The Taming of the Shrew on screen

There have been numerous on screen adaptations of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. The best-known cinematic adaptations are Sam Taylor's 1929 The Taming of the Shrew and Franco Zeffirelli's 1967 The Taming of the Shrew, both of which starred the most famous celebrity couples of their era; Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks in 1929 and Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in 1967. On television, perhaps the most significant adaptation is the 1980 BBC Television Shakespeare version, directed by Jonathan Miller and starring John Cleese and Sarah Badel.
The play has also been reworked numerous times for both cinema and television. Some of the better known adaptations include Kiss Me Kate, a 1953 filmic adaptation of Cole Porter's 1948 musical based on the play, McLintock! (1963), The Taming of the Scoundrel (1980), 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), Deliver Us from Eva (2003) and Isi Life Mein...! (2010).
The earliest cinematic adaptation of the play is D.W. Griffith's eleven-minute The Taming of the Shrew, made for Biograph in 1908, starring Florence Lawrence as Katherina and Arthur V. Johnson as Petruchio. The blurb for the film stated "if we could see ourselves as others see us what models we would become." Also released in Italy in 1908 was the seven-minute La bisbetica domata, directed by Azeglio Pineschi and Lamberto Pineschi. There is no known cast list for this film. Unlike all other silent adaptations, this version retains the Katherina/Bianca sibling rivalry. In 1911, F.R. Benson directed a twelve-minute silent filmed extract from his own Shakespeare Memorial Theatre production, starring himself and his wife, Constance Benson. The film presented a heavily truncated pantomime version of the story, with pieces of Shakespeare's original text used as intertitles throughout. It is now believed lost, although several stills survive in the library archives of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Also released in France in 1911 was La mégère apprivoisée, directed by Henri Desfontaines and starring Madeleine Barjac and Romauld Joubé. It is thought to be the first version to show scenes which take place off-stage in the play; in this case, the wedding and the journey to Petruchio's house. A 1913 Italian version, the twenty-two-minute La bisbetica domata, was directed by Arrigo Frusta and starred Gigetta Morano and Eleuterio Rodolfi. This version also shows scenes not in the play. Another English adaptation was released in 1915, directed by and starring Arthur Backner. This version is also lost. Intended more as a showcase for a new type of sound system than an adaptation of the play, the film consisted entirely of the scene where Petruchio and Katherina first meet. Shot using a process known as Voxograph, the actors spoke the complete text during filming, and when the film was played at the theatre, "the same actors, one at each side of the screen but unseen, repeated the words in what was supposed to be synchronisation. It was expected that the operator, after rehearsal, would be able to project the film so that picture and voice would jibe." The earliest surviving British filmic adaptation is Edwin J. Collins' 1923 version, adapted by Eliot Stannard, and starring Dacia Deane and Lauderdale Maitland. One of a series of forty-minute adaptations of classic texts released under the Gems of Literature banner, only the second half of the film survives, and the final scene is incomplete as a result of print damage. This version very much adopts Petruchio's perspective, and one of the intertitles reads "by noon the next day, though famished and weary for want of food and rest, the Shrew deep in her heart admired the man whose temper is greater than her own."
