The Plays of Shakespeare

Literary critics have long discussed Shakespeare’s so-called “problem plays,” meaning the ones that fail to slot comfortably into one of the established genres of comedy, tragedy, and history. (The last of these genres being, of course, another invention of Shakespeare himself.) The Taming of the Shrew is not a problem play by this definition. It is, however, problematic in a whole different way for the 21st-century reader or viewer, what with its plot that revolves around an alpha-male putting an uppity woman in her place. In addition to the blatant misogyny, there’s a nasty edge in general to this play that’s rare for Shakespeare, as there is to the one he wrote next. It’s enough to make you wonder what was up with him circa 1593 to 1594. Was he going through a bad breakup? (Maybe from a certain Dark Lady?) At least Titus Andronicus, the notoriously bloody-minded play that followed this one, can be turned into high camp with a degree of success. But The Taming of the Shrew is just… unpleasant, without even that much going for it. I think it may be my least favorite Shakespeare play of all. But because it is Shakespeare, it still has some interesting and innovative qualities.

Its story is presented in an almost postmodern way. When the curtain comes up — a metaphorical curtain in Shakespeare’s day, since Elizabethan stages were not so equipped — we find ourselves watching an “induction” that precedes the real first act of the play. We’re in Shakespeare’s contemporary England, in the county of Warwickshire, in the company of a rustic drunkard named Christopher Sly, who is stumbling around just outside of his natural habitat, a pub. This fellow is so deep in his cups that he soon passes out, after which a nobleman comes along with his hunting party. He decides to scoop Sly up out of the gutter, place him in a silk-sheeted bed back at his mansion, and try to convince the wastrel that he is the lord of the manor, that he has just woken up from a delirious dream of life on the skids. It doesn’t take Sly long to get with the program; he even starts speaking intermittently in noble verse instead of a peasant’s prose.

The real lord makes his page dress up in drag and pretend to be Sly’s wife. This places the poor boy in an awkward spot indeed.

Sly
Servants, leave me and her alone.
Madam, undress you and come now to bed.
Page
Thrice noble lord, let me entreat of you
To pardon me yet for a night or two,
Or if not so, until the sun be set.
For your physicians have expressly charged,
In peril to incur your former malady,
That I should yet absent me from your bed.
I hope this reason stands for my excuse.

Little can Sly imagine just how much the page is hoping this! Much to the boy’s relief, instead of a roll in the hay and the surprise of his life, Sly does eventually settle for a personal performance by a traveling theatrical troupe — a performance which becomes The Taming of the Shrew proper.

Shakespeare is winking at the artifice of the theater during this opening sequence enough to make Jacques Derrida stand up and cheer. Not only is there the play within the play, but there’s the fact that real Elizabethan actors were all men just like that page, dressed up in drag just like he is when it was necessary to portray a female, a fact that their audiences knew well and were endlessly amused by. What Shakespeare is doing here is as sly as the name of his country bumpkin. When I came upon it for the first time as a teenager, I immediately hearkened back to the astonishingly sophisticated, non-linear construction of The Odyssey, which I’d recently read for school. These old dead guys were a lot more devious than they looked, I decided.

At the same time, though, the opening bit of The Taming of the Shrew is clever only in a rather superficial way, like a lot of early Shakespeare. When we look at it in the context of the play as a whole, it stands revealed as almost a microcosm of the work’s infelicities. The joke that is played on Christopher Sly by the mincing noble hunter is less witty than it is simply mean, the epitome of punching down. Then, too, we might reasonably expect the framing story to go somewhere as the play itself progresses, in the name of the Aristotelian unities if nothing else. As it is, though, Sly and the nervous page pop up one more time to make a few comments at the end of the first act of the play proper, then are never heard from again. Perhaps it’s too much to ask to have them sitting on a balcony offering up a running commentary, like Statler and Waldorf in The Muppet Show or the host and his robots in Mystery Science Theater 3000. (Come to think of it, this might be the way that I would stage The Taming of the Shrew, if I was forced to present it.) But it doesn’t seem like they should just… disappear. Much of The Taming of the Shrew is haunted by that same vaguely unsettled, unfinished feeling — in addition to continuing to be mean.

