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William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew Essay

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William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew Over the past 400 or so years since Shakespeare wrote _The Taming of the Shrew_, many writers, painters, musicians and directors have adapted and reformed this play of control and subjugation into timeless pieces of art. In _10 Things I Hate About You_ and Kiss Me Kate from two very different times in the twentieth century, and paintings of Katherina and Bianca from the late nineteenth century, the creators of these adaptations have chosen to focus on the role of the two main female characters in the play. The ideas surrounding these women have changed through the years, from Katherina and Bianca simply being young women who deviated from the norm of Shakespeare’s time to women who embody …show more content…

(2.1. 31-36) Katherina feels that if she does not marry before her sister, then she never will find true love, and thusly will never be happy. She dislikes the stigma that has been brought upon her by her unwillingness to settle down with any of the men who have been brought before her, and is angry with her sister even more for buying into what society has deemed as the right way to do things. These instances of the two sisters together are few and far between, almost to juxtapose the two characters even moreso than their very being in the play does. The fact that they eventually switch roles is another interesting point; Shakespeare presents one as a shrew and the other as the seemingly perfect woman, but he abruptly switches these roles in the last act, after all the action has been performed of the men taming the original shrew. The presentations of these two female characters in a cast full of men is the most poignant part of this whole argument; Shakespeare plays on the societal conventions to the point where he is able to show how they can also backfire on someone unintentionally. All of the adaptations that follow highlight the differences between the characters of the two sisters in this play, and while the eventual status of these characters changes somewhat; they still manage to showcase the difference between the feminine and the masculine aspects of the play. Throughout the years critics

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