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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Bardfilm is normally written as one word, though it can also be found under a search for "Bard Film Blog." Bardfilm is a Shakespeare blog (admittedly, one of many Shakespeare blogs), and it is dedicated to commentary on films (Shakespeare movies, The Shakespeare Movie, Shakespeare on television, Shakespeare at the cinema), plays, and other matter related to Shakespeare (allusions to Shakespeare in pop culture, quotes from Shakespeare in popular culture, quotations that come from Shakespeare, et cetera).

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
All material original to this blog is copyrighted: Copyright 2008-2039 (and into perpetuity thereafter) by Keith Jones.

The very instant that I saw you did / My heart fly to your service; there resides, / To make me slave to it; and, for your sake, / Am I this patient [b]log-man.

 —The Tempest