The Taming of the Shrew: The State of Play 9781350138193, 9781350138223, 9781350138216

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The Taming of the Shrew

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ARDEN SHAKESPEARE STATE OF PL AY SERIES General Editors: Lena Cowen Orlin and Ann Thompson Elizabethan Narrative Poems: The State of Play, edited by Lynn Enterline Macbeth: The State of Play, edited by Ann Thompson Othello: The State of Play, edited by Lena Cowen Orlin The Revenger’s Tragedy: The State of Play, edited by Gretchen E. Minton The Sonnets: The State of Play, edited by Hannah Crawforth, Elizabeth Scott-Baumann and Clare Whitehead Titus Andronicus: The State of Play, edited by Farah Karim-Cooper Forthcoming titles: Hamlet: The State of Play, edited by Sonia Massai and Lucy Munro

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The Taming of the Shrew The State of Play Edited by Heather C. Easterling and Jennifer Flaherty

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THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE and the Arden Shakespeare logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 Copyright © Heather C. Easterling, Jennifer Flaherty and contributors, 2021 Heather C. Easterling, Jennifer Flaherty and contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the authors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on pp. xvii–xviii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image © Shutterstock All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-3819-3 ePDF: 978-1-3501-3821-6 eBook: 978-1-3501-3820-9 Series: Arden Shakespeare The State of Play Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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To the late David Bevington, with admiration and deep thanks

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CONTENTS

List of Illustrations x Notes on Contributors xi Series Preface xvi Acknowledgements xvii

Introduction 1 Heather C. Easterling and Jennifer Flaherty Part One Taming Shrews: Negotiating Early Modern Gender 1

Shakespeare’s New Shrew Erin E. Kelly

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Homeschooling the Girl Stomach David B. Goldstein

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The Taming of the Shrew: Afterlives and Oeconomics 57 Romola Nuttall

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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 77 David Bevington vii

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CONTENTS

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The Taming of the Shrew in Soviet Russia: Ideological Dangers of Structural Instability Natalia Khomenko

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Dissident Feminism at the End of the Franco Dictatorship: The New Taming of the Shrew (1975) 105 Juan F. Cerdá

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The Turn of the Shrew: Cross-Gender Casting in the Twenty-First Century 125 Peter Kirwan

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‘My Tongue Will Tell the Anger of my Heart’: Staging and Challenging Irish Womanhood at the Globe (2016) 144 Emer McHugh

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 171 Milla Cozart Riggio

10 ‘The Right Foundation’: Remaking Marriage in a Black Adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew 192 Joyce Green MacDonald

CONTENTS

11 Taming the Internet: Katherina, Bianca, and Digital Girlhood 208 Jennifer Flaherty 12 ‘Kate of My Consolation’: Mary Cowden Clarke and Anne Tyler Revisit The Taming of the Shrew 222 Sheila T. Cavanagh Bibliography of Paratexts, Productions and Adaptations 239 Index 242

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ILLUSTRATIONS

1 Mary Pickford (Kate) depicted cradling Douglas Fairbanks (Petruccio), image superimposed over final credit ‘The End’. Sam Taylor, dir., The Taming of the Shrew (Pickford-Fairbanks Studio/The Elton Corporation, 1929, rereleased 1966). 177 2 Elizabeth Taylor (Kate) pauses before the city gate of Padua, as she decides to go forward rather than return to her father’s home. Behind her are two unidentified men punished as ‘Drunkard’ and ‘Wifestealer’ (detail). Franco Zeffirelli, dir., The Taming of the Shrew (Columbia Pictures, 1967). 183 3 Elizabeth Taylor (Kate) subdues Bianca (Natasha Pyne) and the Widow (Bice Valori), final scene (detail). Franco Zeffirelli, dir., The Taming of the Shrew (Columbia Pictures, 1967). 184

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

David Bevington, Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Professor at the University of Chicago, died at his home in Hyde Park on 2 August 2019, at 88 years old. He received his BA and PhD from Harvard University. He authored a succession of seminal books on Shakespeare and early drama, including From Mankind to Marlowe (1962) and Tudor Drama and Politics (1967), which consistently documented ways early modern playwrights responded deliberately, often forcefully to English political life, at a time when it was dangerous to do so. David published innumerable articles and was instrumental in nurturing professional organizations such as the Shakespeare Association of America (SAA), for which he was the only President to serve twice, and the Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society (MRDS). He was a pre-eminent editor of his generation, editing several full editions of Shakespeare’s plays, including the only single volume complete Shakespeare edited entirely by one person, now in its seventh edition. David was also associated with major editions of other early English dramatists. Most of all, he mentored students at the Universities of Virginia and Chicago and across the country, a contribution honoured in a volume of tributes edited by Eric Rasmussen and Milla C. Riggio, entitled David Bevington Remembered (published by BookArts and released for the SAA meeting in 2020). Sheila T. Cavanagh, founding director of the World Shakespeare Project (www.worldshakespeareproject.org), is Professor of English and Distinguished Teaching Scholar at Emory xi

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University. She also held the Masse-Martin/NEH Distinguished Teaching Professorship. Author of Wanton Eyes and Chaste Desires: Female Sexuality in the Faerie Queene and Cherished Torment: The Emotional Geography of Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania, she has also published widely in the fields of pedagogy and of Renaissance literature. She is also active in the electronic realm, having directed the Emory Women Writers Resource Project (womenwriters.library.emory.edu) since 1994 and serving for many years as editor of the online Spenser Review. Juan F. Cerdá is Lecturer in English at the University of Murcia. He has written about the reception of Shakespeare’s plays in Spanish theatrical culture and cinema. His articles have been published in journals such as Shakespeare, Cahiers Élisabéthains, and Borrowers and Lenders; he has contributed to Shakespeare and Conflict: A European Perspective (2013), Shakespeare Beyond English: A Global Experiment (2013) and has co-edited Shakespeare in Spain: An Annotated Bilingual Bibliography (2015) and Romeo and Juliet in European Cultures (2017). Currently, he is co-editing another volume for John Benjamins’ Shakespeare in European Culture series on Macbeth as part of his work within the research project ‘The reception of Shakespeare’s works in Spanish and European Culture’. Heather C. Easterling is Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at Gonzaga University in Spokane, WA, where she regularly teaches The Taming of the Shrew as part of courses on Shakespeare and on early modern drama, gender and genre. A specialist in the city-drama and theatrical culture of early modern London, she is the author of Parsing the City: Jonson, Middleton, Dekker, and Early Modern London as Language (2007). She has published articles on early modern theatrical representations and productions of the urban, and is editing Middleton’s The Triumphs of Honour and Industry for the Map of Early Modern London (MoEML) digital project and database as part of current work on urban pageantry.

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Jennifer Flaherty is an Associate Professor of Shakespeare studies at Georgia College, where she also serves as coordinator of the English MA programme. Her research focuses on adaptation studies, and she is especially interested in the question of how Shakespeare has been used to address contemporary girlhood. Her work has been published in journals such as Borrowers and Lenders, Comparative Drama, Topic, Theatre Symposium, and Interdisciplinary Literary Studies. She has contributed chapters to the volumes Shakespeare and Millennial Fiction, the Routledge Handbook to Shakespeare and Global Appropriation, The Horse as Cultural Icon, and Shakespeare and Geek Culture. David B. Goldstein is Associate Professor of English at York University, where he serves as coordinator of the Creative Writing programme. His first monograph, Eating and Ethics in Shakespeare’s England, shared the Shakespeare’s Globe Book Award. He has also published two books of poetry and two essay collections, Culinary Shakespeare (with Amy Tigner) and Shakespeare, and Hospitality (with Julia Reinhard Lupton). His essays on early modern literature, Emmanuel Levinas, food studies, ecology, and contemporary poetry have appeared in Criticism, Studies in English Literature, Shakespeare Studies, Gastronomica and numerous other journals and collections. He is currently co-director of the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Mellon-funded collaborative research project, ‘Before “Farm to Table”: Early Modern Foodways and Cultures’. Erin E. Kelly is Associate Professor in the Department of English at University of Victoria (British Columbia, Canada), where she also serves as Director for the university’s Academic and Technical Writing Program. She has published book chapters and journal articles on early modern English drama and reformation religious discourse and is editing Taming of the Shrew for Internet Shakespeare Editions. Natalia Khomenko is a Lecturer in English Literature at York University (Toronto). She has published in Early Theatre,

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Borrowers and Lenders and The Shakespearean International Yearbook. She is also a contributor to the MIT Global Shakespeares Video and Performance Archive and to the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Global Shakespeare. Natalia’s current research project, which has received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada and York University, focuses on the reception and interpretation of Shakespearean drama in early Soviet Russia. Most recently, she guest-edited an issue on Soviet Shakespeare for The Shakespearean International Yearbook (Volume 18, 2020). Peter Kirwan is Associate Professor of Early Modern Drama at the University of Nottingham, UK. His research interests include the textual history and contemporary performance of early modern drama. His books include Shakespeare in the Theatre: Cheek by Jowl (2019) and Shakespeare and the Idea of Apocrypha (2015), and the co-edited collections Shakespeare’s Audiences (with Matteo Pangallo, 2021), The Arden Research Handbook to Shakespeare and Contemporary Performance (with Kathryn Prince, 2021), Canonising Shakespeare (with Emma Depledge, 2017), and Shakespeare and the Digital World (with Christie Carson, 2014). He is the editor of Shakespeare Bulletin and a general editor of the Revels Plays Companion Library. Joyce Green MacDonald is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Kentucky, where she teaches courses on Renaissance drama and culture. She is the editor of Race, Ethnicity, and Power in the Renaissance (1996) and the author of Women and Race in Early Modern Texts (2002), as well as of several articles and book chapters on how performance can circulate, reproduce and reformulate ideas about race. Her most recent book is Shakespearean Adaptation, Race, and Memory in the New World (2020). Emer McHugh completed her PhD at the National University of Ireland, Galway, where she also teaches. She is the author of Irish Shakespeares: Gender, Sexuality, and Performance in the

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Twenty-First Century (forthcoming). Other published and forthcoming essays include ‘A Shared Language: Placing and Displacing Shakespeare in Ireland’s National Theatrical Repertoire’ in Negotiating Ireland’s Theatre Archive (2019) and ‘Shakespeare Performance in Ireland, 2018–2020’ in Shakespeare Survey (2022). She specialises in early modern performance studies, Shakespeare and Ireland, theatre and celebrity culture, gender and sexuality studies, and modern Irish and British performance. Romola Nuttall is an Associate Research Fellow at King’s College London and visiting unit tutor at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. She is currently working on her first monograph, titled Shakespeare, Print and Patronage. Milla Cozart Riggio, James J. Goodwin Professor Emerita at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, received her PhD from Harvard University. She edited Teaching Shakespeare Through Performance (1999) and has written on Shakespeare films including The Merchant of Venice. She has been a professional dramaturge on Shakespeare performances at Hartford Stage Company, Washington Shakespeare Theater, Westport Country Playhouse, and in New York. She taught undergraduate and graduate courses on Shakespeare at Trinity College, as well as a graduate course on Teaching Shakespeare at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad. A past president of the Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society, she also researches medieval drama, film and, for the past twenty-five years, Trinidad Carnival/Caribbean festivals and culture, on which she has edited or co-edited six books.

SERIES PREFACE

The Arden Shakespeare State of Play Series editors: Lena Cowen Orlin and Ann Thompson This series represents a collaboration between King’s College London and Georgetown University. King’s is the home of the London Shakespeare Centre and Georgetown is the home of the Shakespeare Association of America (SAA). Each volume in the series is an expedition to discover the ‘state of play’ with respect to specific works by Shakespeare. Our method is to convene a seminar at the annual convention of the SAA and see what it is that preoccupies scholars now. SAA seminars are enrolled through an open registration process that brings together academics from all stages of their careers. Participants prepare short papers that are circulated in advance and then discussed when the seminar convenes on conference weekend. From the papers submitted, the seminar leader selects a group for inclusion in a collection that aims to include fresh work by emerging voices and established scholars both. The general editors are grateful for the further collaboration of Bloomsbury Publishing, and especially our commissioning editors Margaret Bartley and Mark Dudgeon.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First and foremost, we wish to thank Coppélia Kahn and Linda Woodbridge for convening and leading the seminar ‘The Taming of the Shrew and its Afterlives’ for SAA 2018, and for their support and encouragement of us as we undertook this project. Warm thanks, as well, to all of our fellow participants in the 2018 Shrew seminar for such a collegial and provocative experience that served as the foundation to our work on this volume. Sincere thanks go to Lena Orlin and Ann Thompson, both for their initial query to us regarding a collection like this and for their ongoing assistance as series editors for the State of Play. Along with our many blessings over the process of this book’s creation, there have been challenges and tragic circumstances. David Bevington’s passing in 2019 was a terrible loss to us, as it was for the entire community of Shakespeare studies. Thus we owe some special thanks in difficult circumstances to Peggy and Sarah Bevington, John Cox and Milla Cozart Riggio for working to make his contribution here possible. As well, we have navigated the final months of manuscript preparation amid a global pandemic, and we thank all of the contributors to this book for their fortitude and conscientiousness throughout the crisis. We also thank the many friends and colleagues who have supported us and the project in different ways, especially Allen Baros, Gordon Ritchie, and Miriam Kriss. Finally, we each have brief thanks for each other: From Heather to Jenny: thank you for your incisive critical skills and intellectual generosity, for your sense of humour, and xvii

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most of all for the friendship both professional and personal we have grown alongside this project. From Jenny to Heather: thank you for your deep understanding of this complex and challenging text, your endless generosity and patience, and your wonderful organization and leadership throughout this process. The best part of this truly rewarding project has been our shared camaraderie and counsel.

Introduction Heather C. Easterling and Jennifer Flaherty

Before Justin Audibert reimagined The Taming of the Shrew as a matriarchy in his 2019 production for the Royal Shakespeare Company, he was reluctant to direct the play at all: ‘I remember having a long discussion with the late, great Cicely Berry. She said, “No one should ever do it!” And I could see what she meant. I don’t know if the world needs more imagery of men being violent towards women.’1 When Emma Rice included the play in Shakespeare’s Globe’s 2016 season, she described the comedy as something ‘fresh and vital as we struggle to find a path through modern life’.2 That The Taming of the Shrew could possess such a vitality, much less validity, for today seems paradoxical when many others argue that it is unplayable. After all, it is ‘a comedy . . . [that] reiterates rather than inverts the inequities of power’;3 its notoriously retrograde misogyny and spectacles of female subjection often have rendered it irredeemable among critics and practitioners alike. Yet the popularity of the play on stage and screen endures.4 Diana Henderson describes ‘the pleasures filmmakers [and other producers] continue to discover in retelling the shrew-taming 1

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story’,5 while M.J. Kidnie argues that The Taming of the Shrew’s problems are part of the reason for its persistence: the play ‘taps into what still remains today an unresolved debate about ideal gender relations between the sexes, especially within marriage  . . . [its] ending leaves one with unresolved concerns about the prevailing structure of power.’6 We encounter Shakespeare’s play today amid renewed and stark scrutiny of this ‘prevailing structure of power’. In recent years, the #MeToo movement has newly laid bare the problem of masculine dominion and precarious female autonomy, exploding contemporary sensibilities of a more settled equality. As journalist Rebecca Traister explains, ‘it’s not that we’re horrified like some Victorian damsel; it’s that we’re horrified like a woman in 2017 who briefly believed she was equal to her male peers but has just been reminded that she is not, who has suddenly had her comparative powerlessness revealed to her.’7 Just as poignantly and urgently, in the spring of 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic and efforts to combat its spread literally have brought us home. Sheltering and quarantining in domestic spaces that have become newly resonant and visible, we confront anew the domestic as a space of persistent, gendered inequality and often violence, with headlines and reports testifying to stunning increases in domestic violence as people worldwide are constrained to their homes.8 If #MeToo revealed ‘prevailing structures’ of gender inequality in the public sphere, the 2020 COVID-19 crisis has brought the domestic sphere starkly into view and provoked new questions about gender, power, and performance in this most private of spaces. We need language and texts to grapple with such questions and such persistent realities that also can feel wildly anachronistic. The Taming of the Shrew, we would assert, is one of these needed texts precisely because of its stark rehearsals of gendered powerlessness, because of the marked significance of household spaces to its staging of contending men and women, because its conclusion ‘positions subjection as the determining condition for women’s subjectivity and teaches us how distinctions between male and female bodies are produced, understood,

