Musicals

(Note: I originally wrote this when I was in grad school, hence the meticulous adherence to MLA style and citations. I present it here with some minor edits and nifty YouTube videos for anyone who might find it compelling.)

William Shakespeare, standing as the supreme canonical figure of Anglophone literature, has been used by different societal milieus as a tool of cultural interpretation, or a tried and tested means of attaining cultural self-knowledge. It is perhaps axiomatic, or merely common-sensical, that the task of cultural interpretation develops a sense of urgency during periods of profound social change. In such instances, Shakespeare has proven to be an invaluable tool to establish a sense of continuity, and to gain a seemingly accurate understanding of how human beings change and why, what prompts changes in character, and how those changes relate to both the personal and public spheres. Encircling all these concerns is the question involving what aspects of the human condition are permanent and which ones are fluid and/or contingent. The United States in the aftermath of the Second World War was a social and cultural space with tremendous anxieties concerning gender and sexuality. The necessities of the war effort propelled women into previously male-dominated jobs, and labor-saving technologies further blurred the distinction between men and women’s work, making a gendered division of labor and, by extension, much of the patriarchal social and economic structure, seem less viable, or at least less “necessary.” However, the social imperatives of Cold War politics and social mores placed a strong emphasis on the traditional nuclear family commanded and headed by the father, and so we are blessed yet again with a historical pivot point beset with contradictions. The desire to affirm ‘tradition’ in the face of perceived (and profound) social and political change is a conspicuous feature of many American cultural products of the late 40s and 50s. The celebrated musical Kiss Me Kate, written by Samuel and Bella Spewack with memorable music and lyrics contributed by Cole Porter, is in some regards an example of this rule, and in others a subversion, and it utilizes Shakespeare as a tool of interpretation and affirmation of the prevailing sexual politics of its time. Specifically, it takes one of Shakespeare’s most notoriously problematic plays, The Taming of the Shrew, a work that has been regarded as controversial to varying degrees since its initial composition and performance in the late sixteenth century due to its apparent advocacy of female submission to male authority, and transposes it onto a modern setting, taking a meta-theatrical approach to the material. The plot covers the backstage antics of a group of actors putting on a performance of a musical version of Shakespeare’s play (also called Kiss me Kate). The relationships and romantic stresses the performers endure mirror the events of The Taming of the Shrew, but are significantly altered and have very different implications due to the changed nature of the relations between the sexes since Shakespeare’s time (and place). It is a storytelling approach that invites- in fact demands- comparisons between the past and present (or at least how both temporal conditions are imagined) and an assessment of the nature of social change.

The film version of Kiss Me Kate directed by George Sidney and written by Dorothy Kingsley is one of the more polished and vivacious versions of the musical available, and I will be using it as my source text for an assessment of the story’s gender politics, as well as an analysis of how they relate to the original play. Then, I will apply the adaptation theory developed and propounded by Linda Hutcheon to the work in order to gain a broader understanding of how inter-temporal cultural dialogues operate, and what the implications of striving for a sense of cultural continuity are. Central to my interpretation will be a thorough exploration of what I believe is the key difference between the Elizabethan ‘taming’ process depicted in Shakespeare’s play and the modern one depicted backstage in Kiss Me Kate. In the original The Taming of the Shrew, the lead Petruchio effectively tames his new wife, the quarrelsome and shrewish Katherina (Kate), by taking control of the domestic sphere wherein she is expected to dwell and, to some degree, manage her responsibilities. His efforts are an apparent success. In Kiss Me Kate, the lead Fred Graham (who is playing Petruchio in the play-within-the-play) tries to take control of Lilli Vanessi (playing Kate) by manipulating the public sphere in which Lilli has some degree of visibility and sway. His challenges soon outpace his abilities, as the public sphere is much bigger and difficult to control than the domestic, and the effort at taming apparently fails. It is only by way of a last-minute contrivance that a happy, guy-gets-the-girl ending is secured. This contrivance stems from a certain faith in the value of ‘romance,’ a force that gives the musical a decidedly conservative character that is meant to be authoritative, but remains unpersuasive in the end. The metaphorical (and literal) presence of the Shakespeare play is what is supposed to give the values on display their moral and aesthetic weight, but as the complexities of Shakespeare’s art resist easy identification with any one system of values or glib compartmentalization, so any work derived from it, or at least any work concerned with ideological circumscription, inevitably fails to limit and control the principles it attempts to discover in the Bard’s words. The failure of the conservatism in Kiss Me Kate, in essence, develops, as well as reveals, more complexities, problems, and anxieties in Shakespeare’s cultural presence.

