The Woman Question: The Taming of the Shrew
Is The Taming of the Shrew one of the most anti-feminist plays ever written? Here’s a story about a feisty woman who people marvel at for being completely outside anyone’s control who by the end of the play says that she is ashamed that women should “seek for rule, supremacy, and sway, when they are bound to serve, love and obey.” Was this a message from young William Shakespeare, plying his trade in London, for his wife, Anne Hathaway, left back in Stratford? How can we abide such a retrograde message in this day and age?
Stephen Greenblatt, in Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, writes, “In The Taming of the Shrew, a pair of good actors can persuade audiences that there is a powerful sexual attraction half-hidden in the quarreling of Petruccio and Kate, but the end of the play goes out of its way to offer two almost equally disagreeable visions of marriage, one in which the couple is constantly quarreling, the other in which the wife’s will has been broken.” (I find it hard not to read the last part of that sentence as “…in which the wife’s Will has been broken.” Did Will Shakespeare write this play as revenge because he felt like he had been broken by Anne?)
Tina Packer, the founding artistic director of Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Massachusetts, and a former actor with the Royal Shakespeare Company, has just written a new book called Women of Will: Following the Feminine in Shakespeare’s Plays. She argues in it that Shakespeare’s female characters mature over the course of his career, becoming more rounded and complex as he develops as a playwright. And The Taming of the Shrew is manifestly from the beginning of his career, according to this viewpoint. Interviewed on NPR, Packer argues that,
Right in the very beginning when Shakespeare starts writing about women — and I’m putting this crudely — but he’s projecting on them. He’s a 17-year-old, maybe a 20-year-old projecting on them. He’s either terrified of them — they’re viragoes who have to be shut up and tamed and shrews that have to be silent and do what their husbands say — or they’re sweet little things. “Oh, I’m so obedient, I’m so sweet and I wouldn’t say boo to a goose anywhere!”
They’re kind of male fantasies of the kewpie doll. I’m talking Taming of the Shrew, Comedy of Errors and the early history plays, the Henry VI plays going into Richard III — although we’re getting much more sophisticated by then.
I think, though, that there’s something potentially a bit more interesting going on in this play. As Greenblatt suggests, there’s potentially something in the relationship between Petruchio and Kate that can be seen as suggesting there’s a kind of chemistry between them even as he tries to bend her to his will (Will! I can’t help it now). The difference between Kate and Silvia or Julia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona is that an actress (or actor) would actually want to play the role of Kate. She has a life in her that the female roles in the earlier play just didn’t have. She’s not a two dimensional object of courtly love. So what if she gets subdued at the end of the play? Here is someone with real vigour who breaks lutes over people’s heads and gets to insult people.
In fact, does she really submit to Petruchio at the end of the play? The other characters certainly find it hard to believe that she’s a changed person, which is why Lucentio and Hortensio enter into a bet with Petruchio about whose wife will come when summoned. Just as they are incredulous that Kate submits to Petruchio when their own wives (including the previously meek Bianca) defy them, so we in the audience don’t quite buy it. We’re left with the suspicion that when Kate says as a wife you should “place your hands below your husband’s foot” that her abrupt turnaround could be some kind of ruse and that while she might be putting on an outward show of obedience, she is going to be different at home.
The BBC version of The Taming of the Shrew was screened in 1980 as the first programme in the third series. It gets given a Renaissance setting with rudimentary sets that are functional enough and casting that is most notable for featuring John Cleese as Petruchio. Apparently the casting of Cleese was controversial for the fact that he had never played a Shakespearean role before and hadn’t been keen on the first two BBC series of the complete Shakespeare. He was persuaded by the vision of director Jonathan Miller, however, who didn’t want it to come out as a farce and instead took a more psychological approach. As is his wont, Cleese consulted a psychiatrist to help with his portrayal and came to the conclusion that,
Petruchio doesn’t believe in his own antics, but in the craftiest and most sophisticated way he needs to show Kate certain things about her behaviour. He takes one look at her and realises that here is the woman for him, but he has to go through the process of ‘reconditioning’ her before anything else. So he behaves just as outrageously as she does in order to make her aware of the effect that her behaviour has on other people […] Kate needs to be made happy — she is quite clearly unhappy at the beginning of the play, and then extremely happy at the end because of what she has achieved with Petruchio’s help.
