The Taming of the Shrew

Or, “I come to wive it wealthily in Westeros”

Of all the questions raised by The Taming of the Shrew — and boy, howdy, are there many — none may be as urgent as this: Does anything exist?

Yet before diving into the terrifying ontological implications of Christophero Sly, it’s probably best if we first addressed the 500 pound misogynistic gorilla sitting in the middle of the room. In other words, now is as good a time as any to talk about Northrop Frye.

But first, I need to get a bit meta for a few.

I began to write this essay six months ago, midway through 2016. I found it — the essay, not just the year — incredibly difficult. In fact, I was unable to finish — the essay, not the year. Most of the difficulty was the distraction of the Presidential election. How could I focus on Shakespeare when there were the conventions to watch? And as the election wore on to its ultimately tragic conclusion, I simply couldn’t find it in me to re-immerse myself in a play like this one.

Now, when I started this blog, I wasn’t sure what my publishing schedule was going to be, nor how I would approach the task of reading all these plays. For “Two Gentlemen of Verona”, I tried to read one act at a time, and write a post on each as I went. This was great from a certain perspective, but less great from others. On the one hand, I stuck to a pretty solid schedule of one posting per week. There’s something to be said for consistency.

Obviously, I did not anticipate a six month sabbatical. But the schedule I kept for the first play was, on balance, a bit too challenging. I found it excruciating to have to stop reading after each act in order to collect my thoughts and put a post together. Five acts means four cliffhangers, and I’m too used to bingeing TV to stop after every commercial break. It interrupts the dramatic flow, and frankly, it just isn’t as fun.

I figure I’ll try something different going forwards. I’ll read each play in its entirety, and then write as many essays as I want on each one, organized by theme, or character, or whatever strikes my fancy. After all, it’s my blog, my rules.

So as I was saying… Northrop Frye.

Northrop Frye was a Canadian literary theorist who was kind of a big deal around the middle of the last century. He’s primarily known for his work “Anatomy of Criticism”, which established his theory of archetypal criticism. When I was a young and impressionable high school senior, I was introduced to Northrop Frye in English class, and it changed my life. (Thanks, Ms. Bassen!) For the last twenty-one years, I have been unable to think about narrative art without filtering it through a Fryeian lens.

There’s quite a bit more to it than I can go through in a blog like this, but it’s important for me to cover the basics, because my thoughts on Shakespeare are basically inexplicable without them. If you want the long version, though, the wikipedia page for Northrop Frye is pretty solid.

You know how every few years some book nerd friend of yours will argue that “actually, there are really only four (or six, or three) types of plot that all stories follow”? Northrop Frye is that book nerd. In fact, he turned that argument into a kind of science. According to Frye, there are only four types of stories: Romance, Tragedy, Irony, and Comedy.

• Romance is the story of a hero’s journey. There is a great evil to be defeated, and a great warrior rises to the challenge and defeats it.
• Tragedy is the story of a hero’s fall. Like in a Romance, there is a great evil to be defeated; yet the hero possesses a tragic flaw, often some otherwise heroic quality taken to an unfortunate extreme, and the hero’s death is the price of evil’s defeat.
• Irony is the story of a world without heroes. Evil and apathy rule the day, and change is an impossibility.
• Comedy is the story of rebirth and renewal. There is no great hero, but rather a minor nobody who overthrows a static and sclerotic social order. This is usually not so much because the order is evil, but because the minor nobody wants to have sex, and the social order is preventing that.

Furthermore, Frye assigns each story archetype a season. Romance is summer, Tragedy autumn, Irony winter, and Comedy spring. Keep this in mind; it’ll be important later.

If you’re looking for a Romance, think Harry Potter, Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, and the first two books of Beowulf (Grendel and Mom). For Tragedy, you’re talking Oedipus Rex, the final book of Beowulf (Dragon), Le Morte d’Arthur, and, arguably, Hamilton: An American Musical. (Editor’s note: the reason Hamilton’s second act isn’t as great as the first act is because it doesn’t fully commit to the Fryeian archetypes of tragedy. PM me if you feel like hearing me go on and on and on and on at length about it.) You can’t dip a toe into the twentieth century without drowning in Irony: Kafka, Beckett, Larry David. Comedy is, well, comedy: if you haven’t seen Caddyshack, what’s wrong with you?

And so: what the hell is “The Taming of the Shrew”?

We can rule out Romance and Tragedy, obviously, because there is no great hero and nobody dies. The obvious call is Comedy, because most of the characters are driven by their desire to have sex and get married. It’s neither one of Shakespeare’s tragedies or histories, which only leaves one other option. But there is something terribly wrong in Padua.

First things first, who is the protagonist? Lucentio? Bianca? Hortensio and Gremio? Please. Petruchio might qualify, but as protagonists go, his character arc is utterly flat. He arrives in Padua looking to marry rich. His best friend points out a rich woman. He marries that woman. He gets rich. End of play. True protagonists have challenges to overcome, but Petruchio barely breaks a sweat breaking in his wife. They seem equally matched in their first verbal spar session, but in every subsequent scene he remains fully in control. Considering his scenes in isolation, it reminds me of my days in improv comedy, where every once in a while I’d encounter an actor who refused to play low status, no matter the scene.

Could it be Katherina? Unlike Petruchio, she certainly has an arc. She starts the play shrewish and ends it tamed, as the title helpfully points out. And yet, and yet… Why is she so angry at the start of the play? She doesn’t like men and has no interest in marriage, but why? She only gets one scene without the men pestering her, and she spends it tormenting her little sister. Are we, as an audience, supposed to sympathize with her? How can we, given the impenetrable wall surrounding her inner life? Protagonists are usually defined by their wants, and Katherina has none. Yes, she does not want to be married, but what would she rather be doing instead? Running her own business? Working out at the gym? Studying Torah? The text is silent. Either way, the one thing we know she does not want is the one thing she gets.

