As people who have been following my months-long mission to read all of Shakespeare’s plays will know, I haven’t had much luck with his comedies. I found “Love’s Labour’s Lost” the most interesting but still a bit flawed, and followed that up with actively disliking the first of the truly famous comedies in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. So I was looking forward to “The Taming of the Shrew” with some trepidation, especially since it was a play that I had read in high school and remembered enjoying. Was I not going to like it, in line with the other comedies? Or was I going to enjoy it like I did before, meaning that there was something about it that the other comedies didn’t have?
As it turns out, I actually quite liked “The Taming of the Shrew”.
The basic plot (for the few people who aren’t aware of it) is that there’s a rich gentleman who has two daughters. The younger, Bianca, is being courted by two suitors and a third joins in soon afterwards, but the father insists that his older daughter, Katharina, must be married before his younger daughter can be married. Unfortunately, Katharina is noted for being a shrew and so no one wants to marry her. One of the suitors finds that a friend of his, Petruchio, has arrived in the city and is looking for a rich woman to marry, and isn’t at all afraid at marrying a shrew, promising that he will “tame” her. The rest of the play follows his courting and taming of Katharina, with a subplot where the new suitor poses as a tutor for Bianca while his servant pretends to be him, which causes issues when the suitor’s father arrives in town.
Compared to some of the earlier comedies, this is a comedy that actually has a solid comedic premise and plot. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” has that as well, but it has multiple ones that aren’t that well aligned and yet are also individually important. Here, there is the main plot with the taming of the shrew and a minor aside plot with the deception. Also, most of the humour is not as mean-spirited as some of the humour in the other plays. While one can argue that Petruchio treats Katharina rather badly, the play does make it clear that he’s doing that not to, say, drive her insane (as he insists that the sun is out and then changes to insisting that it’s night and the moon is out, for example) but instead simply to break through her rather insulting nature. So he’s not doing that to insult her, but instead as a direct move against her. Of course, how you feel about that humour will depend on how you view whether that sort of ploy is valid or reasonable, which famously a number of people — especially feminists — don’t appreciate all that much. Other than that, the humour between, say, Petruchio and his servant is based on simple misunderstandings as Petruchio is prone to using words that are ambiguous that his servant happens to interpret in exactly the wrong way, to humourous effect. Also, in line with that, the humour is far more based on banter than on speeches, and Shakespeare, as I’ve said before, has an incredible gift for banter.
That being said, I have to address the actual taming, because that aspect is what makes people call “The Taming of the Shrew” Shakepeare’s most misogynistic play. Coming in and going from my memory of the play, I was sure that it was fair to call it misogynistic. I remembered that he was demanding and totally unfair, but thought that a way to go about it would be to present that as him trying to out-demand her to show how it felt when someone as unreasonably demanding as she could be. And the play actually does that. When he’s courting her, he takes every insult she slings at him and still insists that she’s wonderful and that he wants to marry her, and when they are married he is deliberately unreasonably demanding, which causes her — as someone concerned with social niceties — to actually have to try to pull him back instead of being demanding herself. So if you can see her as being unreasonably demanding and insulting and his goal being to get her to see how much that hurts others and so see how it’s not a good way to be, you won’t really find it misogynistic.
However, I do think the play ends up being problematic in that regard, for a couple of reasons. The first is that Petruchio starts off simply wanting a rich wife with a good dowry, and while I think most people — and certainly most defenders of the play — think that he does come to care for her, there isn’t really anything in the play that indicates that. It’s perfectly valid to believe that at the end of the play he still thinks of her more as a rich wife than as a full wife that he cares about. This is one of the things that blunts her last statement that if her husband asks her to do something out of his “honest will” she should just go along with it, as that would imply that if he cares about her and thinks that it’s the best thing for them then that definitely isn’t something to get stubborn over (unless it’s clearly wrong). If he doesn’t really care about her and instead cares more about himself, then that doesn’t work. The second issue is that when she says that it follows on from him asking her to do things that she clearly doesn’t or shouldn’t want to do just so that he can win a bet with his friend and her father. That in and of itself wouldn’t be bad, but the second thing he asks — for her to take off her hat and step on it, presumably a hat that she likes — comes after he’s already won the bet, and he basically says after they’ve conceded that he’s going to prove it even more so with that. So it doesn’t seem like he’s asking for that out of his “honest will”, because the only thing that could be satisfied by that is his own ego. That she obeys without question, then, doesn’t reflect a relationship where he asks her to do things that she might not want to do because it’s necessary to gain an advantage for both of them, but instead one where he does that to buttress his own ego.
