The Taming of the Shrew

"Now, by the world, it is a lusty wench! I love her ten times more than e'er I did. O, how I long to have some chat with her!" (pg. 52)

"He hath some meaning in his mad attire." (pg. 66)

We don't deserve Shakespeare. We really don't. As with the later The Merchant of Venice, the Bard has, in The Taming of the Shrew, given to us an astute, ironical satire of shabby conduct (there anti-Semitism, here misogyny) that seems to raise up such people, the better to send them plummeting to earth. And what do we do, in our limp-brained culture, with our pseudo-academic meathead scholars, our peddlers in the doctrinaire, our po-faced theatricals? We label it a 'problem play'. We tie ourselves in knots over whether Shakespeare was a misogynist and show more must be cancelled, or rationalized, or patronisingly reworked to 'be better' and 'empower'. The only thing that stops me going crazy is that there's a sort of schadenfreude in getting a joke that seems to pass everybody else over.

Let's take it from the top. No, Shakespeare was not a misogynist. And before you think this is the typical contemporary sleight-of-hand that spouts casuistries like 'people can be racist without being a racist', let me further say that, no, The Taming of the Shrew is not a misogynist play. Just as Shakespeare was not an anti-Semite, and The Merchant of Venice was not an anti-Semitic play. (I go into greater length about that in my review of Merchant elsewhere on this website.)

Consider that strange opening to The Taming of the Shrew, commonly called the 'Induction'. A lousy drunk named Christopher Sly is thrown out of a tavern into the muddy street by a female hostess. Note the gender. (I'm sorry to be leading you by the hand, but a lot of people, it seems, are unwilling to duck as they walk under a low doorway.) There, a passing lord has an impish fancy to dress the passed-out drunk in fine clothes where, upon waking, the unfortunate Sly will not know whether he is coming or going. He is waited on hand and foot by servants, who put on a play called The Taming of the Shrew. Tudor audiences walk into a London theatre to see the upstart Crow's new bawd. They get it.

Leaving aside the play-within-a-play for a moment, consider that the useless Sly, cast out by a woman, is tricked into believing he is a lord. He then watches a play which seems to reinforce the idea that men are to be served meekly by women, while he is waited on by servants. (There is a further thread in the play, which requires an essay in itself, where, just as men treat women with a high hand, the lords in the play treat their male servants with a similar lack of grace. "Help, masters, help! My master is mad!" is said by the male servant Grumio (pg. 40), though it could just as easily be one of Kate's lines.)

It is here where productions that cut the Christopher Sly stuff do a disservice to their audience. This is about a surly man inconvenienced by a woman hostess, who, while lying in the gutter feeling sorry for himself, fantasises a story in which women do men's bidding and all is right with the world. I strongly recommend reading a version of The Taming of the Shrew which includes the other, unofficial Sly stuff (my Wordsworth Classic edition has it as an Appendix, with the Ludlum-esque title 'The Christopher Slie Material'). In this material, Sly, now awake, asks whether he was not a lord after all. Heading for home, and no doubt the wrath of his wife, he tells a passing Tapster that he's not worried because now he knows how to tame a woman properly (pg. 110). Good luck, Sly, you'll need it. The Tapster, no doubt with a secret smile on his face, asks to come home with him and witness the scene. We, too, would like to be a fly on that wall.

I know I've not even discussed The Taming of the Shrew proper yet – Petruchio and Kate, Bianca and her suitors – but you see now how the play ought to be – and was intended to be – framed. As with the later The Merchant of Venice, The Taming of the Shrew is a clever, satirical subversion of what the more boneheaded still claim it indulges. The lord who bamboozles the hapless Sly even says this mockery is there to "abate the over-merry spleen, Which otherwise would grow into extremes" (pg. 28). Laugh, Shakespeare says to men, at how we often grasp the wrong end of the stick, of how dependent we often are on women, of how we dress in motley to imitate women (female roles were performed by boys on the Tudor stage – the above quotation comes immediately after a line about such a thing). Because the alternative is extreme; it is misogyny, or at least boorishness. Smile, you po-faced scholars! Some of it is genuinely amusing – I'm thinking of the initial 'courtship' scene between Petruchio and Kate ("Say she be mute and will not speak a word, Then I'll commend her volubility, And say she uttereth piercing eloquence. If she do bid me pack, I'll give her thanks, As though she bid me stay by her a week" (pg. 53)). When, in this scene, an exasperated Kate says her father seems to want her "wed to one half-lunatic" (pg. 56), we think back to the sad-sack Christopher Sly, and what words his wife will have for him when he stumbles home with some ideas in his head about who is man of the house. Surely there can't be any doubt where Shakespeare's sympathies lie, for those willing to look beyond the superficial?

