The Taming Of The Shrew

In our Tuesday afternoon lesson with Sharon this week we watched the BBC television drama The Taming Of The Shrew, a modern adaption of the Shakespearian play also named The Taming Of The Shrew. Our homework assignment this week was to describe how two charecters from the BBC version although dressed in modern atire have been purposely styled to indicate their social class. Just as in Elizabethan times there are certain fashion styles, fabrics, colours and accessories which can be used as a visial aide not only to determine a characters place on the social scale but also tells alot about their charecters personality.
The two characters I have chosen to discus are Mrs Minola and Bianca Minola.
Mrs Minola throughout this programme is dressed in a range of outfits displaying fabrics and accessories which are used again and again to confirm in the mind of the audience that she is a woman of the upper class, who is clearly wealthy and who likes to flaunt her status at every opportunity her charecter is that of a womam who clearly enjoys the finer things in life and this is not only reflected via the vocabulary she uses and her accent, her actions and her mannorisms throughout the play but on a more subtle note purely by what she wears. she is seen to wear expensive fabrics such as velvet, outfits and fashion styles associated withe high class women such as heels, trouser suits, blazers and expensive looking accessories such as bags and pearls. Not to forget that pearls were a favourite of Queen Elizabeth the first also. Not only the style of what she wears tells us about her though, the colours she wears also depict high society and regality such as purple, a colour often associated with monarchy and cream and white which associated with purity. It can also be noted that on more than one occassion throughout the film she is seen to be wearing a rose could this have been a choice of the stylists for the production as a reference to the Tudor rose? As the original play was of course written in the Elizabethan era with Elizabeth being the last reigning Tudor monarch.

Bianca in the modern day adaption could be described as the picture of renaissance beauty which would have been the desired look for many European women during Elizabethan times. Although in Britain Queen Elizabeth was considered beautiful, iconic and the epitome of class and elegance and who wealthy English women of the era aspired to look like, in other parts of the the continent the fashion differed slighly. the Renaissance Era was a cultural revolution spanning from the early 1400's right up until 16th Century, which started in Florence Italy, and swiftly spread throughout Europe, during this period peoples perception of beauty, fashion, and the arts became an heavily influenced by the art and liturature of ancient civilisations such as Ancient Greece and Rome. The classification of beauty during these early civilisations was now the height of fashion and what every European lady aspired to become. A woman considered Beautiful during the renaissance period would be Voluptuous, over weight in fact in comparisson to what is considered to be an attactive weight by todays standards where there has been a complete turn around in the desired figure of a woman. Women of the renaissance would also have long, often wavy, natural looking hair often worn down and free flowing as a sign of femininity, as with Elizabethan beauty, fair hair was an "in trend" of the renaissance era with European striving to gain golden locks just as in britain, and again resorting to some rather drastic methods to achieve the sunkissed look. Another similarty when compared to Elizabethan fashion was a high forehead.
Although Bianca Minola in the BBC adaptation of the Taming Of The Shrew is not over weight by any means or blonde, she does in other ways fit the renaissance beauty description, with nautural beauty, pale skin, long flowing hair and sporting open neck, revealing garments, renaissance portraits were often painted nude or barely covered showing a great deal of skin. Bianca is clearly also a wealthy woman and this is shown to the audience through her wardrobe of garments made from fine materials such as silk and fur often teamed with elegant looking jewelry and expensive looking high heels.

Above a Renaissance portrait and below the Charecter of Bianca Minola played by Jime Murray in the 2005 BBC adaptation of The Taming Of The Shrew

http://www.thebeautybiz.com/78/article/history/beauty-through-ages-renaissance#articleContinued
http://sirl.stanford.edu/~bob/teaching/pdf/arth202/Haughton_Renaissance_beauty_JCosmeticDermatology04.pdf
http://stylecaster.com/timeline-sexy-defined-through-ages/
http://pictify.com/200033/venus-anadyomene-titian
http://www.bbc.co.uk/drama/shakespeare/tamingoftheshrew/