Script To Screen: “Shakespeare in Love”

The final scenes from the 1998 movie Shakespeare in Love, written by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard.

IMDb plot summary: A young Shakespeare, out of ideas and short of cash, meets his ideal woman and is inspired to write one of his most famous plays.

Here Viola, newly married, meets for the last time with her lover Will Shakespeare.

Here is the movie version of the scene:

The translation of script to screen is precise, even to the point of shots back and forth between Will and “The Twelfth Night” images with Viola.

One wonderful grace note in the scene: The callback to the line: “I don’t know. It’s a mystery.” It’s the fourth time the line is uttered in the movie, the previous three times by Henslowe (Geoffrey Rush). The three previous iterations are used for comedic purposes. Here it takes on a bittersweet quality due to the reality of what’s transpiring — the final moments of the two being together.

One of the single best things you can do to learn the craft of screenwriting is to read the script while watching the movie. After all a screenplay is a blueprint to make a movie and it’s that magic of what happens between printed page and final print that can inform how you approach writing scenes. That is the purpose of Script to Screen, a Go Into The Story series where we analyze a memorable movie scene and the script pages that inspired it.

For more Script To Screen articles, go here.

Script To Screen: “Shakespeare in Love” was originally published in Go Into The Story on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.