25 of the most swoon-worthy romance movies of all time
By Amy Kaplan
Shakespeare in Love
People say that every movie can be traced back to a storyline from a William Shakespeare play — and they are usually right. So it’s no shock that a movie inspired by the playwright himself would make my list. The relationship featured in the movie is purely fiction (some historians even believe that Shakespeare was gay) but that’s kind of what makes the movie fun. Imagine falling in love with the greatest writer of the time — one known to be hopelessly romantic no less. Well, in Shakespeare in Love you get to see it play out and there’s really nothing sweeter (or more passionate).
The movie is the tale of a (probably) fictional relationship between William Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes) and a young woman who poses as a man in order to star in one of the writer’s plays (Gwyneth Paltrow). Shakespeare is suffering from writer’s block and is in need of a new muse when he stumbles across a beautiful upper-class woman who just so happens to be the same woman posing as a man in his play. We watch their already forbidden relationship extend to even more dangerous ground as they begin to meet in secret, even though she’s promised to another man, and Queen Elizabeth even gets involved.
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Don’t worry if you aren’t a fan of the actual playwright, you’ll probably still like this movie.
This movie was a bonafide hit as it won a whopping SEVEN Academy Awards the year it was nominated. If that isn’t a stamp of approval I don’t know what is!
Fun Fact: You may recognize the face of Shakespeare as Commander Waterford in harrowing Hulu series, The Handmaid’s Tale, but we promise he’s much nicer in this movie than he is in the streaming show.
Release date: December 11, 1998