The storytelling conventions employed in Kiss Me Kate are derived, to a significant degree, from the play on which it is based. These conventions are altered, and in some instances, expanded to suit the work’s unique artistic goals, but there is hardly a device present in the musical that does not have some sort of obvious mirror in Shakespeare’s play. For this reason, it may be useful to begin with an analysis of The Taming of the Shrew and a description of how its problematic themes have often been approached in performance.

Not the most PC of character arcs.

The themes of The Taming of the Shrew are difficult to take at face value thanks to the presence of a framing device, commonly called the Induction, in which a ne’er-do-well drunkard named Christopher Sly is, after a night of indulgence at a local tavern, deceived by a mischievous lord into thinking he is a wealthy lord himself, and the entirety of the main action of The Taming of the Shrew is an entertainment performed for his benefit by a traveling troupe of actors. As noted by the Shakespeare scholars Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, “…the opening scenes with Christopher Sly place the entire play within quotation marks. The ‘induction’ presents a series of wish-fulfillment fantasies to a drunken tinker… The effect of the frame is to ‘distance’ the action and so suggest that it does not present the ‘reality’ of proper marital relations” (527). In short, an extra layer of narrative context has the power to change the significance of words and actions within a work of literature, just as an understanding of context can change an individual’s understanding of events and behaviors in real life. As usual with Shakespeare, the approach to context taken by the play is multi-layered and complex. Just as the induction challenges the reader to think twice before taking the story’s surface morals literally, the circumstances surrounding Kate’s climactic speech (the most controversial portion of the play wherein male supremacy and female submission are upheld and advocated) at the play’s end lead any attentive reader to wonder if irony is playing a significant part in the apparently sexist proceedings. “The first half of Kate’s famous submission speech is spoken in the singular, addressed specifically to the widow [whom the character Hortensio has married for largely financial reasons] and not to womankind in general…” (527) Kate’s brand of advice and the social program she seems to be promoting have a dubious relation to the material and economic realities of the union between Hortensio and the wealthy widow. “…in contradistinction to Kate’s prescriptions, in this marriage it will be the wife… who provides the ‘maintenance’; Hortensio will be spared the labors of a bread-winner” (528). The theory of female submission does not match the practice of the incredibly complicated and dynamic realities of male/female relations. Economic conventions and their essential instability seem especially pertinent, as they make any singular theory of marriage and its accompanying social and familial arrangements seem similarly and oddly unstable. Kate is propounding an ideology that lacks the authoritative aura of credible permanence or decisive inevitability. Furthermore, her lack of awareness regarding the social bonds arranged by other people in her community has the effect of making her appear isolated and ignorant, which is of course the intuitive consequence of Petruchio’s shrew-taming program, which involved intensive social isolation and sensory deprivation. By the end of the play, Kate has thoroughly lost the ability to recognize context, and by extension irony, or to recognize particularities or contingencies. She has only the patriarchal dogma inculcated by Petruchio, which she is inclined to apply uncritically to any and all situations. It would seem that Shakespeare is closely associating the perception and awareness of context with power: the more one is aware of the broader social programs governing human lives- or in other words, the degree one is aware of the public sphere and how it relates to the domestic- the more likely one will be able to assert one’s will. The most remarkable thing about Kate’s final speech is that it is undertaken as a performance in front of an appreciative audience, including Petruchio, Hortensio, the Widow, Baptista, Vincentio, Lucentio, among others. There is an irony to the fact that Kate’s exile to the domestic sphere and estrangement from the public is announced in such a decidedly public fashion, but the artifice of the performing act again puts the whole matter in quotation marks. The artful act of ‘performing’ seems to cast the legitimacy, or at least the ‘naturalness,’ of specific social prescriptions into doubt, and this, of course, mirrors the dynamics present in the induction, in which the social reality in which Christopher Sly finds himself embedded is marked as false due to the presence of performing actors and the deception governing the whole situation. A Huntsman attending the Lord remarks, “As he shall think by our true diligence/ He is no less than what we say he is” (Shakespeare 531). This mandate is initially met with resistance. When Sly awakens in a lord’s bed in a lord’s chamber surrounded by servants, he says, “I am Christophero Sly, call not me ‘honour’ nor ‘lordship’. I ne’er drank sack in my life… ne’er ask me what raiment I’ll wear, for I have no more doublets than backs, no more stockings than legs…” (533) It could be considered strange and ironic that Sly would insist on a beggar’s identity when he is placed in the position of one of the higher classes. When he is first introduced in the very first scene of the play, he puts on airs and insists on noble lineage when he is accused of being a petty, drunken rogue by the Inn’s hostess: “You’re a baggage, the Slys are no rogues. Look in the chronicles, we came in with Richard Conqueror (sic)” (530). Self-definition is an extraordinarily important prerequisite for self-respect, dignity, and agency, and Shakespeare shrewdly depicts the pattern of resistance likely to be undertaken by those who have their sense of self imposed on them by others, especially more powerful others. He also understands the resources and abilities the powerful possess over the powerless that often make said pattern of resistance unsuccessful- the ability to name and label, and access to resources to give their names and labels material significance and, by extension, the impression of authority and permanence. Sly comes to be what others claim he is, but the reader knows that the performance being put on for his benefit is comically fragile and can be stopped and revealed as false at any moment. Kate’s situation is hardly any different in structure, although it is largely the opposite in superficial character. She is debased where Sly is elevated, a clever mirroring that suggests the essentially inauthentic quality of both the master and slave roles, if not their respective material conditions. Petruchio’s power is derived from both his ability to deprive Kate of resources, and to name things; that is, to bring about an understanding of the external world through a linguistic act. At the beginning of Act 4 Scene 3, Petruchio and Kate are making the journey from Petruchio’s shrew-taming school to Kate’s home, and they converse about the nature of reality. Petruchio insists that the shining sun is, in fact, the moon, and Kate predictably challenges him. Petruchio threatens to return Kate to his ‘school’ if she does not parrot his description of the outside world, and this threat prompts, to an even greater degree than Kate’s final submission speech, Kate’s total acquiescence to Petruchio’s will. Reality is what he says it is:

