Politics & Power Quote by Anita Diament

Anita Diament’s praise lands like a confession wrapped in a compliment: she admires the craft, then admits the soft spot that helped it win her over. Calling Shakespeare in Love “smart writing of an alternative view of history” is more pointed than it sounds. She’s not just applauding a period romance; she’s endorsing a very contemporary kind of historical storytelling, one that treats the past as a set of costumes and power dynamics to remix, not a museum to tiptoe through. “Alternative view” signals permission: bend the archive if the emotional truth feels right.

Then she pivots to performance: “beautiful acting.” It’s a clean, audience-facing metric, less about fidelity than seduction. That matters because the movie’s entire strategy is seduction - it courts viewers into believing its playful myth of Shakespeare by making it feel lived-in, intimate, charismatic.

The final line is the tell. “Like most Americans, I’m a sucker for the accent” is Diament being knowingly unserious about a serious cultural habit: Anglophilia as shorthand for sophistication. The accent functions as a social filter; it makes dialogue sound smarter, desire sound classier, history sound more legitimate. By framing it as a national weakness, she’s both self-deprecating and gently critical, implicating the audience in how easily “quality” can be confused with a particular kind of British sheen.

Subtext: yes, the film is clever. Also, cleverness isn’t the only reason it works. It flatters our ear, and we happily let it.