Anyway, the play proper that Sly and we take in is less indebted to one specific earlier work than are many of Shakespeare’s plays. It does, however, embrace and regurgitate a lot of established Elizabethan tropes about feckless men and shrewish wives, a veritable sub-genre of theater unto itself. The action takes place in Padua, Italy. Italy was a kind of default setting for Shakespeare and other playwrights, a semi-mythical land where the weather was better, the landscape and the people were more beautiful, and the blood ran hotter; call it the Elizabethan version of the Beach Boys’ Southern California. As was the case for many folks looking westward toward that promised land in the 1960s, Shakespeare isn’t always entirely clear about the details of his setting: he appears to think that Padua is a port city.

The first character we meet in the “real” play is Lucentio, who has come to Padua in search of learning and personal betterment after passing his childhood and youth in Pisa and Florence. (Interestingly, his backstory corresponds uncannily well, in terms of geography at any rate, with that of Galileo Galilei, who less than twenty years after Shakespeare wrote this play shocked all of Europe from his post at the University of Padua with The Starry Messenger, the first book of astronomy to be based on observations made through a telescope.) Predictably enough, Lucentio has his head turned by a girl before he can so much as find his hotel, and learning and betterment are forgotten for the time being in favor of amour. Unfortunately, he has competition for the prize.

A good half of the play that follows focuses on Lucentio’s dream girl, whose name is Bianca and who is not the shrew of the title. Anyone who is familiar with The Comedy of Errors will feel right at home here. Once again, much of the action verges on slapstick. Once again, everybody is putting on disguises to effect their various schemes for getting the girl, until the audience is left almost as confused as the characters about who is really who. Lucentio opts to dress up as a student and get himself hired as a literature tutor for Bianca, the better to fill her head with honeyed words of love. Meanwhile his servant — who, as happens so often in Shakespeare, turns out to be smarter than his master — dresses up as Lucentio himself to petition Bianca’s father Baptista for his daughter’s hand. (This is an extremely convoluted romantic strategy even by the standards of this genre, one that I’m not convinced makes a lick of sense. But never mind: we just roll with it.) In addition to Lucentio, there’s another young guy named Hortensio, who has dressed himself up as a music teacher to try to win Bianca’s heart, plus the greedy old codger Gremio, who is trying to get to her by a direct frontal assault on her father and herself, which earns him points for honesty if nothing else. Through it all, Bianca is a bit of a cipher, all sweet nature and fluttering eyelashes and, it seems, not a whole lot going on upstairs.

The shrew comes into the picture in the person of Katherine, or Kate, Bianca’s equally unmarried big sister. Baptista has declared that he will not give his younger daughter away until he finds a mate for his older one. This presents a serious obstacle for Bianca’s suitors, in that they and everybody else in Padua are terrified of Kate, whose hot temper and razor-sharp tongue have made her infamous. Much to their dismay, the disguised Lucentio and Hortensio are expected to instruct Kate alongside her sister. It doesn’t go well. (As you read the words below, you should imagine them being wailed by a hapless Hortensio who is wearing a smashed lute for a necklace.)

Enter Hortensio [as Litio] with his head broke.
Baptista
How now, my friend, why dost thou look so pale?
Hortensio
For fear, I promise you, if I look pale.
Baptista
What, will my daughter prove a good musician?
Hortensio
I think she’ll sooner prove a soldier.
Iron may hold with her but never lutes.
Baptista
Why, then thou canst not break her to the lute?
Hortensio
Why, no, for she hath broke the lute to me.
I did but tell her she mistook her frets
And bowed her hand to teach her fingering,
When, with a most impatient devilish spirit,
“Frets, you call these?” quoth she. “I’ll fume with them.”
And with that word she struck me on the head,
And through the instrument my pate made way,
And there I stood amazed for a while
As on a pillory, looking through the lute,
While she did call me rascal, fiddler,
And twangling Jack, with twenty such vile terms,
As had she studied to misuse me so.

All things considered, I quite like this version of Kate. Shakespeare actually holds her back from view for a long time, teasing us with her like a monster in a horror movie, the kind of which you’re only allowed to glimpse an eye or a claw before the shocking big reveal. If only the rest of the play wasn’t about reducing her to a state of meek passivity…

That happens at the hands of yet another visitor to Padua, a mercenary fellow named Petruchio who arrives with one goal: to marry his way into money, as explained by his servant Grumio.

Grumio
Nay, look you, sir, he tells you flatly what his mind is. Why, give him gold enough and marry him to a puppet or an aglet-baby or an old trot with ne’er a tooth in her head, though she have as many diseases as two and fifty horses. Why, nothing comes amiss, so money comes withal.

