For contemporary discussions of these issues, I have consulted: Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia Farnham, Modern Woman: The Lost Sex (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947), and their earlier article: “Men Have Lost Their Women,” Ladies’ Home Journal 61 (November 1944), pp. 23, 132–36, 139; their influence was pervasive and provocative enough to generate an angry refutation, nearly two decades later, in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963). See as well Joanne Meyerowitz, “Beyond the Feminine Mystique: A Reassessment of Postwar Mass Culture, 1946–1958,” Journal of American History 79 (March 1993), pp. 1455–82. See too Leslie B. Hohman, ‘‘Married Strangers,’’ Ladies’ Home Journal (October 1944), pp. 156–57; Rudolf Dreikurs, ‘‘Getting Along in Marriage,’’ Ladies’ Home Journal (November 1946), p. 260; William K. Reed Jr., ‘‘One Out of Three Breaks Up,’’ New Republic (March 24, 1947), pp. 17–20; Samuel G. Kling, ‘‘Why Marriages Fail,’’ Better Homes & Gardens (December 1947), pp. 46, 144–46; ‘‘Divorces: A New High for U.S.,’’ U.S. News & World Report (October 4, 1946), pp. 30–31; and ‘‘Divorce: The Postwar Wave,’’ Newsweek (October 7, 1946), p. 33; Douglas Larsen, “Wear and Tear on Wives Is Terrific as Men in Service Come Home and Spank Their Cares Away,” Austin Statesman (January 26, 1946); and Alanson H. Edgerton, Readjustment or Revolution: A Guide to Economic, Educational, and Social Readjustment of War Veterans, Ex-War Workers, and Oncoming Youth (New York: Whittlesey House, McGraw-Hill, 1946). For Willard Waller, see his The Veteran Comes Back (New York: Dryden Press, 1944), War and the Family (New York: Dryden Press, 1940), as well as his op-ed that ran in the New York Herald Tribune (February 18, 1945), and also appeared in the Baltimore Sun, the Los Angeles Times, the Atlanta Constitution, and other national newspapers. For Eleanor Roosevelt’s response, see New York Times, February 20, 1945, and Hartford Courant, February 26, 1945. See too, on male sexuality: Alfred C. Kinsey, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders Co., 1948).
On spanking in the play, in the musical, and in midcentury American culture, see Andrew Heisel, “‘I Don’t Know Whether to Kiss You or Spank You’: A Half Century of Fear of an Unspanked Woman,” https://pictorial.jezebel.com/i-dont-know-whether-to-kiss-you-or-spank-you-a-half-ce-1769140132; Larsen, “Wear and Tear on Wives,” Austin Statesman, January 26, 1946; and for evidence of a 1922 German production of The Taming of the Shrew, directed by Max Reinhardt, in which Katherine is spanked—the first recorded instance of this in a staging of the play—see https://mainstreamspanking.wordpress.com/2017/04/04/the-value-and-risks-of-wearing-a-practical-skirt/. See too https://flashbak.com/women-being-spanked-in-vintage-comic-books-62908/ and https://mainstreamspanking.wordpress.com/2015/05/04/there-isnt-a-spanking-scene-in-the-taming-of-the-shrew/. See too Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011). For the photograph accompanying Brooks Atkinson’s review of the production, see the New York Times, December 31, 1948.
For additional biographical information on Bella Spewack, see Elizabeth Drorbaugh, “Bella Spewack,” in Jewish American Women Writers, ed. Ann R. Shapiro (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994); and her memoir: Bella Cohen Spewack, Streets: A Memoir of the Lower East Side, introduction by Ruth Limmer, afterword by Lois Raeder Elias (New York: Feminist Press, 1995). And for Cole Porter, see George Eells, The Life That Late He Led: A Biography of Cole Porter (London: W. H. Allen, 1967), as well as the invaluable William McBrien, Cole Porter: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1998); Don M. Randel, Matthew Shaftel, and Susan Forscher Weiss, eds., A Cole Porter Companion (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016), especially Lynn Laitman Siebert’s essay on Kiss Me, Kate. There is no biography of Saint Subber. I am also indebted to Forrest A. Newlin, “The New York Stage Designs of Lemuel Ayers” (PhD diss., University of Nebraska, 1978).
