Apparently the ladies protest too much

Maia has a good post on Shakespeare, and in particular her reactions to Much Ado About Nothing and Taming the Shrew.

MAAN used to be my favourite Shakespearean play (not that I'm an expert), and in particular I loved the Emma Thompson et al screen version Maia refers to. The highlight for me has always been the inter-play between Benedick and Beatrice (especially when portrayed by Brannagh and Thompson, who were a couple at the time). I love the scene in the garden where they are talking at complete cross-purposes.

But watching it again in more recent times, since I've stopped saying "I'm not a feminist but...", I've felt a similar discomfort to that which Maia relays, about the relationship between Hero and Claudio.

I'm not the kind of person who can read a play, particular Shakespeare's, and get a feel for it - I usually have to see it before I can really follow it. So my experience of Shakespeare has been largely limited by what the University of Auckland student group has decided to do each summer. As a university-based theatre troupe, they have tended to play around in interesting ways with The Bard's work and we've seen many female characters portrayed in a much more modern sensibility than Shakespeare probably would have intended. They also have a tendency, every few years, to do the good ol' gender switch (in particular Taming of the Shrew, which was made much more watchable for me through this device), further muddying the waters.

Given that Shakespeare is so frequently reproduced in modern times, can we just say his work was acceptable because it's a product of his times and leave it at that? I've never studied Elizabethan England, but I do have the impression that Shakespeare's women are in fact more bolshie than their real contemporaries would have been, although so many of them do get tamed by curtain's fall.

On the other hand, should we be interpreting these four hundred year old plays with a feminist eye* for the modern audience? I'm thinking particularly about new(ish)films that base themselves on Shakespeare's work, like Ten Things I Hate About You** (based on Taming of the Shrew). Could Shakespeare, with the shackles of his time around his writing wrists, have written differently about the outcomes for women (and I don't mean could he have produced Shakespeare in Love) or should all these sad plays (even many of the comedies) be laid out straight to show the tragedy for the female characters, as Maia suggests?

I'd be fine with Maia's point of view, if these modern interpretations did actually show the tragedy, but in fact so often these "fairytale" endings are considered everything the Kate, Hero or Tatiana should ever want.

Apparently we women of the 21st century should seek the same sexist subjugation that we had to put up with in the 16th. In other words, Shakespeare's work may sadly be just as Ben Jonson described the Bard himself, "not of an age, but for all time."


* Or even a non-heteronormative eye, that would make things interesting!
** Perhaps there is a reason why Shakespeare's plays translate so well now into the stereotypical view of a contemporary American high school.