Yeah, I don’t buy this vision of Petruchio as therapist. It makes him a far less interesting character if all of his wildness is just an act to show Kate how to behave properly.
Cleese was just coming off the final season of Fawlty Towers and there’s a strong suggestion of Basil and Manuel in the early scenes with Petruchio and his servant Grumio. Cleese actually makes a pretty good fist of the role, delivering the lines fluently enough, although he doesn’t quite inhabit the role as fully as you might hope. There’s always that Monty Python/Fawlty Towers element creeping through, which is not exactly wrong for the character but doesn’t allow Petruchio to quite be his own man.
Sarah Badel as Kate shows some of the feistiness that the role demands but again feels a little understated for me. The actor that I liked the most in the production was Anthony Pedley as Tranio, the servant of Lucentio, who switches roles with his master so that Lucentio can woo Kate’s more desirable sister Bianca in the role of her tutor. Pedley does a fine line in switching accents between Tranio and ‘Tranio as Lucentio.’ Overall the production is fine, but it lacks a bit of spark and I think Miller’s interpretation is partly to blame for that.
The most famous version of The Taming of the Shrew is the 1967 Franco Zeffirelli film starring real life celebrity couple Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton as Kate and Petruchio (apparently the roles were originally slated for Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni). This was Zeffirelli’s first film as director and it preceded his version of Romeo and Juliet by a year. It was Romeo and Juliet that really made him a household name, but The Taming of the Shrew is a very fine film in its own right, partly due to the star power of Taylor and Burton, but also the overall conception of the film. Zeffirelli cuts fairly liberally, as he does in his other Shakespeare adaptations, and this means that the sub-plot about the wooing of Bianca by Lucentio (played by Michael York) becomes a little incoherent, but the setting and costumes and cast of extras are magnificent. The film looks absolutely magnificent, and Taylor (in her first Shakespearean role) and Burton are captivating as they repeat a version of the tempestuous relationship they played on screen the previous year in the adaptation of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Burton especially captures depths that Cleese just can’t manage in the BBC version and although he mostly comes across as a drunken swaggering bully at the end of the film he shows an uncertainty about how his wife will respond that shows a much more interesting vulnerability to Petruchio. Zeffirelli is prepared to have lingering shots without dialogue that just examine the faces of Taylor and Burton, and why wouldn’t you?
Zeffirelli opens his film with an extended carnival scene that shows a world turned topsy-turvy. He draws on the medieval carnivals that allowed for licensed mockery of those in power, including royalty and the clergy, so we see a man in a pig mask dressed as a bishop and grotesque distortions of authority (for the theoretically inclined, see the work of Mikhail Bakhtin). This is all appropriate introduction to a world that has been turned upside down in terms of the power relations between men and women. All the men are clearly terrified of Kate at the beginning of the play and order must be restored by the end by having Kate not only submit to Petruchio but lecture everyone on the appropriate submissiveness for wives to display. Just as with the carnivals, disorder is only allowed to be temporary. We can allow people to mock authority one day a year as long as they obey it the rest of the time. And we can allow women to have power for a limited period as long as we tame them eventually, Shakespeare seems to be saying.
The Taming of the Shrew was actually the first of any of Shakespeare’s plays to be adapted for film with sound and was filmed in 1929 with the hottest celebrity couple of that time: Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. In that version (which I haven’t seen), Pickford undermines Kate’s final speech by winking at Bianca. Taylor delivers the speech apparently sincerely in the Zeffirelli version, but then leaves, forcing Petruchio to follow her, fighting his way through a crowd of women, indicating that the power dynamic hasn’t changed as much as we might have thought and that she is not a broken woman, unlike Sarah Badel’s thoroughly tamed portrayal of Kate.
