The taming of the shrew

Are Shakespeare’s early plays terrible? Rory Loughnane seems to think so, which is perhaps surprising, given that his new book is an account of Shakespeare’s writing life until the age of 30. The playwright starts out in 1588, aged 24, with The Two Gentlemen of Verona, which is mostly remembered for an unpleasant subplot about rape. ‘The treatment of the female characters is dreadful,’ writes Loughnane, while the ending is ‘underdeveloped and therefore somewhat dissatisfying’. Next up, Titus Andronicus, which was popular with audiences but less so with Loughnane, who gives a summary of the demented plot, quotes some long-dead scholars being mean about it (‘I wish I had never read it’), and concludes: ‘The end, phew.

Even if you’ve never seen Adrian Lyne’s 1987 thriller Fatal Attraction, you’ll know what a ‘bunny boiler’ is. When Alex (Glenn Close) slaughters her lover Dan’s family pet and leaves it simmering on the stove, she invented a universal shorthand for the obsessive, unstable woman who can’t take romantic rejection. In the film, Alex is portrayed as the destroyer of domestic happiness: an embittered career woman on the wrong side of 35, who is made literally sick when she spies on the contentment shared by Dan (Michael Douglas), his wife and his daughter. Audiences loathed her. Susan Faludi, in her book Backlash, reported cries of ‘Kill the bitch!’ and ‘Punch the bitch’s face in!’ during the film’s violent climax.

‘To begin at the beginning,’ intones Richard Burton with a voice like warm treacle at the start of the 1971 film Under Milk Wood. It’s hard to imagine an actor more obviously influenced by his own beginnings. The epigraph to this double biography is ‘The damp, dark prison of eternal love’, a line borrowed from Quentin Crisp. And if that’s an accurate assessment of Burton’s on-off-on-again relationship with the actress Elizabeth Taylor, it’s an even better summary of his childhood in Wales. Born Richard Walter Jenkins to a barmaid mother and a coal miner father (a ‘12-pints-a-day man’ who sometimes disappeared for weeks on end to drink and gamble), as a teenager he attempted a fresh start by moving in with a teacher named Philip Burton.