"Too many words," I complained while a youth first exposed to the Bard and so voiced the tedium I felt under the deluge of verbiage, poetry or no, accustomed to dusty cowpokes who spoke only in monosyllables between gunfights or, say, gangsters who rattled curses like machine gunfire ... until this lively Zeffirelli production was shown me. And its still my fav Shakespeare, embodied with hew and vigor, muscle and blood and bone by Burton and Taylor in my fav film by them. Inspires me to take 30 minutes to say "I love you!" A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

The film stars real-life husband and wife Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, then the hottest celebrity couple in the world. The themes of male chauvinism and feminism which underpin the comedic plot are brought out in a way that would have made the film instantly relevant to a 1960s audience. Provocative satire in sexual politics in the late 16th century. The fact that the play still resonates and can raise a smile suggests that things haven?t changed much in the past four hundred years vis-à-vis male-female relationships.