Kate: Forward, I pray, since we have come so far,

And be it moon, or sun, or what you please.

An if you please to call it a rush candle,

Henceforth I vow it shall be so for me.

Petruchio: I say it is the moon.

Kate: I know it is the moon. (574)

The audience comes to gain a sense of the fragility of Petruchio’s power moves because the formal structure of the play foregrounds the performative quality of them, and reminds anyone who may be watching that performance confers a measure of fluidity to social relationships.

So even in the original play, the framing device mirrored the events of the drama involving Petruchio and Katherina, and called the events depicted and the values espoused into question. This approach would be significantly expanded for the production of Kiss Me Kate, though many of the factors enabling the events in The Taming of the Shrew would be conspicuously absent or fundamentally altered.

Another crucial element at play in the social dynamics of the characters in The Taming of the Shrew is economics. This may not be immediately obvious, as love and romance in the ideal are elevated and celebrated at many points throughout the play, such as the instance when Baptista is discussing Petruchio’s desire to wed Kate: “Ay, when the special thing is well obtained, / That is, her love, for that is all in all” (549). However, the practical necessitates of marriage as an exchange of economic resources hover above the actions of the characters at all times. Indeed, it is the very first thing Petruchio undertakes to discuss with Baptista when first exploring the prospect of marrying Kate:

Petruchio: Then tell me, if I get your daughters love,

What dowry shall I have with her to wife?

Baptista: After my death the one half of my lands,

And in possession twenty thousand crowns.

Petruchio: And for that dowry I’ll assure her of her widowhood…

Let specialties be therefore drawn between us,

That covenants may be kept on either hand. (549)

The arrangement is material and negotiated exclusively between men. Kate’s perspective is only considered as an afterthought, and it is a perspective that is understood to be amenable to change. This mode of exchanging resources was typical of stratified societies that emerged in conjunction with advanced agricultural techniques (it is my understanding that the matter of causality between the two phenomena is still controversial). The different, post-industrial economic realities of the mid-twentieth century would mean that marriage would be a very different business in Kiss Me Kate.

