[nickcarraway]

I found it to have an amazing lack of wit and romance. Give me an example of the wit. I've read instruction manuals for calculators that had more wit. I love Shakespeare and I was looking forward to seeing the movie, but I was gobsmacked at how bad it was. Shakespeare was an ignorant dullard. Almost every charcter in the movie was unlikeable.

[Borges]

There were all sorts of references to his plays and parallels with Elizabethan drama in general. I'll agree that Fiennes's Shakespeare was the weak point. But the performance at the end was as good as one could have could have hoped for. And there's the appearance of John Webster which no one picked up on (a schlockmeister known for lurid violent plays like 'The Duchess of Malfi'). Picking Romeo and Juliet as the transition between his early work and great work was perfect. The plays before it were substandard.