For scholarship on Kiss Me, Kate and the Shakespeare Broadway musical in general, I am indebted to the brilliant essay by John R. Severn, which has shaped my thinking about the social contexts of the musical, “A (White) Woman’s (Ironic) Place in Kiss Me, Kate and Post-war America,” Studies in Musical Theatre 6 (2012), pp. 173–86. I have also found especially helpful: Dan Rebellato, “‘No Theatre Guild Attraction Are We’: Kiss Me, Kate and the Politics of the Integrated Musical,” Contemporary Theatre Review 19 (2009), pp. 61–73; Geoffrey Block, Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical from “Show Boat” to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Irene G. Dash, Shakespeare and the American Musical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); Joseph P. Swain, The Broadway Musical: A Critical and Musical Survey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Larry Stempel, Showtime: A History of the Broadway Musical Theater (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010); Carol E. Silverberg’s excellent PhD dissertation, “If It’s Good Enough for Shakespeare: The Bard and the American Musical” (Binghamton: State University of New York at Binghamton, 2009); Jennifer S. Horn’s valuable PhD dissertation, “The Rehabilitation of The Shrew: Romance, Spankings, Feminism, and the Search for a Happy Ending in Stage and Film Adaptations of Shakespeare’s Play” (London: University of London, 2006); Fran Teague, “Shakespeare, Beard of Avon,” in Richard Burt, ed., Shakespeare After Mass Media (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 221–42; Robert Lawson-Peebles, “Brush Up Your Shakespeare: The Case of Kiss Me, Kate,” in Approaches to the American Musical, ed. Robert Lawson-Peebles (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1996); Andrea Most, Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Raymond Knapp, The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); Ethan Mordden, Beautiful Mornin’: The Broadway Musical in the 1940s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Raymond Knapp, The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); and Scott McMillan, The Musical as Drama (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). Also useful for the comedy of remarriage: Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).
For Swingin’ the Dream, see Frances Teague, Shakespeare and the American Popular Stage; Alan Corrigan, “Jazz, Shakespeare, and Hybridity: A Script from Swingin’ the Dream,” Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 1 (March 2005); Errol Hill, Shakespeare in Sable: A History of Black Shakespearean Actors (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984); Lewis A. Erenberg, Swingin’ the Dream: Big Band Jazz and the Rebirth of American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); and the review in Theatre Arts Monthly (February 1940), p. 93.
For the announcement in early 1949 of the future musical West Side Story, see Louis Calta, “‘Romeo’ to Receive Musical Styling: Bard’s Play to Undergo Local Renovation by Bernstein, Robbins and Laurents,” New York Times, January 27, 1949. And for reviews of the 1953 film that I quote from, see John Beaufort, Christian Science Monitor, November 27, 1953, and Otis L. Guernsey Jr., New York Herald Tribune, November 6, 1953. The 1953 film earned $2 million in North American movie houses; at an average price at the time of fifty cents a ticket, that meant that roughly four million North American moviegoers saw the film.
CHAPTER 7: 1998
This chapter relies heavily on a major archive as well as a few key sources. Tom Stoppard’s archive is in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. I am especially grateful to Stephen Ennis, director of the Ransom Center, as well as his colleagues Aaron Pratt and Eric Colleary. I have drawn on interviews found on the Collector’s DVD of Shakespeare in Love, which also provided outtakes cut from the film. I have also drawn on interviews included in Linda Seger’s And the Best Screenplay Award Goes to . . . : Learning from the Winners: Sideways, Shakespeare in Love, Crash (Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese; Enfield: Publishers Group, 2008). For information about Harvey Weinstein’s involvement in the film I have depended heavily on Peter Biskind’s outstanding Down and Dirty Pict
ures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), which offers an incisive account, based on extensive interviews, of the film’s making. Alisa Perren’s Indie, Inc.: Miramax and the Transformation of Hollywood in the 1990s (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012) has also been useful. For other quotations from the principal figures and for accounts of the making of the film, see Susan Bullington Katz, “Rhyme and Reason: A Conversation with Shakespeare in Love’s Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard,” in Written By (March 1999), pp. 19–27; Ira Nadel’s richly detailed Double Act: The Life of Tom Stoppard (London: Methuen, 2004); Karen Hollinger, “The First Lady of Miramax: Gwyneth Paltrow,” in The Actress: Hollywood Acting and the Female Star (New York: Routledge, 2006); James Spada, Julia: Her Life (New York: St. Martin’s, 2004); and Valerie Marino, Gwyneth (Toronto: ECW Press, 2000).
