The Taming of the Shrew and 10 Things I Hate About You: A modern double feature

 

William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew was adapted to the screen as 10 Things I Hate about You – a RomCom that showed up among the top thirty RomComs on an internet list that we searched last night to have a movie night with the younger stepdaughter.  She wanted to watch a movie that would not be too demanding and the reluctant wife and I agreed that 10 Reasons that I Hate You sounded cute – and it was.  The reluctant wife, having some affection for the Richard Burton/ Elizabeth Taylor version of Taming, recognized and informed of us of many of the allusions to Shrew, including, for example, that the High School is named Padua- the name of the town in Shrew.  Well, because we were already streaming 10 Reasons, we simply called up – as if by magic – Burton and Taylor to perform Shrew.  

Remember when you had to go to a theater, or wait for something to be offered at a particular time on TV, or go to a store to get a DVD?  How much more gratifying – in a weird parallel to the induction of the play that Zeffirelli – the director of the Burton Taylor version - left out of the movie – it is to be able to conjure up what you want to see on a whim.  In the Induction, a drunken tinker is convinced that he is a lord and the play is performed for him – sort of, in my mind, like the play that Hamlet commissions to be played for his doomed stepfather in the climactic scene of that play.  In Shrew, the entire play is framed as a play – one that is performed for common folk who believe they are nobles – and it includes much play of nobles being common folk and common folk pretending to be nobles as part of a variety of ruses to win the hand of Bianca, but I get ahead of myself…

10 Reasons I Hate You  is set in a Seattle High School, Cameron James, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, is transferred into the school and is immediately smitten by the unattainable Bianca Stratford, (Larisa Oleynik), the beautiful but vapid younger sister of Kat (Julia Stiles)– the bad girl of Padua High.  Where the Shrew, as the older sister, needs to be wed before the younger sister can be, in 10 Reasons, the girls’ Obstetrician father, who is obsessed with the fear that they will become pregnant, softens his edict that neither of them can ever date by deciding that the younger sister cannot date until the older one does – something that he sees zero chance of happening as she works so hard to repel everyone in her path.  Cameron, intent on dating Bianca, tries to convince the bad boy in school, Patrick Verona (Heath Ledger) to woo Kat and, when this fails, induces the vapid and pretty boy Joey to pay Patrick to go on a date with her – the catch is that Joey thinks he will get to date Bianca as the prize, something Bianca is initially intent on as well.

To think of Shakespeare as the father of the RomCom, takes some getting used to, but it makes sense –  he is the foremost dramatist of the English Language and wrote in a wide variety of styles.  What audiences demand now is more backstory – and we discover in 10 reasons not simply that Kat is shrewish, but that she used to be popular and to cultivate that popularity.  At first we are led to believe that she may have become more difficult in the wake of her mother’s disappearance – at first it seems like she is dead, but later we are told that she left, but ultimately we learn that the “cause” of Kat’s rejecting high school society is something else: that she, after having sex with Joey when a freshman, because it was the thing to do, asked him to slow things down as she wasn’t sure she wanted to continue to be sexual, and he rejected her – and she has since quit doing things that others expect of her ever since.

With no explanation of Katherine’s shrewishness, Shakespeare moves away from the particular and confronts us with a force of nature unbridled.  She is simply horrid – and a sharp contrast to her sweet sister Bianca – at whom she rails for no apparent reason other than Bianca being appealing – in sharp contrast to how Katherine presents herself.  This play has been criticized for being misogynistic (as has psychoanalysis), and when read or viewed as the wooing of a Shrew, it is hard, from a modern perspective, not to be brought up short by the cruel ways in which the wild man Petruchio, the suitor who is convinced to pursue her by the size of her dowry, tames her.  But if we remember the Induction and think of this as a play conjured up for us to wonder about identity – including especially the identity of the viewer – we might wonder about whether we are confronted by a literal wooing and marriage of a man and a woman or whether we are in the land of symbolism and whether we are deconstructing what it means to be a man (perhaps wild but needing to tame) and a woman (perhaps wild and needing to be tamed).  And we might further wonder whether we are thinking about the masculine and the feminine – aspects of the self that are both related to but independent of gender – so that I, male or female may be wild and wanting to both tame and be tamed.

You might be thinking, at this point, that I am playing modern with a four hundred year old play.  And I may well be doing exactly that.  But I also think that the play was likely performed for Elizabeth, who, in the anachronistic movie Shakespeare in Love states that she knows “something about being a woman in a man’s world.”  And if this play were crafted for her – especially by someone like Shakespeare or Edward de Vere, Elizabeth’s possible lover and one of the possible writers of the Shakespearean plays, a person who was both defending a world where nobles were nobles and commoners were common as men are men and women are women, but is also writing for a stage where women are played by men and a world where commoners are rising through economic means to outstrip the wealth of nobles – the issues of identity were very much in play for him.  And, even if all of this weren’t for in play him (a far weaker argument, I know), they are for us, and we can use his play to look at our world, as the writer and director have done with 10 things.

So, what if Katherine – or Kate – or Kat – is a symbol of the feminine: the feral, untamed wild part of us that, at least in the Burton rendition of the role, a masculine power as wild as Petruchio can, at best, hope to have some influence on?    (It really is fun to wonder about Burton and Taylor playing these roles and to wonder about the ways in which this is a play on the “real life” (as if their lives could have been real) interactions between them)  But in the symbolic – the feminine may symbolize many things – but for a moment, let me borrow it as a symbol of the untamed, wild, aboriginal parts of ourselves that Freud called the id.  Petruchio then becomes that part of ourselves – that tries to assert power over our untamed aspects – OK, the ego – and it might take a wild ego to tame a wild id.  And while we are here, because symbols are plastic, might this pair not also symbolize the relationship between society, parents, and here I will insert the anachronistic therapist, and the wild elements in citizens, children, and the mad among us?