Although the text of The Taming of the Shrew is rife with complexities that undermine its ostensible ‘message’ regarding female submission, these can be very easily altered or undermined through the exegesis implicit in the performance. The performance itself is both an interpretation of a text and an adaptation, as it inevitably provides additional information (assuming the text itself is not abridged, and even then there will be augmentations)- information that may or may not contradict what is written on the page- than can be conveyed exclusively through the play’s written words. Acting, direction, scenery, pacing, and much else besides both expand and demarcate the viewers’ perception of the events of the story and the words written by Shakespeare. For instance, I’ve already discussed the parallels between Christopher Sly’s situation in the induction to Katherina’s, but the perception of the parallel can be fundamentally altered through some creative casting. Marcela Kostihova, in her assessment of various Czech stage productions of The Taming of the Shrew, remarked on one performance, “The Taming directed by Michal Docekal… is the first Czech production to include the Induction and the Epilogue… As a result, Katherina’s taming can be interpreted as the dream of the drunkard Sly, played by the same actor who plays Petruchio…” (73). This approach to the performance adds an extra layer to the dynamics of domination and submission. If Petruchio is in some sense the powerless and put-upon Sly, then it would seem his abuse of Katherina stems at least in part from his own sense of powerlessness. This is an impression that can only be achieved through a staging of the play, as there is little in the text itself to support the interpretation of Petruchio as insecure in any sense. This creates a story in which makes the implicit quotation marks around the main narrative events are now explicit. The implication is that the medium of performance can become the means by which a different time and cultural space comments on both itself and the past, and registers social, sexual, and political change. The perception of change is intrinsic to Shakespeare’s art, so it is hardly surprising that during times of cultural uncertainty (that is, most times) he is called on as a valuable tool to understand (and by extension, control) changes in social conventions. “’Shakespeare’ itself is no safe haven but a field of ‘genuine struggles’” (Kostihova 79).

And now for a different kind of struggle- resisting the charms of Ann Miller.

Kiss Me Kate debuted on the Broadway stage in 1948 and received its film adaptation courtesy of director George Sidney in 1953. The plot involves the theater director and thespian Fred Graham directing and starring in a musical rendition of The Taming of the Shrew written by Cole Porter, who, in classic meta-theatrical fashion, is also a character. Graham manages to entice his ex-wife Lilli Vanessi (who is engaged to a Texan cattle Baron and very much absorbed in her career) into playing Katherina in the production. Accompanying them are a young couple, the aspiring, up-and-coming actors Lois Lane (playing Bianca) and Bill Calhoun (playing Lucentio). Lois is vying for Fred’s affections in part to gain money from him, and Bill is incredibly dissolute and gambles excessively, often putting girlfriend Lois in the awkward position of bailing him out of excess debts. The bulk of the action takes place during the opening night at the theater, and in the tradition of a grand farce, many things go wrong until the climatic romantic reconciliation between Lilli and Fred. The backstage romantic entanglements and financial woes of the main characters mirror the events they are enacting in The Taming of the Shrew, and their approach to the material fluctuates with their emotional states, which are largely influenced by their off-stage problems. By this technique, Shakespeare’s work becomes a means by which the characters engage with their lives and, arguably, the culture at large. Their very modern problems also cast new light on the play they are performing, with the theme of gender roles looming especially large. The critic Irene G. Dash grasped the method of Kiss Me Kate quite well: “Exploring the roles of women in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, this musical employed song, dance, and plot to present a woman’s dilemma of marriage versus career. Because the collaborators of Kiss Me Kate framed the Renaissance comedy within a backstage play, they could also immediately leap into the more accessible modern world and offer contemporary parallels” (49). The dynamics of sex and gender have changed significantly between the time of Shakespeare and the modern world of Kiss Me Kate, but much has remained the same as well. The most conspicuous difference is the financial significance and power assigned to women. In the original Taming women’s economic value was closely tied to that of their fathers or husbands. If a woman was rich, like the widow, it was because she inherited her money. The degree this arrangement applied to ALL women in Shakespeare’s era is largely irrelevant to the world of the play. As a cultural interpretative tool and emblem, the play depicts and assumes a patriarchal dynamic. The lives of its female characters, or at least their material and monetary value and positions, are closely tied to that of their male relatives. Inevitably, the women of Taming are assumed to confine their interests and duties to the domestic sphere. By contrast, Kiss Me Kate has women who possess a degree of financial independence and sexual autonomy. A major source of conflict between Bill and Lois is his tendency to be irresponsible with money, and her tendency to give sexual favors to wealthy men in order to obtain money. The two (perceived) vices are mutually reinforcing, and tied to a conservatism regarding gender roles. The lesson is that a man must be responsible in his bread-winning duties if he wishes to secure the sexual loyalty of a woman, and aspects of this dysfunctional dynamic are reflected in the play-within-the-musical. Bianca’s compliant agreeability becomes not-so-coyly expressed promiscuity (“I’m a maid mad to marry/ And will take double-quick/ Any Tom, Dick or Harry/ Any Tom, Harry or Dick”) as character traits that were previously understood as being in the mould of the passive feminine are re-articulated in terms of relative sexual freedom. Such alterations-by-juxtaposition-and-reinterpretation are made possible by the device of the induction, which is given a significant overhaul in the musical.

