The Taming of the Shrew

by William Shakespeare

  The leading performances were much praised:

  [Janet] McTeer makes a smashing Petruchio and has a ball with the part.... Her swaggering bravado is absurdly comical, yet believable ... [she] is delightfully paired with Kathryn Hunter as Kate. This Kate is a match for her man. Hunter plays her transformation beautifully and delivers the infamous final speech with such heartfelt sincerity that Petruchio actually weeps, until he realises she has beaten him at his own game.45

  The review concludes that the production is "fun while it lasts and, as the play so ably demonstrates, it's almost impossible to tame The Shrew completely."46

  There were seven silent-film versions of The Taming of the Shrew, including a seventeen-minute version directed by D. W. Griffith in 1908, before Sam Taylor's 1929 production for United Artists starring Mary Pickford as Katherina and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. as Petruchio. It was the first Shakespearean "talkie." Much of the focus is on the star-couple billing. As with many early talkies, it deploys a performance style associated with silent films--exaggerated movement and slow delivery. In place of the induction, there is a short Punch and Judy puppet show, which functions in a similar way to frame the action and arguably as a similarly subversive gesture. The main emphasis, though, is on the relationship between these two protagonists. Fairbanks, the notorious swashbuckling hero, swashes his buckle through Petruchio suggesting an empty, blustering braggart. He carries the whip, first used as a character prop by John Philip Kemble, but Katherina has one as well--just not as long! Making the film does not appear to have been a very happy experience for Pickford (a theme which is endlessly repeated in the accounts of other actors taking on the role of Katherina). Pickford was dissatisfied with her performance and reviewers frequently refer to her "kittenish" quality. Her performance is notable historically for the enormous wink she gives her sister and the audience in the final scene at the end of her long speech thereby ironizing Katherina's subjection.

  In Sly, Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari's 1927 tragic opera, the main character kills himself for love of the lord's girlfriend who has pretended to love him. It later turns out that her protestations of love were sincere. Meanwhile, in 1948 Samuel and Bella Spewack and Cole Porter produced the popular Broadway musical, Kiss Me Kate. Franco Zeffirelli's 1967 film starred another celebrity couple with a tempestuous off-screen relationship, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Zeffirelli goes for farce and romance and tones down realistic elements. In place of the Sly induction, the film opens with a backdrop of an Italian landscape across which Lucentio (Michael York) and Tranio (Cyril Cusack) ride into Padua. As they arrive, Lucentio announces his desire to further his studies as a solemn university ceremony for the first day of term is underway. This immediately gives way to carnival and the feast of misrule in which the natural order is turned upside down. The parade and the vitality of these scenes demonstrate Zeffirelli's work at its best--full of invention and wit, and exhilarating to watch. While Burton blusters his way lazily through the film, Taylor's Katherina seems certifiable as she smashes up her father's house. It includes the infamous chase in which Kate ends up on a woolsack/bed with Petruchio on top of her. There is also a curious interpolated scene in which she supervises the cleaning of Petruchio's country house which the critic Ann Christensen locates within postwar twentieth-century attempts to tame and domesticate women.47 Taylor makes an unlikely housewife, but she's clearly the boss as Petruchio walks behind her--on the other hand, she can't, unfortunately, handle the meter of the poetry in her long speech. This is a Hollywood extravaganza, spectacular and enjoyable in its way.