This thoroughly unlikable character doesn’t ask Kate to marry him; he tells her she is going to do so. It’s at this point that the harmless slapstick comedy becomes something darker and more disturbing to our delicate modern sensibilities, seeming determined to put an exclamation point on every single one of the years that separate us from it.

Petruchio subjects Kate to a concerted campaign of physical coercion and emotional abuse. He makes a mockery of their wedding, showing up late in a suit made of rags, then drags her bodily away from the festivities as soon as the vows have been spoken.

Petruchio
For my bonny Kate, she must with me.
Nay, look not big, nor stamp, nor stare, nor fret;
I will be master of what is mine own.
She is my goods, my chattels; she is my house,
My household stuff, my field, my barn,
My horse, my ox, my ass, my anything;
And here she stands, touch her whoever dare.

In the scenes that follow inside his own run-down house, Petruchio repeatedly compares subduing Kate to the breaking of a falcon, a process that in both cases numbers starvation and sleep deprivation among its techniques. Seen today, his campaign is chillingly reminiscent of “enhanced interrogation,” as it was euphemistically known during the Second Gulf War, or cult indoctrination. In a word, it comes down to brainwashing. George Orwell couldn’t have written it better. If Kate ever wishes to see her family again, she must submit. And finally, she does so.

Petruchio
Come on, a God’s name, once more toward our father’s.
Good Lord, how bright and goodly shines the moon!
Kate
The moon? The sun. It is not moonlight now.
Petruchio
I say it is the moon that shines so bright.
Kate
I know it is the sun that shines so bright.
Petruchio
Now by my mother’s son, and that’s myself,
It shall be moon or star or what I list,
Or e’er I journey to your father’s house.
[To Servants]
Go on and fetch our horses back again.
Evermore crossed and crossed, nothing but crossed.
Hortensio [aside to Kate]
Say as he says or we shall never go
Kate
Forward, I pray, since we have come so far,
And be it moon or sun or what you please.
An if you please to call it a rush-candle,
Henceforth I vow it shall be so for me.
Petruchio
I say it is the moon.
Kate
I know it is the moon.
Petruchio
Nay, then you lie. It is the blessed sun.
Kate
Then God be blessed, it is the blessed sun,
But sun it is not when you say it is not,
And the moon changes even as your mind.
What you will have it named, even that it is,
And so it shall be still for Katherine.

The climax of the play comes with a feast at which all of the principal characters gather. By then, Lucentio — the real Lucentio, that is — has won the hand of the fair Bianca, Hortensio has settled for a rich widow instead, and Gremio has seemingly reconciled himself to life as an ugly old single guy. After dinner, the women all go out of the room while the men enjoy their liquor, as was the custom of the times. These same men, acting every bit the self-satisfied patriarchy, decide to make a wager among themselves, upon whose wife will return to the hall without prevarication when her husband sends a servant to bid her to do so. The widow flatly refuses Hortensio’s command, saying she is “busy and cannot come.” (Three cheers for her, say I!) Bianca, who is no longer as passive and complaint as she was in her maiden state, refuses as well, saying she has “some goodly jest in hand”; Lucentio can come to her instead, she says. (Another three cheers for her!)

And so we come to Kate. I wish I could tell you that she follows the lead of the other two wives. But instead she returns to the feast hall promptly, with the most nauseating speech Shakespeare ever wrote on her lips, one as long as the entirety of her dialog in all of the play prior to this point. Our modern-day “manosphere” would eat this speech up with a knife and fork. Just a portion of it:

Kate
Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,
Thy head, thy sovereign; one that cares for thee
And for thy maintenance; commits his body
To painful labor both by sea and land,
To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,
Whilst thou li’st warm at home, secure and safe;
And craves no other tribute at thy hands
But love, fair looks, and true obedience —
Too little payment for so great a debt.
Such duty as the subject owes the prince,
Even such a woman oweth to her husband;
And when she is forward, peevish, sullen, sour,
And not obedient to his honest will,
What is she but a foul contending rebel
And graceless traitor to her loving lord?
I am ashamed that women are so simple
To offer war where they should kneel for peace,
Or seek for rule, supremacy, and sway,
When they are bound to serve, love, and obey.
Why are our bodies soft and weak and smooth,
Unapt to toil and trouble in the world,
But that our soft conditions and our hearts
Should well agree with our external parts?

