10 Things: A Tamer "Taming"?

Sometimes—not very often—we all have the good fortune to stumble upon a literary work and its filmic adaptation within days of one another. It doesn’t happen very often, but when it does, I find it immeasurably helpful, bringing about the unintended consequence of useful parallels and contrasts. We cannot, of course, miss these watching a filmic adaptation (or, vice-versa, read a textual original).

Over the past week, I had the fortune of both reading The Taming of the Shrew (this, I admit, was for class) as well as seeing the film 10 Things I Hate About You (which is, I think it’s safe to say, mainstream Hollywood’s favorite Shakespeare adaptation). As wildly different as they are, the two still create a substantial dialogue when placed side by side.

The character of Kate, for one, is seen in an entirely different light thanks to some careful backstory in 10 Things; Kate’s having slept with the sleazy-greaser-like Joey Donner ends up serving as a somewhat plausible explanation for her “shrewish” behavior. Kate (Katharina) in the play is never provided with any similarly compelling backstory for her behavior in the Shakespeare version of the story. From the first time she appears on stage, she is a sharp-tongued, often-angry woman.

In light of these two different characters, my temptation is to respond to the fuller (at least by first perception) character of Kate in 10 Things. Part of human nature, I think, is to look for rationale behind strange behavior; once writers/directors provide us with the reasons for why characters do the things that they do, we are often attracted to that resulting fullness.

Thinking in this manner about Kate in 10 Things led me, however, towards an examination of Katharina and her curious attitude and “shrewish” behavior in The Taming. When I reread the first scene of Act I, it appears as if Shakespeare sets up Kate’s character as a kind of stereotype rather than a “full” character. This Kate, being a stereotype, forces the reader to re-imagine the intended effect of the blatant sexism and cruelty endured by Kate. In a way, I think that the mere presence of stereotypes often points not only to farcicality, but also to critical satire.

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Whether or not I buy that interpretion of The Taming of the Shrew as not so much a display of egregious sexism but rather a carefully (and maybe not so openly) constructed critique of gender relations, I think that it’s fair to say that 10 Things does not offer any sort of critique along the same lines as Shakespeare.

This lack of critique in the film adaptation is due partly to the absence of the Induction in the play; the Induction helps distance the audience from the actually plot of The Taming and provides a frame by which we can perceive the satirical nature of the roles. Viewing Katharina as a stereotype, however, also helps us to visualize that satire.

The issue here is that while The Taming is overtly sexist and makes a big show about that in order to push the satire home, any sexism in 10 Things is hiding beneath the surface. However, once you start to pick apart the character of Kate in the film, the underlying sexism is obvious. Why has Kate been angry and “shrewlike” for her high school career? According to the backstory provided by the writers, Kate is angry because she (prematurely?) lost her virginity to Joey Donner thanks to the fact that “everybody was doing it” back in the ninth grade. Her essential "wickedness and rebellion," she goes on to explain to her sister Bianca, is because she never wanted to do something just because everyone else wanted to ever again.

That sounds fair enough…but the fact is that the reason for her rebellion is not just peer pressure and the desire to be different—but peer pressure about having sex and endorsing sexuality with her boyfriend. None of this seems all that sexist until we consider what brought her back out of this “shrewish” behavior: Patrick Verona. Verona—the character of Petruchio in the play—eases her out of her mode of rebellion such that, by the end of the film, we are left with a Kate who seems more acceptable and less “shrewish.” She lacks the stark obedience and submissiveness of Katharina in the play, but she has still been changed...or "tamed" from earlier in the film.

It is such that the film actually “tames” women far more than the original play does (so long as it is read as a farce/satire). Perhaps Shakespeare adaptations for the big screen aren't so simple as they seem?