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and maintained’.9 Whether as readers, audiences, critics, or practitioners, we need Shakespeare’s Shrew not in spite of but because of its struggles and our struggles with it. This State of Play volume freshly attends to The Taming of the Shrew as just such an unparalleled site for interrogating relations of gender, power, and performance in society, beginning in its own era of Elizabethan England and throughout its long and ongoing afterlife in performance and adaptation. The recent, highly public dissections of sexism and power and current urgency regarding gender-violence thus do not marginalize this challenging play; instead they renew debates that Shrew stages. One powerful example of this is with Katherina’s famous final speech in Act 5, Scene 2.10 In recent years, both stage-productions and critical readings increasingly have developed what Kidnie calls ‘trickster’ readings, ‘that argue through analysis . . . of irony and theatricality that the play only seems to affirm male privilege and female subjection’,11 locating in this speech not obedience but a subversive performance of obedience that locates some resistance in an otherwise disturbingly tamed Katherina. For Laurie Maguire, by contrast, performance is an unironic key to the play. ‘If the focus is not on meaning but on performance’, she argues, Katherina’s speech becomes a moment of theatre, not of gender: ‘not a case of female submission but of theatrical triumph’.12 The play is about the ways ‘we negotiate life through performance, through hiding or acting a part’.13 But a focus on identity as social and as always role-playing is newly complicated by contemporary scrutiny of the compulsory performances that are part of still-deeply gendered hierarchies of power. Whether focused on ironic performance or just performance, these recuperative readings confirm the requirement that female performance be on male discursive terms in order to claim some manner of authority: performance is required, is the submission. Is female performance thus a form of survival? Are women’s lives still circumscribed by male discourse and authority? Act 5, scene 2’s unresolvable tensions and its overt suggestion of performance as central to gender, order, and female speech make

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Shrew a living text in the present where we continue to reckon with our own experiences and understandings of these systems and discourses. As we continue the current, public reckoning with and scrutiny of the ways our ‘culture condition[s] [young women] to acquiesce’,14 we need Shrew more than ever for the currency of its controversies and ambiguities. However sophisticatedly we might seek to deny that this play is about ‘taming a shrew’, it is always also about taming a shrew, about what ‘taming’ can mean, and about ‘shrews’ and who gets to designate who and what is and is not a shrew. This has always mattered with this play, from the 1623 Folio edition and its distance from both the anonymous Taming of a Shrew and from earlier extant wifetaming texts like ‘A Merry Jest of a Shrewd and Curst Wife Lapped in Morel’s Skin’; to the appearance by 1611 of Fletcher’s The Tamer Tamed.15 Rewritings like David Garrick’s Catharine and Petruchio and John Lacy’s Sauny the Scot attest that this has continued to matter, and the play’s twentieth and twentyfirst-century critical and performance afterlife represents not a comfortable distance from the play, but a continued debate over its representations of marriage, mastery, gender and authority, identity, and performance.16 Over three Parts, this State of Play volume queries anew the play and its remarkable afterlife, beginning with three essays focused on the play in its early modern context and travelling up to the present and the most contemporary performances and new media adaptations. Part One, entitled ‘Taming Shrews: Negotiating Early Modern Gender’, revisits the origins of the play’s debates and situates the play within sixteenth-century narrative traditions in which Shakespeare was both a participant and an innovator. Part One’s three new essays historicize Shrew as an expression of early modern discourses of gender, marriage and social relations, reading the play less as a singular problem than as a complex artefact of domestic material culture and ideology. Erin E. Kelly opens the section with her essay, ‘Shakespeare’s New Shrew’, which foregrounds Shakespeare’s own work of adaptation in The Taming of the Shrew amid the

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prominence of the play’s afterlives and adaptations in its popular as well as critical significance. Shakespeare’s Shrew, Kelly argues, used and changed an existing shrew-tale tradition to originate a story primarily concerned with gender dynamics instead of class, a reassessment of Shrew that also considers Fletcher’s The Tamer Tamed, with new questions about its response to Shakespeare’s innovation of a ‘war-between-thesexes’. David Goldstein’s essay locates the play’s roots in humanist pedagogical discourse. Attending specifically to its vivid staging of food (or, more properly, its deprivation) as a tool in Petruccio’s taming and instruction of Katherina, Goldstein connects Shrew with Renaissance humanism’s substantive focus on food and the table as ‘the ubiquitous use of the table  . . . as a site of pedagogy’.17 Romola Nuttall’s essay concludes Part One with a provocative rereading of both the play and modern critical and performance approaches in the terms of the pre-modern oikos and of Elizabethan ‘œconomics’. Nuttall’s arguments about the economics of gender in the early modern household give context not only to the apparent commodification of Katherina within the text, but also to the challenges of adapting the text for performance in the last twenty years. Rather than presenting Shakespeare’s Shrew as the definitive ‘taming’ text, all of the essays in this first section posit the play as a participant in a continued conversation dating back to the early modern period about the discourses, codes, language and roles that legislate power and social and gender identity. While all of the chapters in Part One are thoroughly grounded in early modern contexts and historical research, they do not distance Shakespeare’s text from the rich and complex afterlife that has evolved in response to it. Kelly revisits Fletcher in light of the generic innovations she finds Shakespeare to have made, and notes how directors of Shakespeare’s Shrew continue to explore and challenge the idea of a ‘battle of the sexes’ in current single-sex productions. David Goldstein explores not only Shakespeare’s response to Renaissance humanists, but also Shrew’s subsequent performance history to clarify its rhetorical

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and theatrical syntax. As a critic, Goldstein explains, he is ‘as interested in how Petruccio’s character moves through the Shrew’s critical and theatrical interpreters as I am in Shakespeare’s original language’.18 Romola Nuttall cites specific performances of Shrew at the Royal Shakespeare Company as well as a corresponding production of Fletcher’s Tamer Tamed to demonstrate how Shakespeare’s œconomic language translates from the page to the stage, and to problematize readings of Shrew that overlook the residual and newer economic formations of the later sixteenth century. Collectively, the essays in Part One demonstrate that the taming narrative of Shrew is and always has been a volatile subject, creating opportunity for discourse about gender and society whose relevance is continually renewed. Following Part One, Parts Two and Three highlight and engage critically with the astonishing regularity of the play’s reimagining and adaptation across a range of historical and cultural moments. Fundamentally they revise the perennial question, ‘Is Shrew still relevant?’ to the more accurate and interesting, ‘How is Shrew always made relevant?’ Indeed, Part Two, ‘Staging Modern Shrews: The Politics of Performance’, explores how specific productions use and long have used Shrew to address political and social issues, demonstrating Barbara Hodgdon’s observation that the play regularly ‘gets caught up and shaped, at particular historical moments, to secure or contest the subjectivities at work in women’s lives’.19 By examining how productions seek to adapt or transform the play for stage performance, these essays also importantly signal the changing discourse about adaptation in recent years, a phenomenon to which Shakespeare and Shrew have been central. David Bevington’s essay, ‘Sometimes Crossing a Line: The Taming of the Shrew in Chicago and Stratford-upon-Avon’, introduces the term ‘denunciatory adaptation’, which he defines as a production whose primary goal ‘seems to be that of discrediting Shakespeare’s original as fatally and irredeemably flawed’.20 Focused on several recent productions of Shrew, Bevington’s concern for adaptation in relation to a stable Shakespearean original thoughtfully

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rehearses still-prevalent anxieties amongst scholars, critics, and audiences. Looking at the blurred lines between performance, adaptation and appropriation, Bevington argues that some productions use the performance as a means by which to reject the play  – and, by extension, reject Shakespeare, raising a concern for fidelity that is central to the changing field of adaptation studies. As M.J. Kidnie explains in Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation, measures of fidelity to Shakespeare are ‘shot through with appeals not just to the text or the author’s intention(s), but to moral probity’.21 The moral issue of fidelity in Bevington’s essay is not whether a director adheres strictly to Shakespeare’s script; it is clear that he admires a variety of film and stage adaptations, including those which drastically transform Shakespeare’s language, settings, and plots. Instead, he critiques directors who use productions of Shrew to make the argument that Shrew should not be performed, rejecting Shakespeare through performance. This concept of fidelity becomes especially fraught in the performance history of Shrew, given the play’s tendency to serve as a lightning rod for discourse on gender and power. Revising the play to challenge misogyny can be read as a denunciation of Shakespeare himself, but the repetition of the play without such intervention can be interpreted as support for a system that demeans and harms women. In a 2019 interview with National Public Radio (NPR), Ayanna Thompson explains the contradictory danger of performing the play by arguing that the ‘deep misogyny’ of Shrew simultaneously inspires and resists attempts at ‘rehabilitation and appropriation’ because ‘people always want to . . . do the one where Katherine has power and agency over Petruchio and the patriarchal system. But they don’t end up working.’22 The performance and adaptation of Shrew becomes an ethical as well as an artistic dilemma: should the play be performed as written? Can it be performed as written? Should actors and directors attempt to ‘solve’ the play? Each of the productions examined in Part Two negotiates the lines and dilemmas raised by Bevington and Thompson, and the authors of the essays in

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this section serve to bring critical attention to the play’s varied performance history. Natalia Khomenko’s and Juan F. Cerdá’s essays both read stagings of the play in distinct historical moments or contexts, analysing the overt political use and work of the play in each case. Khomenko examines Soviet approaches to the play ‘in the intensely ideological context of post-revolutionary Russia’.23 Cerdá similarly investigates Shrew’s significance to a political project, but more subversively in the case of The New Taming of the Shrew, a Spanish production mounted amid the ideological instability of the barely post-Franco era of the 1970s. Peter Kirwan’s essay returns us to American and British stages and examines the intersections of sexual power and politics in recent productions that use the bodies of the actors as a means to rethink gender assumptions. Specifically, Kirwan’s essay focuses on two productions that experiment with gender inversion to address the play’s problems: Phyllida Lloyd’s 2003 all-female production for Shakespeare’s Globe and Justin Audibert’s 2019 gender-swapped production, in which the gender of almost all the major roles was reversed to depict an alternative Elizabethan ‘matriarchy’.24 Kirwan argues that the gender inversions in both productions explore the taming narrative through negative example, inviting spectators to read what is not shown as well as what is. Emer McHugh closes Part Two with a study of how gender politics and Irish identity intersect in Caroline Byrne’s 2016 production of The Taming of the Shrew at Shakespeare’s Globe. Byrne’s Shrew, McHugh explains, draws upon the history of Irish women during the 1916 Easter Rising and uses Katherina’s trauma to explore the marginalization of women past and present. McHugh notes some critics’ objections to Byrne’s use of the Easter Rising, including Jonathan Bate’s resistant comment that ‘women did play a very powerful role in the Easter Rising but The Taming Of The Shrew is a play about women submitting to male power’.25 Such an objection points up the anxieties regarding fidelity raised in David Bevington’s essay and referenced throughout Part Two.

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Just as Byrne adapted Shrew as a way of calling attention to ‘feminist activism and the emphasis on reclaiming women’s voices’,26 each of the productions featured in Part Two uses the play’s plot and characters to explore the politics of gender, broadly and locally, and establish stances on relevant social issues. Like McHugh, several other authors in this section discuss objections by drama critics, scholars, and audience members to productions which rethink the play through staging and setting choices and through alterations to the playtext. These different critiques suggest, implicitly or explicitly, that reinterpreting the key moments of the play represents a betrayal of Shakespeare’s text and the play’s classification as a comedy. As M.J. Kidnie argues, the ‘anxiety’ over adapting Shakespeare’s texts resembles ‘fear of forgery since the adaptation, “misrepresented” as production and so circulating undetected and unchallenged, debases the work’s artistic and cultural currency’.27 The responses of some critics to productions, particularly as noted by Peter Kirwan and David Bevington, utilize this language of forgery, calling into question the legitimacy of the many performances which seek to reimagine or rework Katherina’s submission. The productions treated in Part Two thus illustrate how the play inspires some to fix or solve the play through performance and others to preserve a particular interpretation of the shrew-taming narrative. Taken together, this second set of essays richly suggest how the spectrums of performance, adaptation, and transformation can intersect and interact in the contentious history of responses to the play. Caroline Byrne’s Irish Shrew was part of the ‘Wonder’ season at Shakespeare’s Globe, and the many contradictory responses to this production indicate that The Taming of the Shrew indeed remains a complicated source of wonder and of relevance in our current moment of reckoning with persistent male privilege and female subjection. Shrew’s inclusion in a ‘Wonder’ season of stories of being ‘lost, transported, changed, and found again’28 signals the centrality of transformation with this play, and Part Three’s final group of four essays looks

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at contemporary adaptations of the play, both representing and querying Shrew’s persistent afterlife. This final section confronts the politics of transmission and studies how the play is reworked in films, novels, and web series to reclaim the shrew-character and the taming narrative for twentieth and twenty-first-century audiences. All of these adaptations utilize elements of the romantic comedy genre to address or overcome the challenges of the taming narrative, minimizing or rejecting the more problematic elements of Shakespeare’s Shrew. Milla Cozart Riggio’s essay begins by comparing the gender politics of two film versions of The Taming of the Shrew featuring famous couples in the leading roles. Riggio explores the implications of putting off-screen romantic partners into on-screen taming narratives, and she references the current #MeToo movement to reflect on the directing and marketing choices of each film. The next three essays in Part Three look at adaptations that transform Shakespeare’s plot and language: challenging, inverting, or even erasing the shrew-taming narrative by rewriting the characters in contemporary contexts. Joyce MacDonald’s essay examines race and gender in Gary Hardwick’s 2003 film Deliver Us From Eva, which centres on ‘a family of black women seeking to integrate their romantic loves with their loyalty to each other’ in a romantic comedy that reworks the shrew-taming narrative by ‘decentr[ing] male privilege’ and the ‘foundations of male domination that underlie the Shrew tradition’.29 Moving from film to new media, Part Three continues with Jennifer Flaherty’s essay, which investigates three YouTube web series that use Shakespeare’s play to address issues of sexuality, gender, and power relevant to contemporary teenage girls. Like Deliver Us From Eva, these series reject the shrew-taming narrative and emphasize the power of mutual support among young women. Sheila Cavanagh’s essay draws comparisons between Anne Tyler’s novel Vinegar Girl (2016) and Mary Cowden Clarke’s nineteenth-century prequel to the play in The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines, exploring ‘how these historically distanced female authors contend with the challenges inherent

INTRODUCTION

11

in Shakespeare’s comedy’.30 Cavanagh argues that both prose works are part of a greater historical trend of adapting the play to ‘ameliorate its more controversial elements in order to reduce potential audience discomfort with the narrative’.31 Throughout its contentious history, The Taming of the Shrew has been continually reinvented by critics, authors, actors and directors seeking to renegotiate its meaning and its stakes for their own historical, political and social contexts. Taking as its thesis the perennial relevance of Shrew, this volume collects a range of provocative new approaches to and encounters with the play. With its emphasis on adaptation – on stage and across a range of media  – the collection seeks to illuminate Shrew’s almost unparalleled afterlife, including in the current moment. In different ways, all of the essays in this volume grapple with questions of gendered and literary power structures, examining fidelity and transformation as contrasting solutions to the problems of the play. In their diversity and in the more complex Shrew created therein, all of the essays point up a central tenet of this collection: perhaps more than any other of Shakespeare’s plays, The Taming of the Shrew has become significant ‘as a public object that is negotiated with in important ways in public culture’,32 enacting a set of discourses, codes, and relations that underline why we still need this play as an occasion to think about gender and power, and deepseated structures and ideologies of both.

Notes 1

Rona Kelly, ‘BWW Interview: Director Justin Audibert talks The Taming of the Shrew’, Broadway World, 10 April 2019. Available online: https://www.broadwayworld.com/westend/ article/BWW-Interview-Director-Justin-Audibert-Talks-THETAMING-OF-THE-SHREW-20190410.

2

Emma Rice quoted in Artistic Director’s ‘Welcome’, The Taming of the Shrew (2016) Programme, Shakespeare’s Globe, London, UK. Accessed 20 September 2018, Globe archives.

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3

Diana E. Henderson, Collaborations with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare Across Time and Media (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2006), 156.

4

Critical debate concerning The Taming of the Shrew has long both grappled with and found readings to resolve the play’s provocative elements, with more insistently problematizing, feminist critiques predominant in recent decades. Now classic feminist articles discussing the play include Coppelia Kahn, ‘The Taming of the Shrew: Shakespeare’s Mirror of Marriage’, Modern Language Studies 5.1 (1975), 88–102; Margaret Loftus Ranald, ‘The Performance of Feminism in The Taming of the Shrew’, Theatre Research International 19.3 (1994), 214–25; Lynda Boose, ‘Scolding Brides and Bridling Scolds: Taming the Woman’s Unruly Member’, Shakespeare Quarterly 42.2 (1991), 179–213; and Barbara Hodgdon, ‘Katherina Bound; or Play(K) ating the Strictures of Everyday Life’, PMLA 107.3 (1992), 538–53.

5

Henderson, Collaborations, 155.

6

M.J. Kidnie, The Taming of the Shrew: Shakespeare Handbooks (London: Palgrave, 2006), 146–7.

7

Rebecca Traister, ‘This Moment isn’t (Just) About Sex. It’s Really About Work’, New York magazine, 11 December 2017. Available online: http://nymag.com.

