Romancing the Shrew, Redeeming the Tamer

Most contemporary adaptations of Taming fall under the umbrella of romantic comedy. Due to this genre’s emphasis on a romantic resolution, however, when Taming is adapted within its generic formula, it typically fails to provide a feminist rehabilitation of Shakespeare’s play. Such Taming adaptations can thus be labeled as specifically pop-feminist romantic comedies: a popular feminism that often fails to challenge the economic, patriarchal, political framework(s) that perpetuate gender inequality. This creates what I call Taming’s pop-feminist paradox: an attempt to neutralize the play’s misogyny through romance, which merely heightens the ambivalence of the narrative’s portrayal of gender roles. Taming thus invites adaptation through the romantic comedy genre, but this generic impulse also limits how subversive and/or recuperative those adaptations can be. Two such adaptations—the BBC’s 2005 TV film series ShakespeaRe-Told and Anne Tyler’s 2016 Hogarth Shakespeare novel Vinegar Girl—exemplify this bind, as it is only by making Katherine responsible for addressing Petruchio’s vulnerability—which entails her embrace of feminine stereotypes—that these adaptations allow Petruchio to break from masculine gender norms in a way that makes him sympathetic to contemporary audiences. By adapting Taming as a romance, Re-Told and Vinegar Girl position Katherine as saved only when she provides Petruchio with the maternal nurturance he had until then lacked—ultimately reaffirming the very gender inequalities these adaptations purport to challenge.