A Waste of Shame: The Mystery of Shakespeare and His Sonnets (TV Movie 2005) Poster

(2005 TV Movie)

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8/10
Not As Dense As It Seems
B2413 August 2006
From one of the lesser sonnets (129), this title "waste of shame" taken whole from the first line is used by the scriptwriter to strike a mildly disapproving tone with respect to Shakespeare's apparent sexual ambiguity, instead of making a more general statement in line with the sonnet's entire message. In other words, poor Will -- he just couldn't make up his mind whether he liked boys more than girls or vice versa. Now, the actual message of the sonnet is more like, poor all of us -- we all have this thing in us that makes us subject to losing our reason or good sense from time to time because of our erotic impulses. And if there is any ambiguity, it is a reflection of how different the before and after seem to us once we have acted on those impulses.

In either case, it is a somewhat depressing theme. The film does manage to demonstrate that there was much going in Shakespeare's time and place to be depressed about. Rupert Graves shows again how much he gets into this kind of stuff in a very convincing performance. The costumes and sets seem a bit Merchant-Ivory rather than dismal, but I cannot fault either the overall production or its historical setting. In that regard, it beats the fluffy Shakespeare In Love all to pieces.

The notion of romantic love was not much admired in 1603. It was regarded as we might regard some of the lesser mental illnesses today. So all those long, deep looks between the guys in this film might even have stirred laughs had they been performed in the old Globe.
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7/10
Doesn't Add Up
afhick7 May 2006
William Boyd has written some wonderful books and screenplays. I am a bit confused about his intention here. Is he trying to say that the Bard was so disturbed by the death of his son Hamnet that he transferred his affections to William Herbert? In a purely platonic way? Does he see something of the delicate Hamnet in Herbert's feminine good looks? Boyd is walking on eggshells here. He has to play around with the traditional chronology and compress events considerably to have both the young man and the dark lady of the sonnets arrive in Shakespeare's life on practically the same day. Of course, nobody knows for sure what happened, or even if the story told in the sonnets is autobiographical, so Boyd has a perfect right to postulate what he will. But I am disappointed with his treatment. He seems to have thought he was rewriting "Ulysses," with Shakespeare as Leopold Bloom. Here was an opportunity to speculate about the great loves of Shakespeare's life, and Boyd reduces one to a son-surrogate and the other to a working mom. And poor Anne Hathaway is a henpecking shrew. The daughters play no role in this drama. It's also interesting that Boyd exalts Shakespeare to the position of poet-in-residence with the King's Men, without explaining that he also took a hand in the troop's business and acted important roles in his own and others' plays, all the while he was becoming a wealthy landowner in Stratford. This might go a ways toward explaining why the playwright didn't return to live with his family until he was ready to retire. In the film, Boyd would have you believe that everybody he knew was trying to get their favorite cash cow to leave London and effectively retire from the stage.

I also liked a lot of things about "A Waste of Shame," not the least of which was Rupert Graves' dead-on impersonation of the Bard. I also liked seeing the criminally underused Nicholas Rowe as Richard Burbage and Zoe Wanamaker as the Duchesss of Pembroke. It was Wanamaker's father, Sam, who fought to rebuild the Globe Theatre on the south bank of the Thames, where it stands today, as evidenced by its inclusion in this production. The scenes with Ben Jonson and of Shakespeare at the book stalls were also inspired. But Tom Sturridge (as Herbert) looked like a clueless generation X-er in a bad wig, and Shakespeare's attraction to Lucy (the dark Lady) was underdeveloped--what did he see in her, apart from the fact that she was working, as he was, in London in order to support a family in France? I am rating this film as high as I am because William Boyd cannot help but write a literate script, and the acting in this production (with the possible exception of Sturridge) is first-rate. I also like Boyd's use of lines from the sonnets to introduce scenes. But I remain unconvinced by the scriptwriter's major premise, that, rather than take Herbert to bed, Shakespeare only wanted to be his father.
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6/10
A Groats-worth of research, sold for with a million of production
eschetic-24 January 2018
The tiny amount of commonly accepted speculation on the glorious Sonnets of William Shakespeare (given dubious structure in their initial collected published form leading to centuries of speculation as to what they may or may not have revealed about Shakespeare's own life) are thrown at the viewer in the first 15 minutes of this unfunny 85 minute TV fantasy from "The Open University/BBC" and shown in one of their less demanding time slots on BBC America in 2005.

