The Taming of the Shrew holds the distinction of being the most performed Shakespeare play that is most rarely shown in its entirety. While modern audiences remain wedded to the tale of wildcat Katherine and her “tamer” Petruchio, it is seldom staged “straight”, without major cuts or added layers of irony. Contemporary productions tend to square the circle by giving Kate some obvious wink to the audience, suggesting she is somehow “in” on the marriage bet, or else refocus the play as tragedy rather than comedy, presenting her unequivocally as a victim of domestic abuse.
Others prefer to tame the bard instead. The actress Juliet Stevenson has argued that some Shakespeare plays are simply irredeemable – too problematic for a modern company to perform – citing the Taming of the Shrew, and the Merchant of Venice’s “inescapable” anti-Semitism. It is a depressing thought, not least from one of the great Shakespearean interpreters of recent years, but also questionable. Comparing Shylock to contemporary equivalents like Marlowe’s Jew of Malta reveals infinitely greater nuance. Though you could scarcely stage the play for laughs, as it was in Nazi Germany, declaring it unperformable feels like giving up, sacrificing moral ambiguity – even Shakespeare himself – to our own lack of imagination.
But there is a kind of circularity too, for culture repeats itself and it’s not the first time that theatre has attempted a bizarre fusion with virtue. King Lear, with its crushingly bleak ending, is arguably Shakespeare’s most nihilistic play, forcing us to consider the question “Is man no more than this?” But for more than 150 years, the original was hardly ever staged. Well into the 19th century, the standard performing text remained a 1681 rewrite by the Puritan Nahum Tate, featuring an unfeasibly happy finale in which Cordelia falls in love with Edgar, and Lear ends up alive, happy, restored to sanity and his kingdom. It seems ridiculous now, but when David Garrick portrayed Lear “tearing a passion to tatters”, it would have been this version.
If nothing else, this is a reminder that refusing to stage “problem” plays is no radical position, but one that aligns you with post-Restoration Puritans and 18th-century moralists. But a similar revisionism is afflicting pop culture today. TV and film-makers are increasingly rebooting classics, partly for financial reasons, partly laziness, but frequently to “redact” aspects of the original which they may find unsavoury. Unlike Tate’s King Lear, audiences often detest the products of this trend.
Many long-time fans of the series Sex and the City have been appalled by its recent remake. The original series portrayed four women negotiating New York’s frenetic dating scene, who for all their faults were witty, independent and friendship-minded. The reboot, And Just Like That, sets out to humiliate the women: imposing a painfully woke sensibility on what was once a sharp and subversive series. Miranda, the most poised of the group, emerges as particularly unrecognisable – a gibbering wreck who can barely speak to a black colleague without making some social misstep. It betrays all longstanding ties to the series, even spoiling our pleasure in the original retrospectively; since you watch earlier episodes with renewed knowledge of what each character will become.
So too with No Time to Die, Daniel Craig’s final outing as Bond. (Spoiler alert: If you haven’t yet watched it, skip this paragraph!) Unforgivably, Eon Productions literally kill him off. But it seems less of a loss than it should. The doomed version of the transgressive chauvinist was already “metaphorically” dead in the new film due to his out-of-character behaviour; transformed into a monogamist with a “wife” and a child. One exchange knowingly mocks his old qualities as a ladykiller, when he tries to pick up a woman and is rebuffed. (“So you thought James Bond could just seduce someone with his own sexual magnetism? You idiot!”) This virtuous stuffed shirt may bear the name 007, but he lacks every iota of the fun, aspiration and escapism that defined the franchise.
New screenwriters were let loose on the Star Wars sequels, and similarly made Luke Skywalker behave in ways that feel alien to his initial incarnation. Luke is the new hope of the original trilogy – it is he who seeks to bring Darth Vadar back to the light when everyone else has given up. Yet the Last Jedi transforms him into a bitter fatalist. The actor Mark Hamill, who portrays Luke, was appalled, and managed a few scathing interviews before being reined in by the PR bods. “Who is this guy?” he snapped, “How did the most optimistic, hopeful character in the galaxy turn into this hermit?”
You might argue that it’s a bit rich to complain about consistency in an intergalactic space opera depicting lightsabers and ewoks. On the contrary; all fiction creates a contained universe, and the more fantastical it is, the more vital for characters to behave in ways that feel true to our expectations, since suspending disbelief requires even greater effort. And when art enjoys enduring appeal, supplanting it from its context will always trigger alienation.
The reboot era does this and more, but above all it suggests a terrible narrowing of artistic horizons. With a few exceptions, we may come to look back on this time as a cultural wasteland – full of caution, self-censorship and “corrective” remakes. Unable to make anything new, we settle for destroying the old.
