Romantic Comedies Inspired by Shakespearean Works: ’10 Things I Hate About You,’ ‘She’s the Man,’ More

usmagazine.com:

All the world’s a stage — and the perfect inspiration for a romantic comedy plot line! Many beloved romance-focused movies have taken inspiration from the Bard himself: William Shakespeare.10 Things I Hate About You, the 1999 cult classic that starred the likes of Julia Stiles and Heath Ledger, was initially inspired by Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew.

The movie followed sisters Kat and Bianca Stratford (played by Stiles and Larisa Oleynik, respectively) as they navigated high school romances.

While Bianca was forbidden to date until her older sister did, Cameron James (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) concocted a scheme to be able to ask out Bianca: Get resident bad boy Patrick Verona (Ledger) to woo Kat.The movie’s plot is similar to the 16th century play, in which Lucentio is unable to marry his love, Bianca, until her “shrewish” older sister, Katherina, marries first.

The eccentric Petruccio teams up with Lucentio to charm the reluctant Katherina and turn her into an obedient wife.“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 process 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.