My Shakespeare

Episode
Taming The Shrew
Broadcast Info
2014 (45 mins)
Description
In 1990, Morgan Freeman famously starred in a Wild West version of The Taming of The Shrew for Shakespeare in the Park in New York. One of the bard’s very first works, Freeman sets out to understand how and why the play was written. Interviews include Tracey Ullman and Sinead Cusack.
"16th century England and the Old West had a lot more in common than you might think"
Morgan Freeman first discovered Shakespeare in school in Mississippi. And he, like Shakespeare, was born a country boy with big ambitions! He went on to play the hero of this play - Petruchio - in a famous production for Shakespeare in the Park in New York in 1990?
It’s a love story between two unlikely characters. The Shrew - is Katherine (or Kate) a woman who is not prepared to accept any of the conventions of her time and so is "unmarriageable". Her sister is a kind of Tudor Barie Doll and the contrast is striking. Petruchio is after a wife, and the wealthier the better - he takes up the challenge of "taming" the Shrew.
It’s a role that we discover has appealed to many men, Richard Burton, Brian Cox, John Cleese and Raul Julia. And we reveal some Kates: such as Elizabeth Taylor, Fiona Shaw, Sinead Cusack and Meryl Streep. Morgan’s Kate was Tracey Ullman and they reunite to re-examine their own "wild west" production of the play.
For many this play is an uncomfortable watch. It was one of Shakespeare’s very first plays and perhaps it seems to brutal and sexist for modern audiences. It ends with a speech about how Women should "obey" their men. But is this quite the sexist propaganda that it first seems to be - or is there something more complicated (and more interesting) going on.
Morgan investigates and concludes that beneath the apparent cruelty there is a genuinely modern message about equality in relationships - and we discover that one of the great "voices" of modern feminism, Germaine Greer, agrees with him.
Genre
Literature; Writing

How to cite this record

The Open University, "My Shakespeare". https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/ou/search/index.php/prog/85996 (Accessed 10 Jan 2025)