Transforming Shakespeare: 10 Things I Hate About You

10 Things I Hate About You is a film that I have a long history with. In my third year of uni I shared a house with a scriptwriting MA student. We soon became firm friends, mainly because he had an amazing new machine called a DVD player, a wide-screen TV and a Nintendo 64. He introduced himself as a massive film fan. I thought I would be out of my depth; expecting a year of deep discussions on Eisenstein’s montage technique or the French Nouvelle Vague. Not a bit of it though – For Lee, the pinnacle of film-making was Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and John Hughes was cinema’s greatest auteur. He was going to write teen movies and I, his housemate, consequently had a full year of indoctrination into this cult. I must have seen every high-school comedy made in the eighties. Twice.

10 Things – Kat (Julia Stiles) and Patrick (Heath Ledger)

The only time our courses overlapped was the high-school transformation of The Taming of the Shrew, entitled 10 Things I Hate About You. Released in 1997, There is a lot to enjoy. The script is sharp; full of good one-liners and inventive references to the source text. The performances are strong (It launched the careers of Heath Ledger, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Julia Stiles as viable leading actors.) It uses a lot of the archetypes of a nineties teen movie but is intelligent enough to subvert them and it’s likeable enough to get away with the odd cliché.

In transplanting the action from the city of Padua to an upper-middle class high-school in Seattle there are a few tweaks needed to make the story work in a modern context. Shakespeare’s Shrew presents a world where women are bartered for marriage as commodities. Petruchio “tames” Katherine using abuse and the techniques of falconry. Clearly a modern film, a romantic-comedy looking to appeal to a mostly female audience, needs to adapt this to a more liberal and enlightened time.

A number of characters are made more rounded. The father in the film is a much more sympathetic character. In the play he does not show any real paternal concern, and seems to consider his daughters as financial burdens that he hopes to be rid of as soon as possible. By contrast, in the film he genuinely wishes to protect his family and do his best for them. He doesn’t let Bianca date because he wishes to protect her. Bianca also has much more of an arc – She rejects the vacuous pretty boy suitor in the end and falls for the likeable loser Lucentio. Bianca and Kat (Katherine) bicker but they show genuine familial loyalty and affection; something noticeably absent in Shakespeare’s play.

Kat is the key character in the movie, and throughout the audience is rooting for her. She is rebellious, witty and intelligent; but is not prone to the violent fits of temper of Katherine in the play. Patrick (Petruchio) initially dates her for financial reward, but soon falls for her. He does not try to assert dominance in the way that his counterpart in the play.

Although the film has much to commend it, there are a couple of big problems when the film can’t escape from the source material. The “10 things” of the title refer to a poem that Kat writes (a modernisation of sonnet 141) with Patrick in mind. Despite all his faults and all the nasty things he has done to her, she wants him. It feels like a submission of sorts, similar to Katherine’s last speech on obedience in the play. For this reason I think the ending is disappointing.  Previously, she has rejected the cliques and hierarchies of a stereotypical American high-school, yet as soon as she gets the chance to go the prom and “be normal” she jumps at it. After all, it seems that all that Kat needed was the attention of a strong man. In a teen movie such as this the female lead can be as difficult and confrontational as she wants… as long as she conforms in the end.

Overall, it’s a fun, light watch with some excellent jokes and set pieces. It’s just a pity that right at the end the message it wishes to send out gets confused. Thank you Lee – 15 years later I’ve finally used some of the useless knowledge you have given me in a blog post.

Next week – Chaucer and The Breakfast Club. Maybe.