I Am Conflicted

I just want to state for the record that I did, in fact, read The Taming of the Shrew and watch Ten Things I Hate About You. The Taming of the Shrew with Elizabeth Taylor is proving more difficult to track down than I anticipated. Netflix has it, but Nate and I only just got around to watching Lars and the Real Girl yesterday (and I heartily recommend it, by the way. Don't be scared off by the way the plot sounds), and it's still sitting on our coffee table, waiting to be mailed. The local Blockbuster doesn't have it, probably because it didn't come out in the past ten years or heavily feature explosions or women in bikinis.

I liked the play, generally. I think. I don't know. I feel like I should like it. Everyone else likes it. I've been trying to find some feminist interpretations, where I can like it and still retain my self-respect. The thing is, it's aggressively anti-woman. 10 Things I Hate About You toned it down and made it about the relationship between the Petruchio character and the Katherina character more about how all human beings, regardless of gender, need emotionally fulfilling relationships in their lives. That's a moral I can get behind, and Kat didn't have to sacrifice her individual identity to get there. She didn't change the way she dressed or the way she talked and she didn't suddenly start putting up with people's crap. She just let her guard down enough to have a legitimate emotional connection with another person, and I would say that the gender of the other person was, in this situation, largely irrelevant.

Further, the father character (an OB-GYN) was motivated by fear that his daughters would get into trouble if they were allowed to date before they were ready, whatever that means. He wasn't on a power trip, the way Baptista was. He was a single father afraid he couldn't protect his children, and I completely respect that.

According to the ever-infallible Wikipedia, there's some controversy regarding the way the play is supposed to be read. Apparently some people think that Shakespeare didn't mean what he was saying (that women should submit themselves to men), and thus did not say it at all. Which...makes no sense. You can't write a book about how great it is to be a white supremacist and then turn around and claim that you didn't mean it, so the theme of the book is the opposite of what you wrote.

I tend to think that the people who hold that theory are probably people who just want to believe that Shakespeare was a great person who believed in social equality and was a paragon of moral goodness (in which case, they probably ignore the rumors that Shakespeare was having an extramarital affair with a teenage boy). The more I'm exposed to Shakespeare, the less I like him.