Saturday, October 18, 2008

Early Twentieth-Century Shrew Taming

The Taming of the Shrew. Dir. D. W. Grifffith. Perf. Florence Lawrence and Arthur V. Johnson. 1908.

Wehr, Katy. “’Til Your Heart Comes Around Again.” The Smell of Rain. CD Baby, 2005.

This version of The Taming of the Shrew (which I've written about before) is only eleven minutes long. It's a bit difficult to get a great deal of subtlety into an eleven-minute Shrew, even with words! Essentially, the film sticks with slapstick and spanking and leaves it at that.


The music is from the Katy Wehr album listed above. I hope she doesn't mind the cognitive dissonance created by the combination of the haunting music and the slapstick on screen!

Links: The Film at IMDB.

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Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
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