Friday, November 5, 2010

Taming of the Shrew

Shakespeare is lovely.  There is nothing else to say about Shakespeare.  I have never been disappointed by a play or sonnet.  The man was a genius at telling stories and conveying emotion.  but...everyone knows this.  Even if you don't like the old English, and can't stand reading at all, you have to give the man props.

I have read several of his plays in my day, requisites for classes in school, standards like Hamlet, Romeo & Juliet, Julius Caesar...and others like Othello, Merchant of Venice, and A Midsummer's Night Dream.  And I've seen my share of modernizations of his plays.  Did you know that the 2001 movie Get Over It was a modernization of A Midsummer night's Dream?  Did you know that She's the Man starring Amanda Bynes is an adaptation of Twelfth Night?  well, it is.  And did you know that 10 Things I Hate About You with Heath Ledger and Julia Styles is an adaptation of...can you guess?  Taming of the Shrew.

Now, I knew it was, but I had never read the play...until this week.  And I must say that, though it is a good movie, it doesn't stay very close to the original.  They took a lot of liberty with that adaptation, and I guess they'd have to since it was set in high school and not in Medieval England.  Anyway, I enjoyed the movie and the play independently of one another.  and if you like Shakespearean work, or literature pre-1700, you'll enjoy it.

3 comments:

  1. Just to get a reaction from you: Shakespear stole other people's work and claimed it as his own.

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  2. well...then whoever wrote his stuff was brilliant and lovely...and deserves props for his/her genius.

    ps: where can I read an article on his base falsity?

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  3. One of my professors in college told us about this. We had to write an opinion paper on whether we believed that he wrote everything or stole other peoples work or if he had multiple writters helping him write. I have the paper saved somewhere on floppy disk... hahaha floppy disks i'm not sure I will ever see that paper again :)

    PS is there some setting on blogspot that I can change my notifications so I am emailed if someone writes a comment on my blog or if you comment on my comment cuase other wise I jsut have to continually check and that's lame!

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