The first sound adaptation of the play was in 1929; Sam Taylor's The Taming of the Shrew, starring Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks (the first sound adaptation of any Shakespeare play). This version was simultaneously shot as a silent film, and, depending on whether a given theatre was equipped to screen sound films, was released both as a "talkie" and a silent. Using only 500 lines from the original play, and a few lines from David Garrick's 1754 adaptation of Shrew, Catharine and Petruchio, the film is primarily known for how Pickford delivers Katherina's last speech. As she moves through the litany of reasons why a woman should obey her husband, she winks toward Bianca (Dorothy Jordan), unseen by Petruchio. Bianca smiles in silent communication with Katherina, thus acknowledging that Katherina has not been tamed at all. The film opens with a Punch and Judy puppet show which several critics have argued performs a similar function to the Christopher Sly Induction in the original play, but also works to instill a sense of false anticipation in the audience; the puppet show ends with Judy sinking lovingly into Punch's arms after he beats her. In the film, Katherina never sinks into Petruchio's arms. Indeed, Pickford's Katherina is much more resistant than in many stage versions; there is an extended scene of her wrecking Baptista's home, she only agrees to marry Petruchio when he stands on her foot and her scream is taken by the priest as consent, when she falls in the mud on the way to Petruchio's house, he offers to help but she refuses, she rejects meat at the dinner table rather than being tempted by it. Most significantly, when Petruchio outlines his plan to tame her "with kindness" (4.1.195), which is usually a soliloquy, Katherina hears him. She then proceeds to 'out-tame' him; when he messes up the bedclothes, she overturns the entire mattress, sparking a game of one-upmanship which ends when she flings a stool at him and knocks him out. The conversation about the sun and moon, so often seen as a pivotal turning point in the taming is then delivered with a befuddled Petruchio apparently genuinely unsure whether he is looking at the sun or the moon, and a worried Katherina trying to placate him. This is immediately followed by her 'submission' speech, and her wink. Elizabeth Schafer believes this is a Katherina that has not been tamed; "unlike Shakespeare's Katherina, Pickford's Katherina knows what Petruchio is trying to do in taming her and she responds to this tactically and successfully. Her surpassing of Petruchio's outrageous behaviour leaves him nonplussed and concussed." However, Pickford herself was unhappy with the film, and with how Taylor had directed her. In her autobiography, she wrote she wanted to play Katherina as a ferocious woman, but Taylor told her "We don't want any of that heavy stage drama; we want the old Pickford tricks." Pickford said of her performance, "Instead of being a forceful tiger-cat, I was a spitting little kitten."
The next cinematic adaptation was Franco Zeffirelli's 1967 The Taming of the Shrew, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. This version omits the Induction; however, some critics have commented that the title sequence offers a modern 'replacement' for the Induction. The film begins with Lucentio (Michael York) and Tranio (Alfred Lynch) arriving in Padua in the middle of what appears to be a funeral. However, after a moment, the funeral suddenly transforms into a colourful party which moves from the church through the streets as the credits for the film play. Graham Holderness argues of this scene,
Sylvan Barnet believes that in this adaptation, "Kate and Petruchio fall in love almost as soon as they see each other." Barbara Hodgdon has also pointed out that several times, Katherina can be seen gazing longingly at Petruchio. Critics have also noted that Katherina twice consciously decides to go along with Petruchio. The first moment is behind the stained glass window when she silently decides to marry him. The second is when she follows him after he leaves her at the gates of Padua. In this version, Katherina delivers her final speech seemingly without irony. Zeffirelli and Burton both wanted Elizabeth Taylor to deliver the speech ironically, a la Mary Pickford, but Taylor felt it would be better to speak seriously, and then undermine that seriousness by leaving the banquet without Petruchio, thus subverting his apparent authority over her. However, Elizabeth Schafer calls the film "intensely conservative," citing the controversial advertising blurb; "A motion picture for every man who ever gave the back of his hand to his beloved...and for every woman who deserved it. Which takes in a lot of people! Russell Jackson argues the film "offers a 1960s liberation more likely to appeal to Lawrentians than present-day feminists." However, Schafer does go on to acknowledge that "because of the sheer power of Taylor's presence, Katherina occupies a far more memorable filmic space than the dramatic space she has in the original play.
In 1961, Sergei Kolosov directed a black and white theatrical adaptation for Mosfilm, starring Lyudmila Kasatkina and Andrei Alekseyevich Popov. In 1983, John Allison directed a straight-to-video production played out on a bare Elizabethan stage modeled after the Globe Theatre. The film was part of a series called Shakespeare in Performance, which produced adaptations using relatively complete texts intended for use as educational tools in schools, with the primary aim being to show how the plays would have looked when originally performed. The production starred Karen Austin and Franklyn Seales.
Other film versions (which are loose adaptations as opposed to straight translations from stage to screen) include:
The earliest screening of the play is often inaccurately reported to have been broadcast on BBC Television Service in 1939, directed by Dallas Bower and starring Margaretta Scott and Austin Trevor. However, this was an adaptation of Garrick's Catharine and Petruchio, not Shakespeare's Shrew.