8

See Mark Townsend, ‘Revealed: Surge in Domestic Violence During COVID-19 Crisis’, The Guardian, 12 April 2020. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/ apr/12/domestic-violence-surges-seven-hundred-per-cent-ukcoronavirus. See also: Amanda Taub, ‘A New COVID-19 Crisis: Domestic Abuse Rises Worldwide’, The New York Times, 6 April 2020. Available online: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/06/ world/coronavirus-domestic-violence.html

9

Barbara Hodgdon, ‘Katherina Bound, or Play(K)ating the Strictures of Everyday Life’ in The Taming of the Shrew: Critical Essays, ed. Dana E. Aspinall (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 351. Also of note: David Goldstein comments on Petruccio’s taming in terms of his ‘self-quarantining’ of himself and Katherina in a 23 April 2020 Folger Shakespeare Library talk. See David Goldstein, ‘Home Schooling at Shakespeare’s Table: The Meaning of Meals in The Taming of

INTRODUCTION

13

the Shrew’, 23 April 2020. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=zRJksSfDxIc. 10 Barbara Hodgdon, ed., The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare, Arden Third Series (London: Arden/Bloomsbury, 2010). 11 Kidnie, The Taming of the Shrew: Shakespeare Handbooks, 147. 12 Laurie Maguire, ‘The Naming of the Shrew’ in The Taming of the Shrew, ed. Dympna Callaghan (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009), 123–37: 127. 13 Ibid., 130. 14 Ginia Bellafante, ‘On the Internet, Our Implicit Biases are Showing’, The New York Times, 21 January 2018. Available online (revised title for online edition): Available online: https:// www.nytimes.com/2018/01/18/nyregion/metoo-and-themarketing-of-female-narrative.html. 15 Stephen Roy Miller, ed., The Taming of a Shrew (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Merry jeste of a shrewde and curste wyfe, lapped in morrelles skin, for her good behavyour (London, 1580?; STC 14621), also available in the appendices of Frances E. Dolan’s Bedford Texts and Contexts; Lucy Munro, ed., The Tamer Tamed (or: The Women’s Prize) (London: Methuen/New Mermaids, 2010). 16 David Garrick, Catharine and Petruchio: A Comedy, In Three Acts (London: J. and R. Tonson, 1756); John Lacey, Sauny the Scott; or, The Taming of the Shrew: A Comedy (1667) (London: E. Whitlock, 1698). More recently, adaptations of Shrew have proliferated on both the large and small screens, as the essays in Part Three of this volume attest and explore. In addition to these essays’ Shrews, other notable screen adaptations include Will MacKenzie, dir., ‘Atomic Shakespeare’ Moonlighting, Season 3, episode 7 (broadcast 11/25/1986); and David Richards, dir., ShakespeaRe-Told: The Taming of the Shrew, 2005, BBC/BBC Northern Ireland. 17 David Goldstein, this volume, page 38. 18 Ibid., 56 n. 38.

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19 Hodgdon, ‘Katherina Bound,’ in The Taming of the Shrew: Critical Essays, 352. 20 David Bevington, this volume, page 78. 21 M.J. Kidnie, Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 22. 22 Code Switch: ‘All that Glisters is Not Gold’ (2019), [Radio Programme] NPR, 21 August, 12.01. Available online: https:// www.npr.org/transcripts/752850055. 23 Natalia Khomenko, this volume, page 89. 24 Quoted from ‘Creating a New World’ (pp. 2–3) in The Taming of the Shrew (2019) Programme, Royal Shakespeare Company, UK. The Lloyd and Audibert Shrews, both notably genderinverted, are two of a number of contemporary Shrew productions on prominent UK stages, including Caroline Byrne’s 2016 Shrew for Shakespeare’s Globe, the subject of Emer McHugh’s essay in this volume. Also of critical note, though not discussed directly in the present volume: Michael Bogdanov, dir., The Taming of the Shrew, Royal Shakespeare Company, 1978, Stratford-upon-Avon, UK; Gale Edwards, dir., The Taming of the Shrew, Royal Shakespeare Company, 1995, Stratford-uponAvon, UK. 25 Chris Hastings, ‘Shakespeare’s Bawdy Comedy . . . about a Massacre: How New Taming of the Shrew Production Highlights the 1916 Easter Rising’, Mail on Sunday, 17 April 2016. Available online: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/ tvshowbiz/article-3543910/Shakespeare-s-bawdy-comedymassacre-new-Taming-Shrew-production-highlights-1916Easter-rising.html. 26 Emer McHugh, this volume, page 151. 27 Kidnie, Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation, 23. 28 Emma Rice quoted in The Taming of the Shrew (2016) Programme, Shakespeare’s Globe, London, UK. Accessed 20 September 2018, Globe archives. 29 Joyce P. MacDonald, this volume, page 193. 30 Sheila T. Cavanagh, this volume, page 223. 31 Ibid., 222.

INTRODUCTION

32 Denise Albanese, remarks given as part of ‘ “Futures” Roundtable: Shakespeare Beyond the Research University’, 31 March 2018, Shakespeare Association of America Annual Meeting, Los Angeles, CA.

15

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PART ONE

Taming Shrews: Negotiating Early Modern Gender

17

18

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. 19

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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 shrewtaming 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

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(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.

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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

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23

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 status of the audience by initially addressing them as ‘maysters’ and leaving the stage by wishing ‘fare well [to] this noble company’. Even as it might be shocked by the immorality of both wife and priest, the play’s first audience could have looked down at Johan Johan and thus have enjoyed his inability to manage his wife without being implicated in his powerlessness. A likely mid-sixteenth-century play, Tom Tyler and His Wife similarly makes a low-status man an object of fun.13 When the despairing tiler laments that his wife (whose name is Strife) is ‘to well schooled with too many shrowes / To receive any blowes’ (10), his friend Tom Tailor offers to handle the situation.

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Disguised in Tom Tyler’s clothes, the tailor bludgeons Strife until she cries out, ‘Hold thy hand, and thou be a man’ (11). She yields to her husband’s authority thereafter until Tom Tyler responds to her complaints about her bruises by revealing he is not the man who beat her; at that news, she instantly recovers to again attack and scold Tom Tyler. Part of the joke here is that the husband is a tiler while his friend is a tailor. To tile roofs, a man would need to be physically strong, yet the husband described by one of his wife’s friends as ‘stout’ and ‘large’ is repeatedly beaten by a woman. In contrast, tailors were conventionally thought of as weak and effete.14 It seems ridiculous that Tom Tailor could physically dominate Strife more effectively than could Tom Tyler, perhaps even more improbable than the idea that one man could pass as another simply by swapping clothes. A prologue introduces Tom Tyler by saying the audience would see ‘a play set out by prettie boyes’ (1), indicating a performance by schoolboys or choristers – the latter possibility being evidenced by the play’s many songs. Having young scholars or choirboys perform the play would make its satiric force more potent; such highly educated and likely high-status boys and young men would not have experienced marital troubles or the economic insecurity of tilers and tailors, and their imitation of lower-class workers could prove both delightful and distancing for a small, elite audience. If the play were performed at court by a choir, the aristocratic spectators could laugh at rather than strongly identify with a tiler. And if the play originated at a school then, much like the universityassociated Gammer Gurton’s Needle or the grammar-schoollinked Ralph Roister Doister, Tom Tyler would have been put on by and for the educated to ridicule lower-status townspeople for their inability to resolve trifling problems.

A Shrew Looking at earlier shrew texts and traditions makes clear that what’s humorous about shrew-taming stories is that they offer

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25

audiences opportunities to scoff at men unable to control feisty women while seeing these men as different from themselves. Such humour relies on texts making clear distinctions among male characters. Putting aside the vexed question of which play precedes the other,15 it is important to note that the anonymous The Taming of a Shrew and the play we know as Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew differ markedly in their deployment of this strategy. Unlike its sources and intertexts, Shakespeare’s Shrew levels and withholds information about social distinctions among its central male characters. A Shrew, in keeping with the long-standing shrew-text tradition, carefully delineates the status of male characters. Alfonso – the father to three daughters  – is a merchant and thus an inappropriate blocking figure to the high-ranking men who wish to marry his younger daughters.16 Aurelius is son of the Duke of Sestos, and his friend Polidor is a student and apparently someone Aurelius views as a peer. In contrast, they identify Ferando, the man who woos and wins the shrewish eldest daughter Kate, as someone who ‘will match her every way; / And yet he is a man of wealth sufficient / And for his person as good as she’ (3.76–8). Although they are the social superiors of their wives Phylema and Emelia, Aurelius and Polidor find themselves figures of fun at the end of the play when Ferando demonstrates that he is the only man among them capable of getting his wife to obey. London citizens who saw themselves as more similar to Alfonso and Fernado could therefore enjoy seeing A Shrew in part because it shows the failure of elite men – like the son of a duke – to control their wives. But A Shrew also offers the same pleasures as earlier shrew plays through its depiction of Sly. The Lord’s ability to make this poor tinker believe he is a lord and then to return him, in his rags, to the cold ground outside the alehouse door encourages laughter at Sly by more powerful men in the play and in the audience. In keeping with the established conventions of shrew plays, Sly seems particularly ridiculous when, in the closing frame of A Shrew, he declares to the tapster, ‘I know now how to tame a shrew / I dreamt upon it all this night til

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now’ (15.16–17). His bragging intrigues the tapster to the point where he will ‘go home with [Sly], / And heare the rest that thou hast dreamt tonight’ (15.22–3) but it seems more likely that, as the tapster predicts, Sly’s ‘wife will curse [him] for dreaming here tonight’ (15.15) than that the tinker will actually be able to control her. Sly’s understanding of his dream implies that higher-status men have much to teach their social inferiors about wife-management. Because he is not actually a lord, though, Sly as portrayed in Taming of a Shrew seems illequipped to follow their example. As in earlier shrew plays, the low-status man with the shrewish wife ends as the object of an audience’s laughter. One can easily imagine Sly winding up like Johan Johan or Tom Tyler.

The new shrew What makes possible a shift away from a focus on a particular successful or would-be tamer to a generalized consideration of all husbands and wives in Shakespeare’s shrew play is its fusing of a range of male characters into a single category: men. The opening frame features a Lord who identifies himself as a powerful aristocrat by his ability to transport Sly from the humble tavern from which he has been ejected to a great house that features luxurious bedchambers staffed with attentive servants.17 Thereafter, the status of the play’s men who are masters is much less clear. Lucentio talks of himself as the son of ‘A merchant of great traffic through the world’ (1.1.12), and Vincentio is known to the Mantuan traveller who will impersonate him as ‘A merchant of incomparable wealth’ (4.2.99). But is Baptista also a merchant who is sometimes called a gentleman or really ‘a noble gentleman’ (1.2.239) who only ‘play[s] a merchant’s part’ (2.1.330) when negotiating the marriage of his daughter? Gremio seems to be a merchant, since part of the wealth he offers Bianca is ‘an argosy / That now is lying in Marsailles road’ (2.1.378–9), but the fact that even more of his wealth derives from a ‘farm’ (2.1.360) muddies the picture. Petruccio has inherited his wealth,

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home and servants upon the death of his father Antonio, but since that patriarch is only referred to as ‘A man well known throughout all Italy’ (2.1.69), it is never established whether Petruccio is the son of an esteemed aristocrat or a wealthy citizen. All of these men speak of themselves and address each other repeatedly as ‘gentlemen’, but in the world of this play the precise denotation of this slippery word is not established. Neither is it possible to determine how much wealth these men have at their command or which has more than any of the others. The bidding for Bianca’s hand undertaken by Gremio and Tranio (posing as Lucentio) establishes that these ‘gentlemen’ can bluff when responding to questions about their estates. Hortensio’s decision to woo Bianca in the guise of a music teacher and then to finally give in to the pursuit of ‘a wealthy widow  . . . which hath as long lov’d me / As I have lov’d this proud disdainful haggard’ (4.2.37–9) might be seen as motivated in part by his lack of wealth, at least in relation to his rival Gremio; still, Hortensio seems to have no difficulty in paying the tailor for Katherina’s gown or participating in the obedience wager, so he does not seem impecunious. And it is a matter of interpretation whether Petruccio wants ‘to wive it wealthily in Padua; / If wealthily, then happily in Padua’ (1.2.74–5) because he is impoverished or merely because he sees wealth as a prospective wife’s most important asset. It is in the context of this uncertainty that male characters in The Taming of the Shrew struggle amongst themselves to determine not just who can manage a shrewish woman but who is the most desirable suitor, the most powerful husband, the best man. Since neither wealth nor family lineage operate as reliable indicators of power or status, other means of achieving authority are explored and tested throughout the play. All men become the butt of a joke that shows numerous male characters striving to prove themselves by winning spouses and controlling wives  – most no more successfully than does the tinker Christopher Sly in the play’s opening scenes. Shakespeare’s Shrew removes a key feature of earlier shrew-taming texts, the tendency to offer stable grounds for

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identification with or rejection of (and concomitant laughter at) a man who can or cannot tame a shrew. Out of a tradition that emphasizes competition among men, Shakespeare created a shrew text that instead allows men to see themselves in both the shrew-tamer and the powerless husband. For better or for worse, Shakespeare’s generalized category of ‘men’ shifts comic energy from distinctions among different types of men to relationships between men and women.

The Tamer Tamed This shift is a necessary condition for Fletcher’s sequel to Shrew. The title The Woman’s Prize announces that the play also called The Tamer Tamed has a broader agenda than simply offering an account of Petruchio’s second marriage.18 In the world of the play, the domination of one wife affects all women just as women’s resistance towards one man impacts all men; a proper husband is a prize for a particular woman but also for women more generally. Shakespeare’s play sets up the shrew and shrewtamer as representative figures in a metaphorical battle of the sexes, and Fletcher’s play stages this conflict as a literal battle. As Petruchio’s new wife Maria seeks to avoid the fate of being harshly tamed by the man who wrangled a declaration of obedience from the shrewish Katherina – and as her sister Livia employs deception to marry the suitor of her choosing – Fletcher’s play presents a main plot and subplot that mirror the action of Shakespeare’s Shrew. Maria’s cousin Bianca (perhaps a more mature version of the younger sister featured in Shakespeare’s play) lauds the new wife’s plan to resist Petruchio until he agrees to let her have her will by declaring: All the several wrongs Done by imperious husbands to their wives These thousand years and upwards, strengthen thee: Thou hast a brave cause. (1.2.122–4)

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The fantasy that one woman’s refusal to be subservient to her husband would be the ‘brave cause’ of all women manifests in a display of female solidarity. Maria, Bianca and Livia barricade themselves in a house with supplies and weapons to keep Petruchio away from his wife until he yields to her terms; they are soon joined by a wide array of other women including ‘a tanner’s wife’ (2.3.42), women known for organizing bearbaiting and alehouses (2.3.68, 71–2), three country wenches (2.4), a city wife and a country wife (2.5.90–116)  – what a servant describes as ‘all the women in the Kingdom’ (2.3.34). While these last two women speak as advocates in support of Maria’s case, they make explicit its broader implications, declaring that by demanding she be treated well by her husband, Petruchio’s new wife has become ‘the comfort of distressed damsels, / Women outworn in wedlock, and such vessels’ (2.5.72–3). By bringing so many female characters onstage, the play makes explicit how a conflict between a shrewish or abused wife and her weak or domineering husband might be interpreted as relevant to any woman – and to all men. Moreover, the play’s male characters present themselves as an opposing block. Although the play opens with Sophocles and Tranio commenting that Petruchio the shrew-tamer seems too fierce a husband for the gentle Maria (1.1.2–8), they joyfully endorse the groom’s sense of his entitlement to perform, brag about and encourage wagers on his sexual prowess on his wedding night (1.3.1–33). Upon discovering that Maria refuses this ‘right’, Petruchio instantaneously extends the implications of his rejection to all men, declaring, ‘Stick to me. / You see our freeholds touched’ (1.3.290–1). The other male characters present declare their support, stating ‘We shall have wars indeed’ (1.3.296) and promising ‘My regiment shall lie before’ (1.3.298). Here the fight to tame a wife is not a project that involves only one husband at whom other men might feel comfortable laughing. While likely not written by Fletcher, a prologue and epilogue dating to the 1630s and printed in the 1647 Beaumont and Fletcher folio offer evidence of how an early modern audience

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would have received this battle-of-the-sexes message. The prologue addresses ‘Ladies’ (1) and claims that Fletcher’s play offers them ‘A battle without blood’ (3) fought and won for their ‘defence and right’ (1). The epilogue both speaks to and constructs a section of the audience that is not these ‘Ladies’ by noting The tamer’s tamed, but so, as nor the men Can find one just cause to complain of, when They fitly do consider, in their lives They should not reign as tyrants o’er their wives. (1–4) By insisting that ‘due equality’ and ‘to love mutually’ (Epilogue 7, 8) should be goals for all marriages and for both male and female spouses, these paratexts, and Fletcher’s comedy, extend the logic of Shakespeare’s shrew play to a conclusion that presumes the existence of a ‘battle of the sexes’ that will be either eternal or resolved rather than the desire to celebrate (or laugh at) the particular type of man who can (or cannot) tame a shrewish wife.

