Let’s face it: of Shakespeare’s many plays, many of which have aged poorly to one degree or another, the worst may very well be The Taming of the Shrew. While 17th century attitudes towards Jews or racial minorities in other Shakespeare works can be played in different ways to make them more socially acceptable today, you really couldn’t do that too easily with The Taming of the Shrew. It’s just too much about “taming” a woman into being obedient to her husband in all things.
It’s problematic. That said, it’s still a better known play than, say, Pericles, but the BBC found someone to put into this one that may have helped make this one of their more noteworthy adaptations.
Notable cast members: How about John Cleese? Yes, one of the Monty Python guys and the creator and star of Fawlty Towers got the male lead, Petruchio, the wealthy merchant who sets out to tame the shrewish Katherine. Beyond that, there’s one Frank Thorton, whom I recognized as one of the cast members of the British sitcom Are You Being Served? that used to air on PBS every weeknight.
Trivia: Print versions of The Taming of the Shrew include a prologue most productions probably don’t do for a very good reason. A couple well-off types decide to trick a drunken tinker into thinking he’s a nobleman and the rest of the play is a performance done for him. The thing is, aside from some lines at the end of Act 1, there’s nothing else to all that. How does Christopher Sly react after all is said and done? No one alive today knows. I would think Shakespeare wrapped that plot up, but if he did, the lines and scenes are lost. It’s just as well, I suppose. Making all the rest a play-within-a-play seems a might complicated when all is said and done.
The play: Apparently, if Wikipedia is to be believed, Cleese wasn’t interested in doing this production at first. He’d never done Shakespeare, wasn’t impressed with the first two seasons’ worth of plays, and generally didn’t care for the way most productions of Taming of the Shrew essentially made the play a broad farce. Director Jonathan Miller had done a stage version before, the partial basis for this one, and he essentially promised Cleese that this version would not be like that.
And the version they made really works. It’s a lot quieter. Essentially the idea here was Cleese’s Petruchio is something of a puritan, and his way of “taming” Katherine is, essentially, to treat her the same way she treats everyone else. He’s more wry and ironic than loud and boisterous. If anything, the other characters are a lot more broadly comic than Cleese is.
And really, this may be the best we can hope for in giving us an adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew that sticks to Shakespeare’s actual words as opposed to other adaptations like, say, 10 Things I Hate About You that keep the basic plot but skip the part where Petruchio tortures Kate into submission with starvation and sleep deprivation. How, then, should a production depict Kate’s “taming”? Is she so out of it from lack of food and sleep that she’ll agree to anything Petruchio says, or is she finally getting what’s going on and playing along because it makes life better? I’m not sure either option really works in a way that can’t be seen as sexist or that doesn’t paint Petruchio as abusive and the play as misogynistic.
Still, I rather liked this adaptation. It worked well with what material it had, and Cleese, despite his lack of experience, was some rather inspired casting.
Grade: Again, this may be the best you can do with this play given the materal. A- And I did not expect to give this grade to this play.
Next: Up next is one I’ve seen some scenes of a few times as I’ve used it as a teaching tool. We dealt with Shakespeare’s most misogynistic play, so next up would be the anti-Semitic one, The Merchant of Venice.
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