The Taming of the Shrew - The Play on the Page by Bob Papsdorf

The Taming of the Shrew is a play that can look awfully sexist to a 21st century audience. Here we have the story of a man (Petruchio) who negotiates the right to marry a high-spirited woman (Kate) and proceeds to “tame” her as though she were a wild horse. By the end of the play she’s sufficiently tame that she can primly recite in the following vein:

"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 li’st warm at home, secure and safe."

Everybody on stage coos their approval, but the audience might be more inclined to throw rotten vegetables.

 

Of course, the concept of “women’s rights” is a relatively recent one—is it reasonable to expect a late 16th century writer to anticipate modern sensibilities? Maybe not, but from this particular writer we expect a lot. For a parallel situation, consider the situation of Thomas Jefferson, who owned slaves even as he was writing “We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal.” Granted that slavery was legal in Jefferson’s time, and that most of his fellow Virginia squires (including George Washington) also owned slaves. But many in Jefferson’s time—and even earlier—had no difficulty recognizing the contradiction. So while we may not object to seeing Jefferson’s face on the nickel, his standing as a founding father has lost a bit of luster in recent decades. And maybe when we hear Shakespeare so extravagantly praised, we think of The Taming of the Shrew or The Merchant of Venice and reserve our judgment.

 

Could it be that Shakespeare was holding the relations between the sexes up for us to scrutinize? Maybe the point is to provoke us a little. But Shrew is a thoroughly joyful play. The taming of Kate is accomplished with humor and ingenuity. There really isn’t any questioning of values going on here.

 

The skepticism of modern audiences was much in the mind of Stephanie Shine, Seattle Shakespeare Company’s Artistic Director, when she decided to present The Taming of the Shrew as this season’s final production. (Shine is also directing.) On the one hand, the play antagonizes some viewers who find the storyline offensive. But Shrew is also a crowd-pleaser that puts bodies in the seats. It’s a very funny and lively story—one that has been done over and dressed up for modern audiences almost as often as Romeo and Juliet. (The most recent film version, scrubbed clean of all potentially offensive content, was retitled 10 Things I Hate About You.)

 

Suggests Shine, “When you take away the red flag—the spectacle of a man bullying and subduing a woman, maybe you get a chance to see other themes and ideas in the play that are otherwise eclipsed. This play wasn’t offensive for the first 350 years of its existence. In another 50 years, I’m sure people will look back at our movies and television shows and cringe—we think it’s perfectly OK to depict men as dolts and dunderheads, for example. Our code of behavior isn’t better than the Elizabethans’, it’s just different.”

 

So Shine decided to tackle the sexist angle by staging Shrew with an all-male cast. This opens up the play in all sorts of ways.

 

For one, it presents the play as Shakespeare’s audience would have seen it—women were legally prohibited from appearing on stage in Elizabethan England, so all of Shakespeare’s great heroines, from Juliet to Ophelia to Lady Macbeth, were originally portrayed by men. “This won’t be a drag show,” says Shine. “People know how to use their imaginations, and I’m pretty sure audiences will accept this convention without strain, just as they accept all sorts of other theatrical conventions.” Was it a challenge to direct men in women’s roles? “Mostly I just had to remind them to be more themselves—to just be men. They don’t need to fake anything.”

 

“Marriages were all about commerce in those days, and when you take away the sexual chemistry, the matter of physical beauty (which isn’t to say that our actors aren’t attractive), you see more clearly the materialistic framework of the play,” say Shine. Indeed, Petruchio agrees to marry Kate before he’s even seen her, and he’s initially all about business. This is how his friend Hortensio describes Kate to him:

"I can, Petruchio, help thee to a wife
With wealth enough and young and beauteous,
Brought up as best becomes a gentlewoman:
Her only fault, and that is faults enough,
Is that she is intolerable curst
And shrewd and froward, so beyond all measure
That, were my state far worser than it is,
I would not wed her for a mine of gold."

Petruchio’s response:

"Hortensio, peace! thou know’st not gold’s effect:
Tell me her father’s name and ’tis enough;
For I will board her, though she chide as loud
As thunder when the clouds in autumn crack."

Another advantage to a same-gender cast is that it removes the potentially distracting physical discrepancies between the sexes from the audience’s mind. It should be noted that most of the violence in this play actually occurs offstage—the entertainment is in hearing aghast witnesses describe how they’ve been abused by Kate or Petruchio—not in actually seeing the blows delivered.

Of course, it’s also possible that The Taming of the Shrew isn’t a sexist play at all. Kate and Petruchio have similar personalities, and similar problems getting along in the world. Petruchio doesn’t seem to be trying to purge Kate of her intensity, but rather to channel it, to make her more like him—he calls her “his falcon” in one scene. Both are impatient and ferocious, except that he’s a successful businessman who uses these traits to get what he wants. So despite her conciliatory words at the end of the play this is still not a woman to be trifled with.