Professors Kishlansky (left) and Garber have weighed in about Oscar-nominated Shakespeare in Love (below).

The Bard himself just might like it.

Shakespeare in Love, a cinematic romance centering on the life of William Shakespeare, is replete with swordplay, a towering romance, and revisionist history. With glowing reviews and 13 Academy Award nominations, the film may walk away with a fistful of Oscars when the awards are announced this Sunday, March 21.

Shakespeare in Love has put a spotlight not just on the life of the legendary poet and dramatist, but on Harvard's Shakespearean experts, who are being quoted in everything from The New York Times to the ABC Nightly News to Harper's magazine to cable television's History Channel.

The film recounts how the young, struggling, 16th-century English playwright got his big break with Romeo and Juliet. The film depicts how the love of a woman jump-started his genius and inspired plays that would endure through time.

And almost all of it is a lie.

"We think there was someone called William Shakespeare who wrote plays and that one of his plays was called Romeo and Juliet," quipped Marjorie Garber, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English and director of the Center for Literary and Cultural Studies, "but not everyone is even convinced of that." Garber said she enjoyed the film. "It's completely unhistorical and witty."

Garber, whose thoughts on Shakespeare will appear in the April issue of Harper's and on ABC News this week, is joined in the spotlight by Mark Kishlansky, the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of History, who took part in a panel discussion sponsored by the A&E Network's History Channel.

Kishlansky was among a group of historians who discussed the merits of the five films nominated in this year's Best Movie category (see the accompanying story), which are all historical films. The discussion is scheduled to air at 10 p.m. on Thursday, March 18.

Audiences have been intrigued by the Elizabethan period portrayed in movies such as Shakespeare in Love and Elizabeth. Colin Firth and Judi Dench of Shakespeare in Love are pictured at left. Both Professors Kishlansky and Garber said the movie, despite its departures from fact, was engaging. They also thought it did a good job of evoking the mood of the era.

Stephen Greenblatt, the Harry Levin Professor of Literature, also weighed in on the Shakespeare in Love discussion in his Feb. 6 op-ed piece in The New York Times. He wrote that the filmmakers didn't think American audiences could handle the Bard's sexual ambiguities, which are familiar to Shakespeare scholars.

Despite his fame, little is known about the life -- or sex life -- of William Shakespeare. We do know he was married and had several children. We know he was separated from his wife for several years while working in the theater.

We also know that the sonnet, "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day," which melts the heart of Gwyneth Paltrow's Viola de Lesseps in Shakespeare in Love, was among 126 sonnets written to a fair-haired, wealthy young man.

Viola de Lesseps, whose love inspires Shakespeare in the movie, never existed.

Greenblatt, the general editor of The Norton Shakespeare (1997), said in the Times op-ed that a more interesting movie might have been made about an affair between Shakespeare and rival playwright Christopher Marlowe, who is also thought to have been homosexual.

Greenblatt, who is on leave and could not be reached for comment, writes that he suggested this idea several years ago to screenwriter Marc Norman, who along with Tom Stoppard wrote the film. The suggestion went unheeded. No studio would buy the idea, Norman said.

But Greenblatt maintains that Americans love a winner, and he guesses that audiences would have been carried along by Shakespeare's surging talent as the film progresses, regardless of what sparked the surge.

"The looks of astonishment on the faces of the first audience of Shakespeare's tragedy are the looks of an audience that knows it is encountering a level of skill that it had never before imagined possible," Greenblatt wrote. "But perhaps the studios underestimated how much Americans love talent: even if the film had depicted Shakespeare writing his sonnet to a fair young man, audiences may have delighted in his overwhelming success."

Both Kishlansky and Garber said the movie, despite its departures from fact, was engaging. They also thought it did a good job of evoking the mood of the era, and Kishlansky said he enjoyed watching the impact Romeo and Juliet must have had on that unsuspecting, first audience.

Kishlansky, who has written extensively on early modern England and teaches a course called Shakespeare's England, said that that experience is impossible today -- even for those who haven't seen the play -- because Romeo and Juliet is a part of our culture.

"I don't think anyone really encounters the play for the first time today because the ideas and language have so thoroughly entered the culture," Kishlansky said.

Garber said the film puts an undeniably 20th-century spin on Shakespeare's time. Though men of the day did play women's parts on stage, for example, they were elegant and believable, not obviously guys in drag playing for laughs as in Shakespeare in Love.

She said the film successfully marries two modern passions -- genius and love -- in one neat package.

"The title is irresistible: Shakespeare in Love. It's exactly what we want," Garber said. "We want to know what's the source of genius -- and it's love, which our culture values most of all."

Kishlansky said he admired the way the movie puts the act of literary creation into context.

Shakespeare in Love centers on the origins of Romeo and Juliet, one of Shakespeare's early great tragedies. But when we first meet the young author, he is struggling without much enthusiasm to finish a comedy titled Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate's Daughter.

Some advice from rival playwright Christopher Marlowe, comments from the cast and crew, and, most of all, a clandestine affair with Viola de Lesseps, a wealthy young woman far above his station, all contribute to the process of creative alchemy by which Shakespeare's unpromising idea is transformed into the familiar tale of star-crossed lovers. Kishlansky thought this aspect of the film, while clearly invented, demonstrated an aspect of Shakespeare's writing that tends to be overlooked.

"I thought it conveyed the idea that Shakespeare worked in a theatrical company and that the members of the company must have made suggestions which were incorporated into the plays," Kishlansky said. "The details may be apocryphal, but I'm sure that is more or less how things actually worked rather than the idea that Shakespeare sat in a room in isolation and produced finished copies of great literature."

Though the scholars appreciate the attention the film has brought to that historical period, they caution against reading too much into it. It is, most of all, an interesting tale.

"As a 20th-century play about Shakespeare, it's a fantasy," Garber said. "I think it's a good yarn. It was meant to sell a lot of movie tickets."

And that's something Shakespeare would probably understand.