The induction has a much greater importance to Kiss Me Kate than it does to The Taming of the Shrew. In Taming the induction is short and can easily be omitted. Omitting the framing device in Kiss Me Kate would render the story incoherent. “Borrowing this device from Shakespeare’s play but transforming it, the collaborators too rely on the play-within-a-play… This further distances that story and thematically blurs the play’s meaning” (Dash 52). In the original play, the ‘performative’ qualities of Petruchio and Kate’s story were merely suggestive. Here they are central. Much like Petruchio, Fred Graham attempts to undertake a ‘taming’ of his estranged wife, trying to get her to finish her performance in the play and secure her as a romantic and professional partner. He does this by manipulating the environment around Lilli as much as possible. Gangsters arrive to obtain money from a gambling debt incurred by Bill but signed in Fred’s name. Fred informs them he can get the money if they can intimidate Lilli into finishing the show. He disseminates similar bits of misinformation to Tex, Lilli’s fiancé, and others in order to gain the upper hand, and the romantic and financial struggles of these characters often spill out into their performance of Taming. One of the most memorable moments in the musical is when the gangsters take on bit parts in the play in order to keep an eye on Lilli and hilariously misquote a variety of Shakespeare plays irrelevant to the production. The hyper-modern features of their slang contrasts comically with the mellifluous qualities of the Elizabethan poetry, making the clash between the modern and early modern aesthetics most overt. The essential difference between Petruchio’s efforts and Fred’s is twofold. First: Petruchio successfully dominates Kate by controlling the domestic sphere which is understood to be her rightful ‘place,’ and Fred unsuccessfully dominates Lilli through a failed effort to control the section of the public sphere of which they are both a part. Second: Petruchio possesses the power to name, and Fred does not. The essential difference between the Elizabethan and the modern social milieu in regards to gender is spatial. The necessary ability to isolate the ’shrew’ in Kiss Me Kate is absent, because women are now effective agents in the public sphere in a world where the domestic and familial are considerably diminished. Shakespeare’s play is the tool used to tease this truth out, and serves as the hermeneutic guide to a specific cultural moment.

One of the most conspicuous qualities of this specific cultural moment is the position of marriage. In the modern world, the economic importance of marital arrangements is noticeably diminished (though obviously not eliminated), and this is reflected in Kiss Me Kate, which uses a play which displays multiple and shifting attitudes toward marriage and its functions, both romantic and practical. “How one is to understand this show, depends inevitably on the particular aspect that catches one’s attention…. The show praises marriage, yet shows wedlock as inconvenient and unnecessary… various approaches suggest how Shakespeare’s figure functions in American culture… [and] serves metaphorically as a sort of magic ring granting wishes or as a universal solvent dissolving problems in the fiction” (Teague 138). The problem that is effectively dissolved is the material necessity of marriage. Shakespeare’s play is used to affirm romance in the face of the economic utility of wedlock falling into obsolescence.

If one were to apply an effective theoretical lens to the curious relationship between The Taming of the Shrew and Kiss Me Kate, it would need to pertain to adaptation. Kiss Me Kate is in dialogue with a cultural product which, owing to its canonical status, has the power to both challenge and interpret the mores of the cultural moment of which Kate is part. Linda Hutcheon’s adaptation theory, the most thorough of its kind to date, will be useful here to both understand the dynamic present in Kiss Me Kate and similar works, and to place it in a larger cultural and historical context. Hutcheon remarks in her book A Theory of Adaptation, “Part of this pleasure [of adaptations]… comes simply from repetition with variation, from the comfort of ritual combined with the piquancy of surprise. Recognition and remembrance are part of the pleasure… of experiencing an adaptation; so too is change” (4). The repetition present in Kiss Me Kate comes with the aspects of gender and art that are presented in The Taming of the Shrew and affirmed in the modern setting. The ending in which Fred and Lilli are reconciled is especially revealing here. Fred ultimately fails to keep Lilli in the theater and admits his defeat to her in private. His failure to control the public sphere has apparently thwarted any hope for happiness in the diminished private. He returns to his performance expecting an understudy to recite Kate’s final submission speech. However, to the surprise of absolutely no-one except Fred, Lilli returns at the last moment and performs the last scene as Kate before an enthusiastic crowd, and it is implied that she and Fred are again ’together.’ Lilli’s performance of the speech is ironic considering Fred’s admission of defeat to her in private. In Kiss Me Kate, patriarchy has a public face but little private significance. The ironic context of Kate’s submission speech is retained from the original Taming (the repetition as described by Hutcheon), but is altered by the self-awareness of the heroine (the change) so that it takes on something close to a heroic dimension.