Which leaves us with nobody. No one to root for. No heroes, no villains, no quests, no growth, and no escape. This is no Comedy. This is Irony. This is Shakespeare by way of Harold Pinter, “One for the Road” in Elizabethan dress.

Want more evidence? How do Comedy plots end? With a wedding. Where does the wedding happen in this play? At the end of Act 3. There are two more acts after the wedding, which is like taking that shot of Benjamin and Elaine on the bus at the end of The Graduate and stretching it out for a full hour. And then, as if to drive it home even harder, Act 4 begins in a snowstorm. A snowstorm! Well, maybe not explicitly a snowstorm, but there’s a freezing chill in the air, a dire and urgent need for a fire, and this particular line of text, from Petruchio’s harried servant:

GRUMIO
But thou knowest winter tames man, woman and beast, for it hath tamed my old master and my new mistress and myself…

Out of nowhere, indicated at no point in any of the preceding acts, nor again in any following act, Shakespeare reveals that this play takes place in winter. Spring is the season for Comedy, remember; winter is Irony.

Here, I could make a cheap “winter is coming” joke, but to be honest, it wouldn’t be much of a joke. The worlds of “Taming” and “A Song of Ice and Fire” may not be exact copies, but they rhyme. Marriage in both is little more than an economic transaction between a father and a suitor. Wives are little more than trophies to be won in service of establishing status over other men. A woman with any ambitions beyond submission within marriage is to be mocked, shamed, and broken. Padua must be what Kings Landing was like during the peaceful parts of the reign of Robert Baratheon.

This places Kate in a role halfway between Catelyn Stark and Cersei Lannister. Sold to a husband she doesn’t love, against her will, in order to fulfill some ill-defined family honor. Of course, Petruchio has neither the honorable, stoic nature of Ned Stark, nor the wild, hedonistic abandon of King Robert. Petruchio, homeless and wandering with no true desire but money, quick witted and psychologically astute yet utterly amoral, recently returned from the battlefield, who says of wooing his difficult bride:

PETRUCHIO
Why came I hither but to that intent?
Think you a little din can daunt mine ears?
Have I not in my time heard lions roar?
Have I not heard the sea, puffed up with winds,
Rage like an angry boar chafèd with sweat?
Have I not heard great ordnance in the field,
And heaven’s artillery thunder in the skies?
Have I not in a pitchèd battle heard
Loud ‘larums, neighing steeds, and trumpets’ clang?
And do you tell me of a woman’s tongue
That gives not half so great a blow to hear
As will a chestnut in a farmer’s fire?
Tush, tush! Fear boys with bugs.

Petruchio might as well be a Clegane. Or maybe Bronn, if you’re feeling generous.

It’s important not to lose sight of how terribly Kate is treated throughout the play. There is the obvious stuff, like the way Petruchio allows her to be crushed by a horse, or the way he starves her and denies her sleep as if he were Jim Jones or Marshall Applewhite. All I could think during the whole “I say it is the moon that shines so bright” exchange was Captain Picard yelling, “THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS!”

Yet the thing that makes me saddest is Kate’s position before Act 4, before the brainwashing begins in earnest. All we know about her as a character is that she doesn’t want to be married, and all society has to offer her is a husband. In acting the shrew, she is taking the one option available to stand against her oppressors. It is not completely unbelievable that she might fall for a guy like the Petruchio of Act 2, who banters with her, who keeps up with her anger and responds playfully, who calls her beautiful and worthy of love no matter how strongly she pushes him away. It must be a lonely world she inhabits, and though Petruchio exhibits the behavior of a madman, isn’t the world itself mad?

So let’s assume that by the start of Act 3, Kate is crushing hard on Petruchio, but her heart is still tentative and wary. The whole concept of marriage must seem like a sick joke to her, despite her own ambivalence towards this strange man who has come to woo her. It’s a very modern way to feel, all in all.

Petruchio shows up late to the wedding, dressed like a hobo, drunk as a skunk and making a scene. He insults her father, the man who until that moment had been more of her captor than her parent. He insults the wedding guests, the very people who had insulted and ignored her for years. He makes a mockery of the entire concept of weddings. Petruchio is expressing the anger that Kate must have felt her entire life, using his own male privilege to attack head-on what she could only snipe at. I can’t help but imagine that by the end of their wedding, she is fully in love with him, despite her better judgment.

Which makes his treatment of her in the subsequent scenes all the worse. She finally allows herself to hope, to get emotionally attached, to feel something other than anger and resentment, and the object of her affections turns into the very tormentor she had always feared he would be. Worse, rather than being chained to a milquetoast sap who bores her to death, she is trapped and tortured, psychologically and physically, by an implacable beast. She has exchanged one prison for another. Not that it was ever her choice — Petruchio announced their engagement and her father agreed to it, neither considering her consent worth asking for — but she would have been better off waiting for Godot.

And that, reader, is as far as I got with this play in 2016. I wrote all that, then took a short break to watch society crumble. Reading it back now, it feels both innocent and prescient. Kate is a nasty woman.

I’m not sure there’s much left to say, to be honest. It’s certainly not a play I’d like to spend much more time thinking about, given the state of our national discourse recently.

Except there’s still Christophero Sly to attend to. Perhaps that’s a topic for another, much shorter essay. I’ll try to write it sooner than six months from now.