I’m going to talk about an attempt to modernize this — “Ten Things I Hate About You” — later, but I want to note that a lot of attempts to modernize it that try to avoid that tend to do so by dropping the “taming” part, which turns it into more of a feuding couple plot than what it was originally. Or, at least, that’s my impression. But I think you can make the basic plot work without falling into what might seem like misogyny. What you have to start with, I think, is the idea that Katharina, as someone in that time, does indeed want to get married, but isn’t all that impressed with the suitors available, which would also allow you to fix the scene where she ties up and beats Bianca demanding to know which suitor she likes by having her essentially be asking her which of those idiots she cares for (which can then work to have Bianca reject both for the new suitor). So she wants to find someone that she can at least respect in some way, and is frustrated that so many men aren’t at all worthy of her respect. However, her father has put her in a terrible situation where he wants her sister to get married, her sister wants to get married, but she has to be married before her sister can. So Petruchio can come in and impress her by not being driven away by her insults but also demonstrating that he’s clever, and that impresses her (which was what I suggested the movie “Ophelia” could have done with Ophelia and Hamlet). So he’s a more worthy candidate than the others, which is why she agrees and even looks forward to the wedding. However, she’s still spoiled and still used to being able to get her own way by demanding it, and so Petruchio breaks out being overly demanding to, as noted above, show her what it feels like to be on the receiving end of that. At the end, he should only ask her to do those things precisely to win the bet, and the bet should be clearly something that benefits them both. The best way to do this in line with the original ending is to make it so that Bianca’s father still thinks that she’s the nicer and more obedient of the two, and makes the bet with Petruchio for control of his estate, and so he only overdoes the commands to make it clear that Katharina is more obedient than Bianca is, and only to the point necessary to convince her father.
Doing it this way, I think, would eliminate the more problematic aspects of the play while still maintaining the idea that the shrew does, in fact, need to be tamed and that her being tamed is a good thing, not just for him, but also for her.
That being said, I still did enjoy it. It’s by far the most enjoyable of the comedies for me so far, which also indicates that I can enjoy one of Shakespeare’s comedies. Up next is what I assume is another historical drama in “King Richard the Second”.
Thoughts on “Ten Things I Hate About You”
August 8, 2022I had watched this movie a long time ago, and remembered kinda enjoying it. Then, I was reading “The Taming of the Shrew”, and musing about modern takes on the play that would be explicitly trying to tone down the purported misogyny, and remembered that I had picked this up cheap at some point and never watched it, and so decided it would be a good time to watch it, mostly in order to see how it tried to avoid the issues of the play while still staying true to the overall story. And it turns out that what it did was removing the “taming” aspect of it entirely, which turns it into a more standard teen romantic comedy.
The basic idea does follow on from the basic structure of the play. Kat and Bianca’s father is a obstetrician, and so sees a lot of teenage pregnancies and so does not want his children to end up in that state themselves, and so is a bit overly protective of them in that regard. This is what spawns his demand that Bianca can’t date until Kat does, and Kat doesn’t date. She’s also very aggressive, interrupting her English class to demand more women authors despite her doing that seemingly every class and doing it to a black teacher who points that out to her, and running over people in her soccer match in a way that would get her a red card in most games. Meanwhile, a newcomer to the school falls in love with and wants to date Bianca, while she’s drawn the attention of the Alpha Jock of the school who simply wants to sleep with her. The newcomer finds the guy to date Kat, and he and the Alpha Jock pay him to date Kat, where they clash at times but seem to start to care about each other. Meanwhile, the newcomer isn’t on Bianca’s radar even as he tries to tutor her in French, because she’s interested in the Alpha Jock, but after a party starts to dislike him and like the newcomer, which culminates in them going to prom. The Alpha Jock, upset that he paid money to Kat’s suitor to not get Bianca, reveals the deal and Kat storms off, and when he badmouths Bianca the newcomer tries to stand up for her and gets hit, but then Bianca clocks the Alpha Jock — who had sex with and then dumped Kat earlier when Kat didn’t want to have sex with him again — for her date, her sister, and herself, and the movie ends with Kat and her beau making up while Bianca dates the newcomer.
As it stands, there is no real taming of Kat in this movie. Thus, it works a lot more like a standard teen romance where the two of them have to feel around their feelings for each other around a plot where misunderstandings can occur and get in the road than with him having to really break down her barriers and find a way to get her to let go of her issues and anger and become a better person. So there is no speech where she talks at all about how she’s stopped being so much of a shrew and why she did that, and so no equivalent to the actual taming of the shrew or any real acknowledgement that she ever was. So that aspect is totally lost.
What this does, ironically, is make it so that Bianca has the more interesting arc. In the play, the audience’s perception of her moves from her being all sweetness and light to her becoming more of a shrew herself, while in the movie she is still somewhat sweet but is shown or at least talked about as being more selfish from the start, which she loses at the end of the movie. There’s even a scene where the newcomer, frustrated with feeling that she is using him, asks her if she was always that selfish and she sheepishly and morosely says “Yes”, realizing that she has indeed been a bit selfish. She also picks up or at least demonstrates that she’s not that different from Kat and has picked up her ability to stand up for herself, pushing the newcomer to ask her out and, of course, beating up the Alpha Jock at the end, while realizing that what he could offer isn’t worth having but what the newcomer has to offer is. So she has the better arc and ends up being the most interesting and sympathetic character in the movie.
The movie itself isn’t bad, and is still a movie that I might want to rewatch at some point, so it goes into my closet of movies to rewatch at some point. However, as noted, despite its copious references to the play and to Shakespeare — mainly names and the interest of one of the minor characters in Shakespeare — it doesn’t really capture “The Taming of the Shrew” because it leaves the taming part out (unless you count Bianca’s conversion as that, but she’s too nice from the start for that to work). Still, that doesn’t count against it as its own work, but does make it a poor movie as a follow-on to “The Taming of the Shrew”.
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