Daily Dialogue — August 20, 2015

“I don’t know. It’s a mystery.”

— Shakespeare in Love (1998), written by Marc Norman, Tom Stoppard

The Daily Dialogue theme for the week: Callback.

Trivia: Writer Marc Norman got the idea for the film when his son Zachary called him from Boston University and suggested doing something on William Shakespeare as a young man in the Elizabethan theatre. It took two years for Norman to come up with the idea of having Shakespeare struggling with writer’s block on “Romeo and Juliet.”

Dialogue On Dialogue: This is one of my favorite callbacks ever. In the first clip above, you can see how Philip Henslowe (Geoffrey Rush) says the line three times, so it clearly is a runner. In the second clip, Viola (Gwyneth Paltrow) says the line. In each case, the dialogue goes something like this:

It turns out all right in the end. 
How?
I don’t know. It’s a mystery.

The first three times, the line is played for laughs. The last time, when Viola says it, the line takes on a bittersweet meaning.

There is a bit of mischief here. While Will has heard Henslowe say the line twice, Viola has not, so the how it is she delivers this final callback is a bit of… you guessed it… a mystery