The Taming of the Shrew

One of the first few times I picked up The Taming of the Shrew, my mom came in and asked me if it was the one of Shakespeare’s plays that inspired the movie Ten Things I Hate About You. After she told me that, I realized it was, which made the play easier for me to understand. Some parts were difficult to follow because of the language and the disguises the characters used, but knowing it had some similarities to the movie helped me out. It also became more interesting because I wanted to see if it resolved the same way as the movie. Not only did knowing about the movie make it easier to follow, but it showed that there are many similarities in people today as there were in Shakespeare’s time. The movie uses the same archetypal characters as Shakespeare used in the play. In the play, Bianca, Baptista’s youngest daughter, was not allowed to wed until her older sister Katherina “the Shrew” was married. In the movie, the younger sister Bianca was not allowed to date until her older sister Kat, who had no interest at all in dating, started dating. It shows the common fatherly trait of not wanting to give up his daughters. Out of these three characters alone, there is the archetype of the protective father, the beautiful daughter who is wanted by every man, and the difficult-to-handle daughter who thinks she is too good for any man. Of the men trying to win these girls’ hearts, in both the movie and the play there is the confident man who thinks he can make any girl want him and the handsome, friendly men who fall for the most beautiful girl, possibly only for her supposed perfection. The traits of the characters in the play are stronger and more apparent than in the movie, but these similarities still show that maybe people haven’t really changed that much through all those years.