"Tell it again, but different": Gender, Race, and Adaptation in The Taming of the Shrew and Othello

Abstract

“Tell it again, but different”: Gender, Race, and Adaptation in The Taming of the Shrew and Othello analyzes contemporary adaptations of two of Shakespeare’s most problematic plays: The Taming of the Shrew and Othello, which have received considerable critique for how they voice and rely on sexism and racism. Focusing on adaptation enables me to reorient critical attention from Shakespeare’s plays to how they are used to perpetuate or disrupt problematic representations of gender, race, sexuality, and class. Doing so requires a methodological innovation. Shakespearean adaptation scholarship typically relies on two analytic methods: single-text close readings (a micro level analysis) or broader comparisons across plays to consider large-scale patterns and institutions (a macro level analysis). Bringing these two methods together, my meso level analysis illuminates how expectations of genre and form operate comparatively and across media and/or institution (the macro) to dictate and circumscribe the work of particular reworkings (the micro) in relation to adaptive clusters around specific plays (the meso). Insofar as my method balances these imperatives, I aim to change how Shakespearean critics approach adaptations—not as singular texts and their contexts or as part of Shakespeare’s larger oeuvre, but as curated groupings. By comparing both the multiple adaptations that constitute each play’s cluster and the way different plays produce different patterns, as well as analyzing the effect those patterns have on subsequent reworkings, my method attends to the limitations and possibilities of adaptation, specifically when it comes to the cultural impact of Shakespeare’s “problem plays.” Part I examines how the prevailing tendency to present The Taming of the Shrew as a pop-feminist romantic comedy has limited its adaptations’ ability to provide a feminist recuperation of Shakespeare’s play. Chapter 1 details how adaptations across media types frequently attempt to neutralize Taming’s misogyny through a recourse to romance, producing a dilemma I call the pop-feminist paradox: the contradictory impulse to attempt to fix the sexism of the play through the romantic comedy genre, when the conventions of that genre necessarily replicate the play’s problematic portrayal of gender, class, and sexuality. Chapter 2 analyzes Taming’s pop-feminist paradox in adaptations that represent the three largest contemporary Shakespeare markets: 10 Things I Hate About You (a 1999 teen film), ShakespeaRe-Told: The Taming of the Shrew (a 2005 BBC TV film), and Anne Tyler’s Vinegar Girl (a 2016 Hogarth Shakespeare novel). I argue that Taming’s connection to the romantic comedy genre recreates gender inequality by requiring heroines in these adaptations to shoulder the burden of their hero’s emotional liberation. Part II explores the recent popularity of Othello stage adaptations in relation to the “liveness” of performance and how such re-visionings showcase the possibilities of adaptation by modeling an active, social justice-oriented engagement with the play’s racist and sexist characterizations, themes, and structure. Chapter 3 details how Othello is a problem in performance by mapping out the play’s performance history, exposing the critical intersection of gender, race, sexuality, and class in its representations of the Black male body, interracial sex, and intraracial intimacy. Chapter 4 analyzes eight Othello stage re-visionings—from Paula Vogel’s 1993 Desdemona: A Play About a Handkerchief to Keith Hamilton Cobb’s 2019 American Moor—to consider how they utilize the theater in order to respond to Othello’s problems without repeating them.