“Shakespeare's a dead white guy, but he knows his shit, so we can overlook that.” So says English teacher Mr Morgan in 10 Things I Hate About You, the 90s teen movie adaptation of William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew.
Now, this is not a truth universally acknowledged, and Taming is both one of Shakespeare’s more popular and one of his more problematic plays. The story about the forceful transformation from unruly shrew to submissive wife has been adapted and updated countless times and yet remains difficult to digest over 400 years later.
In this seminar, we will look at the Shakespearean play as well as later adaptations, starting with 10 Things, to see how they treat the central “taming” and what that tells us about contemporary views on gender roles.
- Trainer/in: Nina Heise