The Taming of the Shrew: The State of Play

Jennifer Flaherty, Heather C. Easterling, Jennifer Flaherty, Heather C. Easterling

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350138209
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Shakespeare-Drama

The Taming of the Shrew has puzzled, entertained and angered audiences, and it has been reinvented many times throughout its controversial history. Offering a focused overview of key emerging ideas and discourses surrounding Shakespeare's problematic comedy, the volume reveals and debates how contemporary readings and adaptions of the play have sought to reconsider and resolve the play's contentious portrayal of gender, power and identity. Each chapter has been carefully selected for its originality and relevance to the needs of students, teachers and researchers. Key themes and issues include:
· Gender and Power
· History and Early Modern Contexts
· Performance and Politics
· Adaptation and Afterlife All the essays offer new perspectives and combine to give readers an up-to-date understanding of what's exciting and challenging about The Taming of the Shrew.

PART ONE

Taming Shrews:
Negotiating
Early Modern
Gender

1

Shakespeare’s New Shrew

Erin E. Kelly

It is a critical commonplace to speak of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew as depicting a ‘battle of the sexes’.¹ The sense that this play offers insights into the nature of relationships between men and women, particularly between husbands and wives, underpins the logic of productions that situate Katherina and Petruccio in a world of so-called traditional gender dynamics. Whether employing Renaissance doublet-and-hose costumes or American wild west chaps and cowboy hats, staging choices can fend off a contemporary audience’s potential evaluation of the play’s final scene as, in keeping with George Bernard Shaw’s late-nineteenth-century judgement, ‘altogether disgusting to modern sentiments’ by associating Katherina’s declaration of obedience with the long ago and far away.² Recent all-male or all-female productions of the play reframe its depictions of men’s attempts to control women and women’s attempts to resist as instances of constructed, performative, and often problematic cultural assumptions about gender identity.³ Shakespeare’s shrew play, whatever one thinks is its take on how heterosexual marriages should work, is now regularly engaged with as a statement about whether happy, equitable unions between men and women are possible.

But such perspectives lose sight of how The Taming of the Shrew, by connecting a story of shrew-taming to a generalized exploration of male–female power dynamics, was doing something new. Shakespeare did not invent the shrew-taming story, but neither did he simply bring a version of what already existed in early modern English popular culture to the stage. Consideration of earlier shrew texts, including shrew plays, reveals that Shakespeare’s adaptation of long-standing popular and literary traditions established the notion that shrew-taming narratives comment broadly on relationships between men and women. In contrast, English shrew stories found in earlier folk tales, ballads, and plays show more interest in distinguishing among different types of men – and encouraging laughter at the men unable to control their wives – than in offering advice about how to manage unruly women. Shakespeare’s play reimagined the shrew and her tamer as a stand-in for all wives and husbands and thus made possible sequels, adaptations, and productions that put the shrew at the centre of a ‘battle’ between men and women for appropriate levels of intimacy and autonomy.

Folk shrews

Jan Harold Brunvand’s 1961 dissertation and a subsequent Shakespeare Quarterly article amass convincing evidence that Shakespeare’s shrew play is engaged with a complex folklore tradition that centres around Aarne–Thompson tale type 901 – a story in which a husband teaches his wife to obey by punishing surrogates such as servants, dogs, or horses and often reaps rewards after wagering with other men about whose wife is most compliant.⁴ But few scholars have noted how many of Brunvand’s variants feature a husband who tames a wife with a different, often higher, class and social status than his own. Brunvand collected 415 examples of tale type 901, 168 (or 40.5 per cent) of which include specific information about the class or economic standing of the husband, and 102 of these (24.6 per cent of the total or 60.7 per cent of variants that describe the husband) state he is poor, most commonly a peasant, farmer, or poor widow’s son; only 80 (8.4 per cent of the total or 20.8 per cent of the variants) say he is a prince or a gentleman. This data hints at considerable interest in identifying the kind of man who is able to tame a shrew, especially when one notes that only 94 examples (or 22.8 per cent of the total) describe the shrew’s family. Among those variants, 85.1 per cent (80 of the 94) describe the shrew as the daughter of a rich or powerful man like a merchant, king or governor.⁵ Popular shrew-taming tales, in other words, tend to show that the man who can best manage a spoilt and shrewish wife is likely to lack money, title or other markers of superior social status. Common people sharing these folk tales could enjoy imagining that wealthy, powerful men were not able to control a difficult woman as well as someone like themselves.

Such dynamics are at play in some sixteenth-century ballads and pamphlets that feature a husband bringing his wife to heel.⁶ Merry jeste of a shrewde and curste wyfe, lapped in morrelles skin, for her good behavyour, a verse text frequently included in appendices of teaching editions of Shakespeare’s Shrew, tells about a young man who describes himself as ‘not riche of Gold nor fee, / Nor of greate marchandise ye shall vnderstand: / But a good Crafte I haue pardee, / To get one liuing in any land.’⁷ That is, he is much poorer than the potential father-in-law who offers him ‘gold and syluer’. And it is only this relatively common man who can make his wife a model of obedience by beating her and wrapping her in a salted horse hide – and then help his father-in-law by threatening to do the same to the former shrew’s outspoken mother.

