General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 202610 min read

The Taming of the Shrew (1967 film)

The Taming of the Shrew is a 1967 romantic comedy film directed by Franco Zeffirelli in his major motion picture debut, adapted from William Shakespeare's 1593 play and starring the married couple Elizabeth Taylor as Katharina and Richard Burton as Petruchio, who also served as producers.¹ It was a British-Italian-American co-production shot at the Dino De Laurentiis Studios outside Rome, and it became one of the most commercially successful Shakespeare films of its era.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Release	Royal Film Performance gala premiere 27 Feb 1967 at the Odeon Theatre, Leicester Square, London; US release 9 March 1967³^•¹
Director / writers	Franco Zeffirelli, with Paul Dehn and Suso Cecchi D'Amico; his major motion picture debut¹
Stars / producers	Elizabeth Taylor (Katharina) and Richard Burton (Petruchio), their first effort as producers¹
Financing	The Burtons invested between $1.4 and $3 million of their own money and deferred their salaries until the film turned a profit²
Production	Principal photography began 21 Mar 1966 at Dino De Laurentiis Studios outside Rome; filming completed in late Jul 1966, about fifteen days over schedule¹
Box office	$7 million on initial release; worldwide receipts topped $12 million²
Key crew	Music Nino Rota; cinematography Oswald Morris; production design Renzo Mongiardino; costumes Danilo Donati⁴

Spoilers

Plot

Padua, Renaissance Italy, all mud, chickens, and market-day noise. Baptista (Michael Hordern) has two daughters: the gentle Bianca (Natasha Pyne), pursued by half the young men in the city, and the elder Katherina (Elizabeth Taylor), whose temper has made her a local terror and, in her father's eyes, a marital dead loss. Baptista refuses to let Bianca marry until Kate does, so Bianca's suitors scheme. Lucentio (Michael York, in his film debut) disguises himself as a schoolmaster to get near her, while older rivals Gremio and Hortensio blunder after her in a comedy of swapped identities and forged promises.¹⁵

Into this mess comes Petruchio (Richard Burton), a gentleman of Verona who has heard that Baptista is rich and that his elder daughter comes with a handsome dowry. He wants the money and announces his intention to marry the shrew without ever having met her. When he does meet her, she throws things at him, and he takes it as encouragement, matching her insults with outrageous flattery. Baptista, relieved to be rid of her, agrees to the match.

The wedding is the film's first great set piece, and Petruchio destroys it on purpose. He arrives late, very drunk, and dressed in rags, bellowing through the ceremony while Kate resists every word of it.¹⁶ The congregation is scandalized; Petruchio does not care. Immediately after, he drags Kate off on a long, muddy, rain-soaked journey to his dilapidated country house, refusing her food, sleep, and even a comfortable bed, always on the pretext that the offerings are not worthy of her. His method is not violence but madness: whatever Kate says, he contradicts, until she learns to answer lunacy with lunacy.

On the road back to Padua, the game turns. Petruchio insists the sun is the moon; Kate, prompted, agrees and calls the sun the moon. When an old traveler appears, she cheerfully calls him a young budding virgin, and Petruchio corrects her. The moment is staged as a shared joke between the two of them, a conspiratorial grin passing over the head of the horrified old man. From here on, Kate's obedience is visibly performance, and Petruchio is visibly the only one who knows it.

Back in Padua, the men gather for a wedding feast and lay a wager: each bets that his own wife will come when called. Lucentio's Bianca sends word she is busy; Hortensio's widow refuses. Petruchio, to everyone's astonishment, sends for Kate, and she comes. She then hauls in the other two wives and lectures them on the virtues of wifely obedience, telling them to lay their hands beneath their husbands' feet in token of duty.¹⁶ Taylor delivers the famous speech with such relish, and with such a glint toward Petruchio, that it lands as a duet rather than a capitulation. The two leave the banquet together looking like co-conspirators, racing off through a crowd of women.¹⁷

Characters

Katherina (Elizabeth Taylor) is Baptista's elder daughter, feared by the whole city for her temper. Taylor plays her as intelligent rather than merely furious, a woman deciding moment to moment whether to fight or to play, and whose final obedience is clearly a performance only Petruchio can read.

Petruchio (Richard Burton) is the fortune-hunter from Verona who marries Kate for her dowry and then tames her by being more unreasonable than she is. Burton keeps him likable where the role could curdle, playing the bullying as appetite and swagger rather than cruelty.

Baptista (Michael Hordern) is the exasperated father desperate to marry off both daughters, elder one first if he can possibly manage it.

Bianca (Natasha Pyne) is the younger, much-pursued daughter whose marriage is held hostage by her sister's temper, and who turns out to be less obedient than advertised.

