Content
History
William Shakespeare is considered to be the greatest dramatist of all time. Shakespeare was baptized on April 26, 1564 (there is no record of his birth) at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon, England. William was the third child of John Shakespeare, a leather merchant, and Mary Arden, a local landed heiress.[1] Scant information can be found in regards to Shakespeare’s education and early life. However, there is information known about his married life. Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway on November 29, 1582 in Worcester, when he was 18. Hathaway was 26 and pregnant during their vow exchange. The first child was daughter Susanna and two years later, twins Judith and Hamnet were born. Hamnet died at the age of eleven and many scholars believe the death of Hamnet influenced the play, Hamlet. Still, “In the four years following Hamnet’s death, the playwright, as many have pointed out, wrote some of his sunniest comedies: The Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It.” It was not until the early 17th century that Shakespeare wrote many of his tragedies such as Othello and Macbeth. From the early 1590’s, Shakespeare was living and working as an actor and playwright in London. Shakespeare also was a partner in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, an acting company. Before the start of the start of the 17th century, 15 of the 37 plays written by Williams Shakespeare were published and his last period ends with the romances The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest and Cymbeline, which have a theme of forgiveness. It is believed that Shakespeare died on his birthday April 23, 1616.
Females in Theater
Yale School of Drama has produced some of the greatest female actors of our time, such as Oscar winners Meryl Streep and Lupita Nyong’o. Luckily for Ms. Streep and Ms. Nyong’o they did not live in the Elizabethan Era, as there were then no female actors. “Women were forbidden, by law, to perform in the Elizabethan theatre, therefore there were no actresses at the Globe Theatre. The acting profession was not a credible one and it was unthinkable that any woman would appear in a play. Young boys played the parts of female characters. These boy actors were usually aged between 13 and 19 years of age when their voices were still high and muscles had not fully developed. The voices of Elizabethan boys were believed to break much later than the modern day due to differences in diet and lifestyle which made it possible for boy actors to play women’s parts convincingly until they entered their late teens.”2 The boys who played girls who played boys, like the character of Viola in Twelfth Night and Portia in The Merchant of Venice, offer a blatant instance of deception and disguise. Granted, the deception is known to the audience. However, this awareness of fraud adds to the complexity of understanding character in the play and lends itself to the idea of being a phony both in text and in real life. It was not until 1660 when women were allowed to act in the theater, although many women of exalted status disregarded the ban prior to its lift. “A great deal of attention is paid the fact that Lower Class Elizabethan women were not allowed to perform on the Elizabethan stage as it would have been considered to be lewd and highly immoral. This view was not taken regarding the appearance of Upper Class Elizabethan women who appeared in court masques! The mother of Queen Elizabeth certainly performed in masques! The first recorded appearance of Anne Boleyn at the Tudor Court was on March 1, 1522 was as a performer in a masque! Perhaps the element of disguise allowed for this as vizards, or masks, were always worn by the performers. But the more probable explanation was that these wealthy women of the court wanted to be included in performing in such an exciting diversion as a masque.” The use of a masque even in Elizabethan times promoted anonymity. “The word mask made its first appearance in England around the 1530’s and is derived from the French word ‘masque’ which means, “covering to hide ones face”.” Anne Boleyn, with all her power, still disguised herself. What was feared in removing the mask? Why was there even a law? Were women afraid to be equals to their male counterparts? Do women today still wear a mask, afraid of revealing their true self?
The Taming of the Shrew: Literary Critiques
After countless hours researching William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, one confusion remains – the reader does not truly know whether or not the shrew has been tamed. It is not only open for interpretation, but interpretation varies according to the historical moment in which the play is read. Despite the fact that The Taming of the Shrew has been analyzed for centuries and by hundreds of scholars, the jury is still out on Katherine’s taming.
