Why would anyone tamper with a work of art that’s been around for 400 years?!? 
I like the Moonlighting version.
Who’s suggesting “tampering” with Taming of the Shrew? Unless by “tampering” you mean “experimenting with different interpretations and presentations of it”, which people have been doing for pretty much that whole 400 years not only with Shrew but with all of Shakespeare’s other plays as well?
The proper role of men and women is entirely dependant on our circumstances. 2017 civilization allows far different choices than post plague 14th century. We live in a bubble in the West. But bubbles always burst.
And to a large extent vice versa. The choices we human beings make about what human beings should or shouldn’t do, and how the rules differ for different categories of human beings, have a strongly determinative effect on what our circumstances are like.
[QUOTE=madsircool]
2017 civilization allows far different choices than post plague 14th century.
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And what produced those differences between 14th-century and 21st-century civilization? Largely, the choices that groups of human beings made about how human beings ought to live in societies.
[QUOTE=madsircool]
We live in a bubble in the West. But bubbles always burst.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t understand what you’re getting at here, or how it’s supposed to relate to Taming of the Shrew. Are you suggesting that, say, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa or Francois Poullain de la Barre, two notable Western thinkers, were “living in a bubble”? How you figure? Was the Western literary figure William Shakespeare also “living in a bubble”? That’s quite some centuries-old “bubble” you’ve got there.
Choices is a 21st century bullshit paradigm. We have a civilization that at the present time allows choices. But disasters happen. War. Plague. Then the only choice for the specie is survival. This is why the proper roles of humans will always be in flux until we become extinct.
That would work. Her speech admitting her spirit had been broken is pretty jarring, after several acts of light comedy, especially because it isn’t obvious what did it to her.
But yeah, it’s a period piece, best understood with an Elizabethan-era groundling mindset.
Right…once we have a nice war or disaster, we’ll put this nonsense of equality behind us. It can’t happen soon enough, eh?
At the risk of straying further off-topic, I’m really curious why you think that human societies before the 21st century somehow didn’t have choices in any meaningful sense. Was, say, the institution in the 14th century of the so-called Assizes of Romania, the law code of Frankish regions of Byzantium, not a choice on the part of those who enacted it? Did its decrees about serfdom, criminal penalties, rules of war, etc., not represent choices made by human beings about what their society should be like? Do you imagine that there weren’t different societies with different law codes that allowed a different range of individual choices?
[QUOTE=madsircool]
But disasters happen. War. Plague. Then the only choice for the specie is survival. This is why the proper roles of humans will always be in flux until we become extinct.
[/QUOTE]
Are you really not aware that human societies before the 21st century have often coped with disasters, wars and plagues without abandoning their chosen rules about how people should behave? Do you imagine that in WWI or WWII, say, civilians just went around murdering other civilians at random with impunity because hey, it’s wartime and there’s no such thing as a choice anymore?
Nobody’s denying that extreme situations can, and often have, temporarily broken down the chosen rules of civilized societies. But that doesn’t mean that those societies’ decisions about their chosen rules were invalid from the get-go, or that their choices were a “bullshit paradigm”.
And you still haven’t provided any clue as to how you intended this to be relevant to Taming of the Shrew. Unless your whole burbling rant was just meant as a vaguely threatening diatribe along the lines of bitches these days think they got rights to self-determination like real human beings but just wait till the next round of trouble sees them crushed beneath the conqueror’s manly boot again, oh yeah.
I was in a production in which the [female] director did exactly that: a post-feminist interpretation in which Kate beats Petruchio at his own game. There were no significant textual modifications beyond cuts to reduce the running time. The joke among the cast was that we were doing “Taming By A Shrew.”
Yeah, I’m surprised to see this announced on the Dope like it’s some big revelation. “It’s time to admit it?” People have been talking about this for ages.
Yes, people have been talking about it, but often in the context of “How can we interpret this play as something other than horribly misogynist?”. My contention is that it can’t be done.
Actually, in a time of real crisis, you will find that gold coins are meaningless next to guns and food.
iswydt.
Like we would have a choice. Rome fell. China has a reaccuring history of asendancy and decline. Why would we be any different?
How was that brought about, without changing the text? Must have been a hell of a job of acting. Directing, too.
Was it presented as parody? ISTM that Taming is so over-the-top that parody is the only way it could be presented apart from as a period piece. Sort of like Titus Andronicus - so much an example of itself that it is difficult to present it ironically. Titus is about murder and power and cannibalism and gore. Taming is about how women can be subdued.
I am only moderately familiar with the text, and I am no kind of a director.
Regards,
Shodan
Kimstu…read Anthony Beevors 1945 and tell me again about citizens going around murdering one another. According to Soviet :eek: sources, 1 in 3 German women of all ages were raped by invading Soviet troops. After the war many thousands died during ethnic cleansing.
All I’m trying to say is that we should enjoy our moment of ascendancy in the west because history teaches us its fleeting.
Portable wealth buys guns and food. Source Schindlers List.
It’s worth noting that opinionated women (when the play was written) were charged and punished under the scolding penalty. They were dunked in water or there was a headpiece that fit in the mouth. Scold’s bridles, it punished and prevented talking.
So really Will Shakespeare took a fairly moderate stance for the time period.
I read this play for English Literature my junior year of high school. We discussed at length the depiction of Jewish moneylenders and treatment of women.
Why wouldn’t we have a choice? I don’t know how you managed to avoid noticing this, but our society has actually already lived through several wars and disasters without reinstating chattel slavery or revoking women’s and nonwhites’ voting rights, or similarly invalidating thousands of other choices that we as a society have made about humans should behave.
If what you’re trying to say is that there could be a disaster so tremendous that it would temporarily end the rule of law and principles of civilization in human societies, well sure, nobody’s disputing that. But if you’re attempting to argue that the possibility of such a catastrophe automatically renders the rule of law and principles of civilization a “bullshit paradigm” by their very nature, then you’re not making any sense at all.
Why would you imagine that the possibility of devastating society-destroying temporary chaos is somehow more authentic or less “bullshit” than the reality of relatively ordered regulated societies that most human beings have experienced since the beginning of human existence? Have you been massively binge-playing Fallout 4 or something?
Sure, lots of empires crumbled. And that’s why, when the British Empire crumbled, the British returned to living in caves and smacking the old lady around.
Except the British today are much better off than they were during the height of the British Empire.
Or to take another example, there was this thing called World War Two. At the end of the war, Germany had been flattened, people were living in the rubble. The scale of the disaster was unimaginable.
And what happened in Germany after the war? They stopped treating women as equals? Eh, rather the opposite. They looked around and realized that violent inequality was what had got them into the disaster in the first place, and decided to switch it up a bit. Oh, not invading and enslaving our neighbors, let’s try that!
And of course throughout history we’ve seen examples where the uncivilized savages had a lot better treatment of women than the city-folk. If we take a look at the Roman Empire, how’d they compare to the Germanic barbarians? Huh, the Germans had much more enlightened ideas about equality of the sexes than the literally patriarchal Romans.
So the thesis that when the shit hits the fan we’re going to abandon all this nonsense like sexual equality is just silly. It’s just as often the case that when the shit hits the fan we can’t afford to tolerate nonsense like rigid gender roles and economic stratification and so on. In the Darwinian struggle for existence we often have to abandon our civilized cherished beliefs about the way things ought to work, like “men are superior to women”.