  The 1980 BBC television version directed by Jonathan Miller controversially cast the well-known comedy actor John Cleese as Petruchio, a decision which "was a huge gamble but it paid off."48 Cleese's performance attracted most of the critical attention:

  His performance stands out from those characterisations which hew closely to naturalism, as a sustained and inspired deployment of Brechtian alienation-effect. Cleese is never entirely naturalised within his role, as other comic characters contrive to be: his delivery of the lines always preserves a certain ironic distance, as if he found difficulty not only in taking them seriously himself, but in the idea that anyone could possibly take them seriously at all. The result is a beautifully-composed detachment, which allows to the part of Petruchio a unique doubleness and self-reflexive ironical consciousness. Towering over his strange mixed company of Stanislavskian soul-searchers and music-hall comedians in creative innovation as well as height, Cleese is easily the most admirable component of the production.49

  Gil Junger's Ten Things I Hate About You (1999) updates the play to a modern American high school and stars Julia Stiles as Katarina (Kat) Stratford and Heath Ledger as Patrick (Pat) Verona. Kat is smart and spiky and far too bright for her classmates and teachers, but her gynaecologist father won't let her spoiled younger sister date until Kat has a boyfriend. The boys get together to find a suitable candidate and pick on the local firebrand. It's slick and entertaining, with a lot of nice touches--such as the romantic novelist school counselor, Ms. Perky, played by Allison Janney. The comic references to romantic fiction work in a subversive, ironic, and self-reflexive manner since the film is clearly a romantic comedy but sufficiently embarrassed to want to distance itself from the genre's conventions.

  AT THE RSC

  A Director's Dilemma

  Discussing the function of theater, director Michael Bogdanov commented:

  It's meant to provoke debate: to explore issues that are carried on into debate with a passion and a commitment to change. That makes theatre worthwhile. Theatre, when it is doing its job properly, is a more effective medium than any other for provoking thought into action: unhappily, most of the time it doesn't do its job.50

  As a catalyst for political discussion The Taming of the Shrew has created a wealth of controversy in its last fifty years of performance, provoking extreme reactions at times in directors, audiences, and critics. On seeing Bogdanov's 1978 production, critic Michael Billington questioned whether "there is any reason to revive a play that seems totally offensive to our age and our society. My own feeling is that it should be put back firmly and squarely on the shelf."51 David Ward similarly pointed out: "Shrews used to be good for a laugh. Then guilt set in: where's the joke in seeing a curst woman tamed by a macho bigmouth? Should not the play be stuffed back in the Folio and allowed to die?"52 Misogynist fantasy, feminist critique, or both--the battle between the sexes prompts a passionate response. Nevertheless, the Shrew's popularity has ensured it a regular spot in the RSC's repertoire, indicating that the audiences have no problem with what critics and directors have come to consider a "problem play."

  Making the play palatable is a source of constant worry for the director, even when that director is a woman. Gale Edwards, who directed the Shrew in 1995, neatly summed up the dilemma:

  A woman directing The Taming of the Shrew, whoever she is, might as well get a loaded shotgun and put it against her temple because half the critics will be disappointed and will criticise it if the view of the play is not radical and feminist because they expect that from a woman; then the other half will shoot you down in flames because you're doing a feminist, "limited" view of the play which is meant to be about the surrender of love. So you cannot possibly win. You're absolutely f--ked.53

  The wide variety of approaches to the play by the RSC in the last fifty years has clearly demonstrated the challenges the Shrew poses. The induction scene has proved a crucial staging tool in the re-evaluation of the Shrew plot, that is, as a play-within-a-play. This combined with the emphasis on questions of love, money and class have given the play an added depth, moving it away from farce into far darker territory.

  Plays Within Plays

  Bill Alexander, who directed the Shrew in 1992, commented:

  When I read the quarto text I was convinced that, in structural terms, it was closer to what Shakespeare had intended. The Sly plot has all sorts of proleptic ironies that anti
cipate the action of the central plot, which is all about performance--people in disguise or pretending--in all sorts of ways.... I think Shakespeare's intention was to have Sly and the others watching the play within the play the whole time, that he did intend interruptions and a final scene that reconciles the whole Sly plot. For two reasons. Artistically it's more likely, and such highly conceptualised scenes would more probably be left out than added as time went on ... the idea of life being a performance, of people putting on characters in life to get through, to impress, to conceal themselves, to make a stand against the world. That's the subject matter of this play, a central moral ... that until people stop pretending, confident enough to display their true selves, they will never find love that's meaningful and lasting.54

  In his updating of the induction:

  Christopher Sly collapses outside the Ugly Duckling into the arms of an unpleasant group of coke-snorting young toffs who anticipate some fun in the playing around with his mind. They lift him into their ancestral home where Sly is dressed as a lord, and the players, looking like themselves arrive to put on their play in the panelled drawing room.