Another important and helpful insight offered by Hutcheon that can be applied to Kiss Me Kate concerns the manner of story presentation, or medium. She remarks, “…considering changes in the more general manner of story presentation, however, other differences in what gets adapted begin to appear. This is because each manner involves a different mode of engagement on the part of both audience and adapter” (12). The most noticeable change in the presentation of the story of Kate and Petruchio undertaken by Kiss Me Kate is the change in the nature of the induction. The centrality of the ‘behind-the-scenes’ events renders the action of The Taming of the Shrew more artificial, and more conspicuously ‘performed.’ In the original text, it is very easy to forget that the main plot is a performance for Sly’s benefit, and indeed, many productions of the play omit the induction entirely. In Kiss Me Kate, despite the absence of anything that can be credibly called ‘realism,’ art is not allowed to cast its spell to the same degree because attention is constantly being drawn to its manufactured and constructed nature. Art cannot make reality, and reality is always undermining art, as the constant interruptions of the staged show in Kiss Me Kate demonstrate. The mode of engagement this encourages in the audience is essentially of a contextualizing character. Kiss Me Kate, in its own whimsical way, is constantly encouraging its audience to draw comparisons to different artistic styles and between different times and places. It is an aesthetic that enables the perception, and appreciation, of change.

The third, and final, point espoused by Hutcheon that I would like to draw attention to vis-à-vis Kiss Me Kate concerns both the definition of adaptation itself and the process of artistic production and reception. “[Adaptation] is actually very difficult to define, in part… because we use the same word for the process and the product. As a product, an adaptation can be given a formal definition, but as a process- of creation and reception- other aspects have to be considered” (15-16). The full range of these ‘considerations’ are beyond the scope of this inquiry, so I will focus on just a few aspects that pertain to Kiss Me Kate. As a musical, it foregrounds the process of its own creation and anticipates its reception. It is a musical about a musical being performed. This complicates its engagement with the text it is ostensibly adapting, The Taming of the Shrew. It is by now well understood that modern peoples cannot have access to Shakespeare’s creative process. Distance in time and culture prevent us from really knowing what compelled him to write his plays, beyond the obvious financial incentives, but even if we cannot fully grasp his art, we have some idea of his technique, and it, quite suggestively, included adaptation. The Taming of the Shrew itself is thought to be adapted from texts by George Gascoigne and Ludovico Ariosto (Bate and Rasmussen 529). This would seem to suggest that Shakespeare’s play was in dialogue with a number of cultural traditions and backgrounds, making it an act of interpretation and a receiving. The process of adaptation is the process of recycling stories, and commenting on them anew with each cycle. Kiss Me Kate is very much a link in the continuous process of Taming’s reception, an invitation to construct a relation with the cultural dialogues and conflicts presented through the aegis of Shakespeare’s art and, perhaps, have a say in how the process will continue.

The preceding analysis of Kiss Me Kate and its sister text The Taming of the Shrew is by no means exhaustive. My primary concern was to convey an understanding of the essentially conflicted nature of Shakespeare’s work, and how that sense of conflict and uncertainty makes the play an effective tool for artistically interpreting the realities of social change, especially change that pertains to gender. I also wished to offer a theoretical paradigm (adaptation theory) that may prove useful for gaining a broader understanding of how inter-cultural and inter-temporal dialogues exist through art. Kiss Me Kate presents conflicts between men and women which have the aura of intractability but are always continually resolved through the healing power of ‘romance.’ The fragility of this concept is revealed by its engagement with The Taming of the Shrew (a play which doesn’t offer much hope for the fulfilling power of marriage minus the presence of female submission and monetary gain) and yet paradoxically affirmed by the use of a parallel structure that augments and extends Shakespeare’s artistic methods into a modern setting and deprives the original play of at least some of its superficially misogynistic bite by revealing that the conflicts it depicts can never have a final and decisive victor.