The Bawd of Avon

Liz bounced and jiggled upstairs and down, through houses and haylofts, while Richard, decked out in scruffy beard and scruffier clothes, followed in hot pursuit. At length he caught up with her in a pile of wheat, whereupon the two engaged in some biting and cussing and all-round good fellowship.

Sounds like a replay of some of the hanky-panky that made such eyepopping headlines when Cleopatra was in the making. But not so. This time the Burtons were working. In Rome last week the two were filming a story that William Shakespeare wrote expressly for them some years back: The Taming of the Shrew.

It is a story eminently suited to any pair with a theatrical flair, as Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne showed when they caroused through the play on Broadway in 1940. For this film version of Shrew, the Burtons--who only recently finished shrewing their way through the movie version of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?--are being put through their paces by Franco Zeffirelli, the irreverent Italian director who once did a modern-dress Hamlet in which the Dane intoned: "To be or not to be, what the hell!" Zeffirelli's notion is that Shrew is a walloping good story that audiences can eat up, the Elizabethan language of the script notwithstanding, and he predicts that the film "will go over well with a Walt Disney audience." In fact, he says, "we intend to make Shakespeare as successful a screenwriter as Abby Mann."

To make sure, the Burtons are playing as bawdy a Bard as they can conceive. In the single entendre wedding scene, for example, Burton gobbles up Communion bread like a starving ragamuffin, cuffs the astonished priest, and fumbles grossly through his filthy clothes till at last he finds the wedding ring in his codpiece.

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