For the drafts on which I offer my extended account of early versions of the play (including Marc Norman’s, which I accessed through Stoppard’s copy of Norman’s script), consult the Finding Aid for Tom Stoppard’s holdings at the Ransom Center related to Shakespeare in Love, especially: containers 50–51, container 117, as well as his correspondence for these years, both catalogued and uncatalogued, including G12345 (both 4, which contains his outlines, and 5) and G12573. Stoppard didn’t put all of his drafts in chronological order and only a few are dated. Stoppard’s letter to Barry Isaacson about overhauling Norman’s draft is dated June 20, 1992; his letter to Edward Zwick about “Susan’s” studio rewrite is dated June 10, 1997. For quotations from the published version of the screenplay, see Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard, Shakespeare in Love: A Screenplay (New York: Miramax Film Corp and Universal Studios, 1998).
The film has generated a good deal of critical commentary. I have drawn on: Michael Anderegg, “James Dean Meets the Pirate’s Daughter: Passion and Parody in William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet and Shakespeare in Love,” in Richard Burt and Lynda Boose, eds., Shakespeare the Movie, II: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV, Video, and DVD (New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 56–71; Elizabeth Klett, “Shakespeare in Love and the End(s) of History,” Retrovisions: Reinventing the Past in Film and Fiction, eds. Deborah Cartmell, I. Q. Hunter, and Imelda Whelehan (London: Pluto Press, 2001), pp. 25–40; Courtney Lehmann, “Shakespeare in Love: Romancing the Author, Mastering the Body,” in Spectacular Shakespeare: Critical Theory and Popular Cinema, eds. Courtney Lehmann and Lisa J. Starks (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002), pp. 125–45; Paul J. C. M. Franssen, “Shakespeare’s Life on Film and Television: Shakespeare in Love and A Waste of Shame,” in Adaptation, Intermediality and the British Celebrity Biopic (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2014), pp. 101–13; Emma French, Selling Shakespeare to Hollywood: The Marketing of Filmed Shakespeare Adaptations from 1989 into the New Millennium (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2006), pp. 133–68; Deborah Cartmell, “Marketing Shakespeare Films: From Tragedy to Biopic,” in Shakespeare’s Cultural Capital: His Economic Impact from the Sixteenth to the Twenty-First Century (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 57–76; Russell Jackson, “Working with Shakespeare: Confessions of an Advisor,” Cineaste 24 (1999), pp. 42–44; Kenneth Rothwell, “Elizabeth and Shakespeare in Love,” Cineaste 24 (1999), pp. 78–80; Sujata Iyengar, “Shakespeare in Love,” Literature/Film Quarterly 29 (2001), pp. 122–27; Richard Burt, “Shakespeare in Love and the End of Shakespeare,” Shakespeare, Film, Fin-de-siècle, eds. Mark T. Burnett and Ramona Wray (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000); Todd F. Davis and Kenneth Womack, “Reading (and Writing) the Ethics of Authorship: Shakespeare in Love as Postmodern Metanarrative,” in “The Real Thing”: Essays on Tom Stoppard in Celebration of His 75th Birthday, eds. William Baker and Amanda Smothers (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), pp. 136–49; Sarah Mayo, “‘A Shakespeare for the People’? Negotiating the Popular in Shakespeare in Love and Michael Hoffman’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Textual Practice 17 (2003), pp. 295–315; Sarah Werner, Shakespeare and Feminist Performance: Ideology on Stage (London: Routledge, 2001); Stephen Greenblatt, “About That Romantic Sonnet,” New York Times, February 6, 1999; and for an excellent account of the ending of the film, including what was cut, see John Blakely, “Shakespearean Relocations: The Final Scene of John Madden’s Shakespeare in Love,” Shakespeare Bulletin 27 (2009), pp. 249–59.
