Shakespearean Relocations: The Final Scene of John Madden's Shakespeare in Love

Abstract

This essay focuses upon the conclusion to Shakespeare in Love (1998), in order to consider the significance of its echoes of, and borrowings from, The Tempest . Two interpretive paradigms are engaged in the film's conclusion: namely, that The Tempest is Shakespeare's play about the new world, and that it is his 'farewell to the stage'. These commonplace notions about the play's meaning discerned in the conclusion to the film serve to reinforce its consolidation of Hollywood's new-found confidence in the production of Shakespeare related cinema at the end of the millennium.