Conclusion Although it does show high-status men treating their social inferiors badly, for example the Lord pranking the tinker Christopher Sly and Petruccio berating his servant Grumio, Shakespeare’s Shrew blurs distinctions between different types of men in ways that notably deviated from existing shrew traditions.19 But does the replacement of class warfare waged through laughter at different types of men with the humour associated with a wide-ranging battle of the sexes mean Shakespeare’s play is a more conservative or more liberating iteration of the shrew story? It seems too big a leap to claim Shakespeare’s innovation resulted from either the playwright’s proto-feminist principles or from misogynistic beliefs. More

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likely, Shakespeare transformed the shrew tradition in ways that moved it more directly into conversation with both misogynistic and gynophilic contributions to early modern querelle des femmes debates that divided people into two opposed gender categories.20 Indisputably, the ways in which this Shrew sets up a shrewtaming story as a tale of men and women in tension with one another has inspired a great deal of feminist literary criticism and even made possible defences of its final scene as a celebration of a healthy heterosexual marriage.21 The existence of The Woman’s Prize raises the possibility that even early seventeenth-century audiences wrestled with whether to see Petruccio as a hero for all husbands or a bully who should be feared by all wives. What this early sequel and the many plays, films, operas and other adaptations that Shakespeare’s play inspired most clearly reveal is how significantly The Taming of the Shrew shifted the shrew tradition to something quite new.

Notes 1

The phrase ‘battle of the sexes’ is attached to Shakespeare’s play in numerous texts searchable through Google Scholar including Penny Gay’s As She Likes It: Shakespeare’s Unruly Women (Routledge, 1994); Margaret Rose Jaster’s ‘Controlling clothes, manipulating mates: Petruchio’s Griselda’, Shakespeare Studies 29 (2001), 93–108; Lesley Wade Soule’s ‘Tumbling Tricks: Presentational Structure and The Taming of the Shrew’, New Theatre Quarterly 20.2 (2004), 164–79; Jan Purnis’s ‘The Gendered Stomach in The Taming of the Shrew’ in Gender and Power in Shrew-Taming Narratives, 1500–1700, ed. David Wootton and Graham Holderness (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); and Eleanor Hubbard’s ‘ “I Will Be Master of What Is Mine Own”: Fortune Hunters and Shrews in Early Modern London’, Sixteenth Century Journal 46.2 (2015), 331–58. The examples in print texts are perhaps countless.

2

Elizabeth Schafer, Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare in Production (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)

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offers a helpful overview of the many times and places in which the play has been located in twentieth-century productions. Shaw’s comment first appeared in an 1888 letter to the Pall Mall Gazette; see Shaw on Shakespeare, ed. Edwin Wilson (New York: Dutton, 1961), 186–7. 3

For an example of the effect of an all-male production, see Peter Kirwan, ‘The Taming of the Shrew (Propeller) @ Theatre Royal, Nottingham’, The Bardathon, 1 June 2013. Available online: https://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/bardathon/2013/06/01/thetaming-of-the-shrew-propeller-theatre-royal-nottingham. For a thoughtful discussion of an all-female production, see Farah Karim-Cooper, ‘Recreating Katerina: Taming of the Shrew at Shakespeare’s Globe’ in Women Making Shakespeare, ed. Gordon McMullan, Lena Cowen Orlin and Virginia Mason Vaughan (London: Bloomsbury Arden, 2014), 303–12; see also Peter Kirwan in this volume.

4

Jan Harold Brunvand’s dissertation was published as The Taming of the Shrew: A Comparative Study of Oral and Literary Versions (New York: Garland, 1991); see also ‘The Folktale Origin of The Taming of the Shrew’, Shakespeare Quarterly 17.4 (1966), 345–59.

5

Statistics here were calculated using the tables of variant tale features in Brunvand, Taming of the Shrew, 81–3.

6

For an extended discussion of the shrew as part of an English comic tradition with many more examples from ballads, pamphlets and jest books, see Pamela Allen Brown, Better a Shrew Than a Sheep (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003).

7

Merry jeste of a shrewde and curste wyfe, lapped in morrelles skin, for her good behavyour (London, 1580?; STC 14621) is included in the appendices of, among other editions, Frances E. Dolan Bedford Texts and Contexts.

8

The ballad An Easy Way to Tame a Shrew can be accessed through The English Broadside Ballad Archive, https://ebba. english.ucsb.edu/ballad/35795/citation, which dates it to approximately 1672–96. It is difficult to date ballads precisely, however, because so few copies survive.

9

John Lydgate, ‘Disguising at Hertford’ in John Lydgate: Mummings and Entertainments, ed. Claire Sponsler (TEAMS

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Middle English Texts Series) (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2010), 15–21. 10 A mery play betwene Johan Johan the husbande, Tyb his wyfe, [and] syr Iha[n]n the preest (London, 1533; STC 13298) is sometimes attributed to John Heywood. References here cite signature numbers in the EEBO facsimile. An edition is available in David Bevington’s anthology Medieval Drama (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975). 11 On the implications of names and the French source play, see Howard B. Norland, ‘Formalizing English Farce: Johan Johan and its French Connection’, Comparative Drama 17.2 (1983), 141–52; and Anne B. Coldiron, English Printing, Verse Translation, and the Battle of the Sexes, 1476–1557 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), esp. 188–91. For the connotations of the nickname Tyb, see ‘Tib, n.1.’ OED Online, https://www.oed. com/view/Entry/201694. 12 For a discussion of John Rastell’s connections to both court entertainments and an early professional London stage, see Janette Dillon, ‘John Rastell’s Stage’, Medieval English Theatre 18 (1996), 15–45. Other plays printed by the Rastells (father and son) that seem to have originated with performances at court or in great halls include Henry Medwall, Fulgens and Lucres (London, 1512/16; STC 17778); John Skelton, Magnificence (London, 1530?; STC 22607); and Old Christmas (London, 1533; STC 18793.5). 13 Tom Tyler and His Wife (London, 1661; Wing T1792) survives in a seventeenth-century edition that identifies it as approximately a hundred years old; all citations here reference page numbers in this edition. Reprints by the same publisher of other early plays are essentially type facsimiles of sixteenthcentury editions, so there is no reason to believe Tom Tyler isn’t a Tudor play although it is difficult to tell if it dates to the reign of Mary I or Elizabeth I. Interestingly, John Fletcher’s The Woman’s Prize, or The Tamer Tamed references this play when a country wife calls a group of outraged men ‘Tom Tylers’ (2.5.96), suggesting that the earlier play – or at least its title character – was still familiar to theatre-goers in the seventeenth century.

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14 See Simon Shepherd, ‘What’s So Funny About Ladies’ Tailors? A Survey of Some Male (Homo)Sexual Types in the Renaissance’, Textual Practice 6.1 (2008), 17–30. 15 The first quarto of The Taming of a Shrew was printed in 1594 (STC 23667), and arguments about dating Shakespeare’s play hinge on whether one sees A Shrew as a source for The Shrew or vice versa. Whether one believes Shakespeare wrote a shrew play in the early 1590s, it seems likely that A Shrew survives in a 1590s edition while The Shrew records a later text. For an overview of questions about dating of The Shrew that thoughtfully considers whether it makes sense to link Shakespeare’s play as printed in the 1623 first folio to a single early composition or performance date, see James Marino, ‘The Anachronistic Shrews’, Shakespeare Quarterly 60.1 (2009), 25–46. That being said, the dating of A Shrew does not change the larger point of this essay. If A Shrew was earlier, Shakespeare’s play deviated from its representation of men just as it did from traditions established by other shrew texts. If A Shrew was later, it could be seen as a response to Shakespeare’s play that hearkened back to (and perhaps tried to re-establish) longstanding shrew-text conventions. 16 All references for A Shrew cite The Taming of a Shrew, ed. Stephen Roy Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 17 Barbara Hodgdon, ed., The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare, Arden Third Series (London: Arden/Bloomsbury, 2010). Induction 1.44–60. All subsequent references to the play are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically. 18 John Fletcher’s play is normally dated to 1609/10 although the text didn’t appear in print until the Beaumont and Fletcher first folio was published in 1647 (Wing B1581). All references here cite Lucy Munro’s edition, published with the title The Tamer Tamed (London: Methuen/New Mermaids, 2010). 19 Discussions of class in The Taming of the Shrew are less common than studies focused on gender; insightful examples include Sonya L. Brockman, ‘Tranio Transformed: Social Anxieties and Social Metamorphosis in The Taming of the Shrew’, Journal of Early Modern Studies 4 (2015), 213–30; and Thomas Moisan, ‘ “Knock Me Here Soundly”: Comic Misprision

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and Class Consciousness in Shakespeare’, Shakespeare Quarterly 42.3 (1991), 276–90. 20 For an overview of querelle des femmes debates in England and elsewhere, see Julie D. Campbell, ‘The Querelle des Femmes’ in The Ashgate Research Companion to Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, ed. Allyson Poska, Jane Couchman and Katherine McIver (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 361–79. 21 Now classic feminist articles discussing this play include Coppelia Kahn, ‘The Taming of the Shrew: Shakespeare’s Mirror of Marriage’, Modern Language Studies 5.1 (1975), 88–102; and Margaret Loftus Ranald, ‘The Performance of Feminism in The Taming of the Shrew’, Theatre Research International 19.3 (1994), 214–25. See for an example of a ‘happy marriage’ argument David Daniell, ‘The Good Marriage of Katherine and Petruchio’, Shakespeare Survey 37 (1984), 23–32. Frances E. Dolan Marriage and Violence: The Early Modern Legacy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), especially Chapter 3, ‘Fighting for the Breeches, Sharing the Rod’ (97–131) discusses Taming of the Shrew as a text that still resonates with contemporary advice about how to achieve a healthy, functional marriage.

2 Homeschooling the Girl Stomach David B. Goldstein

Throughout his career Shakespeare remained fascinated by a type of performance filled with dramatic potential: the scene of the dining table, where complex verbal interactions unfold over the mundane violence of consuming another species (or, in the case of Titus Andronicus, one’s own species).1 The theatrical and environmental possibilities of this tension between eating and speaking had been anticipated and explored by preReformation humanist writers, for whom the domestic table formed a key locus of theatre, edification, and œconomia.2 Shakespeare was captivated by the humanist meal, as epitomized by the writings of Erasmus, Rabelais and Sir Thomas More, among many others. Banquets and other scenes of food sharing appear or are discussed in play after play, nearly always framed by humanist expectations of conviviality and moderation. From A Comedy of Errors, which ends with the promise of a ‘gossip’s feast’ to bring the estranged parties into household harmony; to Henry IV Part 1, whose tavern scenes develop an intimate relationship between Hal and the English subjects over whom he will soon rule; to Coriolanus, whose plot turns on an 36

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invitation to a meal with the title character’s arch-enemy, Aufidius; to The Tempest, which uses an illusory banquet to transform family power dynamics; Shakespeare’s plays return to acts of food sharing in order to underscore key points of ethical resonance.3 Whereas modern considerations of banqueting often consider its spectacular and civic elements, thus setting the practice apart from more quotidian acts of domestic eating, Shakespeare consistently views banqueting as part of a continuum defined and framed by the household. Shakespeare’s grandest and most flamboyant banquets  – Act 5 of Titus Andronicus, Act 3 of Macbeth, Act 1 of Timon of Athens  – all take place within a domestic framework, even if they include political guests and concerns.4 Shakespeare understood that ‘meals’, in Michel Jeanneret’s beautiful phrasing, ‘establish a confraternity of speech, manners and thoughts’.5 Taking as he usually does a sceptical view of humanist practice, however, Shakespeare stages these meals in ways that emphasize fragmentation, challenge, and downright violence.6 He focuses largely upon what he calls, in Henry VIII , the ‘broken banquet’ – the convivium interrupted by some event or uninvited guest, or, more philosophically, the banquet whose communitarian underpinnings are themselves broken or called into question. Placing the banquets of Shakespeare and Middleton’s Timon of Athens in the historical context of humanist and monastic ideals of convivial food sharing, Douglas Lanier argues that Shakespeare is consistently drawn to the ways in which food exacerbates divisions rather than healing them. These failed scenarios of edible edification ‘register how fully humanist convivial ideals have been violated and how powerfully many early modern English people longed to restore the banquet to its function as a mechanism for social order’.7 Lanier describes Shakespeare’s cynical attitude toward food sharing in that play as a marker of ‘The souring of faith in humanist idealism in the late sixteenth century’.8 As Lanier reminds us, Shakespeare’s attentiveness to how humanism shapes the table dates back much earlier. The first of Shakespeare’s broken banquets, he notes, appears in The Taming

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of the Shrew.9 And the play contains not one, but, depending on how they are counted, between five and seven meals that act in some way, often metaphorical, as broken domestic banquets – the most of any in Shakespeare. There are so many disrupted or failed meals – or more accurately, interrogations of the form of meals through disruption – that they function as a key leitmotif in the play, and one that has not been fully addressed by critics. What function does this investigation of meals interrupted, broken and challenged, in both literal and symbolic ways, serve? Building upon Lanier’s insights, this essay will analyse the play’s scenes of food sharing  – or, more accurately, food withholding – in relation to the humanist context in which the play situates itself. Other critics have recognized the importance of food in the play. Jan Purnis, for example, views food from the perspective of the stomach, which acts in the play as ‘a central site through which hierarchies of power, particularly in the realm of gender, are established and reproduced’.10 But critics have yet to fully articulate how food functions as meals: i.e. as demonstrations of human relationality and connectivity. I argue that Shakespeare uses the broken banquet to illustrate the ways in which human behaviour pressures humanist idealism. In a play that mounts a critique of humanism throughout, meals function as an especially pointed challenge to the colloquial sensibility of Erasmus and his peers.11 In particular, the play’s meals question the ubiquitous use of the table in humanist discourse as a site of pedagogy.12 These overlapping concerns, explored through the performative culture of the table, reveal an ethical imperative. In The Taming of the Shrew, food is used as a tool for teaching, but Shakespeare’s approach to table-teaching differs sharply from those of his pre-Reformation predecessors in three significant respects. First, the humanists mostly identify the pedagogical subject as male, whereas Shakespeare’s play concerns itself with the teaching of girls and, in Taming of the Shrew, one whose rejection of patriarchal conventions of obedience is centrally at issue in the play.13 Second, the humanists stress moderation and balance at table, both in the consumption of

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food and in the production of conversation. Shakespeare’s Petruccio, by contrast, aggressively pursues a strategy of domination and control over both food and speech. Third, the humanists emphasize conviviality and connection as the ultimate goal of table-teaching. In strategically addressing what Julia Reinhard Lupton terms the ‘culinary humanism’ of preReformation Catholic writers, Shakespeare turns the table into a site of conflict that challenges us to articulate the importance of commensality, or the act of eating together, in civilized society.14 The play demonstrates the imperative of considering conviviality – the encouragement of positive human connection through commensality – as a chief element of civilized behaviour. To treat another individual badly at table, especially one who is vulnerable or lacking in power or status, is to court inhumanity. The development of a gastro-pedagogy that facilitates knowledge of the world and that displays love and care for the other is a crucial ingredient in the growth of a child into an adult capable of fostering meaningful relationships. This thesis may seem counterintuitive. After all, The Taming of the Shrew appears to offer us a narrative in which a girl who refuses appropriate social behaviour is converted into one who enunciates a normative (Tudor) ideal of marital relations, precisely through the rejection of humanist table pedagogy. To read the narrative arc of the play in this way is to accept Petruccio’s view as synonymous with Shakespeare’s. While allowing for the ambivalences and ambiguities that keep Shrew trans-historically interesting, I suggest that the play’s depiction of Petruccio’s anti-humanist culinary training of Katherina invites us to examine our own ways of thinking through meals and the values they teach, both to our children and for ourselves.