It certainly is not essential that an actor portraying a famous personage actually resemble that personage, and Rupert Graves certainly bears little resemblance to William Shakespeare, so we don't have to worry over long as to whether or not the glorious Zoe Wanamaker (in her tiny role as the mother of the beautiful but unwed young Earl whose estates are in fee-tail, making his producing a male heir essential for the family) also resembles her original. In fact, almost none of the historical characters portrayed bear any resemblance to their known portraits which, in turn, leads one to question everything ELSE stated in the film, and indeed, such skepticism is warranted. Shakespeare is shown as an established playwrite and poet, yet he says his "current" play is his early collaboration, the COMEDY OF ERRORS! Out the Bard's window, the carts are calling for families to "bring out their dead" (which they certainly *did* for mass burials a century earlier at the height of the "black death," but if the plague were raging in London at the time shown, Shakespeare would have HAD no "current play" for the playhouses would have been closed down and his company touring the still plague-free provinces! In such circumstances, Shakespeare might actually have been able to see his dying son in his last days - which most historians say he did not, but then Shakespeare's contemporaries and virtually all writers who followed would have been astounded at the depiction of W.S. as the London whore-monger depicted here! The bits of production from Shakespeare's actual plays (especially the "Clowns'" Gravediggers' scene from HAMLET) are so scrimped on as to bear NO relationship to any conceivable actual performance.

Take it for what it's worth (I paid $1.99 for a DVD in a second-hand shop which was about right) and there is enough to find one can enjoy, but don't take ANY of it at face value and expect to learn anything about the Bard or Tudor/Stewart England.
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7/10
Interesting but problematic
sarastro715 December 2006
Warning: Spoilers
As a Shakespeare aficionado, I am constantly pained by the fact that almost no proper dramatizations of the Bard's life have been made. There is Shakespeare In Love, which is a great movie - a great comedy - that I have rated a 10 out of 10, and then we now have this, A Waste of Shame.

This is a beautiful production. Well-acted, and with a good soundtrack. Willingly did I waste my time watching it! That almost all the prostitutes were made up to look like Elizabeth I, "the virgin queen", was quite funny and outrageous, although its historical veracity is doubtful.

However, I think it also has many, many problems. First, it does not present Shakespeare as a poetical and pensive type of person, but simply as someone who reacts to the events around him. Shakespeare's poetry is much bigger than that, and he put much more than that into it. This is not reflected here at all.

Second, I am personally convinced that both the fair youth and the dark lady are poetical constructs and not actual individuals. They are distillations of particular stock characters from the plays, used for mysterious poetical purposes - not real people from Shakespeare's private life. Shakespeare's entire life was poetry! His works are not just casual side remarks on whatever ordinary, boring stuff was going on in his "real" life! At least, I will never believe that.

Also, it is not to be believed that Will himself wrote the introduction to the sonnets - that opening page is signed by Thomas Thorpe! Obviously, the "only begetter" mentioned there is the poet, who created the poems, i.e. Shakespeare himself. Anything else is reaching, but Shakespeare scholars do so love to reach.

But, let's say for the sake of argument that the fair youth and the dark lady were real people. When, in this movie, Will presents the Countess of Pembroke with the first batch of sonnets about the fair youth, he hasn't even met him yet! That's ridiculous! It totally defeats the point the movie is trying to make! How could he have written inspired sonnets about the fair youth before he ever met him? Nonsense! And of course, it stretches credibility a great deal indeed to have both of Will's special idols secretly end up together, by pure coincidence. Not convincing.