The Taming of the Shrew is, admittedly, not as measured as the later Merchant of Venice. That play seemed honed and completely unambiguous in its ambiguity (as I argue in my review of it, the play only works if our sympathy is with Shylock), whereas Shrew does have one or two elements out of balance that can cause unease, even when not viewed through the lens of the boneheaded. Some of the crucial Sly stuff is missing and, without it – and with an unforgivingly modern audience – some of the treatment of Kate in particular seems harsh. Note the scene where Petruchio berates his new wife, and "she (poor soul) Knows not which way to stand, to look, to speak" (pg. 75). Without Merchant's more robust sophistication and form, Shrew takes a few punches behind its guard. But perhaps it wouldn't matter anyway, considering critics still attack the more accomplished Merchant.

As I said, we really don't deserve Shakespeare. An artist who was both popular and thematically astute; who could make crowd-pleasers that also relished in ambiguity of character, structure and morality. The introduction to my Wordsworth edition quotes the critic Benedict Nightingale, who wrote that The Taming of the Shrew is "a funny, touching, coarse, romantic, morally confusing mix of sexism and sophistication", something that is much "better than a politically correct nothing-very-much" (pg. 13). Amen. Even if you don't get the joke, it's always better to have rich colours than a dull, doctrinaire grey. "Here's some good pastime tóward; That wench is stark mad, or wonderful fróward" (pg. 35). Shakespeare delights in ambiguity; an appetite that, alas, seems to be lost in some of his readers. show less

Was Shakespeare a misogynist? He certainly agreed with the patriarchal hierarchy of his day, as is evidenced through the trials and travails of his female characters. One can argue that characters like Lady Macbeth, Ophelia, Juliet and Desdemona are punished for stepping outside of their roles prescribed by society. Some of their infractions are so minor as to be unnoticeable to a modern audience; what, after all, was Ophelia's crime? Her devotion to Hamlet? Her naivete? Do some of these characters resemble the ingenues in horror movies, whose only crime seems to be their virginal womanhood and budding sexuality?

Kate is the titular Shrew in this comedy, and she meets her comeuppance through her marriage to the manipulative and show more psychologically abusive Petruchio. His one saving grace is that he does not physically abuse Kate (which would have been acceptable to Shakespeare's audience), but some of the methods he uses to break her will (starvation, sleep deprivation) would do our "enhanced interrogators" at Gitmo proud.

While Kate eventually disavows her shrewishness (ie independence), her sister Bianca is shown to be disobedient to her new husband Lucentio. Through this tidy bit of irony, we get the impression that humans are not really "tameable" - and through the frame story involving the drunken and ingenuous Sly, we see that men are not necessarily deserving of their place at the top of the patriarchy. show less

How do you rate a play like this?!? It so heavily depends upon one’s interpretation! A straight-up literal read of the text delivers a monstrously misogynistic view of marriage, which you’ll either find hilarious if you believe women need to be trained into subservience like hawks, or harrowing if you feel like the ending celebrates the victory of an abusive prick. However, the case can certainly be made that Kate’s subservience by the end is so completely over the top that it is mocking the idea that her husband would ever be able to control her. Is it making fun of men for wanting to have bland obedient wives à la Stepford wives? Is she telling him what he wants to hear while rolling her eyes? Does she love him, and if so, how show more does being in love change our behaviour?

Anyway, I can see why this is known as one of Shakespeare’s “problem” plays. It’s a confusing play for a contemporary viewer, but there’s so much delightful content in the first three acts of this play that I am not willing to throw out the baby with the bathwater for this one :) show less

It sounds like an extreme and ludicrous statement, but I don't actually know that Shakespeare has a more polyinterpretable play. It all comes down to that moment at the end: Katherine's gonna come out and deliver her closing speech (and for those who still somehow see this as straight-up misogyny, consider all the past versions that haven't done so, and that the ultimate power of meaningmaking is here in Kate's hands--okay, and those of her director--which is easy enough to see as a definitive repudiation of Petruchio's efforts to take away her reality and signifying power with all the no-no-the-sun-is-the-moon stuff earlier). And I mean, relations between the sexes? A friend of mine says about class relations (which are also, show more naturally, at play here, and what is Kate from one perspective but another tinker, an overturner of the social order? A hero?), he says, "of course it's complicated, it's a gas, baby, you dig?" You can play the speech totally straight--but even then, like, what does Shakespeare think about it? Has Kate found strong manlove or been broken by a sadist?--and you can play it ironically, in about a billion permutations.

So well done, Shakespeare. (You're suuuuuch a good writer. I'm sooooo impressed.) But here's what came to me watching this guy the other day at Bard on the Beach, not about that director's interpretation--which was basically "two stong-willed eccentrics find each other, embrace, and turn their rapier tongues on the rest of the world"--not about any interpretation at all, but about what the last scene says about real life. Because you can have your single simple reading of a play if you wanna and walk away and not have any problems come of it, but when you do that with real life there's that certain excess that'll always trip you up and mug you and leave you unsure where it all went wrong.

