Ruth Leon recommends… The Taming of the Shrew- Shakespeare’s Globe

The Taming of the Shrew- Shakespeare’s Globe

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The Taming of The Shrew, like The Merchant of Venice, has long been considered one of Shakespeare’s ‘problem plays’ for very real considerations of political correctness. Merchant is thought to be (well, is) deeply anti-semitic, and Shrew pushes all the anti-feminist buttons on the door. Many solutions have been tried to make this beautiful play acceptable to a 20th/21st century audience, some quite successful, such as playing the entire play as a drunken dream of the character Christopher Sly.

This is just one ruse to make it possible to make the play work, thus side-stepping the more egregious pronouncements of Katherine towards the end of the play about how women must obey their husbands in all things, thereby disavowing all her feminist sentiments expressed at the start. There have been many others, and many adaptations of Shrew, the most wondrous being Cole Porter’s blissful musical version, Kiss Me Kate.

Shakespeare’s Globe has now made their very funny production available on Globe Player. (Usual ritual, you can buy just one production for £9.99 or pay an annual fee for all their productions for £99.99). Samantha Spiro goes head to head with Simon Paisley Day here with predictable results.

It’s harder to make The Merchant of Venice’s Shylock  a sympathetic character, harder still to make the title character, who contrary to belief is Antonio, not Shylock, anything but an anti-semite. But that’s an argument for another day.

For today, sufficient to watch one of Shakespeare’s funniest comedies and try not to be offended. Come on, he wrote it 400 years ago and, as he points out, women were made of sterner stuff then.

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