WHY CAN’T SHREWS BEHAVE, OR KISS ME, KATE REVIVED
WHY CAN’T SHREWS BEHAVE, OR KISS ME, KATE REVIVED

Summary/Abstract: The endurance of Shakespeare’s popularity with both high-brow and low-brow twentieth and twenty-first century audiences has been consistently confirmed by the impressive number of spectators that more or less faithful adaptations of the Bard’s plays have managed to bring to cinema and theatre halls. By mid-twentieth century, The Taming of the Shrew was successfully adapted for the Broadway stage by Cole Porter as Kiss Me, Kate, a musical which combined, in an interesting meta-theatrical structure, the Shakespearean heritage with ‘hot’ topics that the American society showed interest in at the time when the play was first produced (1948). The present paper aims at considering the subtle mechanisms of the adaptation of the Shakespearean text for a different kind of theatrical performance and a different historical context, the way in which new aesthetic codes and cultural-specific issues are addressed in the revival of Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate for the London stage (and the British television) in 2003.

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