So what came out at me was the way both things are true. Petruchio can king-of-the-castle Katherine around all he wants and it will always be repulsive, to our sensibilities as well as (it has been convincingly argued) those of the Elizabethans. That doesn't mean it's the whole story here. In that final scene, when Kate is the only obedient wife, what we see is a dark shadow over the future of these marriages--and leaving aside for the moment whether that includes Kate and Petruchio's and what the implications of that are, think about the others. Lucentio's marriage to Bianca and Hortensio's to the Widow may be under threat because the wives are not obedient--or maybe they're just gonna make their husbands into buffoons and that's in the normal way of things--but what is it that makes either of those eventualities a problem? It's that they're weaklings. And calling them out on that doesn't make Petruchio any less of a bully. But forget the bully thing for a second: he's also a man who knows what he wants and won't settle for any less. And in this milieu, Katherine doesn't have the same privilege--she has to be a shrew or a possession. But are the other wives much happier with their carping men? Not at all. The men still have all the power on paper, but their sense of manhood depends on a submission they're not going to be able to secure.

And I hope we've left all the submission stuff behind. What we need in our relationships is to be responsible for ourselves. Kate's paradox is that in submitting completely to her husband she has total freedom to move--he kisses her hand rather than step on it. It's repulsive. But they're strong people who (perhaps? depending on your interpretation?) respect each other. And I think there's something to be said for a partner who just rides out your storms, who has themself enough in hand to make their expectations clear (thankfully, today this is a mutual process). And I have spent a lot of time trying to please people I was with and needing to protect them to feel okay myself, and that that's emotional brinksmanship and will never actually help them feel better, and then I'll feel distress too. The great thing about The Taming of the Shrew is to see a marriage without any tally of needs and catalogue of fears and litany of resentments and haunting cloud of failures--where whatever anyone does it'll be laughed off in the end. The question it leaves me with is whether the only way to have that is for marriage to be something even worse--a chattel relationship instead of one between messy, needy, hypersensitive equals. show less

This is a deeply troubling and often frankly misogynistic play, and I'm not here to defend those aspects of it. However I saw a version of it years ago that turned the misogyny on its head in a way that I thought was interesting, and perhaps truer to the many levels on which Shakespeare worked. It was a "Shakespeare in the Park" production, in New York, starring Morgan Freeman and Tracey Ullman, and you can imagine how fantastic that was. The best part was how they did the end of the play--that long, troubling speech by Kate where she prostrates herself before Petruchio and declares her obedience. What the director of that production realized, brilliantly, is that the speech goes on way, way too long! In fact, it becomes self-parody, a show more way for Kate to mock Petruchio with the words he wants to hear. Tracey Ullman played it to perfection. She kept pausing in the speech, goading Morgan Freeman into thinking she was done, and then she piled on some more, and then kept pausing and piling on until it was clear she was making fun of him, thereby undermining everything she was saying. It was utterly brilliant and has become my "gold standard" for how to perform--and understand--the play. show less

I've been slowly making my way back through Shakespeare's canon in the amazing Folio Letterpress editions. I pretty much read them all in high school but it's been so long that I have forgotten the lesser known plays. However, I bumped this one up in the reading queue because I just discovered the new Hogarth Shakespeare series. The project pairs acclaimed and bestselling novelists with the plays to re-imagine and retell them. So I'll be reading Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler as soon as it arrives from Powell's. But enough of that...

While the play was enjoyable for the battle of wills between Kate and Petruchio, and made for some comedy, great passages, and quotes, the ally in me exited the "theater" with disgust. Kate's last speech might show more have been what was pushed as the norm in the Bard's time, and some people might wish it was the "family value" way still. But that speech didn't sit well with this feminist; rather, it almost pushed me over the edge of forgetting the play was written 450 years ago.

Nevertheless, it is Shakespeare, and I wouldn't pass up an opportunity to see the Shrew staged. Nor am I ever sorry to read one of his plays in this particular edition. So thumbs up on the wit and artistry of Shakespeare; thumbs down on Kate's transformation. show less

As with all of Shakespeare's plays, there's always a different interpretation always handy at foot, be it a woman's duty to place her hand under her husband's foot or not.

As it is, though, I can both be supremely annoyed with a society that demands that women be always so obedient, culturally, and be wickedly satisfied that Kate and Petruchio have worked out a true meeting of the minds and wills in such a way as to transcend all other's expectations.

There's a little something for everyone in this classic comedy, whether or not you subscribe to the patriarchy or the matriarchy. Kate gets a lot out of the situation because she's discovered just how much power she really holds with the right partner who respects her, and Petruchio finds a show more mate that will always be his equal in wit and will. Is there another definition of happiness?

Ignore the setting if it upsets you. These men in this man's world, even Petruchio's methods of "taming" his wife. The method merely demonstrated his deeper positive qualities by the negative, just as Kate's shrewishness belied a razor sharp wit.

Don't we all have such depths and thorns?

I've seen this one done in many different Veins, now, and the one constant is this: There are no victors, merely endless combatants that sometimes sue for peace. It could be a true power struggle or perhaps it is just an eventual meeting of the minds. What do we prefer? That's interpretation. :) show less