This week on Heavenly Shows and Unnecessary Letters: Taming of the Shrew, directed by Toby Frow for the Globe Theatre in 2012, and written in 1603 by William Shakespeare.

Content Warning: In this episode we discuss depicted episodes of domestic violence. If you need assistance, links to some Australian support providers will be included at the end of these show notes.

Some Shakespeare plays are timeless, and others are a product of their time. When staging plays, what you put on stage is always a mixture of the time when the play was written, and the era in which your audience is living; no matter how period-appropriate, no matter how historically informed, and notwithstanding the colossal temple to Shakespeare in which you’re performing, you’re always going to be judged by modern standards; that’s just the nature of the arts, especially the performing arts. Taming of the Shrew is a story so beloved that it has been adapted many times in many ways, but a lot of those adaptations exist to get past the almost unscalable heights of the play’s chauvinism as written. Our show today, performed in and by the Globe, isn’t making those adaptations; so what is watching a show like that in 2012 or 2020 like?

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Editing by Tammy Sarah Linde and Luke O'Hagan 

Music by Luke O'Hagan 

Audio excerpt from Henry V used under a Creative Commons License from Archive.org - license available here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ 

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