For Harvey Weinstein’s campaign to win Academy Awards, see Nikki Finke’s important “Much Ado About Oscar,” New York magazine, March 15, 1999, as well as Sarah Martindale, “The Golden [Statuette] Age: How Miramax Sold Shakespeare to the Academy,” Networking Knowledge 7(4) (2014); and Rebecca Keegan and Nicole Sperling, “Shakespeare in Love and Harvey Weinstein’s Dark Oscar Victory,” Vanity Fair, December 8, 2017. For contemporary reviews of the film, see especially: Janet Maslin, “Shakespeare Saw a Therapist?,” New York Times, December 11, 1998; Grace Bradbury, “Love Turns Bard,” London Times, February 5, 1999; Peter Clark, “The Divine Gwyneth and Shakespeare in Love,” Evening Standard, January 20, 1999; Martin Harries, “Hollywood in Love,” Chronicle of Higher Education 45, April 16, 1999; and A. O. Scott, “Stoppard in Love: The Playwright’s Infatuation with Smart Fun . . . and with Himself,” Slate, March 20, 1999.
For Romeo and Juliet and the Monica Lewinsky scandal, see Nigel Cawthorne, The Mammoth Book of Sex Scandals (London: Constable and Robinson, Ltd., 2012); “Valentine Ad in Paper Thrilled Bill, Tape Says,” New York Daily News, January 27, 1998; https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/icreport/6narritvi.htm; and Susan Schmidt and Peter Baker, “Lewinsky Gives Starr Detailed Testimony Offer,” Washington Post, January 27, 1998. I’m grateful to Richard McCoy for telling me about Lewinsky’s ad. My account of Two Gentlemen of Queens is based on the account provided in Nadel as well as the quoted passage from George Rush, Joanna Molloy, and Marcus Baram, “Spielberg, Benigni: A ‘Beautiful’ Friendship,” New York Daily News, March 22, 1999, and Frank DiGiacomo, “A Tense Best-Picture Victory for the Miramax Mogul Who Stormed Oscar Beach,” Observer, March 29, 1999. For Stuart Klawans, see his “Oscar Who?,” the Nation, February 25, 1999. And for Willa Cather, Frederick Wadsworth Loring, and Moncure Conway, see my anthology, Shakespeare in America.
I include a number of statistics in this chapter. My source for how much Shakespeare films have earned is the invaluable online site Box Office Mojo. For figures on Shakespeare in Love’s test audiences, and for the pressure from Weinstein and the other producers, see Biskind, pp. 330–31. For the average ticket price in 1999—$5.08—see https://www.the-numbers.com/market/. The adult population (18 or over) of the US in 1999 was 207,094,130 (http://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/99-total-population-by-child-and-adult#detailed/1/any/false/870,573,10/39,40,41/416,417); for polling on divorce and other moral issues, see http://news.gallup.com/poll/183413/americans-continue-shift-left-key-moral-issues.aspx and https://www.usnews.com/news/national/articles/2008/03/27/how-common-are-cheating-spouses.
For a list of the more than eighty women who have accused Weinstein of sexual misconduct, see https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/people/2017/10/27/weinstein-scandal-complete-list-accusers/804663001/.
And for Brad Pitt and Robert Lindsay’s confrontations with Harvey Weinstein, see http://www.kansascity.com/entertainment/article178239306.html and http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/movies/robert-lindsay-weinstein-fired-movie-article-1.3575014, as well as “Gwyneth Paltrow: Brad Pitt Threatened to Kill Weinstein over Alleged Assault,” Guardian, May 24, 2018.
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