Shakespeare's Comedies: A Very Short Introduction by Bart van Es

Author:Bart van Es [van Es, Bart]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780198723356
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2016-02-05T00:00:00+00:00

A film based on Shakespeare’s plot

Successful films of Shakespeare comedies are a comparative rarity, in part because the stage world, with it caricatured action and set-piece dialogues, is so hard to place in a real environment, which the window of the movie theatre almost inevitably displays. Shakespeare’s stories, however, because they concern relationships, can translate more easily onto the screen. The list of successful films based on the comedies is substantial. Fairly recent examples include 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), based on The Taming of the Shrew; She’s the Man (2006), based on Twelfth Night; and Get Over It (2001) and Were the World Mine (2008), which are both adaptations of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. All four of these movies are set, at least substantially, in American high schools: locations with plenty of neutral spaces, a large youthful population, and a set of authority figures whose status can be challenged without genuine anarchy being a threat. The American high school (as an imaginative space) has remarkable similarities to the world of Shakespearean comedy. Also worth noticing, however, are the key points on which Hollywood and Shakespeare take opposite sides.

In 10 Things I Hate About You Julia Stiles plays Kat, an independent minded grunge-loving feminist teenager at an affluent West Coast day school. The mood of the place is fairly preppy (there is even a club for future MBAs). Kat’s sister Bianca, played by Larisa Oleynik, is a prize asset in this environment: she is pretty, rather virginal, and loves designer clothes. Of course Kat is also beautiful, but she has contempt for those around her: in opposition to the dominant jock culture, she likes Sylvia Plath and is applying for a place to study at the left-leaning Sarah Lawrence College. It is easy to see the connections between this environment and the mercantile Padua of Shakespeare’s play, where Katherine alone resists the conventions of femininity and courtship, frightening everyone (especially her sister) with her aggressive stance. In the film, Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays a new student at ‘Padua High School’ who immediately falls in love with Bianca. Like Lucentio in The Taming of the Shrew, however, he faces a problem because Bianca’s father will not allow Bianca to date unless her ‘shrewish’ sister also finds a man. The obvious solution is the same as that in Shakespeare’s comedy. Gordon-Levitt and another suitor decide to hire a willing third party (Heath Ledger playing the equivalent of the fearless Petruchio) who will court Kat/Katherine while they compete for Bianca’s favours on their own terms.

So far, so similar. But what is different? The main thing an audience is likely to remember about Shakespeare’s Shrew is Katherine’s ‘taming’ by means of Petruchio’s wildness: he starves her, denies her clothing, and insists on her slavish acceptance of his authority, no matter how absurd his commands. Even by 16th-century standards this treatment is shocking and the model of wifely obedience on which the play closes was almost as crazy then as it is now. Shakespeare’s

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