Great Character: Viola De Lesseps (“Shakespeare in Love”)
A compelling Attractor character which led to an Academy Award.
A compelling Attractor character which led to an Academy Award.
I’ve had the opportunity to screen Shakespeare in Love (written by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard) again recently. What a superb film! And this time, I was struck by the story’s Attractor Viola De Lesseps, played wondrously by Gwynneth Paltrow.
How could Will not fall in love with a woman who confesses these sentiments and in such rhapsodic manner:
VIOLA
All the men at court are without
poetry. If they look at me they see my
father’s fortune. I will have poetry
in my life. And adventure. And love.
Love above all.
NURSE
Like Valentine and Silvia?
VIOLA
No . . . not the artful postures of
love, but love that over- throws life.
Unbiddable, ungovernable, like a riot
in the heart, and nothing to be done,
come ruin or rapture. Love like there
has never been in a play.
Will thinks his problem is that he has writer’s block. He also thinks the solution is that he must find a muse. He is only partly right. The reason for his writer’s block is two-fold: (A) He desires to be a great writer and that challenge looms like a shadow over him, stifling his creativity. (B) Moreover he has yet to demonstrate that he has the talent to be a great writer, in large part due to the fact that he has been living on the surface: writing cheap comedies, having meaningless sex with countless women, selling a play to one producer, then re-selling it to another to feed his life of drinking and debauchery.
Yes, he needs a muse. And he finds one in Viola with whom he falls deeply in love, inspiring him to write “Romeo and Juliet.” But what he also needs is to lose her, the tragedy of their separation — she forced to marry Lord Wessex and venture off to America — compelling Will to move beneath the surface of his life into the depths of his emotions. For it is there, as painful as it is, he finds what he needs to become a great writer.
WILL half smiles. Then he’s serious. They look deeply at
each other…and rush into each other’s arm.
WILL
You will never age for me, nor fade,
nor die.
VIOLA
Nor you for me.
WILL
Good bye, my love, a thousand times
good bye.
VIOLA
Write me well.
She kisses him with finality. Then turns and runs from
him. WILL watches as she goes.
INT. WILL’S ROOM. DAY.
A blank page. A hand is writing: TWELFTH NIGHT. We see
WILL sitting at his table.
WILL (VO)
My story starts at sea…a perilous
voyage to an unknown land…a shipwreck
EXT. UNDERWATER. DAY.
Two figures plunge into the water
WILL (VO)
the wild waters roar and heave…the
brave vessel is dashed all to pieces,
and all the helpless souls within her
drowned
INT. WILL’S ROOM. DAY.
WILL at his table writing
WILL (VO)
all save one … a lady
EXT. UNDERWATER. DAY.
VIOLA in the water
WILL (VO)
whose soul is greater than the ocean …
and her spirit stronger than the sea’s
embrace … not for her watery end, but
a new life beginning on a stranger
shore
EXT. BEACH. DAY.
VIOLA is walking up a vast and empty beach ….
WILL (VO CONTINUED)
It will be a love story … for she will
be my heroine for all time
INT. WILL’S ROOM. DAY.
WILL looks up from the table.
WILL (VO CONTINUED)
and her name will be … Viola.
He looks down at the paper, and writes: “Viola” Then:
“What country friends is this?”
EXT. BEACH. DAY.
DISSOLVE slowly to VIOLA, walking away up the beach
towards her brave new world.
THE END
Viola De Lesseps is a classic Attractor figure, directly and intimately involved in the emotional development of the story’s Protagonist, transporting him from the heights of rapturous joy to the depths of dark despair, thus enabling him to become the great playwright… William Shakespeare.
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