ABSTRACT
Of all Shakespeare’s comedies, The Taming of the Shrew most overtly reinforces the social hierarchies of its day. Lacking the gendered inversion of power and the poetic complexity of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies, this early play might seem less likely to capture the imagination of modern audiences and producers; we might expect it, like its farcical companion The Comedy of Errors, to be filmed infrequently and almost obligatorily as part of canonical projects such as the BBC-TV Shakespeare series. Quite the converse is true. More than eighteen screen versions of the play have been produced in Europe and North America, putting Shrew in a select league with the “big four” tragedies, and outpacing those comedies scholars usually dub more “mature.”1 What accounts for this frequent reproduction of an anachronistic plot premised on the sale of women?2