Pedagogies of the humanist banquet European treatises concerning table manners date back at least to the twelfth century; the humanist innovation upon them was to use dining etiquette as an explicit device for the teaching

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of children. Table manners have obvious pedagogical value since, as Daniela Romagnoli puts it, they are ‘underpinned by two concerns: the control of the body and its gestures, and the bridling of the soul and its motions’.15 While on the surface etiquette treatises seem a simple list of dos and don’ts, the policing of manners always points toward ideologies of ethical governance. For Anna Bryson, these treatises’ emphasis on ‘the formal dinner as the central ritual of the household  . . . dramatized both its internal hierarchy and its relation to the outside world in the provision of hospitality’.16 If ethics is the way in which we govern ourselves with respect to others, then our behaviour at table is a chief material demonstration of how capable we are of shaping our bodies and words toward and in relation to the needs of our fellows. Erasmus’ De civilitate morum puerilium (1530), Englished twice in the sixteenth century, constitutes a significant step in this ethical inculcation, as well as in what Norbert Elias calls ‘the civilizing process’.17 Rules for table etiquette take up the plurality of the instruction in this manual, which was used as a school textbook in England and on the continent for centuries after its first publication. The attention to dining is by no means true of all such manuals – for example, the 1477 Book of Curtesye devotes only a few stanzas to behaviour at table. Commentators, including Elias, tend to emphasize Erasmus’ admonitions about proper hygiene, such as relieving oneself before taking one’s seat, and refraining from licking one’s fingers. But the bulk of Erasmus’ concerns constellate around the question of how children can facilitate an atmosphere of warmth, humility, and camaraderie in dining. He exhorts his young charges (in Thomas Paynell’s 1560 translation, poetically titled The Ciuilitie of Childehode): To bee ioyfull and mery at the table. AND wiping thy handes, caste by and by away all molestiousnes [maliciousness] and heauinesse that thou hast in thy hearte, for thou muste not bee heauie at the Table, nor make none other man sad nor heauie.18

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Erasmus repeats the importance of good cheer several times throughout the manual, suggesting that, for him, civility is not merely or at least not primarily a matter of inculcating discipline. According to Erasmus, discipline holds little intrinsic meaning if it does not contribute to what Paynell translates as ‘honeste gesture in eatynge’, the forthright and celebratory inclination of word and body.19 Indeed, Erasmus speaks most sternly when he refers to ‘They that constrayne the child to endure and suffer hunger’, or those parents who withhold food as a means to discipline. ‘Truely’, he writes, ‘after my opinion and mynde thei are foolishe’, for such behaviour ‘doth weaken the force of the litle child’.20 Social eating should offer an occasion for joy, and the ultimate goal of viewing the table as a site of theatrical pedagogy is to train young boys in how to gain access to that joy without stepping over the delicate boundary into excess. In all of these precepts, Erasmus anticipates Rabelais’s wellknown passage in Gargantua and Pantagruel on the tableteachings of Gargantua’s humanist tutor Ponocrates, published in 1535. Ponocrates skilfully manages Gargantua’s appetite, not by limiting his prodigious food intake or by exerting control over him, but by redirecting his energies into conversation and a balance of various table behaviours. Dinner involves not just hearty eating, but also discourse ‘of the qualities, properties, efficacy and nature of all the things that had been served up at table.’21 Dessert fuses scholarly learning, fine food and training in table manners: ‘Afterwards they would discuss the lessons read that morning, finishing off their meal with some quince jelly, picking their teeth with a sliver of mastic-wood, washing their hands and eyes in clear fresh water and rendering thanks to God.’22 Under Ponocrates’ tutelage, Gargantua develops into a true culinary humanist, exhibiting proper behaviour, engaging in conversation both high and low, and eating for both moderation and enjoyment, as appropriate: ‘whilst his dinners were sober and frugal, since he ate no more than was necessary to stop his stomach from barking, his suppers were copious and generous, for he took as much as was needed to nourish and

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sustain him.’23 For Rabelais, at least in the opening books of Gargantua and Pantagruel, dining constitutes a chief way of arriving at humanist ethical ideals: ‘on the one hand’, as Jeanneret puts it, ‘the exuberance of conviviality and the consumption of natural produce being set above all else, and on the other the moderation of right-thinking people and gluttony on trial.’24 In his 1516 Utopia, Sir Thomas More is likewise preoccupied with the integration of sober and joyful eating and good conversation, but unlike his predecessors he excludes children from this network of conviviality. The resulting picture of adolescent dining is surprisingly bleak. In Utopia, amonge the nourceis, syt all the chyldren that be vnder the age of v. yeares. All the other children of both kyndes, aswell boyes as gyrles that be vuder the age of marryage doo other serue at the tables, or els if they be to yonge therto, yet they stande by with meruelous silence. That whiche is geuen to them from the table they eate, and other seuerall dynner tyme they haue none.25 Throughout the narrative, More opines frequently, in language mostly lifted from Plato’s Gorgias, about the dangers of gluttony and of mistaking eating for real pleasure. How children are supposed to learn the table cheer of adulthood if they spend every meal of their unmarried lives standing in silence and eating only what adults remember to feed them is left unaddressed.

Banqueting in The Taming of the Shrew Ever a careful, if deeply sceptical, reader of humanist philosophy, Shakespeare takes up the question of children at the table nearly a century later. The Taming of the Shrew – which is after all set in Padua, one of the seats of Italian humanism, and whose connection to humanist culture has been extensively

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adumbrated – follows the humanists in considering the domestic table as a chief scene, and perhaps the chief scene, of theatrical pedagogy.26 Whether or not he had Erasmus, Rabelais, or More in mind when he wrote The Taming of the Shrew, the dynamics of the table in the play pivot around questions of pedagogy, silence, control, and proper behaviour. The fact that Katherina, under an even more severe pedagogical regime than that of More’s Utopians, manages to transform herself into a figure of formidable grace and eloquence, is an impressive act of culinary humanism in its own right. The first banquet in The Taming of the Shrew is in a sense the most symbolically instructive, because in it the interloper – the figure or event who breaks the scene – is the play itself. The conceit of the Induction to The Taming of the Shrew is that Sly, plied in jest with ‘a most delicious banquet’ (Induction 1.38), will behold the play as an entertainment to accompany his ‘lunatic’ experience (Ind. 1.62).27 The play begins as an integrative element of Sly’s ‘flattering dream’ (Ind. 1.43) but ends up breaking and superseding its original frame, which is forgotten by the play’s end. Sly’s interlude provides the play with a model of the banquet whose fictions are disrupted by events that occur within it. The importance of this initial banquet is underlined by the fact that the opening moments of the Induction echo one of the major genres of culinary humanism, the macaronic text, which as critics have noted is not only named for a foodstuff but often uses food as a vehicle for its satirical experiments.28 Sly’s opening speech, ‘we came in with Richard Conqueror: therefore poucas pallabris, let the world slide. Sessa!’ (Ind.1.4–5) draws from English, Spanish, and French, while directing our attention to the originary moment of English macaronics, the Norman invasion of 1066 (Sly’s error of Richard for William compounds the carnivalesque lexical mixing upon which his speech reflects).29 Shakespeare develops the implications of macaronic language by famously mixing the teaching of humanist subjects with the communication of desire when two of Bianca’s suitors disguise themselves as tutors to woo her.30 In order to express

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their intentions, both engage in macaronic feats of their own, mixing Latin and musical notation with English protestations of love in a kind of stew of linguistic eroticism. The prevalence and foregrounding of macaronic language deliver a rhetorical counterpoint to the material scene of the table. Verbally and physically, food is activated as a locus for pedagogical negotiation and struggle. If Bianca’s suitors, Hortensio and Lucentio, use grammar and music as a cover for erotic pedagogy, Petruccio uses both macaronic language and actual food as a cover for the teaching of obedience. In both cases, humanist teaching is being consciously and strategically perverted. Lucentio’s translation of Ovid’s Heroides for Bianca essentially turns the text into the Ars Amatoria.31 As Deanne Williams argues, Hortensio’s attempt to woo Bianca through lute instruction attempts to resolve that instrument’s stereotypical bifurcation between ‘ideals of feminine gentility and decorum’ and ‘seduction’ in favour of the latter.32 Petruccio proceeds along similar but far more brutal lines. His linguistic acrobatics are designed not to substitute one meaning for another, as Lucentio and Hortensio intend with Bianca, but to render meaning secondary to the naked assertion of power.33 The pedagogical message of insisting that the sun is the moon, or that an old man is a young woman, is simply that the sense of the speech is subsidiary to the status of the person speaking. The chaotic quality of the language indicates that it is a purely perlocutionary speech act – it conveys not meaning but force.34 The second broken banquet is a symbolic one, and illustrates the way in which Petruccio substitutes physical and verbal force for dialogical rhetorical engagement: his rejection of the wine shared at the wedding celebration, which Linda Boose aptly describes as a ‘bridal Communion’ interrupted by an ‘anti-communal’ act.35 What begins as a verbal eruption  – cursing when asked if he will take Katherina for his wife – ends as a culinary one, when Petruccio swigs the communion wine as if ‘carousing to his mates / After a storm’ (3.2.170–1) and then throws the dregs in the sexton’s face. This breach of decorum, in which the groom treats the sacred heterosocial

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commensality of the wedding cup as if it were a scene of secular, violent homosocial bonding, distantly echoes what Lanier refers to as the primal scene of the broken banquet, the sudden entrance of the drunken Alcibiades into Plato’s Symposium.36 In this case, however, the banquet is broken by the guest of honour himself. As with the play that interrupts Sly’s fooleries, the wedding ceremony is broken from within rather than from without. An analogous dynamic occurs immediately after the ceremony, at the third broken banquet; namely, Kate’s wedding banquet, which is broken not by the arrival of an unexpected guest, but by the departure of the expected ones: the bride and groom, without whom the banquet becomes a hollow celebration, somewhat like the ‘worthless fancy’ presented to Sly (Ind. 1.43). Petruccio, entering after the chaotic wedding ceremony, announces: I know you think to dine with me today And have prepared great store of wedding cheer, But so it is my haste doth call me hence And therefore here I mean to take my leave. (3.2.184–7) Petruccio’s refusal to engage in the expected commensality of the wedding celebration builds to a contest of wills between himself and Katherina, culminating in what Natasha Korda calls Petruccio’s ‘blunt assertion of property rights over Kate’: ‘She is my goods, my chattels; she is my house, / My householdstuff’ (3.2.231–2).37 The scene ends with Baptista awkwardly assuring the remaining guests that ‘there wants no junkets at the feast’ – the banquet is still a banquet, with sweetmeats to spare, even if the guests of honour will be replaced by Lucentio and Bianca (3.2.249–51). The broken banquet becomes a scene, not of conviviality, but of the naked expression of patriarchal and capitalist power. As the play progresses, the tension between conviviality and patriarchal dominance becomes increasingly uncomfortable,

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devolving into an elaborate justification for starvation. In the fourth and most discussed meal, Act 4, Scene 1, Petruccio begins in earnest his disciplinary regimen by offering meat to Katherina and then sending it away with the dismissive comment that ‘’twas burnt and dried away’, and thus that neither Petruccio nor Katherina, both apparently choleric, should touch it (4.1.159). In the scene that immediately follows, the fifth and perhaps most brutal meal takes place, or rather begins and then is promptly cancelled: in Act 4, Scene 3, Grumio teases her with a series of choleric foods – a neat’s foot, a piece of tripe, and finally a cut of beef with mustard. When she begs for them, he refuses her by saying, ‘I fear ’tis choleric’ (4.3.23). Even the critical adage that Grumio’s withholding of meat and mustard has a sound, if manipulative, ideological basis in humoral theory does not hold up under scrutiny. None other an authority than Galen had held that: A Chollerick man is oftner hurt by much fasting and much drinking than by much eating, for much fasting weakens Nature in such people, and fills the Body full of Chollerick Humors, breedeth adult Humors, let such eat meats haard of Digestion, as Beef, Pork, &c. and leave Danties for weaker Stomachs.38 Eating choleric foods may be dangerous for the choleric individual, acknowledges Galen, but not eating at all is even worse. To treat a meal as an occasion for withholding food has neither a medical nor a pedagogical justification. Its only rationale is power. Immediately following Grumio’s taunt, Petruccio enters and appears to invite Katherina to a proper meal, this time with an invited guest, Bianca’s suitor Hortensio. (Whether this constitutes a separate meal from Grumio and Katherina’s interaction is up to directors to decide.) Petruccio then urges Hortensio to ‘Eat it up all’ (4.3.52) so that Katherina, already prevented from eating for a day, will get none of it. As with his attitudes toward symbolic and actual acts of commensality,

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Petruccio’s approach to Katherina’s appetite is, as we are seeing, pointedly about control. What is most striking about it, though, is its complete rejection of all but the bare frame of humanist culinary pedagogy. First and most clearly, in employing the strategy of famishing that Erasmus views as antithetical to the civility of childhood, Petruccio replaces a model of balance and good cheer with one of domination and linguistic antagonism. He not only withholds food but does so sadistically, feeding Katherina ‘with the very name of meat’ (4.3.32), in a cruel twist on the humanist idea that books are metaphorical meals to be chewed and digested. In this play, words are all Katherina has left to dine upon, and even the words are scrawny, perverse little scraps. The second time he brings food to the table, Petruccio pretends to want to draw out Katherina’s speech, but his only interest is a bare word of gratitude: ‘The poorest service is repaid with thanks, / And so shall mine before you touch the meat’ (4.3.47–8). Here again, Petruccio’s approach to language  – the meaning is the menace  – parallels the performative quality of food in the play. Food is marshalled neither for nourishment nor for the cementing of social bonds, but for the establishment of hierarchy and dominance. Throughout Taming of the Shrew, food is weaponized.

The burden of the table If Petruccio’s culinary pedagogy is avowedly an anti-humanist one, this is partly because he himself seems impervious to the charms and obligations of humanist conviviality. He betrays the fundamental laws of hospitality by refusing to stay for the marriage banquet after his wedding, then acts like a boor at his own table, yelling ‘Food, food, food, food!’39 as soon as he sits down. When he returns for another banquet at his father-inlaw’s house, given the opportunity to ‘sit to chat as well as eat’ (5.2.11) in accord both with humanist and human tenets, he complains with churlish abruptness, ‘Nothing but sit and sit, and eat and eat’ (5.2.12). Most of these reactions are gratuitous, in

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the sense that Petruccio does not stop at depriving Katherina of meals but takes the further unnecessary step of spurning the hospitable codes of those meals. As Lupton argues of this scene, Petruccio’s outburst ‘establishes himself as hostile to the kinds of discourse associated with dessert and with humanist conviviality more generally’.40 The Taming of the Shrew thus reveals itself a battleground of not only sex but also pedagogy  – between a pedagogy that encourages engagement and connection, and one that exacts an obedience cleaved from reason. Clearly, Petruccio’s approach to culinary discipline departs sharply from those of Erasmus and Rabelais. But it is, perhaps alarmingly, not so far removed from More’s Utopian vision of silent children lined up behind their betters, never to utter a sound. In reminding us indirectly of More’s own difficulties in imagining a positive gastro-pedagogy, Shakespeare simultaneously demonstrates a profound sympathy with humanist models of commensality, and also questions their internal coherence. The transition from child to marriageable adult, replete with pedagogical pitfalls in every generation, is very much at issue both in Utopia and in Taming of the Shrew, where females are both girls and women, and where the boundaries between the pedagogy of schoolroom and bedroom are literally and figuratively erased. Food in the play carries meaning both as a vehicle of infantile nourishment and as a metaphor for erotic desire. For Petruccio, the one informs and brings into being the other along a gradient of sovereignty, both parental and conjugal. As critics have noted, it is marvellous that, denied the opportunity for a convivial humanist pedagogy, Katherina emerges finally as its master. In the final scene of the play, stage directions indicate that a last banquet is brought in, although no dialogue suggests whether anyone is eating, as if the food that has been withheld from Katherina throughout the play is now being withheld even from the audience. In this setting, Katherina gives her (in)famous speech about wifely duty. Her oration to the assembled company, with its various opportunities for interpretation – its outward subservience perhaps masking a subtle web of resistances – not only epitomizes the humanist

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ideal of moral colloquy, but even indexes humanist texts in a way that leaves them available for alternative use. If, as Katherina declaims, ‘Such duty as the subject owes the prince, / Even such a woman oweth to her husband’ (5.2.161–2), then the play’s context puts us in mind of the humanist notion that a chief duty of the courtier is not just to obey but to advise. The play ends without resolving the tension of what education is supposed to do – whether it is to make obedient children into obedient wives and subjects, or to produce a riskier, more dangerous, and potentially more satisfying sort of citizen: the kind that can think for itself. Further and perhaps more troubling, the play refuses to resolve the question of the morality of humanist pedagogy. Petruccio’s rejection of Erasmus and Rabelais occurs, to an extent, under the sign of Thomas More. And it is to the point that in the scene where Petruccio exacts thanks from Katherina, there is an invited guest at the table – Hortensio, suitor to Bianca and scion of humanist Padua. While Hortensio exhibits evident discomfort at Petruccio’s treatment of Kate throughout the scene, he declines to stop it. By the end of the meal, he has in fact been pressed into service as one of Katherina’s torturers, since Petruccio exhorts him to ‘Eat it up all’ and so deny any of it to her. Whether Hortensio obeys the laws of hospitality and friendship and acquiesces to his friend, or obeys the laws of commensality and human decency and shares the meat with Katherina, is for each director to decide. The fact that such a choice is forced upon him is indicative of just how discomfiting is this tart comfit of a play.

Notes 1

For more on this mundane violence, see David B. Goldstein, Eating and Ethics in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), Part 1. Some of the arguments presented here are expansions of ideas developed in that work. Early versions of this essay were presented at the Shakespeare Association of America and Canadian Society for

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Renaissance Studies Conferences in 2017; my thanks go to the organizers, participants, and audiences of those venues. I am also grateful to my team members in ‘Before “Farm to Table”: Early Modern Foodways and Cultures’, the inaugural collaborative research project of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Folger Shakespeare Library, for helping shape these ideas through hospitable conversation. 2

On the term ‘œconomia’ and its importance to the early modern household, see especially Natasha Korda, Shakespeare’s Domestic Economies: Gender and Property in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002); Lena Cowen Orlin, Private Matters and Public Culture in Post-Reformation England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). In relation to The Taming of the Shrew, see the essay by Romola Nuttall in the current volume.