  The clash between reality and illusion and the nature of identity become crucial themes: Sly becomes a Lord, and Tranio, disguised as Lucentio, falls in love with both his part and Bianca.55

  The lords and ladies watching the play had their own existence and journey throughout the play. They were dressed in contemporary costume and given updated dialogue, and the play-within-a-play was performed in Renaissance dress. Bill Alexander explained:

  All I've done is modernise the language; there's a juxtaposition of times and periods on stage. It is taking a liberty indeed to rewrite the first two scenes, but I think it's worth it because you are making the play modern, but setting it in its period context. It would be inconsistent to have modern characters speaking the same language as the actors playing the sixteenth century characters. So what I've sacrificed in terms of what Shakespeare wrote, I think I've more than replaced by reclaiming the overall structure of the play.56

  On stage throughout, watching the action of the Taming, the lords were also roped into the action as a means of deflating their pompous smugness:

  The most disconcerting moment comes when the players enlist the yuppies to take on roles in their play. The gangly young things are shown to have no wit or imagination about them as the players outpace them easily in the bravura display of comedy.57

  In 1985 director Di Trevis used the framing device to take the issue of class dynamics a stage further by creating a link between the victimization of Sly and Katherina and the powerlessness of the poor:

  I felt with the structure of the play within a play, I could make all the comments I wanted about the role of the women and this became intensely interesting to me. With that very sadistic trick played on the poor man, Sly, I realised that I could draw a parallel between the powerlessness of the women in the play and the powerlessness of that beggar. And I didn't have to do that terrible thing of making Katherine send up the last speech because I had a structure whereby, after the ending of the play, I could make a theatrical comment about the position of the actress playing Katherine in the inner play--she and the beggar were finally left alone on the stage together and one saw that they were fellows.58

  The harsh realities of the dispossessed players punctuated the action. Their costumes were shabby and ripped. As the production began, out of the darkness, the audience heard the cry of a baby, which was brought on by the actress playing Katherina. Later in the production Di Trevis explained how she

  also kept showing that the players were acting; just little things like when they all danced at Kate's wedding, and it was the end of the first half, all the players came out dancing but Kate came out nursing the baby as if the baby had been woken up by the music.59

  Gale Edwards, who was the second woman to direct the play for the RSC, used the induction to present the play as the guilt-ridden male fantasy/nightmare. The play began with Sly and the rarely seen Mrs. Sly in fierce argument, during which

  Christopher Sly, a drunken tinker, is abandoned by his wife on a blasted Warwickshire heath. In his alcoholic stupor, he imagines he is rescued by a lord who presents him with a Paduan farce in which Sly himself is translated into the fortune-hunting Petruchio and his wife into Katherina. Finally shamed by the excesses of his chauvinist fantasy, Sly wakes to find his wife standing over him and leading him off into a presumably redefined marital relationship.60

  The idea of the Shrew as a twisted male fantasy was taken further in Lindsay Posner's 1999 production. The induction was again in contemporary costume--the drunken Sly was picked up and cleaned off by the hunting party to awake in the lord's bedroom, believing it is somehow his own:

  Logging on to "his" computer, he accesses a dodgy web-site and "becomes" Petruchio. The story is presented as the chat-room fantasy of an angry mind, and Ashley Martin-Davis's designs consist chiefly of back-wall projections of computer-screen images. At the end, Sly is again drunk and dirty in a gutter, listening to Prodigy's Smack My Bitch Up, which sort of puts his domination-dreams into context.61