The first television performance of the Shakespearean text was in the United States in 1950, broadcast live on CBS as part of the Westinghouse Studio One series. A heavily edited sixty-minute modern-dress performance, written by Worthington Miner and directed by Paul Nickell, it starred Lisa Kirk and Charlton Heston. Katherina's opening speech in 4.3, beginning with "the more my wrong, the more his spite appears" was delivered in the form of a voice-over, an unusual technique at the time. The production is also notable insofar as when she hugs Petruchio after her climactic speech, she winks at the camera. Diana E. Henderson writes "this version relentlessly reiterates conventional post-war ideas of gender difference [...] the production as a whole serves to legitimatise the domestication of women." In 1952, BBC Television Service screened a live adaptation as part of their Sunday Night Theatre series, directed by Desmond Davis and starring Margaret Johnston and Stanley Baker. In 1956, NBC's Hallmark Hall of Fame screened the first colour television adaptation, directed by George Schaefer, and starring Lilli Palmer and Maurice Evans (who also produced). The initial script was written by Michael Hogan, who included the Induction, and kept Sly on stage for the entire show, which culminated with him beating his own wife, much to the delight of the actors who have just performed for him. This script, however, was heavily rewritten by Hall of Fame producer William Nichols, who removed the frame. The production instead opens with Grumio (Jerome Kilty) addressing the camera directly, inviting the audience to view the "antic players." A commedia dell'arte-style production, Katherina and Petruchio first meet in a boxing ring, with their initial encounter, literally, turning into a boxing match.
In 1982, CBC broadcast Peter Dews' production from the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario. Directed for television by Norman Campbell, it starred Sharry Flett and Len Cariou, with Desmond Ellis as Sly. This is the first known television version to include the Sly framework. Elizabeth Schafer describes the effect of using the Induction in a TV production as "Brechtian without ever being too solemn." Also in 1982, the play inaugurated the Channel 4 series Shakespeare Lives! Conceived by director Michael Bogdanov as a direct reply to the BBC Television Shakespeare, which he loathed, the series examined six plays using National Theatre actors and a live audience, with whom Bogdanov and the actors would speak, often re-acting scenes using different suggestions from audience members. The Taming of the Shrew episode was the basis of a two-part Roundhouse Theatre workshop starring Suzanne Bertish and Daniel Massey, which addressed whether or not the play demeans women, or depicts how they are demeaned in society.
In 1986, the television series Moonlighting produced an episode entitled "Atomic Shakespeare", written by Ron Osborn and Jeff Reno (with a writing credit for William 'Budd' Shakespeare), and directed by Will Mackenzie. The episode recasts the show's main characters in a self-referential comedic parody of The Taming of the Shrew. The episode opens with a boy who is annoyed that he has to read The Shrew for his homework, rather than watching his favourite programme, Moonlighting itself. He goes to his room and begins reading, and the episode then takes place in his mind as he imagines the members of the cast of Moonlighting in an adaptation of the play itself, with Cybill Shepherd as Katherina and Bruce Willis as Petruchio.
In 1994, BBC aired an adaptation as part of Shakespeare: The Animated Tales. This version adapted the end of The Taming of a Shrew to round out the frame; after Sly announces he now knows how to tame a shrew, he proudly walks back into the tavern to confront the hostess, but almost immediately, he is flung back out, in exactly the same way as the episode began. Directed by Aida Ziablikova and adapted from Shakespeare by Leon Garfield, it is voiced by Amanda Root and Nigel Le Vaillant, with Malcolm Storry as Sly.
