Read The Taming of the Shrew Online
Authors: William Shakespeare
Then there is Kate’s sister. Petruchio’s “taming school” is played off against the attempts by Lucentio and Hortensio to gain access to Bianca by disguising themselves as schoolmasters. In the scene in which Lucentio courts her in the guise of a Latin tutor, the woman gives as good as she gets. She is happy to flirt with her supposed teacher over Ovid’s erotic manual
The Art of Love
. This relationship offers a model of courtship and marriage built on mutual desire and
consent. Bianca escapes her class of sixteenth-century woman’s usual fate of being married to a partner of the father’s choice, such as rich old Gremio. If anything, Bianca is the dominant partner at the end. She is not read a lecture by Kate, as the widow is, and she gets the better of her husband in their final onstage exchange. Like Beatrice in
Much Ado About Nothing,
she more than matches her man in the art of wordplay. One almost wonders if she would not be better matched with the pretended rather than the “real” Lucentio, that is to say the clever servant Tranio who oils the wheels of the plot and sometimes threatens to steal the show.
The double plot is a guarantee that, despite the subduing of Kate, the play is no uncomplicated apology for shrew-taming. But is Kate really subdued? Or is her submission all part of the game that she and Petruchio have been playing out? It is their marriage, not the other ones, that compels the theater audience. A woman with Kate’s energies would be bored by a conventional lover such as Lucentio. She and Petruchio are well matched because they are both of “choleric” temperament. Their fierce tempers are what make them attractive to each other and charismatic to us. They seem to know they are born for each other from the moment in their first private encounter when they share a joke about oral sex (“with my tongue in your tail”). “Where two raging fires meet together” there may not be an easy marriage, but there will certainly not be a dull match and a passive wife. In the twentieth century the roles seemed ready made for Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.
What you have just read is
one
critical interpretation of the play. But there are many other possible answers to the awkward questions raised by its title, action, resolution, and framing, so for the sake of balance the remainder of this introduction will offer an overview of some of them.
The critical debate about
The Taming of the Shrew
begins at the end: is Kate’s notorious last speech delivered ironically? Is she genuinely tamed, or is she playing a game of her own, retaining her psychological independence? A related question concerns the play’s
style. Is it a farce, a form in which we are not encouraged to take it very seriously when people are slapped around? Or is it a sophisticated social comedy, the ironic texture of which directs our attention to what one critic calls the social illness of a materialistic patriarchy?
Historically attuned commentators have related the play to contemporaneous debates about the nature and role of the sexes, and the disruption caused to society by unruly, “shrewish” or “scolding” women. In early modern England there was a criminalization of female unruliness. As Sir William Blackstone later explained in his
Commentaries on the Laws of England,
A common scold,
communis rixatrix,
(for our law-Latin confines it to the feminine gender) is a public nuisance to her neighbourhood. For which offence she may be indicted; and, if convicted, shall be sentenced to be placed in a certain engine of correction called the trebucket, castigatory, or cucking stool, which in the Saxon language signifies the scolding stool; though now it is frequently corrupted into ducking stool, because the residue of the judgement is, that, when she is so placed therein, she shall be plunged in the water for her punishment.
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The equivalent punishment in Scotland was the “scold’s bridle,” a form of muzzle designed to stop the foul, gossipy, or malicious mouth of the woman. What is striking in this context, feminist critic Lynda Boose suggests, “is that the punishments meted out to women are much more frequently targeted at suppressing women’s speech than they are at controlling their sexual transgressions”: “the chief social offences seem to have been ‘scolding,’ ‘brawling,’ and dominating one’s husband. The veritable prototype of the female offender of this era seems to be … the woman marked out as a ‘scold’ or ‘shrew.’ ”
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Public humiliation as much as physical discomfort was the purpose of the “cucking”/“ducking” stool and the “scold’s bridle.” They were shaming devices: “The cucking of scolds was turned into a carnival experience, one that literally placed the woman’s body at the center of a mocking parade. Whenever local practicalities made it possible, her experience seems to have involved being ridden or carted
through town.”
3
The Skimmington Ride in Thomas Hardy’s novel
The Mayor of Casterbridge
(1884) is a late example of this practice.
The question, though, is how to relate the play to such customs. In one sense, a drama performed on the public stage is close kin to a mocking parade. In another sense, it is very different, since we know that it is only a game and that the female victim is only an actor. And within the world of the play, the humiliation of Kate is more private than public. Furthermore, Petruchio’s actions are intended to be pre-emptive: unlike many of the women who were ritually punished for their behavior, she is not an unruly
wife
.
The starting point of the modern female spectator’s response to the play is likely to be Kate’s own emotion: rage. Why should a daughter submit to her father’s will? Why should women accept the way they are treated by men? In an influential feminist reading of Shakespeare, the critic Coppélia Kahn has no doubt about the play’s historical authenticity:
The overt force Petruchio wields over Kate by marrying her against her will in the first place and then by denying her every wish and comfort, by stamping, shouting, reducing her to exhaustion, etc., is but a farcical representation of the psychological realities of marriage in Elizabethan England, in which the husband’s will constantly, silently, and invisibly, through custom and conformity, suppressed the wife’s.
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Yet at the same time, she credits Shakespeare with the intelligence to see the irrationality of such behavior:
Shakespeare does not rest with showing that male supremacy in marriage denies woman’s humanity. In the most brilliant comic scene of the play [4.3], he goes on to demonstrate how it defies reason. Petruchio demands that Kate agree that the sun is the moon in order to force a final showdown. Having exhausted and humiliated her to the limit of his invention, he now wants her to know that he would go to any extreme to get the obedience he craves. Shakespeare implies here that male supremacy is ultimately based on such absurdities, for it insists
that whatever a man says is right because he is a man, even if he happens to be wrong.
5
The purpose of theater is not usually to endorse or to dissent from a moral position or a sociological phenomenon. It is to show—comically, tragically, farcically, thoughtfully—how human beings interact with each other. Shakespeare’s greatest resource is his language and what attracts him to Katherina as a character for realization on the stage is what attracts Petruchio to her: her lively language. How would his original audience have responded to that language? First and foremost, they would have enjoyed it and laughed with it. If they began to reflect upon it, they would have been pulled in contradictory directions. There may well have been an element perhaps of fear and loathing: “From the outset of Shakespeare’s play, Katherine’s threat to male authority is posed through language; it is perceived as such by others and is linked to a claim larger than shrewishness—witchcraft—through the constant allusions to Katherine’s kinship with the devil.”
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But equally, among the more sophisticated, there could have been a relish in the subversion of norms. Translating this into the language of modern feminist criticism,
Kate’s self-consciousness about the power of language, her punning and irony, and her techniques of linguistic masquerade, are strategies of italics.… Instead of figuring an essentialized woman’s speech, they deform language by subverting it, that is, by turning it inside out so that metaphors, puns, and other forms of wordplay manifest their veiled equivalences: the meaning of woman as treasure, of wooing as a civilized and acceptable disguise for sexual exploitation, of the objectification and exchange of women.
7
Mastery of language was an extremely important idea in Shakespeare’s time. The pedagogy of Renaissance humanism was fundamentally concerned with the cultivation of the powers of speech and argument as the means of realizing our potential as rational beings. Within the play, Petruchio’s subduing and refinement of Kate operates in parallel to the purported efforts of the supposed tutors to
teach the sisters classical literature and the art of the lute. “By learning to speak the pedagogue’s language of social and familial order, Kate shows herself to be a better student of standard humanist doctrine than her sister.”
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Paradoxically, there is a sense in which Petruchio liberates Kate from her own demons:
Petruchio directs Kate to the dark center of her psyche and dramatizes her fears so that she may recognize them. He shows her what she has become, not only by killing her in her own humour but also by presenting her with a dramatic image of her own emotional condition: he acts out for her the drama of her true self held in bondage by her tyrannical, violent self. What is internal … Petruchio makes external.
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Petruchio’s method is to suppose (and he is correct) or assume qualities in Katherina that no one else, possibly even the shrew herself, ever suspects. What he assumes as apparently false turns out to be startlingly true. His “treatment” is a steady unfolding of her really fine qualities: patience, practical good sense, a capacity for humor, and finally obedience, all of which she comes gradually to manifest in a spirit chastened but not subdued.
10
The suggestion, then, is that beneath the surface of the brutal sex farce is a different story in which two intelligent but temperamental people learn how to live together. A variant on such an interpretation is to suggest that Petruchio’s “taming” may be an elaborate game:
The audience’s realization that Petruchio is game-playing, that he is posing behind the mask of a disorderly male shrew and is having considerable fun exploiting his role, is the key to a romantic reading of the play. Thus Kate is tamed not by Petruchio’s whip but by the discovery of her own imagination, for when she learns to recognize the sun for the moon and the moon for the dazzling sun she is discovering the liberating power of laughter and play.
11
As a wife she submits, but as a player in the game she is now a full and skillful partner. Most important, she is helping to create her own role as an obedient spouse, and the process of creation gives her pleasure. Her obedience is not meekly accepted, but embraced and enjoyed.
12
Like a good humanist husband, he has been his wife’s teacher; and like an actor, he has taught her to assume a new role. When Kate learns to mimic as well as he, these two easily transcend the roles and hierarchies that govern their world.
13
By this account, Petruchio injects a dose of realism into the romantic ideas about love that comedy habitually perpetuates. It has been said that he
drags love out of heaven, and brings it down to earth. To the chivalrous, love is a state of worship; to him, it is a problem of wiving. Its object is not primarily a search for spiritual bliss in the contemplation of the beloved. It seeks merely a guarantee of domestic comfort.… A condition of this is, naturally, that he must be master of what is his own. Courtship is merely incidental to the attainment of this ease and settlement.
14
Perhaps Kate, too, participates willingly and actively in the game. The submission speech has often been read in the light of this possibility:
Far from reiterating old platitudes about the inferiority of women, however, what Kate actually says reflects a number of humanist assumptions about an ideal marriage popularized by Tudor matrimonial reformers. If we wish to see a real vision of subjugated woman, we should turn to the parallel speech of Kate in the anonymous
A Shrew
… [who] recites a medieval argument about women’s moral inferiority.… Shakespeare makes no reference to moral inferiority in women. His emphasis instead is on reciprocity of duties in marriage, based on the complementary natures of man and woman.
15
We cannot really take that speech at face value. Much of this comedy is an unspoken dialogue between Katherina and Petruchio; and we have to take her speech in the context of the whole play, not as a set-piece on the woman’s place. We should read Katherina’s final speech as the parallel, and answer, to Petruchio’s rhetoric. The mode of speech adopted by each is hyperbole.
16
Kate’s “act” at the end is, therefore, far more ethical than Bianca’s “act” throughout the play, although both women pretend to be good. They do not simply exchange roles, for then Kate would appear as false as Bianca has been. Through the use of parodic speech, Shakespeare makes Kate shatter the façade of female hypocrisy that … Bianca put into practice.
17
The very nature of Kate’s performance
as
performance suggests that she is offering herself to Petruchio not as his servant, as she claims, but as his equal in a select society … those who, because they know that man is an actor, freely choose and change their roles in order to avoid the narrow, imprisoning roles society would impose on them.
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