One of the previous comments say that it seemed to him that William Herbert was supposed to be an ersatz son for Shakespeare, who then idolized him as a son, rather than as a potential lover. Well, maybe so, but I didn't get any such impression at all. His son's role was much too small. I thought Will's attraction to Herbert was supposed to be genuinely (if somewhat repressed) homo-erotic desire - not that I agree that any such thing actually happened, or has anything to do with the sonnets.

I would like to see the sonnets treated as proper poetry. All the speculation about the individuals they were addressed to is pure populism, and many of the more whimsical Shakespeare scholars are entirely in its throes. If you want to read a proper analysis of the sonnets, get Stephen Booth's "Shakespeare's sonnets" (Yale University Press, 1977), where the sonnets are analyzed soberly and factually. For instance, he has a very brief paragraph on Shakespeare's alleged homosexuality, which states:

"William Shakespeare was almost certainly homosexual, bisexual or heterosexual. The sonnets provide no evidence on the matter." And the rest is merely parenthetical.

The truth is that the speculation about the possible historical addressees of the sonnets bars the mere commencement of more serious scholarly analysis of the sonnets, and this state of affairs truly is a great wasteland of shame for Bardic scholarship.
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7/10
A pleasant surprise
SB1003 September 2022
Rupert Graves is not an actor I care for much, but he is good in this film as William Shakespeare, having to eternally make money and using that as an excuse to escape domestic life. This is all shown through a story about what might have been the motivation behind the writing of the Sonnets, which are one of the finest achievements in English poetry. The story is credible, although of course there are many theories about the issue. The period settings were very believable, and in contrast to a number of films about the era (eg All is True) the dialogue was easily audible and understandable. Amongst other performances, Tom Sturridge makes a devious pretty boy, and Indira Varma is very good as the mixed race prostitute Lucie, making her way in a world which will use her even as she uses the men. Camilla Arfwedson manages to make an impression in a single thirty second scene, and Zoe Wanamaker also has an effective cameo.
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7/10
Shame about the lead...
revenge_of_the_joolsby18 August 2009
Warning: Spoilers
I wish I could give this a higher mark, I really do. So why do I want to, and why can't I? Reasons I want to give this 10/10: - Tom Sturridge as Willian Herbert of Pembroke. A pre-Wildean Dorian Gray mixture of charm, innocence and debauchery, Sturridge carried a beam of light with him the first time he stepped into the frame. Androginously attractive and rather endearing, he made for a believable begetter of the sonnets.

  • Zoe Wanamaker as the Countess of Pembroke - Sam Wanamaker, responsible for the recreation of a third Globe Theatre on the London South Bank, would be proud. Her few minutes on screen are glorious.


  • Anna Chancellor as Anne Shakespeare: ex-baddie Miss Bingley from the BBC Pride and Prejudice is brilliant as the forgotten and embittered wife of a man who's a father only when it suits him, and no husband at all.


  • The lavish sets, costumes and photography make for truly stunning viewing.


Reasons I want to give this a 4/10:

  • Rupert Graves as William Shakespeare. I found his performance as flat, stale and unprofitable as were for Hamlet all the uses of this world. Most unsympathetic. I am aware that Shakespeare was no saint; but when you feel more sorry for the physician who has to tell Shakespeare he's got the pox than for the genius who's actually got the pox, there's a problem. The miscasting was even more glaringly obvious seeing this in the wake of an episode of the series "Will Shakespeare": Tim Curry, who with the sarky sparkle in his eye seems born to play Cristopher Marlowe, is an OTT a Shakespeare as I've ever seen - but he works. Aggrandised as his emotions might be, they feel real, unlike Graves's wooden Bard. Though I'm quite the bardolater (I'm a student of Shakespeare for crying out loud!), all I felt for the protagonist of a waste of shame was that he was a nasty little so and so; the immortal lines from the sonnets which were continually voice-overed did not manage to redeem him in the slightest.


-The tacky device of actually writing down the occasional pithy quote for us meditate upon. Patronising, and detrimental to the dramatic illusion.

In conclusion, this is a worthy addition to the neverending Mr W.H./Dark Lady debate, and a production for the most part up there with the standards one has come to expect of the BBC - shame about the wasted potential.
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