All the world’s a stage — and the right inspiration for a romantic comedy plot line! Many beloved romance-focused motion pictures have taken inspiration from the Bard himself: William Shakespeare.
10 Things I Hate About You, the 1999 cult basic that starred the likes of Julia Stiles and Heath Ledger, was initially impressed by Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew.
The film adopted sisters Kat and Bianca Stratford (performed by Stiles and Larisa Oleynik, respectively) as they navigated highschool romances. While Bianca was forbidden to this point till her older sister did, Cameron James (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) concocted a scheme to have the ability to ask out Bianca: Get resident dangerous boy Patrick Verona (Ledger) to woo Kat.
The film’s plot is much like the sixteenth century play, through which Lucentio is unable to marry his love, Bianca, till her “shrewish” older sister, Katherina, marries first. The eccentric Petruccio groups up with Lucentio to attraction the reluctant Katherina and switch her into an obedient spouse.
“We were recruiting so many of our friends to find fairytales, or fables, and one night a friend was like, ‘You guys should do Taming of the Shrew, that would be great,’” screenwriter Kirsten Smith recalled to Refinery29 in June 2019 of her writing course of with cowriter Karen McCullah. “He suggested switching the genders, but after considering it, we decided it would be better [in its original form.] It was a pretty intense two-month search trying to find the perfect thing [that] would lend itself well to high school.”
She continued: “We sought out to find this perfect teen idea, and once we landed on Taming of the Shrew, we went to Mexico where Karen had a timeshare, and we spent a week outlining the script on the beach. We went back to our respective states and wrote the script long distance. It was before internet [was a big thing] so we were like mailing each other pages and faxing each other scenes. It was very low tech!”
10 Things I Hate About You was simply the tipping level for romantic comedies based mostly on Shakespeare’s acclaimed performs. Amanda Bynes and Channing Tatum notably starred in 2006’s She’s the Man, which drew inspiration from Twelfth Night. In the movie, Bynes’ Viola schemed to take her twin brother Sebastian’s (James Kirk) place at a brand new boarding faculty to affix their soccer crew after her personal squad is minimize. There, she quickly falls in love together with her roommate, Duke (performed by Tatum), who’s infatuated by common classmate Olivia (Laura Ramsey).
The OG play adopted an identical story when Viola — separated from her twin Sebastian — posed as a boy whereas working for her crush, Duke. However, Duke is in love with Countess Olivia and enlists Viola to courtroom her on his behalf regardless of Olivia falling for Viola’s Sebastian.
“I totally fought for Channing [to get cast in] that movie because he wasn’t famous yet,” the Amanda Show alum instructed Paper journal in November 2018, calling the film an “interesting” expertise as a complete. “He’d just done a Mountain Dew commercial and I was like, ‘This guy’s a star — every girl will love him!’ But [the producers] were like, ‘He’s so much older than all of you!’ And I was like, ‘It doesn’t matter! Trust me!’”
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Scroll beneath for extra of the very best romantic comedies that had been tailored from Shakespearean origins:
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