To which my first reaction is to think just how completely this smirking gaggle of male partygoers would be beat down by the backbreaking toil the typical Elizabethan wife had to carry out every day in order to keep her husband sleek, well-fed, and happy in his abode. “Soft and weak and smooth,” my left butt cheek!

Because The Taming of the Shrew is a Shakespeare play, there are throngs of critics — many of them critics who would pillory any modern author who expressed one-tenth of these sentiments — who rush to apologize for it. They point out that the earlier plays that danced to this theme tended to have their wife-wranglers using brutal violence to achieve their ends, from birch rods to the backside to suffocation in the rancid skin of a slaughtered plow horse. In contrast to these techniques, Petruchio’s use of food and sleep deprivation and psychological manipulation seem almost enlightened if you squint just right.

Some of the same critics like to say that the play-within-a-play construction is meant to convey that we aren’t to take any of it at face value. Some like to say that Petruchio and Kate are putting one over on the others as a team, that Kate should be understood to deliver her final homage to housewifely submission with a disingenuous wink. I’ve tried to find these sentiments in the text. I really and truly have, because I too always want to think the best of my man the Bard. But they just aren’t there. Nothing in the play itself indicates that we are meant to read it in any of these ways. The best dodge I can come up with is that maybe — just maybe — this was one of those plays that was substantially written by other playwrights, then polished up by Shakespeare.

With all that said, it is of course possible to turn any play into just about anything you want it to be through acting and staging. This has become standard practice in our day and age for The Taming of the Shrew, which is still performed with surprising frequency — certainly much more often than The Comedy of Errors or the Henry VI plays. The various subversive or deconstructive performances turn the wishful thinking of the apologists into lived reality on the stage.

And that’s just fine, on the whole. One of the things I love about Shakespeare is that he is always evolving, always in dialog with the times, even four centuries after his death.

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For an illustration of how badly wrong a non-subversive reading of the play can go, and thus an explanation of why the revisionists do what they do, look no further than the most famous cinematic production of The Taming of the Shrew under its original name, the one directed by Franco Zeffirelli. Zeffirelli was an American’s stereotype of a flamboyant Italian auteur, whose answer to any aesthetic question was always more, more, more. He directed three films of Shakespeare plays over the course of his long career.

The Taming of the Shrew was the first of these, reaching theaters in 1967. Its contemporary appeal was rooted in its audiovisual extravagance and, most of all, in its two stars. Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, who play Petruchio and Kate respectively, were the reigning king and queen of Old Hollywood at the time, just as the studio system that had created them was beginning to creak like the rusty anachronism it was. Widely considered two of the most beautiful people in the world, their real-life relationship, born in a juicy mutually extra-marital affair that led to divorces for both of them, was so contentious and schizophrenic that they would marry and divorce one another twice over before all was said and done. For this film, the Columbia Pictures marketing machine leveraged the work of the Hollywood gossip columnists shamelessly, using language that would never fly today: this was “a motion picture for every man who ever gave the back of his hand to his beloved, and for every woman who deserved it.” Gorgeous leading actors who had long since stopped playing roles on the screen in favor of just playing themselves, combined with the allure of Italy… what could go wrong? Nothing, according to the heartless logic of filthy lucre. Zeffirelli’s Taming of the Shrew was a significant commercial success, paving the way for his even more popular, equally delirious adaption of Romeo and Juliet just one year later.

Alas, it’s even more painful to watch today than its source material might lead you to believe. Zeffirelli chops out fully 70 percent of Shakespeare’s words. The induction with Christopher Sly gets the axe, which is to be expected; relatively few performances of the play for stage or screen retain it. Less justifiably, almost all of the silly but unobjectionable B plot, involving Bianca’s wooing by her disguised suitors, is done away with as well, the better to focus on the two big-name leads. Michael York, appearing here in his very first feature film in the role of Lucentio, is actually very good, delivering a performance that’s both subtler and much, much funnier than that of either Richard Burton or Elizabeth Taylor. But he’s given nowhere near enough screen time to save the film, which in the end exists to serve its two stars, not the other way around.

One reason that Zeffirelli cut the script so extensively is doubtless that Shakespeare’s original play gives Kate so few words to say for herself prior to her concluding speech. The director compensates by throwing Burton and Taylor into elaborate wordless burlesques, the better to highlight his muscular frame and virile beard and her striking double-lashed eyes and breasts that are perpetually on the verge of tumbling right out of her dress. In the middle of the film, everything else grinds to a halt for an extended sequence in which Petruchio chases down the wife he has decided will be his inside what appears to be some sort of wool factory; it’s as uncomfortable as it is tedious to watch, and appears nowhere in Shakespeare’s script.

