Intertextual Ever Afters: Fictionalised Biography and Compensatory Adaptation in Shakespeare in Love and Becoming Jane

The paper aims to explore the fusion of intertextual borrowings and imaginative historical recreation in John Madden’s 1998 Shakespeare in Love and Julian Jarrold’s 2007 Becoming Jane in an attempt to establish the full extent of the similarity between the strategies employed in their scripts and the relevance of the insights they provide into issues concerning literary authorship and a wider cultural landscape. This will entail both a comparative assessment of the two cinematic endeavours and a side-by-side analysis of each film script and the literary work whose plot it mirrors (Romeo and Juliet and Pride and Prejudice respectively). Particular attention will be paid to the ways in which isolated lines or entire episodes from William Shakespeare’s tragedy and Jane Austen’s novel are subtly adapted or simply pilfered to fill in gaps in two similarly elusive biographies and to account for the inspiration behind two of literature’s most enduring couples, whilst also somehow compensating for the missing element of romance in the real lives of their creators. In focusing on the complex fusion of literary biography and adaptation to be discovered under the surface of apparently facile (albeit bittersweet) romantic comedy, this exploration will ultimately try to assess each film’s relevance in the context of the constantly escalating interest in William Shakespeare and Jane Austen and the daunting intertextual (and multimedial) universes radiating from these two centres of the western and universal canon