Every Version of 10 Things I Hate About You

Gil Junger's film works because it doesn't hide the Shakespeare: it announces itself as a retelling, then earns its own emotional life anyway. Heath Ledger's bleachers sequence is the kind of thing that belongs to cinema rather than to a source text. More importantly, the film's updating of Kat refuses to fully domesticate her, and Julia Stiles's delivery of the sonnet-speech at the climax has genuine weight. The 1999 version is not just the most familiar version of this story. It is the version that solves the problem the play can't quite solve on its own: how to make a coerced romance feel earned.

The Taming of the Shrew is one of Shakespeare's funniest plays and also one of his most unresolved. Whether Katharina's final speech is sincere submission, bitter irony, or a survival strategy is a debate that has been running since at least the nineteenth century, and the text genuinely sustains all three readings. Directors choose: prestige productions tend toward the ironic reading; productions that trust the knockabout comedy tend toward the more uncomfortable one. Neither is wrong. What the play is not, despite what the 1999 film made it feel like, is a romance with a happy ending that everyone can comfortably accept. That tension is what makes it worth returning to.