For those who are unfamiliar with it, the A plot is a man who decides, sight unseen, to marry a woman, just because she’s rich, despite warnings from his friends that she’s a “cursed shrew”. He comes to an agreement with her father, whereupon the wedding is set for a few days later, against her will. He then proceeds to break her through a combination of starvation and sleep deprivation until, by the end of the play, she’s a good docile wife willing to go along with everything he says, even absurdities like calling the Sun the Moon, or addressing a man as a woman.
This play is often referred to as “problematic” or “difficult”. I saw a production of it on Saturday where the director cast it mostly with women, in the hopes that that might change how it’s viewed. It didn’t work. The previous production I saw, the director’s statement said something about how she views it as being actually about female empowerment (with no explanation for how that could work). Nope, sorry, it’s not.
The simple fact of the matter is that the play is that it’s not “problematic” or “difficult”. It’s just plain broken beyond repair. Its message is that women should be mindless extensions of their man and master, and that if they’re not, they should be tortured until they are. I know people don’t want to say that about the greatest author in the history of the English language, but it’s true.
Does this mean that Shakespeare himself was misogynist? I don’t know; I’ve never met the man. Maybe he was just writing to suit the tastes of his patron at the time (who I’m guessing wasn’t Elizabeth), while holding his nose and stifling his own opinion. Regardless of the origin, however, it’s clear that the play itself is misogynist.
That’s like saying a grandfather clock is broken because you can’t change the time on it via an app on your iPhone. The Taming of the Shrew is a product of the time it was written and originally performed, and if you had tried to critique it back then using the concepts you just brought up, your audience might well have considered you to be broken.
OK, true, it’s still an accurate representation of the attitudes of its time. But its time is not our time, and such attitudes are much less relevant today. I’m not saying we should drop it entirely into the Memory Hole: It is still of value, after all, to understand how our forbearers thought. But there’s no need to accord it any special respect just because it’s Shakespeare. After all, there are other Shakespeare works we’ve mostly abandoned: When was the last time you saw a performance of Titus Andronicus, or Troilus and Cresseda? So let it be with Shrew.
A few years back, I saw a production of shrew where the actress playing Katherine went with an interesting slant.
She played her, as broken by the end, scared, mind fucked, and battered.
Somehow thinner and smaller, pitiful.
The male actors at the end were braying, cocky, immensely punchable.
It was deeply disturbing and kinda brilliant.
I wouldn’t watch it again though, it made me cry.
I’ll admit to not being a scholar of Shakespeare and mainly having an “I took English classes in high school & college” level understanding but I assumed that people still read & performed The Taming of the Shrew was because it was an interesting story with well-written lines. Plays we’ve abandoned were those which failed to catch the public’s eye, not ones we shoved into the back of the closet because they upset modern mores.
Back when I was an undergraduate, the dramatic society at Wellesley put on a sex-reversed version of Taming of the Shrew, with all roles sex-reversed and some liberal rewriting (all the “Kate/cat” jokes became “Petrucchio/peter” jokes). It was interesting.
John Cleese performed Petrucchio played straight (well, as straight as anyone can play him) on a version broadcast in the US on PBS. In an interview about it, he acknowledged that many people tried to somehow alter the production to make it more acceptable to modern audiences, but he thought very little of these attempts to mollify the audience, and insisted on playing it as written and intended.
Wouldn’t take too much modification to have mainly the same play but Katherine turns out to be pulling the strings in the end and showing the other wives how to do it.