3

On The Comedy of Errors, see Joseph Candido, ‘Dining out in Ephesus: Food in The Comedy of Errors’ in The Comedy of Errors: Critical Essays, ed. Robert S. Miola (New York: Garland, 1997), 199–225. On Hal’s drinking practices, see Peter A. Parolin, ‘ “The Poor Creature Small Beer”: Princely Autonomy and Subjection in 2 Henry IV’, in Culinary Shakespeare: Staging Food and Drink in Early Modern England, ed. David B. Goldstein and Amy L. Tigner (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2016), 21–39. On The Tempest, see e.g. Wendy Wall, David B. Goldstein, and Amy L. Tigner, ‘Introduction’, in Culinary Shakespeare: Staging Food and Drink in Early Modern England, ed. David B. Goldstein and Amy L Tigner (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2016), 1. More generally, on banqueting in early modern English drama, see Chris Meads, Banquets Set Forth: Banqueting in English Renaissance Drama (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2001); Diane Purkiss, ‘The Masque of Food: Staging and Banqueting in Shakespeare’s England’, Shakespeare Studies 42 (2014), 91–105. On the importance of food sharing in early modern English literature, see Goldstein, Eating.

4

Among the many important discussions of these scenes, see e.g., respectively, William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, ed. Jonathan Bate, Arden Third Series (London: Routledge, 1995), Introduction; James A. W. Heffernan, Hospitality and Treachery

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in Western Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 136–40; Daniel W. Ross, ‘ “What a Number of Men Eats Timon”: Consumption in Timon of Athens’, Iowa State Journal of Research 59.3 (1985), 273–84. 5

Michel Jeanneret, A Feast of Words: Banquet and Table Talk in the Renaissance, trans. Jeremy Whiteley and Emma Hughes (Chicago and Cambridge: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 28.

6

On Shakespeare’s typically sceptical approach to humanism, see especially Graham Bradshaw, Shakespeare’s Scepticism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987); William M. Hamlin, Tragedy and Scepticism in Shakespeare’s England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Lars Engle, ‘Sovereign Cruelty in Montaigne and King Lear’, Shakespearean International Yearbook 6 (2006), 119–39; David Hillman, Shakespeare’s Entrails: Belief, Scepticism, and the Interior of the Body (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

7

Douglas Lanier, ‘Cynical Dining in Timon of Athens’ in Culinary Shakespeare: Staging Food and Drink in Early Modern England, ed. David B. Goldstein and Amy L. Tigner (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2016), 142.

8

Ibid., 155.

9

Ibid., 141.

10 Jan Purnis, ‘The Gendered Stomach in The Taming of the Shrew’ in Gender and Power in Shrew-Taming Narratives, 1500–1700, ed. David Wootton and Graham Holderness (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2010), 185, https://doi. org/10.1057/9780230277489_11. See also Paster, who approaches food and diet in the play from a humoral perspective; Boose, who discusses the role of the tongue; Martin, whose interest in the humanist banquet is metaphorical and neo-Platonic; Korda, who considers food from within a capitalist framework of consumption; and Orlin, for whom food operates as one of a number of material objects in a play crowded with them. Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2004), 130–4; Lynda E. Boose, ‘Scolding Brides and Bridling Scolds: Taming the Woman’s Unruly Member’, Shakespeare Quarterly 42.2 (1991), 179–213, https://doi.org/10.2307/

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2870547; Randall Martin, ‘Kates for the Table and Kates of the Mind: A Social Metaphor in The Taming of the Shrew’, ESC: English Studies in Canada 17.1 (1991), 1–20, https://doi. org/10.1353/esc.1991.0037; Natasha Korda, ‘Household Kates: Domesticating Commodities in The Taming of the Shrew’, Shakespeare Quarterly 47.2 (1996), 109–31, https://doi. org/10.2307/2871098; Lena Cowen Orlin, ‘The Performance of Things in “The Taming of the Shrew” ’, The Yearbook of English Studies 23 (1993), 167–88, https://doi.org/10.2307/3507979. 11 Several critics have argued, to my mind unpersuasively, that Petruccio’s methods are both humanist and effective; see Dennis S. Brooks, ‘ “To Show Scorn Her Own Image”: The Varieties of Education in “The Taming of the Shrew” ’, Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 48.1 (1994), 7–32; Helga Ramsey-Kurz, ‘Rising above the Bait: Kate’s Transformation from Bear to Falcon’, English Studies 88.3 (2007), 262–81, https://doi.org/10.1080/00138380701270804; Elizabeth Hutcheon, ‘From Shrew to Subject: Petruchio’s Humanist Education of Katherine in “The Taming of the Shrew” ’, Comparative Drama 45.4 (2011), 315–37. I am more sympathetic to Wayne Rebhorn’s argument that although Petruccio tries to use the kind of rhetoric championed by humanists to seduce and mould Katherina, he fails to do so and instead must ‘bully her into submission’. Katherina’s able use of rhetoric at the end of the play, Rebhorn argues, shows that rhetoric does have value as a tool of resistance. Thus the play functions as a complex critique of rhetorical methods rather than a celebration of them. Humanist table pedagogy features much less emphasis upon authority and control than do the rhetorical manuals that Rebhorn quotes; therefore I find that the play is much more favourable to humanism than Rebhorn allows. But the critique remains intact. For Rebhorn it is a critique of rhetorical tyranny; for me, additionally, of humanist idealism. See Wayne A. Rebhorn, ‘Petruchio’s “Rope Tricks”: “The Taming of the Shrew” and the Renaissance Discourse of Rhetoric’, Modern Philology 92.3 (1995), 316. Holly Crocker is less concerned with humanism or rhetoric per se but arrives at similar conclusions regarding Katherina’s deployment of language to subvert Petruccio’s taming protocols. See Holly A. Crocker, ‘Affective Resistance: Performing Passivity and Playing

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a-Part in “The Taming of the Shrew” ’, Shakespeare Quarterly 54.2 (2003), 142–59. 12 Critics have tended to consider falconry as the central analogy for Petruccio’s brutal methods. While falconry clearly functions as a key pedagogical model in the play, the Shrew’s dynamic and multivalent approaches to the question of education not only allow for but demand a competition and coexistence among models, which are staged in overlapping ways throughout the play. Further, the fact that it is a human and not a nonhuman animal who is ‘tamed’ activates ethical concerns that may be effaced by the falconry model, in which the withholding of food is an integral and uncontroversial aspect of training. That such is not the case for humans is underscored by the conduct manual context that I explore here. On falconry in the play, see especially Edward I. Berry, Shakespeare and the Hunt: A Cultural and Social Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), ch. 4; Sean Benson, ‘ “If I Do Prove Her Haggard”: Shakespeare’s Application of Hawking Tropes to Marriage’, Studies in Philology 103.2 (2006), 186–207. 13 In viewing Katherina as a girl in the pedagogical sense of the term, I follow Deanne Williams, who argues that the term ‘often appears in Shakespeare as a label for a young woman’s independence, willfulness, and resistance’. See Deanne Williams, Shakespeare and the Performance of Girlhood (New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 6. 14 Julia Reinhard Lupton, ‘Room for Dessert: Sugared Shakespeare and the Dramaturgy of Dwelling’ in Culinary Shakespeare, ed. David B. Goldstein and Amy L. Tigner (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2016), 215. 15 Daniela Romagnoli, ‘ “Mind Your Manners”: Etiquette at the Table’ in Food: A Culinary History, ed. Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari, trans. Albert Sonnenfeld (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 328. 16 Anna. Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England (Oxford Studies in Social History) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 27, http://catdir.loc. gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0605/97032460-d.html. 17 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1978), 51.

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18 Desiderius Erasmus, The Ciuilitie of Childehode with the Discipline and Institucion of Children, Distributed in Small and Compe[n]Dious Chapiters, trans. Thomas Paynell (London, 1560), C3v. 19 Ibid., D3r. 20 Ibid., D5v–D6r. 21 François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. M.A. Screech (New York and London: Penguin Classics, 2006), 280. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., 284. 24 Jeanneret, Feast, 87. Most scholars hold that Rabelais’ attitude about the commensal power of food darkens in the later volumes of Gargantua and Pantagruel. For both a critical survey of these positions and a rebuttal of them, see Timothy J. Tomasik, ‘Fishes, Fowl, and La Fleur de Toute Cuysine: Gaster and Gastronomy in Rabelais’s Quart Livre’ in Renaissance Food from Rabelais to Shakespeare, ed. Joan Fitzpatrick (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2010), 25–54. 25 Thomas More, A Fruteful, and Pleasaunt Worke of the Beste State of a Publyque Weale, and of the Newe Yle Called Vtopia, trans. Ralph Robinson, Early English Books, 1475–1640 / 439:03 (London, 1551), Book 2: K1 r–v. 26 Critics have established the influence of Erasmus and other humanists on the play; on Erasmus, see Richard Hosley, ‘Sources and Analogues of The Taming of the Shrew’, Huntington Library Quarterly 20 (1963/4), 299–302; William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew: Texts and Contexts, ed. Frances E. Dolan (New York: Bedford St. Martins, 1996), 184–5. 27 Barbara Hodgdon, ed., The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare, Arden Third Series (London: Arden/Bloomsbury, 2010). Unless otherwise noted, all subsequent references to the play are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically. 28 See e.g. Elena Kostioukovitch, Why Italians Love to Talk about Food: A Journey through Italy’s Great Regional Cuisines, from the Alps to Sicily (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2009), 180–2. On macaronics in early English poetry, see William Otto Wehrle, The Macaronic Hymn Tradition in Medieval English Literature (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America,

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1933), Introduction; Elizabeth Archibald, ‘Macaronic Poetry’ in A Companion to Medieval Poetry, ed. Corinne J. Saunders (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). On the pedagogical implications of language-mixing in the period, see Joyce Boro, ‘Multilingualism, Romance, and Language Pedagogy; or, Why Were So Many Sentimental Romances Printed as Polyglot Texts?’ in Tudor Translation, ed. Fred Schurink (Early Modern Literature in History) (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2011), 18–38, https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230361102_2. 29 This passage is more frequently read in terms of Shakespeare’s personal and theatrical history; see Hodgdon, Taming, 1–2. 30 See e.g. Lynn Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), ch. 4; Heather James, ‘Shakespeare’s Learned Heroines in Ovid’s Classroom’ in Shakespeare and the Classics, ed. Charles. Martindale and A. B. Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 66–85. 31 Patricia B. Phillippy, ‘ “Loytering in Love”: Ovid’s “Heroides”, Hospitality, and Humanist Education in “The Taming of the Shrew” ’, Criticism 40.1 (19980101), 27–53. 32 Williams, Girlhood, 39, 40. 33 See e.g. Rebhorn, ‘Petruchio’s “Rope Tricks” ’, 295. 34 J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, ed. J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 101. 35 Boose, ‘Scolding Brides’, 193. 36 Lanier, ‘Cynical,’ 141. To be clear, Alcibiades’ entrance does not disrupt a heterosocial commensality, as the whole Symposium is homosocial. But it disrupts a civil banquet with a drunken, if facetious, threat of violence. 37 Korda, ‘Household Kates’, 122. On the ways the invocation of ‘household stuff’ links this scene with Sly’s banquet, see Orlin, ‘The Performance of Things’, 183. 38 Galen’s Art of Physick . . . Translated into English, and Largely Commented on: Together with Convenient Medicines for All Particular Distempers of the Parts, a Description of the Complexions, Their Conditions, and What Diet and Exercise Is Fittest for Them, trans. Nicholas Culpepper (London, 1653),

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F3v. My thanks go to Elisa Tersigni for directing me to this reference. 39 In F1, as in Hodgdon’s edition, the repeated word is ‘soud’, a sort of humming. Here my authority is William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, ed. Stephen Orgel (New York: Penguin, 2000), 4.1.129. Whatever textual evidence may be marshalled for keeping the original orthography, the editorial and performance history overwhelmingly agree upon ‘food’. I am as interested in how Petruccio’s character moves through the Shrew’s critical and theatrical interpreters as I am in Shakespeare’s original language; in this case, at any rate, ‘food’ underscores Petruccio’s behaviour in the rest of the scene and in other parts of the play. For a contrary view, see Richard Levin, ‘Petruchio’s Soud’, Notes and Queries 53.4 (2006), 478–9. 40 Lupton, ‘Room for Dessert’, 215.

3 The Taming of the Shrew Afterlives and Oeconomics Romola Nuttall

Economic contexts inform the construction and performance of social roles, for example those of husband and wife. Here, I revisit the economic context of early modern England to explore how it informs the gendered, marital relationship between Katherina and Petruccio in The Taming of the Shrew. Critical readings, theatrical interpretations, and related early modern texts will be used to confirm both the relationship between economic contexts and social roles, and the importance of analysing performance history alongside critical discourse. This chapter understands an economic context as that which marks a society’s relationship to economic and fiscal factors. Like any social context – i.e. political, religious – an economic context changes over time and so helps to characterize a particular historical moment. For example, the economic context of today is generally termed neo-liberal, and is defined by its tendency towards free-market capitalism and placing financial control with the private sector rather than the state; 57

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this context defines the social factors of our own time from leadership to wealth distribution.1 The economic context in which Shakespeare’s plays were originally produced and performed is typically understood as the period in which feudalism, and the social hierarchy and limited opportunities for wealth generation associated with it, gave way to capitalism.2 A feudal society and economy relies on subordination to landowners while a capitalist economy is based on the ability to generate private wealth and conduct trade independently. These terms reflect the intimate relationship between economic issues and social hierarchy, and therefore the construction and performance of roles within societies, past and present. Bill Alexander’s 1992 production of Taming of the Shrew, for the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), demonstrated the connectivity between social roles and the economic context particular to the late twentieth century. It mapped Petruccio’s marital dominance onto social inequalities engendered by modern capitalist imperatives through the invention of Lord Simon (Anton Lesser), a reconstructed version of the Lord of the Induction who doubled as Petruccio. Lord Simon united the capitalist imperatives of market forces with patriarchal, classbased power. Barbara Hodgdon sees Alexander’s production as a sharp critique of ‘commodity-obsessed upper-class audiences’ for a ‘post-Thatcherite Britain deep in recession’.3 Although commenting on the play in performance, Hodgdon confirms that, in the critical discourse of the 1980s and 1990s, when theoretical analysis was the staple of the critical diet, The Shrew’s original context and overall message became associated with the depiction of a market-driven society, an important point to which my discussion will return. Alexander’s production modernized the language and the setting of the Induction, inviting then-current social preoccupations to be read into the play. The subordinate positions of the peasant-tinker, Christopher Sly (Maxwell Hutcheon), and Lady Sarah Ormsby (Amanda Harris), who doubled as Katherina, were closely intertwined. Sly was found by Simon’s party of ‘Hooray Henrys’ who revealed their snobbery with exclamations

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like, ‘He’s probably working class. He certainly smells like it.’4 He was carried to Simon’s manor house where servants took on the roles of actors. The performance was watched by upper-class guests, who, with the now richly attired Sly, remained onstage throughout. The play-within-the-play was set in early modern dress, clarifying distinctions between the two dramatic worlds, but the back wall’s Tudor panelling complemented both settings, and in the final act ‘actors’ mingled with the ‘guests’. Any sense that the gendered taming story would be left in the relative safety of Sly’s supposed dream was disrupted before the ‘play’ had even begun: As Lord Simon commanded Lady Sarah to instruct his brother Rupert to dress as Sly’s fictional wife, she protested. Simon yelled at her Do it – don’t cross me, and he grabbed her by the hand and forced her to submit . . . Sarah recoiled from Simon with You’re mad, and this anticipated a possible response to Petruchio’s own perversity.5 Simon and Sarah did not share the happy union of Katherina and Petruccio; at the end of the play Sarah refused the proffered hand of her husband and exited alone. The closing freezeframe, which left Sly, returned to his labourer’s boiler suit, exchanging awkward looks with the actors, underlined Alexander’s emphasis on Simon/Petruccio’s dominance and on socio-economic critique. The Taming of the Shrew invites this kind of emphasis through its many references to social inequality, financial gain and value. It is, however, important to note that a modern and contemporary understanding of economy and economics – as represented by Alexander’s production – differs from the early modern understanding of these terms which informed the play in the first place. A modern sense of economy and economics refers to the management of money widely applied to a state or nation. Crucially, in early modern England, economy was generally spelt ‘œconomie’, making clear its derivation from the Greek word oikos, meaning a private household. An early