Throughout, Richard Burton manages the neat trick of making Petruchio even more odious on the screen than Shakespeare does on the page. His supremely uncharming rogue is a bellowing, raging asshole without a single redeeming quality. It’s rare that a film can make me actively dislike an actor who is presumably merely playing a role, but this film does, given the lengths to which its promoters went to engender the suspicion that Burton is really playing himself.

In the end, then, Zeffirelli’s Taming of the Shrew is one of those baffling movies that just leave me shaking my head, wondering how anyone could ever have thought this was a good idea, how anyone could have believed these scenes were somehow funny. That many in the film’s intended audience, if not most critics, apparently were entertained by it is the riddle inside the enigma. Its bloviated emptiness is all the explanation you need for why the younger generation was already embracing films like Blow-Up and The Graduate, which would soon sweep the micro-managed studio system that had given us The Burton and Taylor Show away like last autumn’s leaves. And good riddance. God, I hate this movie.

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So much for straight adaptations. Thankfully, the riffs on The Taming of the Shrew tend to be less infuriating and more enjoyable.

The most long-lived of these is the musical Kiss Me Kate, the last and biggest success of all of the prolific Broadway songwriter Cole Porter. First produced for the stage in 1948, with a book by Bella and Samuel Spewack, it was turned into a movie by the director George Sidney in 1953. This was the peak of the Hollywood studio system that was starting to look so tired by Zeffirelli’s day, and Kiss Me Kate made the most of it. It was every inch a big-budget blockbuster in the context of its time, being filmed in MGM’s new “stereoscopic 3D,” this era’s closest equivalent to IMAX. The movie is littered with little visual gimmicks to show off the technology: actors throwing balls and fruits at the audience, swooping scene transitions, even credits sequences that refuse to stay planted firmly in 2D space. Ever since the Lumière brothers shocked that Parisian audience with that oncoming locomotive of theirs, spectacle has had its place in filmmaking.

Kiss Me Kate takes the framing-play concept from Shakespeare’s original and expands it to fill half of its 109-minute running time. In place of the inimitable Christopher Sly, we have the cast and crew of a play called, you guessed it, Kiss Me Kate, with songs by one Cole Porter (who does appear as a character, but is sadly played by actor Ron Randell rather than the real McCoy.) The leads are entangled in a web of romantic attachments that make those of the play they’re putting on look simple. We bounce back and forth between the backstage and onstage plots, which eventually merge into one in the rush of events. The roundabout interpretation winds up giving Kate a lot more agency, softening the misogynistic edges so that it’s all just good fun.

As I’ve confessed to you before, I’m not a huge fan of musical theater in general, but Kiss Me Kate does work for me better than most examples of this sort of thing. With their self-descriptive titles like “I Hate Men,” the musical numbers function reasonably well as comedy, sneaking many a naughty insinuation into the script that the censors would never have let stand as ordinary dialog. The standout for me is a jaunty little number called “Brush Up Your Shakespeare,” truly a call to arms worth hearing — even if it is, like the rest of the movie, so lightweight that it will float up into the sky and pop if you don’t make a point to tie it down.

Brush up your Shakespeare!
Start quoting him now!
Brush up your Shakespeare,
And the women you will wow.

Just declaim a few lines from “Othella,”
And they’ll think you’re a helluva fella.
If your blonde won’t respond when you flatter ‘er,
Tell her what Tony told Cleopaterer.
If she fights when her clothes you are mussing,
What are clothes? “Much Ado About Nussing.”

With the wife of the British embessida,
Try a crack out of “Troilus and Cressida.”
If she says she won’t buy it or tike it,
Make her tike it, what’s more, “As You Like It.”
If she says your behavior is heinous,
Kick her right in the “Coriolanus.”

If you can’t be a ham and do “Hamlet,”
They will not give a damn or a damnlet.
Just recite an occasional sonnet,
And your lap will have honey upon it.
When your baby is pleading for pleasure,
Let her sample your “Measure For Measure.”

Better mention “The Merchant Of Venice,”
When her sweet pound o’ flesh you would menace.
If her virtue, at first, she defends – well,
Just remind her that “All’s Well That Ends Well.”
And if still she won’t give you a bonus,
You know what Venus got from Adonis!

