The Taming of the Shrew steps forward and speaks directly to the audience as herself; "Well, I must own, it wounds me to the Heart/To play, unwomanly, so mean a Part./What – to submit, so tamely – so contented,/Thank Heav'n! I'm not the Thing I represented." Cole Porter's musical "Kiss Me, Kate" is an adaptation of "Taming of the Shrew". The music and lyrics are by Porter and the book is by Samuel and Bella Spewack. It is at least partially based on the 1935/1936 Theatre Guild production of "Taming of the Shrew", which starred husband and wife Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, whose backstage
The Taming of the Shrew in performance thus takes on a disturbing irony. Marowitz described his intention in "The Shrew" as "a head-on confrontation with the intellectual substructure of the play, an attempt to test or challenge, revoke or destroy the intellectual foundation which makes a classic the formidable thing it has become [and to] combat the assumptions of a classic with a series of new assumptions, and force it to bend under the power of a new polemic." Due to the extreme nature of the production, the play divided critics and audiences, but it was a huge box office success. The Taming of the Shrew in