The 1999 Chilean soap opera La Fiera is a free adaptation of the play; the story is set in the late 1990s and relocated to Chiloé, an island in the south of Chile. The role of Katherina is played by Claudia Di Girólamo (as Catalina Chamorro), a tough, free-spirited woman who refuses to settle as a wife; she eventually finds love with Martín Echaurren (Francisco Reyes, who plays the role of Petruchio), one of her suitors. Similarly, the 2000-2001 Brazilian soap opera O Cravo e a Rosa relocates the play to 1920s São Paulo and introduces Catarina, a wealthy feminist who doesn't believe in marriage and slowly finds herself falling in love with a gruff peasant farmer named Petruchio. Created by Walcyr Carrasco, the show starred Adriana Esteves and Eduardo Moscovis as Catarina and Petruchio, respectively. In 2002, the television series One on One produced an episode called "Tame me, I'm a Shrew". Written by Kenny Buford and directed by Dana De Vally Piazza the episode depicts the main character, Breanna (Kyla Pratt) getting the leading part in a school performance of The Taming Of The Shrew. Upon finding Shakespeare's language difficult and out of date, she creates a rap version. However, she allows her ego to get the better of her, and unconsciously attempts to take over the production from the director, who ultimately fires her, and hires her best friend for the role instead. In 2003, an episode of The Anna Nicole Show, called "Shrew's the Boss?", featured Anna Nicole Smith attending acting classes in Los Angeles, where she performs the first meeting between Katherina and Petruchio, alongside actor Danny Bonaduce.
In 2005, BBC One broadcast an adaptation for the ShakespeaRe-Told series, written by Sally Wainwright and directed by David Richards. Written in modern prose, the episode relocates the story to contemporary London, where Katherine (Shirley Henderson) is an abrasive career politician who is told she must find a husband if she wants to become the party leader. Meanwhile, her supermodel sister Bianca (Jaime Murray) has fallen in love with Lucentio (Santiago Cabrera) and wants to marry him, but Bianca's manager, Harry (Stephen Tompkinson), has long believed she will marry him. To put him off, Bianca announces she will not marry until her sister is married (as she believes Katherine will never marry). Harry then arranges a meeting between his friend Petruchio (Rufus Sewell) and Katherine. Harry bets Petruchio that he will not be able to woo Katherine, so, determined to prove him wrong, Petruchio sets out to win her over. At the end of the episode, Katherine's 'submission' speech is triggered when Bianca is annoyed that Lucentio refuses to sign a pre-nuptial agreement. Katherine states it is a woman's duty to love and obey her husband, but with the requirement that he do precisely the same for her. Petruchio even willingly becomes a "house-husband" for their young children whilst Katherine is elected as Prime Minister.
In 2009, ABC Family adapted the 1999 film 10 Things I Hate About You as a sitcom of the same name, starring Lindsey Shaw and Ethan Peck.
In 2014, the play featured in an episode of My Shakespeare on Sky Arts. Each episode of the show is hosted by an actor discussing their favourite Shakespearean play with other actors and theatrical professionals. Scholars are also interviewed in each episode, and clips from various productions are shown, as well as scenes shot specifically for the show at Shakespeare's Globe. The Taming of the Shrew episode is hosted by Morgan Freeman, who had played Petruchio in 1990 at the Delacorte Theater. Interviewees include Tracey Ullman (who played Katherina to Freeman's Petruchio), Sinéad Cusack (Barry Kyle's 1982 production at the Barbican), Brian Cox and Fiona Shaw (Jonathan Miller's 1987 RSC production), Julie Taymor (directed a 1988 production at the Triplex Theatre in New York), Germaine Greer (feminist writer), Jonathan Bate (Provost at Worcester College, Oxford), Farah Karim-Cooper (Head of Education at Shakespeare's Globe), and Laura Maguire (Professor of English, Magdalen College, Oxford). Footage is included from D.W. Griffith's 1908 film, Franco Zeffirelli's 1967 film, Wilford Leach's 1978 Delacorte Theater production starring Meryl Streep and Raúl Juliá, Jonathan Miller's 1980 BBC Television Shakespeare production, A. J. Antoon's 1990 Delacorte Theatre production (in which Freeman and Ullman appeared) and Toby Frow's 2012 Shakespeare's Globe production. Footage from Shakespeare's Globe depicts two different performances of the "I will be master of what is mine own" (3.2.231-235) speech; one delivered in an aggressive threatening manner, one in a bawdy sexual manner, directed by Adele Thomas and performed by Eleanor Matsuura and Anthony Howell.
