Shakespeare: inventor of popular phrases; the man responsible for my less-than-stellar A Level English grade; and, now, the inspiration behind some of the best-loved romantic comedies of a generation. When Anyone But You arrived in cinemas last December, Sydney Sweeney was its main selling point, enabling straight men across the globe to witness the revival of rom coms based on the works of the Bard. Yes, Anyone But You might initially seem like a typical will-they-won’t-they like-story set in America, but in actual fact, it’s a will-they-won’t-they like-story set in America based on Much Ado About Nothing! Unfortunately, while it is an entertaining enough movie, the Shakespearian element is so watered down that you’d be better off turning to Gnomeo and Juliet for authenticity.
10 Things I Hate About You, on the other hand, is a rom com that incorporates lines from the original play, The Taming of the Shrew, into its script. That is, of course, unless 16-year-old boys in the nineties typically wandered down school corridors spouting phrases such as “I burn, I pine, I perish”. It would get their heads shoved down the toilet in any modern British secondary school, but because it’s Shakespeare even Heath Ledger’s bad boy character, Patrick, doesn’t make Joseph Gordon-Levitt a target. In true Shakespearean fashion, performances are still rated in terms of rotten tomatoes; in the Globe, they were thrown; in 2024, a website is listlessly browsed before making a decision on whether a film is worth watching. With a rating of 71%, 10 Things I Hate About You is certainly certified fresh, unlike She’s the Man.
If you can bear to look back at Amanda Bynes’s filmography without bothering your friends with constant exclamations of, “what happened?”, you’d have likely watched She’s the Man (based on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night) a fair few times since its 2006 release. While Rotten Tomatoes considers it a dud, I believe it to be pure entertainment, due in part to foetus Channing Tatum. Although it’s another Anyone But You-style film, in that it’s about as Shakespearean as Phil Mitchell, it reflects the ongoing discrimination in modern society. Personally, I fail to understand why anyone would want to join the army or even play football on a muddy field, but no activity should be reserved for just one gender. Ironically, if Amanda Bynes entered the industry as a guy, her mental health may not have suffered as greatly. The noughties was not a great time to be a young woman.
Despite there once being a time where you’d have been better off going to Cineworld than Southwark to experience the complete works of Shakespeare, adaptations of his plays dwindled after the mid-2000s. Perhaps we were too greedy; in addition to 10 Things I Hate About You and She’s the Man between 1999 and 2006, movie-goers got Get Over It – a teen rom com loosely based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As it came out in 2001, before most of The Badger’s readers were born, it’s unsurprising that Get Over It slipped through my radar. Yes, it stars Kirsten Dunst and Mila Kunis, but it also features Sisqó, a man only famous for singing at women to take off their thongs. Shakespeare, he ain’t.
It’s unsurprising that these teen flicks are all based on the playwright’s comedies, which lend themselves to lighthearted plots and arguable vapidity. It would have been interesting to see a noughties rom com based on Othello or Hamlet (yes, I know we got The Lion King, but Lindsay Lohan didn’t star in that, did she?). The closest we got to evil was Regina George, and she even got a villain-to-hero arc after getting hit by a bus. Poor Iago never stood a chance – the 25 to Old Steine didn’t exist in 1603, and getting run over by a horse-and-cart doesn’t have the same impact. Literally.
Hopefully after Anyone But You, Shakespeare will once again make it out of the shackles of the classroom and into teenagers’ good books. In other words, it’s time for the resurgence of Shakespeare for the everyman at the Everyman.