From the point of view of a typical spectator in an Elizabethan audience, Katherine was tamed. The belief that her last speech must be a masquerade arises from modern views. “For some three hundred years Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew was generally accepted as being about the taming of a shrew. Kate was a shrew, Petruchio was tamer, and he tamed Kate. The first step in revision, then, is to back off from the play as it stands and to find Shakespeare out of line with modern feeling: women do not and should not submit. Yet, this is a mild demurrer compared with the second step, the leas as I have called it, that began about fifteen years ago: the real and more astonishing revisionism, far from declaring Shakespeare out of line with modern sentiment, is to declare him actually consistent with it but in ways we can appreciate only now in mid-twentieth century. In brief, he has really presented Kate, not as a shrew, but as a modern girl. This new being has only “developed the defensiveness of shrewishness” against her “horrible family” – that is, a father ready to “sell” her to “the highest bidder and “her sly little sister.”3 This is from Nevill Coghill in 1950. A few years later, in 1958 Margaret Webster brought to life that modern Kate. “In 1958 Margaret Webster – whose great-grandfather Ben Webster in 1844 has restored the original Shakespeare Taming to the stage as a rival to Garrick’s shorter and simpler version-carried on from Coghill and Goddard. To her, Kate is “a ‘modern’ woman, of intellect, courage, and enormous energy of mind and body, shut up in a society where women were supported only to look decorative.” Webster’s take on Katherine did not sit well with peers. “A year later George I. Duthie felt constrained to issue a warning that the play is “liable to be seriously misunderstood by the modern reader” and to insist, “Katharine’s last speech in the play is an enunciation of the doctrine of order as applied to the domestic milieu…An insubordinate wife corresponds to a rebellious subject.”[2] This did not phase Webster who continued to treat “the speech outright as an ironic jest by Kate, it expresses her “delicious realization….that to ‘serve, love and obey in all outward seeming is the surest road to victory.”
Like many before her, Paula S. Berggren, author of The Woman’s Part: Female Sexuality as Power in Shakespeare’s Plays agrees that Kate has not been tamed, rather she holds all the power. She even compares the speech to those of other Shakespeare female characters who she believes are women who were tamed. “In Kate’s speech there are no arguments supporting the husband’s right to capricious domination nor any recommendation of the wifely submissiveness we find in say, the patient Griselda, for Kate’s submissiveness depends on Petruchios’ “honest will.”4 On his being a “loving lord.”[3] During the time of Shakespeare, most women were submissive to their husbands. Moreover, it was the husband who had the upper hand. Berggren continues to argue that the love between Kate and Petruchio is in Kate’s hands, not her husband’s. “Like Cordelia, Kate will love only according to her bond, no more, no less, and the limits of her bond will be reached whenever Petruchio’s authority ceases to be loving.” Berggren suggests that if Petruchio’s authoritative role is no longer of a loving nature, Kate’s love will stop and the bond between the two will be broken. Berggren continues, “Kate’s final speech in The Taming of the Shrew, then, in its use of political analogies and its emphasis on woman’s warmth and beauty rather than on her abject sinfulness, is not a rehearsal of old, medieval ideas about wives but of relatively contemporary ideas growing out of humanist reforms.” Could it be that Shakespeare knew his readers would question the authenticity of Kate’s speech? Presenting Kate as a tamed shrew in disguise may have been the “modern” approach Shakespeare has taken.
On the opposing side, it could also be a duet between Kate and Petruchio that lingers into Act 5. Kate understands the game Petruchio is playing and abides by the game because it is fun and enjoyed by both. She still has dominance over her sister, especially in the circumstances surrounding the speech. Kate has found a new way to have fun, to enjoy life, but admittedly in a way that appears to relinquish being shrewish or contrary. This role change is rendered easier by the fact she is in love with her husband. She is willing to follow his lead, but at the same time her eloquence reflects sheer delight in a kind of freedom that has opened for her, and is already apparently in the fun she and Petruchio have at the expense of old Vincentio. She has found an outlet for her eloquence. Everyone is listening to her instead of talking about her. Kate is strong in her magnificent capacity to play all the strings on an instrument, which is the hallmark of all Shakespeare’s great characters.
