Romantic Comedies Inspired by Shakespearean Plays: Photos

All the world’s a phase — and the best inspiration for a intimate comedy plot line! Quite a few beloved romance-concentrated films have taken inspiration from the Bard himself: William Shakespeare.

10 Items I Despise About You, the 1999 cult common that starred the likes of Julia Stiles and Heath Ledger, was at first encouraged by Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. 

The film followed sisters Kat and Bianca Stratford (played by Stiles and Larisa Oleynik, respectively) as they navigated substantial school romances. Though Bianca was forbidden to day right until her older sister did, Cameron James (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) concocted a plan to be ready to ask out Bianca: Get resident undesirable boy Patrick Verona (Ledger) to woo Kat.

The movie’s plot is related to the 16th century perform, in which Lucentio is not able to marry his like, Bianca, until eventually her “shrewish” more mature sister, Katherina, marries initially. The eccentric Petruccio teams up with Lucentio to allure the unwilling Katherina and change her into an obedient spouse.

“We were being recruiting so quite a few of our pals to obtain fairytales, or fables, and one particular night time a friend was like, ‘You men need to do Taming of the Shrew, that would be great,’” screenwriter Kirsten Smith recalled to Refinery29 in June 2019 of her crafting process with cowriter Karen McCullah. “He recommended switching the genders, but soon after thinking about it, we decided it would be greater [in its original form.] It was a rather extreme two-thirty day period lookup seeking to find the ideal detail [that] would lend by itself perfectly to higher college.”

She ongoing: “We sought out to locate this best teen strategy, and as soon as we landed on Taming of the Shrew, we went to Mexico in which Karen had a timeshare, and we put in a week outlining the script on the seaside. We went back to our respective states and wrote the script lengthy distance. It was right before net [was a big thing] so we had been like mailing just about every other pages and faxing just about every other scenes. It was very very low tech!”

10 Matters I Loathe About You was just the tipping place for romantic comedies based on Shakespeare’s acclaimed performs. Amanda Bynes and Channing Tatum notably starred in 2006’s She’s the Person, which drew inspiration from Twelfth Night time. In the film, Bynes’ Viola schemed to consider her twin brother Sebastian’s (James Kirk) place at a new boarding school to be part of their soccer crew following her personal squad is slice. There, she shortly falls in really like with her roommate, Duke (performed by Tatum), who is infatuated by common classmate Olivia (Laura Ramsey).

The OG play adopted a equivalent story when Viola — divided from her twin Sebastian — posed as a boy even though performing for her crush, Duke. Nonetheless, Duke is in like with Countess Olivia and enlists Viola to court docket her on his behalf regardless of Olivia falling for Viola’s Sebastian.

“I totally fought for Channing [to get cast in] that movie due to the fact he was not famed nonetheless,” the Amanda Show alum told Paper journal in November 2018, calling the motion picture an “interesting” practical experience as a entire. “He’d just performed a Mountain Dew commercial and I was like, ‘This guy’s a star — every woman will enjoy him!’ But [the producers] have been like, ‘He’s so considerably more mature than all of you!’ And I was like, ‘It does not subject! Have faith in me!’”

Scroll down below for a lot more of the most effective romantic comedies that had been adapted from Shakespearean origins: