The Taming of the Shrew (22 page)

Lloyd:
I had been asked to direct the play several times previously and had always been paralyzed by the notion of how to do it. It seemed to require so many contortions to make sense of to a modern audience. I stepped in to direct the Globe production when someone became indisposed and the crucial decision to perform it with an all female cast and without the induction had been made. These radical choices became ones that unlocked the play for a contemporary audience. By being able to exaggerate male behavior—male bonding, powerplay, need for supremacy, codes of behavior, etc., we were able to show how isolated and vulnerable women were in society.

What’s going on in the induction? How did you handle it? (Or justify not handling it!)

Doran:
Often directors don’t so much direct
The Taming of the Shrew
as try to solve it. I felt that the induction had been responsible for excusing the play in so many productions. So we decided to cut it instead. That way, we couldn’t wink at the audience as if to say, “Of course we think this is misogynistic behavior, but the people in this play-within-a-play do not!” If Shakespeare had really had faith in his framing device he would have concluded it with an epilogue, but he didn’t. He inherited the device, and his play does not need it in my opinion.

The actors playing the understudy roles in our production presented a reading of
The Taming of a Shrew,
so we could see what Shakespeare had apparently inherited. (We concluded that this play is not a bad imitation of the
Shrew
but the source play.) Now there’s a misogynistic play! At one point the shrew promises to tear the flesh off someone’s face and eat it. (As I recall, we decided that the actor playing the Grumio character in that play had brought it to Shakespeare to expand, because it was a great part for him!)

Lloyd:
We replaced the induction with a speech from one of the company members—a kind of mock apology that we were an all-female cast. “The first time this house hosted Shakespeare’s Shrew, / All
parts were played by men—weird, yes, but true!” “We have ‘odd piece’,” etc. (referring to the play and to rhyme with “codpiece”), which established an atmosphere of levity from the start.

One of the play’s sources is an Italian comedy, and there is something of the
commedia dell’arte
types about many of the roles (the patriarchal father, the elderly suitor, the clever servant, and so forth): is there a case for playing some of the supporting parts almost as caricatures?

Doran:
This again is an instinct which can impose upon the play a light-hearted approach which excuses the characters as types. Shakespeare may have had something of those types in mind, but he is incapable of such two-dimensionality, and the characters all emerge with much more depth and humanity. If you begin with
commedia
as your starting point you may not bother to search out this greater depth.

Lloyd:
Of course one can see how these characters derived from
commedia
but we felt the play was served by giving every character as much depth as possible. What may seem superficial or “light” is underpinned by each character’s desperate need to hold their places in the complex social hierarchy.

Did the fact that Shakespeare originally wrote his female parts for boys ever come across in your work on the play?

Doran:
Same problem. You wouldn’t approach Cleopatra or Lady Macbeth with that in mind. It just excuses Kate, and robs her of her depth and truth as a portrait of a real person, a real woman forced into her own stereotype as a Shrew, and therefore playing it to the hilt.

Lloyd:
Yes, but in opposite terms since ours was an all-female cast! Everything was thrown into relief about the society in which the play took place. That men controlled everything was heightened. That women were chattels to be played for, but that a woman who broke the code was extremely hard for that society to manage or control, became even more evident.

What did you discover about Kate’s relationship with her sister?

Doran:
For me this was the source of Kate’s trouble and pain. Though I am not sure I ever told them, I watched my own sisters go through something very similar, when they were children, and I guess it’s a familiar scenario. My twin sister was always very pretty, and winning, of a sweet nature and thus the apple of my father’s eye. My older sister resented this and would do things to make my father notice her; would demand his attention, sometimes by bad behavior, and when she was punished would resent my sister even more, and accuse my father of favoritism. Both sides dug their heels in and their relationship deteriorated. She came to regard herself as unloved and unlovable, and would regard any boy who expressed his interest in her as suspect. Kate isn’t a stereotype, she’s an accurate portrait of a woman of low self-esteem, forced to think of herself in the mercantile world of the play as a devalued chattel, until she meets a man with similar problems in his life and they recognize a like spirit.

In some productions, Kate and Petruchio form a bond early on, because they are both subversive, aggressive figures. He’s the first interesting man who has come after her. Is that a line you took? It’s certainly striking that something seems to click between them for the first time when they share a joke about oral sex …

Doran:
The key to the first encounter is to watch their language and beware of editorial stage directions. If you take seriously the distinct use of the familiar “thee/thou” or more formal “you” forms, there is a clear route-map for the scene. The other revelation for us, and frankly the key to the production, was a stage direction which had been misplaced by almost every editor in nearly every edition we read. Baptista and the others return to see what is happening in the middle of Petruchio’s final speech, but many editors had replaced the stage direction at the end of the speech. The fact is that, as Jasper Britton [who played Petruchio] realized, the couple have come to a kind of plateau, to the start of a negotiation, but suddenly, as Kate’s father enters, Petruchio returns to the “you” form:

Petruchio is suddenly performing for the benefit of his new father-in-law, and himself
conforming
and reverting to the stereotype of wild, violent wife-tamer that Baptista and the others think he is. He is also possibly alerting Kate to the deception. It was a crucial moment in the rehearsal process, and provided an important lesson: DON’T TRUST EDITORS!

Lloyd:
We felt that there was real attraction between Kate and Petruchio from the start. They recognized each other’s verbal wit and also that neither one quite fitted in to society. Kate is really battling to define herself in this patriarchal world. Petruchio is an immature baby and has such self-confidence that he thinks he can handle anything. The kind of man who has a go at all kinds of extreme sports without any experience. A real alpha male.

The consequence of that reading might be to make the whole process of the taming a kind of game—but in some productions the cruelty, mockery and sense deprivation are in deadly earnest. Where did you stand on this? Tell us about what you and your Petruchio discovered about his character.

Doran:
Petruchio is full of bluff. He is as much in a trap as Kate is. He is trapped in a view of him as a wild man. But wild men may behave as they do because of some hurt in their lives, just as angry women or “Shrews” can find themselves forced to play a role in society. One of the keys for us was Petruchio’s recent bereavement. His father has died. Is he in mourning? Is he unable to face up to the sudden responsibilities of running the estate he has inherited? We felt it was wrong to view his household as some sort of grotesque place filled with Gormenghast
servants. It is a substantial household. Curtis has under his charge at least twelve named servants, who presumably worked for Petruchio’s father until very recently. The first thing Petruchio does is to find a rich wife who can help him run this household.

In our production, having met a woman he likes, instead of shopping in Venice as he promised to buy her “rings and things and fine array,” he is afflicted with second thoughts, and out of terror goes and gets roaring drunk. He arrives at the church in this state and satirizes the whole pompous edifice of matrimony, reminding the company that he can do what he likes with his wife because, according to their rules, and to their Bible, indeed,

We decided that he does not have a conscious plan, and at first neglects Kate because he is embarrassed and does not know what to do next. His initial treatment of her is careless and brutal and self-defensive. As Curtis says to Grumio’s story of their journey, “By this reckoning he is more shrew than she.”

He is perhaps being ironic when he talks about beginning his reign in a politic manner. He is flying by the seat of his pants, unsure of quite what he has taken on. Then, however, he begins to structure a series of “games” with Kate. It is hardly torture. His intention is not to break her, but to help her transform from the angry spoilt woman (“who never knew how to entreat”) she has been to someone who can see beyond the need to dress up to society’s expectations of her. Together they reassess what it means to be man and wife in their world. After the sun/moon scene, when the scales fall from Katherine’s eyes, they both enjoy playing the game together, “their first merriment” particularly with Vincentio whom they meet on the road.

Lloyd:
We felt that Petruchio simply had no idea how to behave toward a woman. There was an inhuman and immature side to him. We gave him a huge shaggy dog, played by an actress, and it was obvious that he found it easier to relate to his dog and show it affection than his wife. In fact, Kate became so hungry she ate the dog food from the bowl. We fully explored Petruchio’s misogyny and it was shocking to witness his cruelty toward and neglect of Kate.

6
. Phyllida Lloyd production, 2003: “We fully explored Petruchio’s misogyny and it was shocking to witness his cruelty toward and neglect of Kate.”

How does Kate relate to the other women at the end of the play?

Doran:
With something approaching pity, and possibly disgust.

Kate and Petruchio have, we believed, found in each other fellow spirits, they have come to understand the negotiations required in a healthy relationship and they understand the mercenary transaction of marriage in their world, which Shakespeare is at pains to make clear (witness the satirical marriage market scene of Baptista’s trading for his daughter, and Tranio and Gremio’s competition for Bianca’s hand).

Hortensio has certainly married the widow, not for love (he was wooing Bianca earlier, remember) but for her wealth. And she is already nagging him.

As for Bianca, she is surely not satisfied with the airheaded Lucentio. We decided that Tranio has fallen for Bianca himself, while wooing her for his master, and possibly she for him. But their relationship across the class divide (apart from anything else) is doomed. Petruchio sees this, saying: “Here, Signior Tranio, / This bird you aimed at, though you hit her not.” Tranio tries to excuse himself, saying: “O sir, Lucentio slipped me like his greyhound, / Which runs himself and catches for his master.” However Petruchio (and we) see through his simile.