Weird and Queer on tv: The Taming of the Shrew between William Shakespeare and Sally Wainwright

Abstract

The Taming of the Shrew produced by the bbc, written by Sally Wainwright and directed by David Richards is the last of a very long series of screen adaptations of the Shakespearean Shrew and was broadcast in 2005 together with three other rewritings – Much Ado about Nothing (David Nicholls), Macbeth (Peter Moffat) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Peter Bowker) – under the umbrella title of “ShakespeaRe-Told”. This label not only makes the series very snappy, but also gives an idea (consciously or not) of the kind of connection, still persisting between “original” texts and their rewritings, through the smart linguistic joke offered by last syllable connecting the two words and by the use of the hyphen. Whether and how Shakespeare is told or re-told through and by Wainwright’s The Taming of the Shrew will be the main focus of this paper, which will also discuss in the first part some stages of the history of Shakespearean adaptations since its eighteenth-century origin.