[Between 2006 and 2016 I wrote a number of short articles for the magazine of Shakespeare’s Globe in London, Around the Globe; I’ve been depositing them on this blog under the category ‘Globe Essays’. This is the sixth, from Spring 2012.]
The Taming of the Shrew exposes the sheer oddity of what we take for granted: curious conventions, wild assumptions, about gender, geography, family, finance, fashion, and everything else in this world we know so imperfectly.
The action takes place in a nonsense Italy whose cities are all geographically misplaced, and whose inhabitants utter strings of English proverbs while quoting Italian with the inaccuracy of enthusiastic neophytes. Proverbs are the key to their philosophy: neat verbal packages of hackneyed ‘wisdom’, which can be trotted out on any given occasion to sustain their prejudices. One focus of these platitudes is young Bianca, a woman who embodies the ideal of many men, and whose name, meaning ‘white’, seems to confirm her suitors’ assumption that she’s a metaphorical blank sheet of paper ready to be embellished with their most extravagant fancies. When things are going badly, her suitors comfort themselves with homely sayings as if to domesticate their disappointment: ‘our cake’s dough’, they tell each other (it’s failed to rise, i.e. their efforts have fallen flat); ‘there’s small choice in rotten apples’; ‘he that runs fastest gets the ring’ (i.e. there’s everything left to play for in this courtship competition). Lucentio, the most resourceful of Bianca’s suitors, is as ready as anyone to weave clichés around her, dubbing her mild and modest before he’s heard her speak, comparing her to Minerva, goddess of wisdom, when she finds her tongue (though he scarcely seems to hear her: ‘I saw her coral lips to move, / And with her breath she did perfume the air’). This is no land for non-conformists, rebels, wits or original thinkers.
Bianca, meanwhile, seems happy to play along with the suitors’ view of her as a compliant virgin, though there are signs she can change her tune when it happens to suit her. When Lucentio and another suitor, Hortensio, disguise themselves as teachers to get into her house, she tells them ‘I’ll not be tied to hours or ’pointed times, / But learn my lessons as I please myself’; a promise she makes good at the end of the play, when she refuses to respond to her husband’s peremptory summons. And in the end she chooses the suitor who pleases her most, without consulting her father or any other authority. Her name might in fact stand for the perfect blank surface she presents to any man who seeks to uncover her true agenda, her hidden motives.
If proverbs and other clichés, then, can be misleading, so too can the identities to which they claim to supply an insight. In the world of the Shrew, as in the Roman comedies of Terence and Plautus, identities can be swapped or reinvented with amazing ease. Lucentio swaps his with his servant Tranio in order to become Bianca’s teacher, and later they transform a total stranger into Tranio’s father to support these roles. When Hortensio too dons a disguise, neither Bianca’s father nor her oldest suitor Gremio recognizes him, despite the fact that they know him well. Clearly people see what they expect to see in this play. And this is what enrages Bianca’s elder sister, Katherine. From the beginning, she finds herself inscribed as her sister’s opposite, the ‘shrew’ or recalcitrant woman of the title, as if there were only two roles available to women, the obedient bondslave or the termagant. She ties Bianca up to show how she has diminished all women by her ready compliance with male desires, smashes the lute of the fake music-teacher Hortensio over his head when he seeks to make her dance to his tunes, and informs all men who care to listen that ‘I will be free, / Even to the uttermost, as I please, with words’. Yet for all her claims to freedom, she is restricted even more than Bianca in her choice of roles. She is ‘Katherine the curst’, ‘curst Katherine’, ‘wildcat’, ‘devil’, and excluded from conversation or social interaction of any kind, except as a precondition for the release of her attractive sister onto the marriage market. Her father won’t let Bianca marry before Katherine is spoken for; so that Katherine’s contempt of Bianca does not prevent her from being always measured against her sibling. If Bianca were not valued more highly, her father would not have insisted that Katherine be married first; Kate, then, becomes a commodity despite all her attempts to make herself unsaleable. ‘There’s small choice for rotten apples’, as Hortensio might have put it.
Which is where Petruchio comes in. A rich man, he does not really need to enter the marriage market, and chooses to do so on his own terms. We first meet him trading aggressive puns with his servant Grumio, suggesting that he values verbal inventiveness more than the deference due to rank. And when he agrees to court Katherine as a favour to his friend Hortensio, it seems to be as a means of discrediting the drab proverbial wisdom that both he and Katherine despise. His first verbal encounter with the ‘shrew’ is a rapid-fire exchange of clever insults and dazzling wordplay which shows them to be singing from the same hymn-sheet – an impression confirmed when the conventionalists later call Petruchio ‘shrew’ and ‘devil’, the names they earlier applied to Katherine. That first meeting ends with Petruchio’s first deployment of his secret weapon, irony: he describes Katherine as a woman like Bianca, a dull bondslave of male fantasy, in blatant contravention of the evidence provided by their brilliant dialogue: ‘thou with mildness entertain’st thy wooers, / With gentle conference, soft and affable’. So absurd and inappropriate is this description that it exposes the male ideal as a blatant fantasy, a chimera no less extravagant than to assert that the sun’s the moon, or that a dignified old male merchant is a shy young girl.
Later, Petruchio coerces Katherine into making just such extravagant assertions. She follows him in greeting Lucentio’s father Vincentio as a ‘young budding virgin’, thus marking her recognition that that the gender conventions which guide her peers – that men should be women’s masters, that fathers deserve to control their daughters’ destinies, that obedient women are more desirable than rebels – are arbitrary constructs, designed to make things more comfortable for men. Such conventions reflect the reality of relations between the sexes no better than Hortensio’s earlier assertion that Bianca is Minerva, goddess of wisdom. So when Katherine trots out a truckload of truisms concerning women, at Petruchio’s command, in the final scene, we can surely have no idea if she is speaking seriously – or whether she has learned instead to wield her husband’s most potent verbal weapon, irony, for her own purposes. What tone is she adopting when she declaims the old worn sayings – as old and worn in Shakespeare’s time as in ours – that a woman’s husband is ‘thy lord, thy life, thy keeper’, or that ‘Such duty as the subject owes the prince, / Even such, a woman oweth to her husband’? Well, this is a comedy of inverted identities where the fantastic nature of hackneyed proverbs and clichés about gender has been relentlessly exposed; so at the very least, we must acknowledge that these lines are unstable, capable of being detached from the material reality of Shakespeare’s Padua as radically as his Padua is detached from the real Italian city after which it is named. And in making this acknowledgement, we’ll have learned something more useful than anything taught to Bianca by her disguised instructors.