The undated ballad An Easy Way to Tame a Shrew similarly links horse-management to wife-management.⁸ A poor young man is unable to buy a horse but convinces an older man to let him have one that cannot be tamed. After the young man gets the horse to obey – first by starving it and then by strategically tempting and rewarding it with food for good behaviour – the old man offers the young horse-tamer his shrewish daughter. When the new wife refuses to spin or do any other work, her husband denies her food until she yields to his command. For some readers or singers, the comic delights of a shrew-taming tale were derived from a poor man showing his ability to control a woman who previously defied high-status authorities.

Stage shrews

Surviving stage entertainments and plays flip the dynamic found in folk tales and ballads but are no less interested in ridiculing specific types of men. The earliest readily available example is John Lydgate’s Disguising at Hertford, likely performed for Henry VI at Christmastime in 1426 or 1427.⁹ A man enters to present to the king ‘rude upplandisshe people compleyning on hir wyves, with the boystous answere of hir wyves’. Five other performers dressed as ‘rusticos’ appear, and a single man speaks for them, but the wives seem to have their own female spokesperson who vehemently defends women’s traditional right to dominate their husbands. Since the ‘disguising’ brings to the court examples of how villagers – including a reeve, a cobbler, a butcher, a tinker and a tiler – are beaten and bossed by their wives, this entertainment offers an opportunity for an elite audience to laugh at physically strong but ultimately powerless husbands.

A later play printed by John Rastell, A mery play between Johan Johan the husbande, Tyb his wife & Syr John the preest pays attention to an individual case of the same state of affairs.¹⁰ The working man Johan Johan starts the play by offering the audience a series of arguments about why he should beat his wife, and it soon becomes apparent that he has grounds for complaint. Not only does Tyb order him to make dinner ready, but she also confirms his suspicions that she is inappropriately affectionate with Sir John the priest by demanding her husband bring the cleric to supper. In a riotous scene, Tyb and the priest consume all the food and exchange lovers’ banter while Johan Johan suffers from heat, smoke, and hunger while standing by the fire trying to plug a crack in the household pail. Realizing that he will get nothing to eat and that his wife has humiliated him, Johan Johan finally loses his temper, ordering Tyb, ‘get thee out of my house thou priest’s whore’ (B4v) and fighting with Sir John. Once his tormentors have fled and he is left alone onstage, however, Johan Johan grasps that he has been tricked, something the audience realized would surely happen once Tyb greeted the priest with ‘Welcome myn own sweetheart / We shall make some cheer ere we depart’ (B2r). By ejecting her from the house, Johan Johan has given Tyb exactly what she wants, an order from her husband to spend the night with her well-fed lover.

Much of the play’s humour comes at Johan Johan’s expense, but the particular power dynamics involved in laughing at this character come into high relief when one compares the English play to its source, the French entertainment Farce nouvelle tres bonne et fort joueuse du Paste. The French play makes its characters generic (L’Homme, La Femme, and Le Cure) while the English text assigns names that hint at social distinctions. Tyb, a nickname for Isabel, seems to have been strongly associated with maids and harlots, while ‘Sir’ John the priest is clearly the social superior of the husband.¹¹ Clues about the original performance situation of this play indicate that its intended audience was not likely to identify Johan Johan as one of their own kind. Action that suggests a fireplace was present hints that A mery play was first performed (like other plays printed by the Rastells) in a great hall or at court.¹² The player portraying Johan Johan acknowledges the social st...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Series Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One Taming Shrews: Negotiating Early Modern Gender
• 1 Shakespeare’s New Shrew
• 2 Homeschooling the Girl Stomach
• 3 The Taming of the Shrew: Afterlives and Oeconomics
• Part Two Staging Modern Shrews: The Politics of Performance
• 4 Sometimes Crossing a Line: The Taming of the Shrew in Chicago and Stratford-upon-Avon
• 5 The Taming of the Shrew in Soviet Russia: Ideological Dangers of Structural Instability
• 6 Dissident Feminism at the End of the Franco Dictatorship: The New Taming of the Shrew (1975)
• 7 The Turn of the Shrew: Cross-Gender Casting in the Twenty-First Century
• 8 ‘My Tongue Will Tell the Anger of my Heart’: Staging and Challenging Irish Womanhood at the Globe (2016)
• Part Three Reclaiming the Shrew: Contemporary Transformations
• 9 Telling the Anger of Her Heart: (M)aligning the Stars in the Taylor and Zeffirelli Taming of the Shrew Films
• 10 ‘The Right Foundation’: Remaking Marriage in a Black Adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew
• 11 Taming the Internet: Katherina, Bianca, and Digital Girlhood
• 12 ‘Kate of My Consolation’: Mary Cowden Clarke and Anne Tyler Revisit The Taming of the Shrew
• Bibliography of Paratexts, Productions and Adaptations
• Index
• Copyright