Historical considerations make a difference, but they still don’t settle the question of how to understand The Taming of the Shrew. This itself teaches the lesson that we can truly never know someone. Moreover, how we must always be ourselves.
The Taming of the Shrew: Summary and Quotes
The Taming of the Shrew is the story of how Petruchio, a money hungry wife hunter, converts the shrewish Katherine Minola into an obedient and adoring wife. Written by William Shakespeare, it is one of his earliest comedies, and to modern readers, one of the most controversial due to the misogynist theme. In the play, Petruchio, a wealthy bachelor, comes to the town of Padua with the hope of marrying a very wealthy woman. He makes it very clear that money is the root of his happiness: “I come to wive it wealthily in Padua; If wealthily, then happily in Padua.”5 Petruchio’s motive is clear from the beginning; hence the reader cannot argue that he is a phony. Hortensio, Petruchio’s best friend, suggests that he marry Kate, as she is very rich. Hortensio is also a suitor of Kate’s sister, Bianca and knows he cannot marry her until her Kate is married, a rule imposed by their father, Baptista. However, Bianca is in love with Lucentio, who is new to Padua, thus it is very unlikely that Bianca’s father will allow the marriage between the two. Therefore Lucentio disguises himself as tutor named Cambio. Petruchio is excited over the dowry he could receive and agrees to the idea suggested by Hortensio. After a brief introduction to Petruchio, Baptista treats the possible marriage exchange of his daughter as a business deal. He says, “Faith, gentlemen, now I play a merchant's part; And venture madly on a desperate mart.”
When Petruchio first meets a bitter Kate, he “matches her fierce temper and manages to convince her father that she passionately loves him but only pretends to hate him in public.” The two are married, even though Petruchio arrives late and dressed comically to his own wedding and the ‘taming’ beings. First, he frightens Kate by yelling at the servants and prevents her from eating. Next, he offers Kate the gifts of jewelry and fine dress, only to take them back them because they were not good enough for her. “When Bianca and Lucentio (who has abandoned his disguise) wed, he refuses to let Kate go to the wedding unless she agrees with everything he says, even if it seems far fetched. His last taming trick is tested when he tells her that “a man is a woman and that the moon is the sun”, which she agrees with.
At the wedding, Petruchio is taunted by Hortensio, who has married a widow, and Lucentio with his Bianca, for having married a "shrew". He proposes a contest to see which man has the most obedient wife. In Act V, Scene II line 62 he says, “Well, I say no. And therefore, for assurance,/ Let’s each one send unto his wife;/ And he whose wife is most obedient;/ To come at first when he doth send for her, /Shall win the wager which we will propose.”6 The wager begins at twenty ‘crowns’ and is upped to one hundred. Of the three women, only Kate comes. “Now, by my holidam, here comes Katherine!” Neither the widow nor Bianca come in with an excuse. Bianca and Lucentio even argue, allowing the reader to believe maybe she was the real shrew. In Act V Scene II line 134, Bianca says, “Fie! What a foolish duty call you this?” Lucentio responds, “I would your duty were as foolish too./The wisdom of your duty, fair Bianca,/Hath cost me an hundred crowns since suppertime.”7 Bianca’s retort to her husband is quick, “The more fool you for laying on my duty.”
The misconception of Bianca proves that you never really know someone. Is she a phony? She is not the woman Lucentio believed her to be. Petruchio then orders Kate to bring the other wives and give a speech telling them to honor their husbands always. He says, “Katherine, I charge thee, tell these headstrong women/ What duty they do owe their lords and husbands.” Katherine delivers her speech that stuns all. She says,
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 thy 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, thy life, thy 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 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?
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 now 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 your 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.
X, iv, 13-198
Leaving the other couples stunned, silent and ashamed, Petruchio proudly kisses Kate and they leave.
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