If your goal is a Washington Heights dream,
Treat the kid to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
If she then wants an all-by-herself night,
Let her rest every eleventh or “Twelfth Night.”
If because of your heat she gets huffy,
Simply play on and “Lay on, Macduffy!”

Now, those are some double entendres that a boy like me can get behind.

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Kiss Me Kate does deign to include the occasional verse written by Shakespeare betwixt and between the songs and the backstage antics. My very favorite adaption of The Taming of the Shrew — defining the word “adaption” more loosely than ever here — doesn’t even do that much.

10 Things I Hate About You is a 1999 teen movie directed by Gil Junger that is, shall we say, Shrew adjacent. Taking place in a present-day high school called Padua High, it gives us a pair of sisters named Kat and Bianca, the one a staunch iconoclast and non-conformist who has rejected dating and all it entails, the other a pleasant and pretty go-along-to-get-along type. Wanting to keep his more impressionable younger daughter out of trouble and non-impregnated — a subject on which he is weirdly fixated — their widower father tells Bianca that she may only start to date after her older sister has done so. This marks the beginning of a pressure campaign on the part of Bianca’s would-be beau to hook Kat up with Patrick (“Petruchio” was apparently too much of a stretch), a new student at the school with a carefully cultivated reputation for heedless fearlessness. Patrick agrees to accept the assignment, for a cash price.

The movie holds no surprises in the broad strokes. It follows the exact sequence of plot beats that romantic comedies, teenage or otherwise, are expected to. Thrown together under false pretenses, Kat and Patrick at first express nothing but disdain for one another. But disdain gradually turns into grudging affection, then a strong attraction, as Patrick learns that Kat isn’t quite the hellion she’s been described to him as and Kat learns much the same thing about Patrick. Then comes the big climactic crisis, when Kat learns that Patrick has been been hanging out with her, ostensibly at least, strictly for a paycheck, and all seems lost — until the inevitable last-minute reconciliation and declarations of love.

Needless to say, this outline applies equally well to your run-of-the-mill Hallmark Channel movie. What distinguishes 10 Things I Hate About You  from such tired pablum is its wit and, for lack of a better word, its soul. I’m tempted to say that this is its most Shakespearean aspect of all. Most of the Bard’s plays too worked within well-wrought genres, telling stories that had been told many times before, yet found ways to be more than the sum of their formulas. Bravo to screenwriters Karen McCullah and Kirsten Smith.

The young cast is more than up to the task of bringing the script to life. Small wonder that many of these actors would go on to become Hollywood perennials in the new millennium. The tragically short-lived Heath Ledger is great as Patrick, as is Julia Stiles in the role of Kat; the same can be said about Larisa Oleynik, who plays Bianca, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who plays Cameron, the movie’s version of Lucentio. The soundtrack, consisting mostly of female-dominated alt-rock bands — or, as described by Patrick, “chicks who can’t play their instruments” — is absolutely banging; this is the album to put on at your next party. The toxicity of Shakespeare’s play is entirely gone, replaced by a sweeter tale of connections made and self-knowledge uncovered — a tale that is disarmingly honest despite all of the contrivances in the telling. This is one of those movies where you can tell that everyone on the set was happy to be there; the good vibes radiate from the screen long before you get to the end-credits-sequence blooper reels. There’s a lot of 1990s-era irony on display, but very little of the cynicism that threatens to overwhelm our lives today.

Indeed, I must sheepishly admit that I found watching 10 Things I Hate About You in 2026 to be a downright moving experience. I realize that this sounds like the eternal lament of the middle-aged, but I couldn’t help but feel wistful as I viewed this artifact of an earlier time, a time when the world felt more sane and less clouded by existential dread, when the solipsistic algorithmic cancer of social media had not yet crept into the lives of our young people.

In the film’s most welcome twist of all, Kate/Kat’s big speech here is… something else than what Shakespeare envisioned. Something that actually made this sentimental old man choke up a little bit.

I hate the way you talk to me,
And the way you cut your hair.
I hate the way you drive my car.
I hate it when you stare.

I hate your big dumb combat boots,
And the way you read my mind.
I hate you so much it makes me sick.
It even makes me rhyme.

I hate the way you’re always right.
I hate it when you lie.
I hate it when you make me laugh,
Even worse when you make me cry.

I hate it that you’re not around,
And the fact that you didn’t call.
But mostly I hate the way I don’t hate you,
Not even close, not even a little bit, not even any at all.

Bravo to all the cast and crew, I say. It’s not often that one improves upon Shakespeare.

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