Lucentio (Michael York) is the young student who disguises himself as a tutor to woo Bianca, in a subplot the film trims almost to incoherence.¹⁵

Interpretations and controversies

The ending is the question every production of the play must answer. Katherina's final speech, commanding women to lay their hands beneath their husbands' feet, can be played as sincere submission or as an ironic act, and how it is staged determines the meaning of the whole film.¹⁸ Zeffirelli splits the difference: the taming scenes can read as abuse of a woman if staged cold, and one retrospective suggests the same footage recut with a darker score would change their meaning entirely.¹⁹ Critics have also noted that the film drops the play's Christopher Sly framing device, in which the whole story is a play performed for a drunkard, removing the frame that presents the taming as theatrical con. A 2025 retrospective reads the film as a constant pursuit between the leads, from Petruchio's house to the final chase through the crowd of women, and asks where the power really lies: pursued or pursuer.¹⁷

Origins

Shakespeare's play had reached the screen once before as a talking picture, in the 1929 version starring Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, then the most famous couple in the world. In 1965 Zeffirelli, until then a stage and opera director, had the idea of remaking that version with the most famous couple of the 1960s. He first imagined an Italian pairing such as Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren, but his London agent, Dennis van Thal, insisted he think of British actors and pointed him to the Burtons, knowing that Burton longed to return to Shakespeare. Zeffirelli flew to Dublin in February 1965 to meet them.²

After numerous discussions the Burtons agreed not only to star but to co-produce, investing between $1.4 and $3 million of their own money and deferring their salaries until after the film turned a profit. Taylor, who had never performed Shakespeare, experienced stage fright in the first days of shooting; Burton advised her not to pronounce the verse "to a metronome as you were taught in school." Zeffirelli later judged that Taylor, with no Shakespearean background, "gave the more interesting performance because she invented the part from scratch."²

Production

On 14 Sep 1964 the trade press announced the Burtons were planning the adaptation; production duties were split between the New York-based Royal Films International and Films Artistici Internazionali (F.A.I.) of Rome. Principal photography began on 21 Mar 1966, with the unit occupying the entirety of the Dino De Laurentiis Studios outside Rome, where four soundstages were dressed to resemble the play's setting of Padua. Contemporary accounts credited Italy with providing the "congenial, traditional ambience" needed for the story and easy access to period costumes. Burton and Taylor favored Rome because they had filmed Cleopatra (1963) there; unlike that production's notorious overspending, several sources noted the pair's commitment to cutting costs. Filming was completed in late July 1966, approximately fifteen days over schedule.¹

The sets were designed by Renzo Mongiardino and the costumes by Danilo Donati. Costuming Burton posed a problem: an early tight, striped outfit by Hollywood designer Irene Sharaff recalled Laurence Olivier's Richard III, and Zeffirelli switched to loose, flowing garments to flatter Burton's build.²

Cast and adaptation

The supporting cast included Cyril Cusack as Grumio, Michael Hordern as Baptista, Michael York as Lucentio, Natasha Pyne as Bianca, Victor Spinetti as Hortensio, and Alfred Lynch as Tranio.⁴ The screenplay, credited to Zeffirelli, Suso Cecchi D'Amico, and Paul Dehn, applies extensive cuts to Shakespeare's text and inserts new lines; the Library of Congress's Shakespeare film guide describes the result as an "exuberant kinetic spectacle with opulent visuals and over-the-top performances."⁵ As Shakespeare wrote it, the play is a play-within-a-play framed for the tinker Christopher Sly; the film largely drops this frame and follows the main story closely.⁶

In the story, Petruchio, a poor gentleman from Verona, comes to Padua seeking a wealthy wife and is paid by Bianca's suitors to woo her hot-tempered elder sister Katharina, whom their father Baptista refuses to let marry after her. Their honeymoon becomes a battle of wit, and when the couple returns to Padua, Katharina helps Petruchio win a wager on wifely obedience.⁷

Reception and interpretation

The film premiered in London at the Odeon as the 1967 Royal Film Performance on 27 February 1967, with Princess Margaret in attendance, and opened in the United States on 9 March 1967.³^•¹ It proved a sound investment: $7 million grossed on initial release and worldwide receipts of over $12 million.²

Critical reaction was mixed. Bosley Crowther, the longtime film critic of The New York Times, titled his review "Burtons Arrive in 'Taming of the Shrew': Shakespeare Gets Lost in Film," complaining that under Zeffirelli's "gleeful urging" the stars raced through the first part of the film, "committing physical violence on each other with a minimum exhaling of Shakespeare's words."² On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes the film holds an 82% Tomatometer score from 22 reviews, with a critics consensus that it "may not be reverent enough for purists" but is "too funny -- and fun -- for the rest of us to resist."⁸

A screwball reading. The scholar Mei Zhu, writing in CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, argues that although the film follows the narrative structure of the play closely, its effect differs: Zeffirelli's Taming is based on the Hollywood genre of screwball comedy, films rooted in mid-1930s America that feature a comic battle of the sexes in which the males generally lose.⁹ The film's casting of a real-life tempestuous couple was itself part of the appeal, as it had been for the 1929 Pickford/Fairbanks version.⁵

The film appeared amid a broader shift in 1960s cinema: in 1966, every other movie made with American money was made abroad, and The Taming of the Shrew, like A Man for All Seasons and Blow-Up, was made by a European director with American financing.¹⁰ Zeffirelli followed it with his 1968 Romeo and Juliet, the Shakespeare adaptation for which he is best known as a film director.¹¹

Versions and availability

The AFI Catalog and the BFI list the running time as 122 minutes, while streaming listings give 117 minutes.¹^•¹²^•¹³ The film is distributed by Columbia Pictures, which holds the 1967 copyright renewed in 1995, and in the United States it has streamed on services including fuboTV and YouTube Free, with digital purchase on Amazon Video, Apple TV Store, and Google Play.¹³^•¹⁴

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026