Stephen+Farrington

Movie: The Secret of My Success
//__The Secret of My Success__ is similar to __The Taming of the Shrew__ in that the men seeking certain women manipulate those women in order to win them over.// In __The Secret of My Success__, a recent college graduate named Brantley Foster is given a job in the mail room at his uncle's giant corporation, where he uses his access to an empty executive office to play the assumed role of an executive, where he successfully woos a female executive by the name of Christy Wills. In __The Taming of the Shrew__, Petruchio, a wealthy man from Verona, decides to marry rich, and Katherine, the eldest and meanest daughter of a wealthy businessman named Baptista Minola, fits the bill nicely. These two men are quite different in their choices of subterfuge, for Petruchio uses a marriage while Brantly uses his fake job as an executive, but their goals are the same: to get something out of their trickery.

**Conformable as other household Kates.**
(Act II, Scene i, 95)

Petruchio tells Katherine that she is to marry him because Katherine's father consented to the marriage, the dowry has been agreed upon, and that Petruchio will make the marriage appear to be copacetic to Katherine's father, so Katherine must marry Petruchio, whether she wants to or not. This quote ends a quarrel that Katherine had started because she was unwilling to marry the stranger that Petruchio was, and causes Katherine to become quieter when expressing her disdain for the marriage, which helps Petruchio to meet his goal of marrying Katherine.



This picture shows Brantley imagining himself becoming an executive. Immediately before finding this vacant executive office, Brantley was delivering mail as a mail boy, and then once he found this office, he realized that he could get a fake job as an executive so that he could meet his executive crush, Cristy.

**If it would please him come and marry her!”**
(Act III, Scene ii, 125)

Katherine is explaining to all that will listen to her that she has been forced to marry Petruchio, even though she doesn't believe that he will actually go through with the marriage, for she believes that he is playing a joke on everyone. Although my first quote might have lead someone to not believe that Katherine said quote #2, she did indeed, although it was the last time she would ever speak out against the arranged marriage, because she would be too flustered dealing with the emotional torture Petruchio was enacting on Katherine in order to cause her to become tame and unshrewlike.



This scene shows the first meeting between Brantley (wearing a suit as an executive, even though he wasn't hired as an executive) and Cristy as executives. This particular picture accurately describes Brantley and Cristy's work relationship: Cristy will ignore Brantley at work while Brantley succeeds at persuading the other executives in the executive group (not shown) so that Cristy will be forced to pay more attention to Brantley, thus giving him a business edge over Cristy, which means that she will look up to him (which leads to Cristy asking Brantley out to dinner).

Brantley has to lie to Cristy in order to win her over; Petruchio must lie to everyone interested in Katherine's marriage in order to get married to Katherine. __The Taming of the Shrew__ and __The Secret of My Success__ are similar; both of these men lie about some part of their relationships, which shows us that we expect characters and actual people to lie about relationships.