lending money to players in the lean season. The screenplay, however, shows Henslowe as an impresario in the red. A creditor tortures him at the Rose, while an old poster of an Admiral play entitled The Moneylender Revenged lies on the floor. Such liberties with facts hardly count, given the rich possibilities of ignoring the imprecise little we do know. William Shakespeare made good use of the plague lay-off, composing narrative poems for his patron, the Earl of Southampton. In the film script, he is seeing an occult consultant to recharge his sex life and tide over a writer?s block. He tries out the prescription on Rosaline, the other ?Rose? who looks after the wardrobe of Richard Burbage?s men at the Curtain playhouse. The remedy fails to curb Rosaline?s catholic appetite for the wardrobe?s users, but her faithlessness has its benefits. Th e Master of the Revels reopens the theatres so that he may have safe use of Rosaline in Burbage?s bed when the actor is back at work. Burbage at this time is setting up the Lord Chamberlain?s company, and he offers Shakespeare a share. Poor William lacks the money and has to carry on as a freelancer, promising Henslowe and Burbage in turn an unwritten comedy about Romeo and a pirate?s daughter. Arthur Brooke?s poem, ?The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet?, was in print since 1562, and Shakespeare had used the source in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. The screenplay, however, has him picking up tips on the plot from Christopher Marlowe. The plot takes a sharp turn as William is smitten with Viola de Lesseps, a high-born girl he sees at a Whitehall Palace performance. Viola, in love with the theatre and Shakespeare?s plays, dresses up as a boy and auditions for Romeo?s part. The events that follow turn the proposed comedy into the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, anticipating at the same time the Viola-Orsino-Olivia episodes in Twelfth Night. The William-Viola pairing is potentially hypergamous, and the family feud of the tragedy is shadowed by the class taboo in the screenplay. William and Viola know that theirs is a stolen season. The awareness gives their love an air of poignant desperation, and the familiar lines from Romeo and Juliet a strange and fateful urgency. The screenplay thus hits upon an equivalent for what Harold Bloom claims was Shakespeare?s discovery, the formula ?that the sexual becomes the erotic when crossed by the shadow of death?. The action of the tragedy is postfigured in a set of deft analogies, the most interesting being the one involving Mercutio. He is a scene-stealer, and the film?s William gives the role to Alleyn, the exhibitionist hero of Marlowe?s plays. But the ?real-life? Mercutio is Marlowe himself ? impetuous, witty, and disdainful of soft passions. Norman and Stoppard make brilliant use of the legend, propagated by John Dryden, that Shakespeare had to kill off Mercutio before the latter killed him and his play. The contest between fellow writers becomes a clash of dramatic styles and sensibilities, and William is haunted by the guilt he feels for the death of a poetic rival and of his high astounding terms. Likewise, the family feud is turned into a professional scrap between Alleyn and Burbage?s men, and William is shown stealing the Puritan?s curse on both their playhouses for Mercutio?s dying line: ?A plague o? both your houses!? The Montagues and Capulets needed a string of deaths to bring them to their senses. The rival players, on the contrary, forget their enmity in order to stage a play. When the Rose is closed down, Burbage invites Henslowe?s men to the Curtain. The film script is most engaging in its suggestion of this curative mystery of the theatre, where Puritans and loansharks shed tears, stammerers turn fluent, and the queen and her subjects discover their common humanity. The heart of the screenplay is its portrayal of the starcrossed passion of William and Viola. They switch gender roles in speaking their lines on the stage and in bed, until the final scenes force William to play Romeo and Viola to play Juliet, to assume the fictional selves which alone would let them doff their disguises. The screenplay cleverly exploits the androgynous possibilities of Elizabethan playhouse practice, and at times one gets the feeling that this is Shakespeare rewritten after Virginia Woolf?s Orlando. The crowning moment for the theme comes when the queen finds in the play a sad resonance of her own predicament in the male world of politics. She pardons the players, who have broken the law by allowing a woman on the stage, with a muted display of sturdy regal humour. There is more than a hint in the script that Romeo and Juliet is a new assertion in Western culture of the private world of the erotic, coinciding with the rise of capitalist and colonial enterprise. The impression is strengthened by the ending, in which Viola leaves for Virginia with her mean husband, after suggesting the opening of Twelfth Night to William. As he writes the first lines of the shipwrecked Viola of the comedy, her ?real-life original? is seen walking the shores of the new world. The closing sequence makes for a tragicomic open-endedness, although it might seem historically tendentious. What in Shakespeare appears a brave new world of authentic erotic sensibility may not be all that far from the vindication of the affective life in Chaucer?s Troilus and Criseyde. The queen helps William find the capital for joining Chamberlain?s Men, and his freelancing days are over. Henceforth, he would be a sharer-player in the foremost company of the realm. At the turn of the century, his new rival Ben Jonson would write Poetaster, a play which is set in Augustan Rome but which makes fun of the poets of Jonson?s London. Jonson casts himself as Horace, and the play also has its Ovid. The balcony-scene from Romeo and Juliet is parodied in one of its passages, where the banished Ovid declares his passion for Julia. The affair, like the one in the film script, was socially unequal, and poor Ovid was exiled for chasing Caesar?s granddaughter. Jonson?s contemporaries, as is well known, believed that Ovid?s soul lived again in ?honey-tongued Shakespeare?. Why does Jonson?s Ovid behave like Shakespeare?s Romeo? Did Jonson know something about the latter-day Ovid?s real-life balcony-trysts? The question certainly is worth a thought.