  As an idea it is ingenious; and the designer, Ashley Martin-Davis, cleverly uses a giant screen to show filmic images dissolving into reality, so that the two horsemen riding toward us in the opening shot turn into flesh-and-blood Lucentio and Tranio.62

  The induction device used by Michael Bogdanov (1978) unnerved his audience as they settled into their seats:

  Before the house lights dim we become aware of an uproar in the aisle. A roughly dressed man, grasping a bottle, quarrels loudly in a prole accent with the usherette, then proceeds to clamber on to the stage and wreck the set--one of those tacky, pastel-flavoured, Italian Renaissance confections, complete with proscenium arch.... Much tumult accompanies the demolition: stagehands running up and down, bits and pieces of carpentry collapsing.63

  Who was the unshaven lout in the third row, shouting and singing and struggling with an usherette? Wasn't it Jonathan Pryce, the actor billed to play Petruchio? Yes, it was, and presenting so plausible a display of alcoholic rage that I was momentarily convinced he had been given the boot and was taking an ugly revenge on the RSC hierarchy. Then he yelled, "I'm not having any bloody woman tell me what to do."64

  The usherette getting the tirade of abuse and threats of violence was actress Paola Dionisotti, who also played Katherina. This riotous opening and the subsequent destruction of the set gave the audience a clear indication that they were not going to be witnessing a traditional approach to the play:

  The elaborate prettiness of the old-fashioned, Italianate set was literally deconstructed before the audience's eyes to reveal a network of metallic stairs and gantries, resembling the uncompromising interior of a gaol.65

  In this one clever move, Bogdanov set up and then demolished the audiences' preconceptions, left-footing them and preparing them for a very different reading of the play. The dividing line between reality and fantasy was crossed by the leading actors, who took the audience physically into the world of the play. The Italianate set which audiences saw as they entered, set up the expectation of safe theater--the traditional approach. In destroying it to reveal the stark modern setting behind it, Bogdanov instantly installed a darker note--they are going to see beyond the facade, a break from preconceptions about the play from its stage history.

  My Goods, My Chattels: Anti-Capitalist Shrews

  Money, class, and status have a marked effect on the characters in The Taming of the Shrew. As soon as human life is evaluated as a financial commodity you devalue a person's worth, take away their humanity and individuality. Similarly, in a society where people are valued by how much wealth they have, those with less are valued as lesser human beings and open to all sorts of exploitation.

  In his 1978 production:

  Bogdanov was concerned to stress the continuities between the mercantile ethics of Renaissance Padua and the commercial values of modern-day British capita
lism; between the oppression of women in Shakespeare's time, and the continuing exploitation of sex today; between the class-divisions of the sixteenth century and the economic inequality of the twentieth.66

  When interviewed, Bogdanov stated:

  Shakespeare shows women totally abused--like animals--bartered to the highest bidder. He shows women used as commodities, not allowed to choose for themselves. In The Taming of the Shrew you get that extraordinary scene between Baptista, Grumio and Tranio, where they are vying with each other to see who can offer most for Bianca, who is described as "the prize." It is a toss of the coin to see which way she will go: to the old man with a certain amount of money, or to the young man, who is boasting that he's got so many ships. She could end up with the old impotent fool, or the young "eligible" man: what sort of life is that to look forward to? There is no question of it, his sympathy is with the women, and his purpose, to expose the cruelty of a society that allows these things to happen.67

  In this production, Baptista

  sits hunched over a vast gilt desk, the epitome of the Mafioso-turned-magnate, totting up the value of one suitor's argosies on an automatic calculator and skimming through the latest digest of farm prices when another boasts of his milch-kine and oxen. And the very last image the production offers is of the servant Grumio clambering across a table to retrieve the wager that Katherine's compliance has won his master, while Petruchio himself swaggers offstage with his wife hanging off one hand and a 20,000-crown cheque from her father in the other.68