Wow. It took me almost a month to get my thoughts collected and written for the second play — not as fast as I had hoped. It has been a very busy several weeks, as I had expected (that’s why I assigned myself three plays for September). I’m already reading Titus Andronicus, but it has been difficult to get the writing done with the school year starting and long days at Bungie. Also, it was a challenge for me with this play, Taming of the Shrew, to find a way to talk about its gender politics while also celebrating its sharp comedy of identity. So I just chopped my thoughts in two.

SHAKESPEARE, MISOGYNIST?

I didn’t start this project to dwell on Shakespeare with a polemical, political filter. But it is hard not to open with gender politics when you’re talking about The Taming of the Shrew in the Twenty-first century. Sitting down to write this, I just came off of watching Milk, the Sean Penn biopic about San Francisco gay rights advocate Harvey Milk. The presence of that film in my mind inclined me want to be harsher with Shakespeare than I was right after putting The Taming of the Shrew down.

In blunt terms, the plot (abstracted from the humor and elegant absurdity that makes it worth reading) sounds like a right-wing dystopian novel about women, akin to Margaret Atwood’s Handmaiden’s Tale. Baptista Minola of Padua is father to Kate and Bianca. Bianca is young, passive, and beautiful. Kate is, by the terms of the play, a “shrew” — a woman whose opinions won’t be tamed. Bianca has many suitors, notably Hortensio; the student, Lucentio (newly arrived from Pisa); and the pantaloon, Gremio. But before Baptista will allow Bianca to marry, he insists that Kate find a husband. He cloisters away Bianca, restricting her only to her tutors until Kate’s wedding day. Just in time, Petruchio arrives in Padua, enticed by the challenge of taming Kate, marrying her, and capturing her dowry. He undertakes a campaign of deprivation and distortion to break her. He insists that good food tastes terrible and that her accommodations are too poor for her to sleep, and he won’t concede until she obeys his every command. In the end, exhausted and famished, she does break and agrees to marry Petruchio. Lucentio, who — along with Hortensio — has managed to court Bianca by posing as a tutor, wins Bianca’s hand. But Petruchio “wins” the day with a final demonstration of Kate’s obedience: she comes when called and does his bidding without question while the other husbands look on with awe.

Marjorie Garber’s approach to The Taming of the Shrew tempers my snide, Twenty-first Century summary. She points out that, while the play is certainly “of its time” in its depiction of women, Shakespeare is always polyphonic in his work. Indeed, Kate is a fabulously strong character — after some stilted early moments, and I buy Garber’s argument that a talented actress can perform a completely ironic reading of Kate, and even her famed last speech (try it yourself, reading the whole passage with mental eye rolling and scare quotes):

Fie, fie unknit that threat’ning unkind brow
And dart not scornful glances from those eyes
To wound thy lord, thy king, thy governor.
It blots they beauty as frosts do bite the meads,
Confounds thy fame as whirlwinds shake fair buds,
And in no sense is meet or amiable.
A woman moved is like a fountain troubled,
Muddy, ill-seeming, thick, bereft of beauty,
And while it is so, none so dry or thirsty
Will deign to sip or touch one drop of it.
Thy husband is thy lord, the life, they keeper,
Thy head, thy sovereign; one that cares for thee
And for thy maintenance; commits his body
To painful labor both by sea and land,
To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,
Whilst thou liest warm at home, secure and safe;
And craves no other tribute at thy hands
But love, fair looks, and true obedience —
Too little payment for so great a debt.
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 in 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?
Come, come, you froward and unable worms,
My mind hath been as big as one of yours,
My heart as great, my reason haply more,
To bandy word for word and frown for frown.
But no I see our lances are but straws,
Our strength as weak, our weakness past compare,
That seeming to be most which we indeed least are.
Then vail you stomachs, for it is no boot,
And place your hands below your husband’s foot,
In token of which duty, if he please,
My hand is ready, may it do him ease.
(V.2 142- 185)

I, like other readers before, see in Kate some echo of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, a character that is equally rich and full of alternate readings. Garber argues, and I agree, that it isn’t possible to find “Shakespeare’s view” in his characters or his plays, including this one. Their power — even in the lesser plays — is the battle of ideas and emotions and the poetry and humor that they present. They are not strictly polemical. The Taming of the Shrew can’t be reduced to my humorless plot summary above.

