The rom-com gains fresh material as Hollywood and Broadway keep turning to Shakespeare, most recently with Lena Dunham and Carly Rae Jepsen’s stage adaptation of 10 Things I Hate About You slated to debut next August.
Dunham is co-writing the book with Jessica Huang, while Jepsen is composing music and lyrics with Ethan Gruska. The project reunites a modern pop sensibility with a film that already treated Shakespeare as source material, and it highlights a broader trend: filmmakers routinely mine the Bard for romantic plots built on mistaken identities, feuds, and staged declarations.
The 1999 film 10 Things I Hate About You reworked The Taming of the Shrew into a high school story, casting Julia Stiles as the bristly Kat and Heath Ledger as the risky suitor Patrick Verona. The film turned several set pieces into cultural touchstones, and it helped establish the idea that a classroom-sized retelling of Shakespeare can reach a wide audience.
Other turnings of the plays have found durable followings. Amanda Bynes’s 2006 comedy She’s the Man borrows Twelfth Night’s twin‑swap premise, moving the action to Illyria Prep and inserting teen sports culture for comic effect. The cast includes Channing Tatum as the desirous Duke Orsino and Laura Ramsey as the object of affection, Olivia.
John Tucker Must Die nods to The Merry Wives of Windsor by centering a revenge plot in a high school clique, with Jesse Metcalfe as the cheating athlete and a trio of girls who recruit an outsider to enact their plan. Get Over It, a loose take on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, stages a school production of Shakespeare as the engine for romantic rivalries, with Martin Short playing an eccentric drama teacher and Ben Foster as the dumped basketball player trying to win back his girlfriend.
After a lull, the pipeline proved commercially viable again with Anyone But You in 2023. The Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell vehicle drew social‑media heat and became a surprise box‑office hit, openly borrowing names and the antagonistic banter of Much Ado About Nothing for a modern enemies‑to‑lovers romp built around a faux romance setup.
The persistence of these adaptations is no accident. As screenwriter Ilana Wolpert has said, “They are classic stories, they’re original plots. They are very, very simple, and they work.” That economy of plot lets filmmakers and stage creators recast familiar beats inside different social worlds, from suburban high schools to starched boarding schools to contemporary romantic comedies.
With the Dunham, Jepsen musical on the calendar, the cycle looks set to continue. Audiences can expect more reinterpretations that trade period language for pop music, teen tropes, and contemporary humor, while the Bard’s structures keep supplying reliable dramatic architecture for modern romance.
