Shakespeare, the ’90s, and Julia Stiles

10 Things I Hate About You is the first installment in one of Millennials’ niche genres, “Shakespeare in high school”. The premise of The Taming of the Shrew is an easy fit for adolescent angst: throw together kids trying to be tough who hate each other but then find that there’s more to life than scowling at the sheep that inhabit their high school. You almost forget that Ol’ Billy even came up with the premise in the first place.

While 10 Things‘ wild success has spawned imitators (all rather clever and fun) like Whatever It Takes, Get Over It, and She’s The Man, it’s the original Katerina, Julia Stiles, who’s the queen of Shakespeare adaptations. Technically, these movies came out in the very beginning of the aughts, but she filmed them in the nineties.

She followed up her turn as “The Shrew” by playing another crazy, Ophelia, to Ethan Hawke’s Hamlet. Michael Almereyda’s modern-day adaptation makes the ambitious choice of keeping the Bard’s words but setting them into the context of art versus corporations, as New York film student Hamlet squares off against his uncle Claudius, who has usurped Hamlet’s dad as CEO of the Denmark Corporation. In keeping with the central conflict, his girlfriend Ophelia is an aspiring photographer who, in contrast to Shakespeare’s energetic young woman with her teasing and dirty jokes, is instead sullen and apathetic.

Stiles brings some of her performance as Kat into this role, her face scrubbed clean of makeup and almost thrust toward the viewer. She is emblematic of the adaptation’s more modern, mechanical workings: as she goes mad, she paints her nails with black polish, and she flings Polaroids of flowers instead of the real petals. Finally, she drowns herself in the fountain outside of Hotel Elsinore. It’s the shift from the bratty girlhood of 10 Things, with Ophelia struggling toward womanhood and ultimately missing the mark.

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