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Diablo Cody Writing Taming of the Shrew Adaptation?

by Brandon Lee Tenney
January 16, 2009

Apparently Steven Spielberg himself will be ponying up half of the $26 million handed over to Paramount today from his ailing company, DreamWorks. And due to their floundering financial status, they've also lost their legal right to co-finance 17 of their previously developed projects. Long story, short: less money, less projects. So what are these 17 abandoned projects? While you can go read up on a few of them, including Spielberg's own Lincoln biopic, one of them that caught our eye is that of Diablo Cody's possible next project, a modern re-imagining of William Shakespeare's early comedy The Taming of the Shrew.

Basically, the story in The Taming of the Shrew boils down to a plot of the courting of a headstrong lady by a gentleman of Verona named Petruchio and his attempts to "tame" her. All the while, there's a subplot involving a competition between a host of suitors attempting to court the main lady's obstinate sister. Sounds great, right? Well, let me cast this in a different light: Shakespeare gave us such words as "bloody", "critic", "gloomy", "obscene", and "suspicious", to name just a few of the almost 1,700 words he came up with. Diablo Cody has given us such gems as "slutwaffle" and the over-use of the word "shenanigans."

So maybe she'll be able to subvert what seems to be a massively misogynistic work of literature with her extremely idiosyncratic writing style and over-the-top sense of story? What we do know is that she'll be doing it (at least for now) without the help of Spielberg or DreamWorks. Although someone else might pick it up instead. Does Diablo Cody have what it takes to re-imagine William Shakespeare?

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