“It is a kind of history.”
Were it a better written play, “The Taming of the Shrew” might qualify as Shakespeare’s most controversial. Even today, no one seems quite sure what to make of it. W.H. Auden called the play “a failure.” George Bernard Shaw found it “embarrassing.” Others scholars see it as a sly parody of the social mores and patriarchy of Elizabethan England. This feminist/anti-feminist debate is not new. In 1611, John Fletcher, who collaborated with Shakespeare on “The Two Noble Kinsmen,” wrote a reply of sorts called “The Woman’s Prize, or the Tamer Tamed,” in which a widowed Petruchio remarries and has the training tables turned on him by his new wife. Every generation, it seems, get the “Shrew” it deserves.
But, aside from obligatory Tudor history, Shakespeare doesn’t take sides. He observes human behavior and ask questions, but he doesn’t preach or force answers on the reader. Instead he shows how people act, how they think, and lets the reader come to his own conclusions. “The Taming of the Shrew” is where he starts to more fully develop this idea.
Here, he wants us to view things from a distance. First, he sets the play-within-a-play in Italy. (Nope, no commentary on English social values here. Move along, move along.) Secondly, by way of the Induction, centering on a drunken commoner named Christopher Sly. The Induction contains some of the best writing in the play. It also introduces the major theme of the play: how people perceive themselves and are perceived by others. But it also creates perspective. By the time Sly makes his final appearance at the end of Act I, Scene 1, the reader/audience is watching Sly watch Luncento and Tranio, who are watching Baptista and company explain the gist of the play. That three subtle steps back from where the play began.
Notice, too, that almost every character in the play pretends to be some one else in order to attain his/her goals. Petruchio plays tamer to peal away Kate’s shrewish exterior. Lucentio and Hortensio pretend to be teachers to gain access to Bianca, who acts the ideal sweet young thing. Senor Baptista is more deal-maker than father. Even a total stranger joins in to impersonate Lucentio’s father.
One of the under-mentioned sources for “The Taming of the Shrew” is Shakespeare’s own “The Comedy of Errors.” Petruchio and Kate are very much a younger, more passionate version of Antipholus of Ephesus and his wife, Adriana. The comedy of misidentification in “Errors” (Act III, Scene 1 and Act V, Scene 1) are re-written as comedy of assumed identity in “Shrew” (Act V, Scene 1.)
As for Kate’s notorious monologue, consider this from Luciana in “The Comedy of Errors:”
“If you did wed my sister for her wealth,
Then for her wealth's sake use her with more kindness:
Or if you like elsewhere, do it by stealth;
Muffle your false love with some show of blindness:
Let not my sister read it in your eye;
Be not thy tongue thy own shame's orator;
Look sweet, be fair, become disloyalty;
Apparel vice like virtue's harbinger;
Bear a fair presence, though your heart be tainted;
Teach sin the carriage of a holy saint;
Be secret-false: what need she be acquainted?”
Compare that to Kate’s:
“Such duty as the subject owes the prince
Even such a woman oweth to her husband;
And when she is froward, peevish, sullen, sour,
And not obedient to his honest will,
What is she but a foul contending rebel
And graceless traitor to her loving lord?
I am ashamed that women are so simple
To offer war where they should kneel for peace;
Or seek for rule, supremacy and sway,
When they are bound to serve, love and obey.
Why are our bodies soft and weak and smooth,
Unapt to toil and trouble in the world,
But that our soft conditions and our hearts
Should well agree with our external parts?”
Luciana’s advice calls for blatant, if harmless, deceit. Kate’s is subtly the same, because she’s now in on the joke. Having married for courtly love and/or money, the others are in for taming sessions of their own. In “The Taming of the Shrew,” Shakespeare’s view of the battle between the sexes involves far more espionage than open warfare.
Learning Points
As Petruchio can be seen as a reworking of Antipholus of Ephesus, Lucentio is a reworking of Valentine from “The Two Gentlemen of Verona.” Like Valentine, Lucentio is freshly arrived to better his mind and manners. Like Valentine, he quickly falls in love and hatches a plan to elope with his beloved. Unlike Valentine, he discovers that courtly love has consequences beyond the wedding vows. While Valentine-- a lead role in that play-- is a sketchily drawn, well-intentioned dope, Lucentio is given much more to do in “Shrew.” We get to see him woo and win Bianca. His sparring with Hortensio is better played than Valentine’s exchange of insults with Thurio. And his final comeuppance, after raising the bet from 20 to 100 crowns, show that Petruchio’s methods trump both courtly love and marrying for money.
Details, Details: “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” was also set in Italy and is notable for being as authentically Italian as a basket of Fish and Chips. In “The Taming of the Shrew,” Shakespeare gets his geography straight and adds authentic details such as when Gremio describes the appointments of his house (Act II, Scene 1, 366-376.) How Shakespeare got the particulars of “Turkey cushions bossed with pearls” is irrelevant. What matters is that, even in this farce, Shakespeare wanted the setting to more closely resemble reality. The action of the the play is farcical, but Shakespeare’s interest in the unity of character and setting are moving more and more toward the real world.
Linkage: How one reacts to “The Taming of the Shrew” depends on how one reads it. Here are links to three very different versions of Petruchio wooing Katerina in Act II, Scene 1. The go from dark, to comic, to just plain silly.
The Royal Shakespeare Company, 2012
American Conservatory Theater, 1976
Bruce Willis and Cybil Shepard (Yep, Moonlighting.)
Next: Love's Labor Lost