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modern understanding of œconomie and œconomics, therefore, referred to the management of the household rather than the generation of capital through production, trade and services, which the Greeks called ‘chremastics’ and which we call economics.6 This distinction has significant implications for our understanding of the gendered social roles at work within The Taming of the Shrew. Katherina (in)famously demonstrates her awareness of these traditional social roles in the so-called submission speech, which presents the relationship between husband and wife as that of subject and master, ‘Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper, / Thy head, thy sovereign’.7 The speech describes the provision of the husband and responsive obedience of the wife. This husband is: One that cares for thee And for thy maintenance; commits his body To painful labour 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. (5.2.153–60) Whether or not these lines are taken as an ironic, fauxsubmission on Katherina’s part, they emphasize an essentially ancient, pre-modern model of the marital relationship, reflective of the idea of an oikos from which the word economy derives. The oikos evokes the structure of an ancient household, with the master at the top and other members, from wife, to servants, to goods, defined by their relative positions in that hierarchy. The concept is most fully explained in Xenophon’s Œconomicus, which explains that ‘the wife who is a good partner in the estate carries just as much weight as her husband in attaining prosperity’.8 The treatise was well known in the early modern period; Gentian Hervet’s translation, titled

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Xenophon’s Treatise of Household, was reprinted at least six times between 1532 and 1573.9 Robert Cleaver’s 1598 conduct book on marriage exemplifies the paradigmatic quality of Xenophon’s oikos model. Cleaver writes that the husband should ‘travell abroad to seeke living’ while wives ‘oversee and giue order for all things within the house’.10 According to this model, and its reiterations in Elizabethan conduct literature, it is the husband who engages with the outside world to provide for the wife and the household, and the wife who cares for its management from within. When read against this early modern understanding of œconomie, Katherina’s final speech reflects the household roles of husband and wife given in the Œconomicus, in which husband and wife share responsibility for the successful maintenance of the household. The oikos model clearly persisted into the early modern era. Households of the middling sort as well as the elite were structured accordingly, in a tessellation of wider political structure. Sir Thomas Smith’s well-read De Republica Anglorum, first published in 1583, links the structure of domestic governance to that of the whole kingdom, the household being ‘one of the best kindes of a common wealth  . . . where a few and the best doth governe’.11 Frances E. Dolan, among others, has commented on what she calls the ‘commonplace analogy between the household and the commonwealth’ in early modern England and the ‘reciprocity that ought to exist between rulers and ruled’, a reciprocity which is foregrounded in Shrew by Katherina’s final speech.12 I argue that this linkage stems from the ancient oikos model and demonstrates its continued influence on the economic context of early modern England, and, therefore, on the construction and performance of social roles in that society. Moreover, bringing the oikos model to bear on Shrew’s presentation of ideal marital conduct grants Katherina an important degree of responsibility and agency as the manager of the home. The idea of marriage as a fulfilment of the social function of the oikos is evident throughout the play, but in reflecting an understanding of economy as œconomie rather than chremastics (meaning the production of capital), the Katherina–Petruccio

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relationship replicates the model provided by the oikos. In Katherina’s opening exchange with her father and Gremio, albeit ironically, she alludes to the role of the wife within the oikos. She taunts Gremio with an imagined proposal of her as his wife whose ‘care should be / To comb your noddle with a three-legged stool’ (1.1.63–4). This assertion promises only violence – the line is taken from a proverbial saying in which a noddle is a head and the combing means hitting or thrashing with the stool.13 Nevertheless, it recognizes the wife’s duty of care towards her husband, manifest in her function as the person who has ‘care’ for the household’s management. Katherina may appear to disdain this traditional role, but it is clearly a system of social organization of which she is aware, indicating conceptual closeness between the early modern household and the ancient oikos. Reading Shrew and the marital relationship at its centre as a reflection of the oikos contrasts sharply with interpretations of the play which have privileged its emphasis on material gain but tended to overlook the early modern sense of the word economy. Admittedly, the play appears to prize the capitalist imperative of chremastic wealth accumulation highly, if not higher than the marital happiness of the characters it works to unite. From the negotiation outside Baptista’s house for the, in effect, earning of his daughter Bianca, to the final betting scene in which the value of uxorial obedience is decided by male characters, the play can be said to place monetary worth over more abstract, human values. This emphasis has made the play an object through which certain strands of criticism – particularly examples of the New Historicism and its tributary school, the New Economic Criticism (NEC) – have defined Shakespeare’s England as an era of nascent capitalism characterized by the growth of market economies.14 Such readings, roughly contemporary with Alexander’s 1992 production, provide invaluable new ways of reading the play but, in foregrounding the early modern period as a market society, generate somewhat anachronistic impressions of the economic context which informs the relationship between Katherina and Petruccio.15

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For example, Natasha Korda conducts a compelling reading of Kate as a ‘cate’, a type of cake,16 which began to be ‘bought [by early modern housewives] because they are more delicate or dainty than those made in the home’. Kate’s name takes on a new significance, opening an interpretation of the play which charts the ‘historical shift from domestic use-value production to production for the market’. Korda defines Petruccio as a representative of feudal, ‘land-based values’, who enters the play ready and willing to adapt to the demands of a newly commodity-centric world through consumption of Kate herself (Katherina representing the rising merchant class and growing market economies).17 Karen Newman also reads the play against ‘the social changes for which the period is known’, positing the union of Katherina and Petruccio as one which confirms ‘that marriage is a sexual exchange in which women are exploited for their use-value’.18 Again, the terminology used to critique the play suggests that it documents a period of complete transition from feudalism to capitalism. Lynda E. Boose similarly understands the play as a ‘middle- and lower-class male viewer’s fused fantasies of erotic reward, financial success and upward social mobility’.19 What such readings tend to neglect is the complexity of the early modern economic context, in which aristocratic systems persisted alongside product-based, mercantile structures. Indeed, as work by David Baker reminds us, despite living in a recognizably feudal economic context, medieval and early modern societies had been ‘commercialized for some time, possibly since the twelfth century and the profit motive was more or less constant’.20 This more nuanced picture of economic development, of interaction between feudal and capitalist systems in early modern domestic economies, and the female agency at work within them, can be productively applied to The Taming of the Shrew. The play shows, in fact, that, in spite of the emergence of market-driven economies, the private household remained the dominant unit of production in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and that women played a central role in commercial and domestic production.21

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Seen in this light, the narrative of Shrew reflects an early modern understanding of economy as œconomie still more clearly. The play’s insistence on material gain – the exchange of wives for wealth – can be attributed to the need to sustain the household and so reflects non-financial, more obviously feudal socio-economic systems, as well as the commercial and market-based values associated with the early modern period. The ideal household which Katherina’s final speech conjures is not necessarily a centre of domestic production and consumption, as Korda and others have described it. Certainly, the speech contains monetary and commercial vocabulary, with the husband’s ‘labour’ and the wife’s duty as ‘tribute’, a ‘payment’ of a ‘debt’; however, these terms do not have to indicate only the nascent capitalism of Shakespeare’s England through their apparent reflection of how the market infiltrates the household. The complex nature of Shrew’s economic hinterland can be further realized when comparing the play with its apparently un-Shakespearean cognate, The Taming of a Shrew.22 Despite their closeness in chronology of production, these plays generate very different impressions of husband–wife relationships. Most relevant here is the greater authority that the later Shrew attributes to Katherina in marriage. As noted above, Katherina’s final speech in Shrew defines her husband’s labour as a means to serve her, and her own form of repayment as the desire to ‘serve, love and obey’ (5.2.170). In A Shrew, the equivalent speech is built on theological ideas. After describing ‘the glorious God of heaven’s’ creation of the world, Kate’s speech in A Shrew moves to the creation of man: Then to his image he did make a man, Old Adam, and from his side, asleep, A rib was taken of which the Lord did make The ‘woe of man’ so termed by Adam then ‘Women’ for that; by her came sin to us, And for her sin was Adam doomed to die. (14.130–4)

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A Shrew’s presentation of gender relations as conditioned by Original Sin leaves the female agent irremediably subordinate to the male. The invocation of a domestic economy according to the collaborative marital relationship of the oikos model is completely absent.23 That the word ‘economy’ retained its Greek meaning in early modern England strengthens my alignment of the role which Katherina’s speech, in Shrew, assigns to the wife with the paradigms presented in Xenophon’s Œconomicus. As we have seen, modern-day expressions of economy pertain to what the Greeks called chremastics, which encapsulates production, trade and services. David Hawkes explains that this usage of economy derives from American understandings of the word and refers to ‘a whole system of material activities comprising production, extraction, trade, distribution and services’, while British usage traditionally refers to the ‘management of resources’.24 The British meaning of economy has been somewhat eclipsed by its American counterpart, and the early modern sense of the word economy as œconomie, to which it relates, is almost totally absent from contemporary social and critical discourse.25 For the Greeks, as represented in Xenophon’s treatise, the object of labour was not to make money but to supply the household. Chremastics (the process of exchange, now understood as economics) was a means to an end and considered banusic: banal and base.26 Cleaver’s treatise reflects these ideas, stating that ‘[t]he dutie of the husband is, to get goods: and of the wife to gather and saue them . . . [the] dutie of the husband is, to get money and prouision: and of the wiues, not vainely to spend it.’27 Cleaver’s manual also contains a critique of the ‘street-wife, one that gaddeth up and down’ in contrast to the expectations for those who ‘wee call the Huswife, that is house-wife’, so called because they remain within the home.28 Cleaver’s negative views of the street-wife suggest that Kate’s speech in A Shrew, and the biblical paradigm it references, present a heavily idealized version of marital relationships, removed from the reality of daily life in early modern England.

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Recent work on early modern women exposes the idealized nature of marital relationships as represented in sources like the Shrew plays and Cleaver’s conduct manual; the early modern housewife did, in fact, ‘toil and trouble in the world’ (5.2.172) and often went abroad. Ann C. Christensen, for example, finds ‘ample evidence of women’s power, agency, and authority within the home as well as their mobility outside it, however limited by customary and legal restrictions’.29 Similarly, for David Pennington, the agency of early modern women has, quite ironically, been obscured by ‘[f]eminist interrogations of the household economy [that] have focused on how patriarchal precepts and the legal privileges of husbands entrenched a gendered “dual labour market” which relegated women to unskilled, low paid, or unpaid domestic working roles, thus ensuring the status of male householders’. Pennington gives the example of Shakespeare’s childhood house in Stratford, from which the gloves manufactured by his father were sold to customers from a ground-floor window of the house, and shows that male craftsmen and artisans often assigned the manning of the shop counter to their wives, a division of labour which meant that work on production would not be interrupted by the act of sale.30 Other studies also suggest that commerce and commerciality developed out of the microcosm of the private, industrious household, rather than the other way around.31 Viewed through the framework of an oikos, the language of Katherina’s final speech in Shrew takes on a less mercantile quality. The service wives owe husbands is described as a ‘tribute’, a ‘tax or impost paid by one prince or state to another in acknowledgement of submission or as the price of peace, security, and protection; rent or homage paid in money or an equivalent by a subject to his sovereign or a vassal to his lord’ (OED 1a). The speech then reflects an understanding of social relationships which pre-dates the birth of what is now understood as economy. The word ‘tribute’ here also invites interpretation of payment in forms equivalent to money; it recalls mythological and classical tributes which took a human

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form  – for example, the young Athenians given annually to Mynos of Crete  – and so affirms the speech’s insistence on human relationships and transactions in which the human body is the central object of worth. Katherina’s final speech is one of only a handful of moments in which the play steps back from manufactured objects and instead attributes notions of value to the human body. Here, it is not a fashionable cap that is trodden underfoot, but Katherina’s hand that is offered for Petruccio to tread upon (5.2.183). Of course, her actions come at a price, over 20,000 crowns (5.2.119), but the way the money is treated by Petruccio suggests that it is of little worth compared to Kate’s ‘new-built virtue and obedience’ (5.2.124). For Petruccio, the point of material gain is the sustaining of his household, or oikos, rather than the hoarding of expensive goods in the manner of Vincentio and, to a lesser extent, Gremio, whose goods are itemized earlier in the play (2.1.366–89). Shrew arguably reveals the fallacy of placing value in material worth; it is Gremio and Lucentio, after all, who are ill-served by their wives in Act 5.32 Petruccio cannot be said to disregard money by any means, but his repeated aversions to the trappings of wealth suggest that his interest is with œconomie rather than chremastics. If Petruccio has money, he will be happy  – ‘If wealthily, then happily’ (1.2.75)  – because he will be able to maintain his household and have leisure in which to enjoy it. This distinction helps elucidate the difference between modern usages of economy as chremastics and the early modern œconomie: the management of a household’s resources. Petruccio recalls the husband of Xenophon’s Œconomicus who teaches his wife the true qualities of right and good, and regards her, at times, as his superior in the management of his estate.33 The type of wifely obedience Katherina delivers at the end of Shrew is all the more appropriate when considering the contempt for objects of value displayed by Petruccio, most obviously, when he insults the haberdasher’s cap and the tailor’s gown in Act 4, Scene 3. He has commissioned the manufacture

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of these items in order to refuse and revile them, the point being to show it is ‘the mind that makes the body rich’ (4.3.171). Interestingly, A Shrew’s equivalent of this exchange, Scene 10, ridicules fashionable objects but does not include the educative speech Petruccio gives to Katherina after the tradesmen have departed: What is the jay more precious than the lark Because his feathers are more beautiful? Or is the adder better than the eel Because his painted skin contents the eye? O no, good Kate; neither art thou the worse For this poor furniture and mean array. If thou account’st it shame, lay it on me. (4.3.174–80) The presence of this speech in A Shrew denies the interrogation of material value, focusing instead on the financial deals which surround its protagonists. Shrew, by contrast, directs more attention to the abstract, emotional transactions which occur between Katherina and Petruccio. Interpretations of Shrew which emphasize financial power as Petruccio’s patriarchal power effectively relegate Katherina’s role to that of a subordinate commodity. Equally, reading present-day economy, rather than early modern œconomie, into Shrew – a trait I have located in Alexander’s 1992 production and contemporaneous strands of historicist, feminist criticism – undermines the marital role and wifely authority Katherina assumes at the end of the play. A less anachronistic view of the economic context which informs the Katherina–Petruccio relationship gives women a more industrious role within the household and outside it. The wife, as represented by Katherina, works within a patriarchal structure, but one in which she moves with relative autonomy and whose success depends on her capability. Understanding the similitude between the structure of the oikos and the early modern household is an important step in accurately understanding the economic

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context which informs the construction and presentation of gender roles in early modern literature. I close this essay with reference to another RSC Shrew, directed by Gregory Doran in 2003, which appears to have anticipated recent criticism’s nuanced view of the early modern housewife, and so confirms the value of considering recent performance history alongside scholarly debate. In Doran’s production, ‘Jasper Britton’s Petruchio was a mad drunk, obsessed by his father’s recent death who was effectively “cured” by Alexandra Gilbreath’s sympathetic Kate who glimpsed a figure worthy of redemption.’34 Here, Petruccio needs Katherina as the husband of the Œconomicus needs his wife, not as a commodity, but as an agent who participates in the construction and maintenance of the household, and indeed of Petruccio himself. This interpretation becomes more pointed when considering that Doran’s Shrew played alongside The Woman’s Prize, or the Tamer Tamed (1611), John Fletcher’s sequel to Shrew, with Britton and Gilbreath doubling the central parts. In Fletcher’s play, female agency is unquestionably dominant. For example, Maria, whom the widowed Petruchio marries after Katherina’s death, asserts her authority by refusing to consummate the marriage. Doran’s pairing helps demonstrate the instability of gendered social roles in early modern drama and, by extension, the period’s complex economic context, in which ancient models of social organization persisted alongside a preoccupation with mercantile acquisition and commercial opportunity. The sense of optimism evident in Doran’s Katherina becomes more poignant when looking back on 2003 from the economic context of the time of writing in 2019. In 2007, a global financial crisis ushered in economic uncertainty and austerity. It is perhaps living through this kind of economic flux that has encouraged critics to destabilize received views of early modern economic behaviour and activity. Our economic outlook is still one of uncertainty but the sense of insecurity it generates has, perhaps, contributed to a more nuanced approach to the economic contexts recorded in historic texts,

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like The Taming of the Shrew, and the social roles performed within Shakespearean drama.

Notes 1

The Oxford English Dictionary defines neo-liberalism as including, ‘beside free trade: privatisation, deregulation, competitiveness, social-spending cutbacks and deficit reduction’. Available online: https://www.oed.com/view/ Entry/255925.

2

A useful definition of feudalism is ‘the system of polity which prevailed in Europe during the Middle Ages and which was based on the relation of superior vassal arising out of the holding of lands’. See ‘feudal’ OED 2 b. Available online: https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/69651.

3

Barbara Hodgdon, ed., The Taming of the Shrew (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2010), 116.

4

Margaret Jane Kidnie, The Taming of the Shrew (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 137.

5

Review, Cahiers Élisabéthains, 41.1 (1992), 89–91: 89.

6

For a full discussion of the misapplication of ‘economy’ and ‘economics’ as ‘chremastics’ see David Hawkes, Shakespeare and Economic Theory (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2015), 1–14.

7

Barbara Hodgdon, ed. The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare, Arden Third Series (London: Arden/Bloomsbury, 2010), 5.2.152–3. All subsequent references to the play are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically.

8

Sarah B. Pomeroy, Xenophon, Œconomicus: A Social and Historical Commentary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 121.

9

Pomeroy, Xenophon, 80–81.