At least one reader at the time thought that Katharina wasn’t remotely tamed; John Fletcher wrote a sequel, during Shakespeare’s lifetime and probably with Shakespeare’s blessing, in which Petruchio’s second wife gives him his comeuppance. Katharina is dead before the play begins, but one of the things we do learn is that everyone wonders why Petruchio wants to marry again when his first wife didn’t give him a moment’s peace
As a Shakespeare professor, my experience has been that some students do read the play as horribly misogynist, some students (including ones who openly identify as feminist) see it as a lively, over-the-top romantic comedy about two people who don’t really fit in their society but turn out to be improbably right for each other, and some see it as depicting misogyny but not necessarily endorsing it. All of these are totally plausible interpretations that can work in performance, and you don’t particularly have to wrench the text to make any of them work. (Just to add a layer of added interpretative complexity, the whole thing is a play-within-a-play – there’s actually a frame story, which often gets cut in performance, where a passed-out-drunk man gets dressed up as a lord for a prank, and the main plot is actually presented as a play performed for the “lord’s” entertainment – a funhouse-mirror version of reality rather than reality itself. Noticeably, a LOT of what goes on in the frame story is also about performance vs. reality; specifically, the page boy who has to play the “lord’s” wife gets detailed instructions on how to do a convincing impression of wifely obedience, with the implication that real women are performing too.)
(As a side note, Titus and Timon certainly do get performed on a reasonably regular basis; the RSC has a production of Titus running right now, and Timon just ended at the Folger.)
Frankly, we know very little about Shakespeare that does not come through interpretation of his plays and sonnets and from the instructions in his will, including conjecture over his arrangements to his daughters and their issue and the infamous bequeathment of his “second best bed” to his wife (although that may not be as meaningful as many care to believe).
The Taming of the Shrew is a comedy (in the classical sense of the term, as well as containing many witticisms) but like many of Shakespeare’s comedies it takes much pleasure in the misfortunes of the characters. Much of the modern criticism is focused on the treatment of Kate, but Bianca is as much treated as chattel as well, and not one character really comes off as being all that sympathetic. Given the mores of the day, this is about what can be expected from the play. I think it can be somewhat redeemed by treating the final scene in a winking, trenchant fashion but that is obviously not the original intent, and frankly it is far from my favorite play. However, none of Shakespeare’s plays has a more discordant ending than Measure for Measure, where Vincentio has manipulated the entire situation apparently for the purpose of humiliating Angelo and proposing to the very much younger and somewhat naive Isabella, which is pretty fucked up by any standard.
I don’t know; I imagine there were quite a few who had mastered the fine art of “Yes, dear” for the sake of domestic tranquility.
But even granting that most men were misogynists by today’s standards, there’s still a lot of room between “more misogynist than modern standards” and “as misogynist as Taming of the Shrew”. Compare some of Shakespeare’s other plays: In Much Ado about Nothing, for instance, it’s pretty clearly Beatrice who gets the better of Benedick, overall, and in The Merchant of Venice, Portia is the only one who’s able to unravel the mess the menfolk have gotten themselves into. And in fact, in the plays in general, if there’s a conflict over who ends up with whom, it’s generally resolved according to the women’s preferences.
Fretful Porpentine, I’d never heard of the framing story before. One wonders why it’s not more popular, given so many directors trying frantically to cast the story in a different light. It sounds like the framing story would provide a lot of opportunities for that.
(and I must admit that I’m not sure whether the performance I saw used the framing story-- We had a heck of a time finding parking, and so missed the first several minutes)
This is news? When John Cleese starred in a version in 1980, he appeared at the beginning to say that it was sexist.
And in the plot, it is. But for most of the play, Katherine is a strong woman who takes no crap from anyone. The ending, of course, is a big problem and certainly is a bit cringeworthy. But it’s less sexist than something like, say, The World According to Garp.
I suppose it could be argued that no man (or woman for that matter) in a historically patriarchal society could ever be entirely non-misogynistic. But there were certainly predecessors and contemporaries of Shakespeare whose attitudes towards women were far less misogynistic than those portrayed in Taming of the Shrew.
So I think it’s a little too glib to dismiss critiques of the misogyny in Shrew with a shrugging “Meh, but everybody was misogynist back then”. In fact, western intellectual discourse of the 16th and 17th centuries contained quite a wide range of views on the nature and proper role of women.
