Glynns Book Reviews

I wanted to see how and if the movie Shakespeare in Love had any relationship to the book Will in the World. I began watching the movie with the expectation that it would be a biography in the same sense as Will in the World. Well..... it was and it wasn't. The book did give a more-or-less chronological telling of Shakespeare's life while trying to discover the "real" Will by looking for parallels between his work and his life. The movie made no serious attempt at an actual biography, but was instead a fictional depiction of Shakespeare as a character in his plays, primarily Romeo and Juliet. The limited compass of the movie made it successful as entertainment, but too fanciful to carry any weight as biography. That doesn't mean I didn't enjoy the movie. I did. But I learned a great deal about the real Shakespeare (and his work) from the book and very little about the man Shakespeare from the movie.