If we take the latter metaphor, and we, for a moment, suggest that Shakespeare is writing a manual for future therapists (OK, now I have gone anachronistically mad), might he be proposing something like this:  In a household with only a father present – the mother is absent without explanation in both Shrew and 10 things – we have two diametrically opposed feminine objects that emerge.  The one is unbridled and seemingly untameable.  The father adores her, but from afar.  He does not understand her.  The other is sweet, demure, but largely uninteresting.  The wooing of these characters demands two very different suitors.  Katherine (and Kat) are wooed by men who appear to be their equal as forces of nature – they are bad boys.  At least in the Burton rendition – and more starkly in 10 things – they turn out to actually not have been as bad as all that.  They are the ruffians with hearts of gold – and they help the shrew return to her true roots as a someone who wants to be tamed – who wants to be loved and is willing to be lovely to achieve that – once she can count on a man (or masculine force – whatever that might mean for us at this moment) to be reliably present – to give her what she really needs.

Bianca – our sweet feminine nature (again, whatever that means for us in this moment – see a post on Transparent for ideas about that current general configurations) responds, ultimately, to the suitor in false clothing.  In Shrew, she is wooed by a noble posing as the servant/scholar to a noble – one who falsely promises to the father more than he can deliver.  In 10 Things, the successful suitor quickly learns French in order to be able to tutor her (something, it turns out, she knows much better than he does), and he is duplicitous, but constant in his direct adoration of her.

What are the results?  The Shrew is successfully tamed.  She sings – perhaps archly – the virtues of obedience.  Despite having been publicly humiliated and ill treated, she has come to heel.  She will and does do as she is told.  And while she may bridle against that – different productions of the play portray this differently – I think there is a sense of a true and genuine marriage between the two entities – whether they are symbolizing man and wife, state and citizen, role and person (e.g. Sovereign and Elizabeth), or, perhaps dubiously and certainly speculatively, therapist and patient.  In 10 things, Kat is freed to articulate her pain – which she eloquently does with her modern rendition of Shakespeare’s 141^st sonnet when she articulates the ten things that she hates about her suitor, but acknowledges that, despite these things, she still deeply loves him.  Stating – in effect – that love for the other does violence to ourselves.  To enter into a compact with nation, person, office or therapist we must violate ourselves in some essential fashion.  And while this hurts (Shakespeare refers to this directly as pain in sonnet 141), it is also the state that ultimately works best for us.

Bianca’s love in both renditions sounds an interesting counter tone.  She is docile from beginning to end – seemingly doing what state, role and person would have her do – but she proves to be, if anything the more recalcitrant of the two.  In Shrew, she disobeys her husband in the climactic scene, failing to come when called for (along with another woman), perhaps indicating that the majority of apparently happy marriages are really anything but that – they are seeming monarchies in which the subjects actually do as they please, disregarding the overlord.  In 10 things, Bianca is the one who outwardly revolts against the father – she actively campaigns to go on dates against his wishes while her sister is actually adored by the father and he seems to not so secretly wish that she would connect with others despite his fears that she will become pregnant.  Bianca also manages to have a much more complex path to connecting with Cameron – she has to discover that Joey is really not for her.  And it is not clear that Cameron ever appreciates who it is that Bianca actually is – she is more than the pretty, but vacuous person we are led to believe she is at the beginning, but neither we nor he get to know all that is there.

OK, this seems like a pretty good stopping place, but let me note in closing that my obsession with treatment here might have to do with reading Sydney Blatt these days.  Blatt proposed that there are two types of depression that are related to two ways of relating to the world – in the first we crave the presence of others.  In the second, we are so self-critical that we can’t imagine that others would want to have anything to do with us.  These two types of depression require different kinds of treatments.  The one who can’t imagine that others want us (I am supposing that to be the Shrew), needs a constant other who can engage them across time and help them learn to trust others.  Ironically, needy ones do not do as well with unlimited contact – they need to learn how to function more autonomously.

Blatt’s observations of depression led him to posit a broader developmental task – that we all need to both connect with others and to function autonomously.  When we are connecting well, that helps us feel competent to function autonomously, and vice versa.  This is a positive spiral.  We can also spiral down – feeling incompetent so that we worry no one will want us, etc.  While Shrew feels violent, it may be that Shakespeare was onto something that it would take 400 years to figure out, that there is a violence to bringing our selves to heel - and whether we do that ourselves or the state, a therapist, or a lover assists us with that, it is an important part of the socialization process - even if something essential about us is lost in process.  I think that his induction - could this be the source of our talking about hypnotic inductions? - invites us to wonder about the ways in which our socialized roles - as men and women, as nobles and commoners - define us - but also for us to wonder about what unites us - how we are all, in some very real sense, essentially similar - some of us just wake up to find ourselves noble or common, male or female.  There is some irony, then, that this defender of the sovereign and of nobility plays to and connects with the common people in ways that will, over the course of the following 400 years, empower them.

 To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index of this blog, link here.

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), if you are on a computer, hit the X button on the upper right of this screen and, on the subsequent screen, hover your cursor over the black line in the upper right area and choose the pop out box that says subscribe and then enter the information.  I'm sorry but I don't currently know how you can subscribe from a mobile device - hopefully you have a computer as well...