What a great script. It works on so many different levels and hits just the right tone between comedy and genuine pathos. Young Will goes through a profound psychological journey, necessary for him to become the great writer he has the potential to be. The love story is terrific. And from a sheer storytelling perspective, such a polished script with numerous elegantly employed set-ups and payoffs. The whole tongue-in-cheek satirical references to the modern day movie business are a hoot. I hope lots of people read this script and are ready to discuss it because it is superb, definitely worthy of the Academy Award it won.

Hello Scott and everyone - I only discovered GITS last week, and I am very excited about being a part of the community! Briefly, about me, I am just finishing my MFA in Creative Writing at UBC (that's British Columbia) and, through that program, am working on my first feature film screenplay. Which I am very excited about! Anyway, I am about 1/4 of the way through Shakespeare in Love, and just letting you know that I am excited about taking part in this discussion... will probably be back on with some comments very late tonight (as in after the trick-or-treating). Jackie

A really solid script that uses the structure of Romeo and Juliet very cleverly as part of its own structure. The parallels help to guide us through the love affair, illuminate the characters' emotions, and involve the viewer in the theatrical and the writing processes. The characters are engaging, accessible, and funny, playing on stereotypes (Ned the OTT actor, Shakespeare the tortured writer) but still making them fresh and interesting. All in all, a great script!

What a script! I'm sure we're gonna have a great week analyzing it. I found some trivia I found interesting thought I'd share with you guys: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0138097/trivia

Jackie, welcome! Congratulations on your MFA. I know I've posted something on that program, might be worth a Google search of the site to find it. What genre is your first screenplay? Again greetings!

That's a good point, Debbie: The script does have a good deal of fun with stereotypes, but as I mentioned, they hit the tone just right. Could easily have strayed too broad and it's a sign of the talent of the screenwriters they avoided that temptation as even the characters of their types show levels of depth, most of them affected by the power and majesty of the play Shakespeare is writing -- and they are rehearsing.

Thanks for that link, Anna. FYI I have worked up a scene-by-scene breakdown of the script and can post that tomorrow, so if you're inclined in that direction, hopefully I can save you the time. Off that breakdown, we can discuss plot points, act breaks and all the rest. There's also a really interesting variation on theme in the story, specifically the Protagonist's metamorphosis. We can get into that on Thursday.

Thanks, that would be great since I've budgeted most of my time this week on finishing the first draft of my screenplay. It kept me from reading "the Thing" and participating last week. I'm glad I included "Shakespeare in Love" in this week's budget. I'm also eager to analyze the role of the Queen in this story. She was a stout character, a female ruler in the world of men. Her lines were remarkable as well. Happy Halloween everyone.

So, I have to admit off the bat, I have never seen Shakespeare in Love. But it's on my Netflix queue now! Anyway, it was once again interesting reading a script without having seen the movie. Having read more recent screenplays, the style of writing, especially in the opening scenes, threw me a bit. Specifically, the early scenes had a couple of big paragraphs that, at the top of the scene, described the major players and objects. Today, I'm used to seeing those elements spread out, which I find makes for a good reading experience. That said, even those scenes were entertaining, and once I got a bit further in, I was hooked! I'm very much looking forward to checking this out.

Such a beautiful read, I started reading slower almost immediately to get every word and nuance. Still much to read, my life a series of interruptions for the moment, sharing first impressions. Overall, a period piece that feels alive and modern. Characters, feel fully formed, vital, all driven by their own needs, and this despite the stereotype framework underneath that makes them easily accessible. The wrapping is convincingly historical, even with modern moments underneath that wrapping (shrink, ha, and what a great setup to quickly address and dispense with Shakespeare's real life personal history). And it flows and reads so smooth. Theater owner, shrink, fortune teller, bang, bang, bang, so efficient, illogical really, but who's noticing, it reads so smooth, and propels things forth. Movie was fun, I like the script even more.

Hello everyone - I am still not all the way through, but want to chime in while this conversation is active. Like L. Fernando, I found some big chunks of text to get through... but they did also seem necessary to set up not only the world, but also the tone of the whole piece. I really liked the parallelism with the R&J story... we know right way what these characters want, and having that story parallelism allows this romance story to be very concise... because we already know it. Which allows room for divergences, the subplots, and the humour. I do find the characters a bit stereotypical for my tastes... but I have to say that I love Will's character, the young developing writer wh is not yet the William Shakespeare that we all already know, the writer we know he will become. Especially the "formative" moments where he gets his inspiration: e.g.Sc6 making the notes on the line "A plague on both your houses," Sc10 the Hamlet image, and Marlowe coaching him on the R&J idea. I am not sure, when he finally used the name Juliet rather than Ethel for his story, where that came from?

Thanks so much, Scott! I'm a working freelance writer/author, and the themes that interest me are the environment, sciences, human rights, indigenous peoples... my move into screenwriting is to hopefully continue with these themes, but to reach a wider audience and also to reach people on a more emotional rather than factual level. So this first screenplay is a drama... the main story is a romance, but the main theme (what it's really about) is more about racism, intolerance etc.

Jacqueline, you point out one of the most interesting narrative techniques in the script: While clearly Will is the Protagonist, the story pivots at multiple points to track Viola and her story, looking at the story universe through her eyes as Protagonist. You could almost look at it as a Dual Protagonist story, although those categories -- being categories -- are finally an artificial construct laid atop an organic entity (the story) for interpretation purposes. Will and Viola exist within that story universe as living, breathing souls, and there is no reason we can explore their characters as if each is the Protagonist in their own story. Re where Juliet came from: This is a nice bit of business that mirrors Will's own metamorphosis, the shift in the play's title and genre. It starts off a low-brow comedy: "Romeo and Ethel, the Pirates Daughter." When he discusses his play with Marlowe [P. 22], the great playwright obviously is not impressed with the name Ethel (among other things about the play). Then on P. 39, Viola clutches the play: "Romeo, Romeo... a young man of Verona. A comedy. By William Shakespeare," thus another step in the play and titles transformation. Then on P. 47, Will reveals he has made a change from Ethel to Juliet. Then on P. 72, Alleyn suggests "Romeo and Juliet." Finally on P. 73, Will wakes up in bed with Viola and announces something he discovered in his sleep: "It is not a comedy I am writing now." All of those changes reflect meeting Viola, falling in love with her, and learning she is to be wed to Lord Wessex. All of that feeds into the transformation of both the content of the play and its title.

Thanks Scot - yeah, I got that part, the gradual transformation of his own conception of his story mirroring the events in his life... it was just the plucking of the name "Juliet" from seemingly nowhere. It just seemed to me it needed one more line of dialogue to make that leap, to have him (or someone like Marlowe) say something like "But Ethel is not the name of a lover, it needs to be more romantic... such as Juliet." A very minor point... but it just seemed to me a small lapse in the thought process.