There is chemistry between Taylor and Burton in the film, and it underscores some of the lines from the play that indicate that maybe Kate and Petruchio really are made for each other. Petruchio himself declares that he is “as peremptory as she proud-minded” indicating a kind of marriage of equality between these “two raging fires.” And witnesses to the wedding declare that “of all mad matches never was the like,” with Bianca observing of her sister that “being mad herself, she’s madly mated.” These two are more violent precursors to Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, and just like those two we see initial antipathy turn into what seems to be a pretty good match by the end, “mad” as it may be.
The BBC had another stab at The Taming of the Shrew as one of the four episodes in their ShakespeaRe-Told series in 2005. This series updated the plays to modern times and adapted pretty freely, doing without the Shakepearean language, although echoes remain, as you can see in this excerpt showing Kate’s final speech about submission:
We get a much greater departure from Shakespeare’s message about taming wives here, as you would expect in 2005. Shirley Henderson’s Katherine Minola is a successful politician in this version, leader of the opposition by the end of the film, so obviously a powerful woman in her own right already. It becomes more a question of how she can moderate herself to live with others, particularly Rufus Sewell as Petruchio. I really enjoyed this adaptation at the time and rewatching the end of it I think it stands up well a decade on. It also has David Mitchell in it, which is always a good thing.
Despite being an apprentice work by Shakespeare, the play has proved surprisingly attractive to filmmakers over the years and has also made a couple of other Hollywood appearances in rather more distorted versions. It was the basis for the 1948 Cole Porter stage musical Kiss Me Kate, which MGM filmed in 1953. I have not and will not see it, because musicals really aren’t my thing. And then its most popular incarnation was the 1999 teen comedy 10 Things I Hate About You, which helped make stars of its lead actors, Julia Stiles, Heath Ledger and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. I have seen this film and at the time thought it was a pretty decent film. You can see enough of The Taming in the Shrew in it to make it count as an adaptation, although it’s obviously very different.
One thing I hadn’t realised about The Taming of the Shrew, not having read it before, is that the play actually is a play within in a play. It starts with an “Induction” consisting of two scenes which neither Zeffirelli nor Jonathan Miller saw fit to include, largely because it’s essentially a stage device that wouldn’t make sense on film. The Induction introduces a drunkard by the name of Christopher Sly who passes out in a pub, much to the disgust of a Lord who happens to stop in for a cleansing ale while out hunting. He decides to teach Sly a lesson by playing an elaborate practical joke on him. They cart him back to the Lord’s house, dress him in fine clothes and when he wakes up they convince him he’s really a married nobleman who had just been dreaming that he was a dissolute tinker. One of the servants gets dressed up as his “wife” and then has to resist Sly’s entreaties to get into bed with him. And then some travelling players happen by and perform a play for them called The Taming of the Shrew. We never come back to the frame story at the end of the play, either because Shakespeare never wrote it or because it has been lost. I’d like to see a film version that did give us the Christopher Sly story. I reckon Tom Stoppard could do something interesing with it.
One final thing that I observed about The Taming of the Shrew is the element of masquerade. Shakespeare had tried out a woman dressed as a man in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, but here he goes into overdrive with people pretending to be other than they really are. So we have servants dressed as masters— “Your fellow Tranio here, to save my life, puts my apparel and my countenance on,” says Lucentio, before he pretends to be a tutor in order to win over Bianca — Hortensio likewise pretends to be a music teacher for the same purpose and Tranio enlists a false Vincentio for the wooing plan, leading to a showdown between the real and false Vincentios and Lucentios. Shakespeare will use this device for the rest of his career and here as elsewhere it often comes down to clothing. When Petruchio turns up in outlandish garb for his wedding he is described as “a monster in apparel” and when he taunts Kate with fine clothes which he won’t let her wear he observes that “’tis the mind that makes the body rich,” not the clothes. We can’t have any faith in someone’s outward appearance: fine clothes may conceal a wretched mind, and vice versa. It’s mainly used for comedic purposes in The Taming of the Shrew, but Shakespeare will go on to explore it in other ways…