In 1980, BBC2 aired an adaptation for their BBC Television Shakespeare series, directed by Jonathan Miller and starring Sarah Badel and John Cleese. The casting of Cleese as Petruchio was not without controversy at the time. He had never performed Shakespeare before, was not a fan of the first two seasons of the BBC Television Shakespeare, and took some persuading from Miller that the BBC Shrew would not be, as he feared "about a lot of furniture being knocked over, a lot of wine being spilled, a lot of thighs being slapped and a lot of unmotivated laughter." Miller told Cleese that the episode would interpret Petruchio as an early Puritan more concerned with attempting to show Kate how preposterous her behaviour is (showing her "an image of herself" as Miller put it), rather than bullying her into submission, and so the part was not to be acted along the lines of the swaggering bully a la Richard Burton in Franco Zeffirelli's adaptation. According to Cleese, who consulted a psychiatrist who specialised in treating "shrews",
Miller also researched how troublesome children were treated at the Tavistock Clinic, where imitation is often used during therapy; "there are ways in which a skilful therapist will gently mock a child out of a tantrum by giving an amusing imitation of the tantrum immediately after it's happened. The child then has a mirror held up to it and is capable of seeing what it looks like to others." In his review of the adaptation for the Financial Times, Chris Dunkley referred to this issue, calling Cleese's Petruchio "an eccentrically pragmatic social worker using the wayward client's own doubtful habits to calm her down." Actress Sarah Badel had a similar conception of the psychology behind the production. She constructed an "imaginary biography" for Katherina, arguing "She's a woman of such passion [...] a woman of such enormous capacity for love that the only way she could be happy is to find a man of equal capacity. Therefore she's mad for lack of love [...] he feigns madness, she is teetering on the edge of it. Petruchio is the only man who shows her what she's like." In this reading of the play, the production was at least partially based on Miller's own 1972 Chichester Festival stage production starring Joan Plowright and Anthony Hopkins.
Miller was determined the production not become a farce, and in that vein, two key texts were Lawrence Stone's The Family, Sex and Marriage in England: 1500-1800 and Michael Walzer's The Revolution of the Saints, which he used to help ground his interpretation in recognisably Renaissance-esque societal terms; Petruchio's actions are based on accepted economic, social and religious views of the time, as are Baptista's. In tandem with this interpretation, the song sung at the end of the play is a musical version of Psalm 128 ("Blessed is everyone that feareth the Lord"), which was often sung in Puritan households at the end of a meal during Shakespeare's own day, and which praised a peaceful family life. Speaking of the addition of the psalm, Miller states "I had to give [the conclusion] an explicitly religious format, so people could see it as not just simply the high-jinks of an intolerantly selfish man who was simply destroying a woman to satisfy his own vanity, but a sacramental view of the nature of marriage, whereby this couple had come to love each other by reconciling themselves to the demands of a society which saw obedience as a religious requirement." Along these lines, Miller was also insistent that to interpret the play in light of twentieth-century feminism was a flawed approach; "what we think now is really quite beside the point. If everything is done in the light of what we think, it's a sort of historical egocentricity, which is quite intolerable." Diana E. Henderson was unimpressed with this approach, however, writing "it was the perfect production to usher in the neo-conservative 1980s" and "this BBC-TV museum piece unabashedly celebrates the order achieved through female submission."
In this adaptation, the induction and all subsequent references to Sly are absent. Speaking of the somewhat controversial decision to remove the induction, Miller wrote "I find [it] terribly hard to do in any other format but the stage: it is a stage device, and it's frightfully hard to see it on television. It's a device that brings the audience into close identification with some person who is like them. It would be on television a little extra programme tagged on before the programme proper begins. On the stage, it's possible to make it work much better: it's a folk style which sits rather uncomfortably in this very twentieth-century medium of domestic viewing." Similarly, the BBC Shakespeare's textual editor, David Snodin wrote
As with all of the episodes Jonathan Miller directed, he allowed the work of celebrated artisans to influence his design concepts. In the case of Shrew, the street set was based on the work of architect Sebastiano Serlio, as well as the Teatro Olimpico, designed by Andrea Palladio. Baptista's living room was modelled closely on Johannes Vermeer's The Music Lesson.