So I think it is possible to find an ironic reading of Shrew that evolves the play for contemporary audiences (as it has evolved since it was first performed). But I think it can also be read straight up as a work that provides a window into a different historical moment from our own, a moment that is every bit as bigoted towards women as the Anita Bryant 1970s were for gay people.

Thus, I don’t agree with Harold Bloom’s more self-assured assertion, that Shakespeare intended for the play to be ironic, or at least of Kate’s speech: “…one would have to be very literal-minded indeed not to hear the delicious irony that is Kate’s undersong, centered on the great line ‘I am asham’d that women are so simple'” (Bloom 33).

Harvey Milk doesn’t let me let Shakespeare off that easy. Whatever Shakespeare’s ultimate intent was (and we have to stop insisting that we ever will “figure that out”), the play is full of misogynistic situations. But the play still is rich in so many other Shakespearean ways, and Shakespeare was (whatever else we may want to say about him being “timeless”) a man who lived in a misogynistic time. Before I cast stones, I’ll recall my own youthful homophobia — and that of most of my male friends until my college years. That wasn’t 400 years ago. That was 25 years ago. I’d be ashamed to have my words from that time put in front of me today. I can understand Shakespeare’s words and historic situation and not condemn his whole body of work. But I also don’t have to excuse it or pretend he transcended his time.

TUDOR TUTORS AND OTHER PLAYS WITHIN PLAYS

With gender politics addressed, though not put to bed, I turn to the part of the play that was my moment of great delight — the moment I could see the greater Shakespeare emerge from amidst what is otherwise a light Elizabethan comedy.

First, to say what it wasn’t: the frame play, the Induction. Unlike Garber, I don’t find the strange opening of Shrew to be a defining element. It is interesting, no question — for being odd. Christopher Sly, a beggar, falls asleep, and a Lord decides to have some fun with him. He has Sly placed in his lordly bed and has his men insist to Sly that he, Sly, is the Lord of the house and has just forgotten his role due to amnesia. The true Lord even has his servant dress as Sly’s supposed wife. The play itself (the plot described above), then, becomes a command performance for Sly, ordered by the Lord. There is only one moment from there on — at the end of Act 1.1 — where Sly makes a brief comment about the action on the stage. He and the Lord never appear again. Odd, right?

What I do find especially notable is how this framing narrative with Sly sets off what I think is the true center of this play: a play about playing roles (and this is something that Garber acknowledges, so maybe she is more right than I am giving credit).

The Taming of the Shrew is an absolute explosion of plays with plays. It delights in having servants playing masters, in having noblemen shifting realities, and role-players role-playing to each other not realizing that they both are being false. There are so many layers of “playing a role” that I found myself having to jot down the relationships of the characters and their actual and assumed names.

• Christopher Sly is tricked into playing the part of a Nobleman.
• The Lord poses as Sly’s servant all the while directing the sham.
• Bartholomew, the Lord’s page, poses as the “Lord’s” (Sly’s) wife.
• Lucentio plays the role of Cambio, Bianca’s tutor. Hortensio doesn’t know.
• Hortensio becomes Littio, a second tutor.
• Tranio, Lucentio’s servant, adopts the guise of his master, Lucentio.
• The Pedant is hired by Lucentio to play Lucentio’s father, Vincentio. But the Pendant doesn’t know Vincentio.
• And, of course, Petruchio plays the part of the compassionate husband while systematically taming his wife according to his plan.

Got all of that?

When it comes together, when Vincentio confronts himself (played by the Pedant) and Lucentio’s ploy unwinds, it’s a joy. For me, this moment in V.1 is akin to the satisfaction of fitting together the last three pieces on a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle or filling in the final word on a crossword. By the time Petruchio calls to his tamed, obedient wife, “…. Come on and kiss me, Kate” (V.2 186) I’ve already been well pleased beforehand by the intellectual resolution.