The Noughties brought even more offerings in this vein. Whatever It Takes (2000), a modern update of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, was followed in 2001 by Get Over It, which integrated the plot of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and O, an adaptation of Othello. Then in 2006 came two further Shakespeare updates and one Austen adaptation – She’s the Man (Twelfth Night), John Tucker Must Die (The Merry Wives of Windsor) and Material Girls (Sense and Sensibility).
However, often in adapting literature greats, these films have not just translated the plots but updated them, incorporating their own progressive values into stories with questionable gender roles, for instance. Take 10 Things I Hate About You and its treatment of The Taming of the Shrew: there’s long been a debate about the plot, which sees the strong-willed Katherina ‘tamed’ by a suitor, Petruchio, and whether Shakespeare is guilty of deep misogyny – or whether that is offset by a knowing edge.
However, in adapting the play for the screen, Smith made sure to avoid such contentions by infusing her script with the “spirit of 90s feminism”. That’s never more obvious than through Julia Stiles’ Katarina ‘Kat’ Stratford, an intellectual feminist dealing with suburban girl angst, who loves “angry-girl music of the indie-rock persuasion” and exhibits a disdain for archaic notions of femininity reinforced by the male-dominated world. “I don’t like to do what people expect,” she says. “Why should I live up to other people’s expectations instead of my own?” Kat asserts her right to be a “heinous bitch”, as she’s known at school, because her rage against the patriarchy and misogyny is more than justified.
