Appropriating of The Taming of the Shrew, altering the play and making it less sexist just to make it fit in to the 20th century would be changing the whole point of the play itself. The Taming of the Shrew reflected the 16th Century values of men and women alike, the play showed how men and women should behave towards each other. There was the whole Great Chain of Being thing, where god (who was in fact a man) would stand high up at the top, then the arch angels, the king (also a man), and then somewhere clearly below the men on the chain was the woman; it was a patriarchal society which dominated women.
Women didn't play a significantly important role in society, they were just 'owned' by men and played their part in society by adapting the roles which were given to them by the world at the time; the housewife who is obedient, loyal, virtuous, and to provide heirs.
William Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, Act IV,...
Taming of the Shrew by Augustus Egg
Petruchio forces Katherina to call the sun the moo...A woman and her dowry would be negotiated for a perspective suitor. These social alliances were common in the commercial world of 16th Century Padua- the play's setting. The Taming of the Shrew illustrates this fact rather explicitly, they show in great detail how the society treats someone who is threatening to disrupt to The Great Chain of Being- Katherine the shrew.
Katherine is a woman who refuses to accept the unwritten rules which society has placed on everyone, she refuses to sit around and be like her virtuous, seemingly perfect younger sister, Bianca. Instead, she is the opposite; she knows what she wants in life and doesn't take any crap from anybody. 20th Century views will see Katherine as being as feminist but she wasn't intentionally a feminist character, she doesn't believe in inequality between...