ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the BBC's ambitious five-part series Shakespeare Re-told, broadcast in 2005, and, within that series, the three romantic comedies, "A Midsummer Night's Dream", "Much Ado About Nothing", and "The Taming of the Shrew". It looks at three of the programmes, emphasizing the complex context of contemporary production for mainline British television. Television reviewers have long specialized in lofty condescension in the service of breakfast-reading amusement, in part because before DVDs and i-players their readers were unable to see the programmes at the expense of which the journalists attempted to lay down the law and/or to provoke controversy. Shakespeare Re-Told was, of course, not the BBC's first venture in modernized retellings, and it continued some of the policies which had been successful with Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales two years previously, made by the same producer. The three romantic comedies of the BBC Shakespeare Re-Told offered more than life up to marriage.
