Page "The Taming of the Shrew" Paragraph 257

In 1980, the BBC produced a version of the play for their BBC Shakespeare series, directed by Jonathan Miller and starring John Cleese and Sarah Badel.

The casting of John Cleese as Petruchio was not without controversy at the time.

Cleese had never performed Shakespeare before, and was not a fan of the first two seasons of the BBC Television Shakespeare, and took some persuading from Miller that the BBC Shrew would not be, as Cleese feared " about a lot of furniture being knocked over, a lot of wine being spilled, a lot of thighs being slapped and a lot of unmotivated laughter.

" As such, Miller told Cleese that the episode would interpret Petruchio as an early Puritan, and that the part was not to be acted along the traditional lines of the swaggering bully a la Richard Burton in Zeffirelli's 1967 adaptation.

In tandem with this interpretation, the song sung at the end of the play is a musical version of Psalm 128, which was often sung in Puritan households at the end of a meal during Shakespeare's own day.