10 Robert Cleaver, A godlie forme of householde government (London: Thomas Creede for Thomas Man, 1598) [STC 5383], sig. M4v, M5. 11 Sir Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum (London: James Roberts for Gregorie Seton, 1601) [STC 22857], sig. C3.

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12 Frances E. Dolan, ‘The Subordinate(’s) Plot: Petty Treason and the Forms of Domestic Rebellion’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 43.3 (1992), 317–40: 317; Marriage and Violence: The Early Modern Legacy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 120–27. 13 Hodgdon, Taming, 164. 14 The NEC has made significant contributions to the study of Shakespearean drama by considering the ways his plays reflect early modern economic concerns. For a summary of the approach, see Peter Grav, ‘Taking Stock of Shakespeare and the New Economic Criticism’, Shakespeare 8.1 (2012), 1–111. 15 Ivo Kamps validates my association of these readings with the NEC commenting that, while many critics do not identify themselves as part of the NEC, the approach highlights common socio-economic concerns across variant approaches including ‘new historicist, Marxist, feminist, and cultural materialist tendencies’, in Money and the Age of Shakespeare: Essays in New Economic Criticism, ed. Linda Woodbridge (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), viii. 16 ‘Provisions or victuals bought (as distinguished from, and usually more delicate or dainty than, those of home production); in later use, sometimes merely = victuals, food. Obsolete.’ (OED , 1a). 17 Natasha Korda, ‘Household Kates: Domesticating Commodities in The Taming of the Shrew’, Shakespeare Quarterly 47.2 (1996), 109–31: 110, 120. 18 Karen Newman, Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 43. 19 Lynda E. Boose, ‘The Taming of the Shrew, good husbandry, and enclosure’ in Shakespeare Reread: The Texts in New Contexts, ed. Russ McDonald (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 193–225: 215. 20 David Baker, On Demand: Writing for the Market in Early Modern England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), xv. 21 Indeed, in The Shrew’s Induction, the transformation of a male tapster into a female tavern hostess foregrounds female agency at work in commercial, as well as domestic, early modern economies from the outset of the play.

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22 Twentieth-century editors generally present the text of The Shrew, first printed in the 1623 Folio, as wholly Shakespeare’s and date its composition around 1592. The Taming of a Shrew, first printed in quarto in 1594, is explained as an imitative spin-off designed to capitalize on the theatrical success of Shakespeare’s superior play, which circulated onstage but not in print before 1594. As G.W. Hibbard has stated: ‘The Taming of a Shrew is, most modern critics, though not all, think, a pirated text, put together from memory by an actor, or several actors, who had once taken part in performances of The Taming of the Shrew.’ See his edition of The Shrew (Bristol: Penguin, 1968), 44. Hibbard based his conclusions on previous work by R.B. McKerrow and W.W. Greg which took the presence of the names Sinklo and Soto in the Folio text of The Shrew as evidence of the original foul papers, or authorial manuscript, and signs that the copy from which the text of The Shrew was set came directly from the King’s Men’s store of scripts. Other critics read both Shrew plays as authoritative and legitimately produced. In this theory, The Shrew’s differences from A Shrew are explained as part of the process of commercially driven revision by which popular play-texts were updated to ensure continued audience appeal. For a helpfully neutral summary of these debates see Margaret Jane Kidnie, The Shakespeare Handbooks: The Taming of the Shrew (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 1–4. For a detailed and convincing dismissal of the theory that A Shrew was produced after The Shrew by memorial reconstruction, see James Marino, ‘The Anachronistic Shrews’, Shakespeare Quarterly 60.1 (2009), 25–46. 23 Several editors have highlighted this notion, but with slightly different readings. Ann Thompson notes the theological, homiletic quality of Kate’s lines in A Shrew, Stephen Roy Miller comments on their use of ‘cosmic’, rather than worldly imagery, while Graham Holderness and Bryan Loughrey point out the speech’s reference to Sarah, Abraham’s wife in the Old Testament. See Ann Thompson, ed., The Taming of the Shrew, by William Shakespeare, second edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 159; Stephen Roy Miller, ed., The Taming of a Shrew (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 123; Graham Holderness and Bryan Loughrey, eds, The

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Taming of a Shrew (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 102. 24 John Bohstedt, The Politics of Provisions: Food Riots, Moral Economy and Market Transition in England, c. 1550–1850 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 8. 25 Two rare discussions of Elizabethan economy as œconomie are David Landreth, The Face of Mammon: The Matter of Money in English Renaissance Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) and Stephen Deng, ‘Global OEconomy’, in Global Traffic: Discourses and Practices of Trade in English Literature and Culture from 1550 to 1700, ed. Stephen Deng and Barbara Sebek (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 245–63. 26 Hawkes, Economic Theory, 5. 27 Cleaver, A godlie forme, sig. M4v–M5. 28 Cleaver, A godlie forme, sig. P8v. Another example of early modern women not fulfilling the expectations set out in sources like Cleaver’s manual is found in the public railing contests between fishwives. Participants would scream at each other in verbal boxing matches while spectators placed bets on which woman’s insults would be the most scathing. See Richard Priess, ‘John Taylor, William Fennor, and the “trial of wit” ’, Shakespeare Studies 43 (2015), 50–87: 54. 29 Ann C. Christensen, Separating Spaces (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2017), 28. 30 David Pennington, Going to Market: Women, Trade and Social Relations in Early Modern English Towns, c. 1550–1650 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 7, 44. 31 See for example, Catherine Richardson, Domestic Life and Domestic Tragedy in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006); Natasha Korda, Labours Lost (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); Don Herzog, Household Politics: Conflict in Early Modern England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013); and Matthew Kendrick, At Work in the Early Modern English Theatre: Valuing Labor (Madison and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson Universtiy Press, 2015). 32 In A Shrew the equivalent grooms are similarly disobeyed by their brides; however, the model of wifely obedience with

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which Kate goes onto admonish her sisters is significantly different. 33 Pomeroy, Xenophon, 121. 34 Michael Billington, ‘Best Shakespeare productions: The Taming of the Shrew’, The Guardian, 3 April 2014. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/apr/03/bestshakespeare-productions-taming-of-the-shrew.

PART TWO

Staging Modern Shrews: The Politics of Performance

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4 Sometimes Crossing a Line The Taming of the Shrew in Chicago and Stratford-upon-Avon David Bevington

This essay proposes a line of interpretation that, for my purposes at least, should not be crossed in today’s theatrical world. Many of us in Shakespeare studies find much to admire in the adaptations that are a vital part of today’s world of Shakespearean production. One need only think of such excellent film adaptations as Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing (2012), set in modern-day southern California, or Tom Stoppard and Marc Norman’s Shakespeare in Love (1998) as an adaptation in part of Romeo and Juliet. But is there a point at which adaptation goes too far? Can that over-the-top place be defined? Granted of course that not everyone will agree, I want to argue that there is a line that shouldn’t be crossed. I’d like to talk about a few recent adaptations of The Taming of the 77

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Shrew, a play where the issue of over-adaptation is especially acute, for the obvious reason that the thorny and timely problem of sexual harassment appears to be at stake. Of course, adaptation is right to confront the problem and to explore attitudes and responses that are distinctly relevant to modern audiences. The difficulty, for me at least, occurs when the point of a given production seems to be that of discrediting Shakespeare’s original as fatally and irredeemably flawed, deserving of production only if the modernized version makes clear that the original play needs a massive and invasive surgery that changes its very nature. A denunciatory adaptation can turn a richly lyrical comedy like Shrew into a farce that discredits the language of the original altogether, or into a bitter semitragic satire, or both at once, implying that the only other option available in today’s theatre is to expel the play entirely from the viable canon. Chicago Shakespeare Theater presented an interesting adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew in autumn 2017, directed by Barbara Gaines. The adaptation featured an impressive allfemale cast. Not a new concept, to be sure: Shakespeare’s Globe had the same idea in 2013, and so did Phyllida Lloyd’s production at New York’s Delacorte Theater in 2016. (The Chesapeake Shakespeare appears to have done a more traditional production in Elizabethan costuming under the direction of Ian Gallanar in early 2017.) The Chicago show updated the play by setting it in Chicago of 1919–20, when Congress was about to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. A group of socially well-connected ladies belonging to the Chicago Women’s Club were rehearsing their forthcoming production of Shrew in the club’s grand parlour, much as women’s societies of the time actually did with Shakespeare. The conversation of the frame plot, devised by Second City’s Ron West, alluded from time to time to the Chicago Cubs, the Congress Hotel, construction on Michigan Avenue, partisan political bickering, popular vote totals, Ida B. Wells, and the like. One woman, Mrs Mildred Sherman (played by Rita Rehn), could be heard telephoning her Senatorial husband to learn what was happening in the

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Nineteenth Amendment debate. A poster, held aloft, read defiantly, ‘Wilson is Against Women’. The cast featured E. Faye Butler as Dr Fannie Emmanuel playing Baptista Minola, Crystal Lucas-Perry as Mrs Victoria Van Dyne in the role of Petruccio, Alexandra Henrikson as Mrs Louise Harrison playing a fiery and funny Katherina, Hollis Resnik as Miss Judith Smith in the role of Gremio, Cindy Gold as Mrs Sarah Willoughby in the role of Vincentio, Olivia Washington as Mrs Emily Ingersoll playing Bianca, Tina Gluschenko as Mrs Beatrice Ivey Wells in the role of Hortensio, Heidi Kettenring as Mrs Dorothy Mercer in the role of Tranio, Lillian Castillo as Mrs Lucinda James playing Biondello, and Kate Marie Smith as Mrs Olivia Twist in the role of Lucentio. Ann James was the Pedant, Rita Rehn was Grumio and the Widow, and Faith Servant was Curtis. The performances were designedly broad. The director’s concept worked for many in the audience, even if the overall effect was unsurprising: the show was unapologetically a feminist pageant offered as an uplifting tribute to the idea of sisterhood. We were told in advance that Katherina’s final speech was to be regarded as intolerable. The message was loud and clear: women need to get past their petty rivalries on behalf of the greater good. And audiences generally enjoyed themselves. The production was elaborately set in Chicago Shakespeare Theatre’s new Courtyard Theatre, featuring nine ‘audience towers’ that moved about on cushions of air, making for myriad configurations.1 This was, then, a moderately successful adaptation. Even if it was visibly concept-driven, it generously allowed Shakespeare’s play to shine through in its own right. Crystal Lucas-Perry and Alexandra Henrikson as Petruccio and Katherina, splendid performers, were allowed to enjoy their sparring in the war of the sexes as the very stuff of romantic comedy. Each gave as good as she got. But I found myself hearkening back by way of contrast to Barbara Gaines’s earlier production of Shrew for Chicago Shakespeare Theatre in 2010, as directed by Josie Rourke with an original framing plot by playwright, film director and screenwriter Neil LaBute.

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In that encounter, the Shakespearean original took a beating considerably more severe than that handed out to Katherina. The frame plot on this occasion served as a perspective from which we were shown how a bad Shakespeare play needed to be not simply updated but thrown on the dust heap of sexist patriarchy. Did the more recent show of 2017, I wondered, represent in some way Gaines’s rethinking of what her company could do to salvage a play that was on the verge of being discarded as landfill? LaBute’s frame plot of the 2010 production introduced a Shrew in rehearsal. The onstage director in the frame of this adaptation, played by Mary Beth Fisher, heavily involved in a lesbian relationship with the actress playing Katherina (Bianca Amato), saw the production as an opportunity to revel bitterly in the story’s sexism. Bianca Amato, as lead actress, suspected that the director’s concept was retribution for the lead actress’s refusal ‘to adopt a monogamous rings-and-babies lifestyle’.2 In the frame plot, rehearsals were not going well, owing to a breaking down of the increasingly fierce contention over concept between director and leading lady, and more fundamentally, one assumes, to other incompatibilities in that relationship. The upshot was that Katherina finally decided that she had had more than enough, whereupon she walked off with no intention of returning. The show was over. The implication seemed clear enough: Shakespeare’s play, with its outrageous ending, did not deserve a hearing in the theatre. Not surprisingly, then, the scenes from the Shrew-proper bordered incessantly on travesty. Mary Shen Barnidge at Theater Review wrote that the play-within-the-play plunged ‘into full cartoon mode, replete with circle-chases, a groom in peekaboo bridal drag, an ingenue gowned in Disney princess froufrou (with matching dog), codpieces in the Aristophanean fashion (i.e., big and elaborate), offstage cries and crashes, giddy Neapolitan tunes bridging the scenes’, and still more. The men, according to Chris Jones in The Chicago Review, were ‘sufficiently ridiculous to have no real bite’. Amato’s Katherina was beautiful and witty enough to better all the men ‘and imply

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that every man there knows it from Day One’.3 To Tony Adler, writing for The Chicago Reader, the whole performance was ‘ultimately tedious and essentially wrongheaded’. This adaptation, wrote Adler, ‘isn’t about a woman’s subjugation. It’s about a woman who gets a crash course in gaming the system for fun, profit, and love’. It is an ‘act of subversion’. LaBute’s frame plot, in Adler’s estimate, is the work of a director and screenwriter who had ‘risen to fame on charges of sexism and misogyny’.4 Perhaps, indeed, LaBute’s agreeing to write this adaptation was his attempt to redeem himself from that damaging reputation. The frame plot, in Barnidge’s view, forestalled spectators from ‘becoming involved in the problematic dynamics’ of Shakespeare’s play. Barnidge complained of a ‘looney-tunes universe’, despite occasional moments of deft (and daft) acting by Mike Nussbaum especially in the role of Gremio. The lesbian relationship, in Leah Zeldes’s opinion, managed to usurp the relationship between Petruccio and Katherina.5 Katherina was also involved in another lesbian relationship, this time with her sister Bianca. Not everyone in the audience was displeased, to be sure, and some of the funny business was amusing; a marble statue onstage periodically lost its arms (owing to a series of collisions with members of the cast) in such a way as to look suddenly like the famous Venus de Milo statue in the Louvre. But I agree with the majority of reviewers who found that the production crossed a line. Adaptation is fine, of course, when deftly done, but a denunciatory adaptation that works its revenge on the whole original as unworthy of the theatre is apt to be offensively boring. The Royal Shakespeare Company production of Shrew in Stratford-upon-Avon in 2008, directed by Conall Morrison, crossed the same fault line, and in this case with truly disastrous results. Morrison saw the play as a nightmarish male fantasy. Christopher Sly, the drunken beggarly tinker of Shakespeare’s original but incomplete Induction, was reincarnated as an urban lout. This drifter was picked up from his dreary homeless existence by a mischievous lady aristocrat to become the

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temporary guest and ridiculous object of a practical joke. In this modernized version he was entertained by travelling actors who, arriving by lorry with the number-plate ‘XME K8’ (‘Kiss me, Kate’), proceeded to revel in a wild, rugby-inspired haka dance known as ‘Dave’s stag party’. Their scenario soon found a role for Sly as Petruccio, the ineffable wooer of ‘Katherine the Curst’ (Michelle Gomez).6 As such, he quickly proved as brutal and malevolent as they could have wished. He slammed the heads of servants against doors or walls. He sprouted a stag’s antlers with which to bloody the bridal gown of his intended. Not surprisingly, Katherina responded to his physical and psychological mauling of her with head-bashing of her own, along with gouging of eyes and kneeing of crotch. Michael Billington complained that director Morrison did not allow Katherina ‘to display the sardonic wit of which we know she is capable’. And, added Billington, Morrison’s insistence on treating the play as an ‘ugly male fantasy’ and ‘a relentless critique of masculine values’ denied the audience any compensatory idea of redemptive laughter. The play-within-the-play devised for Sly/Petruccio’s delectation managed to fulfil Sly’s ‘wildest, sadistic dreams’.7 My uneasiness, actually, was not directed so much at this brutality as at the dull, mechanical acting out of the commedia dell’arte secondary plot in a lifeless style seemingly intended to demonstrate that Shrew as a play was inherently worthless. One obvious danger in such an enterprise is that directorial ingeniousness will be privileged over theatrical interpretation of the original. I will call reviewers as witnesses when that evidence suggests a kind of failure of critical responsibility. Charles Spencer, reviewing for The Daily Telegraph in May 2008, described the performance as ‘awesomely unfunny’. Nicholas de Jongh, in The Evening Standard, reported that the Lucentio–Bianca subplot was played ‘with an over-pitched farcical exuberance that left me cold and unamused’. Benedict Nightingale, in The Times, lamentingly ‘longed for the deft comedy and psychological subtlety to be found in the play. Neither materializes.’ And Ian Shuttleworth, in The Financial Times, was bewildered by what appeared to be the production’s

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‘blind spot’ about racism and sexism in its pointless ‘cartoon Jamaicanisms’: ‘As I say, blowed if I know.’ It seemed to reviewers as if that cast must have been instructed by the director to be monumentally stiff and unnatural in their gestures and deliberately unfunny in what they said to one another. I don’t know how to account for such stilted and stereotyped performances by a gifted acting company like the RSC without supposing that the actors were doing what they were told to do: to burlesque inept acting, as if their play was a spoof in the vein of Pyramus and Thisbe or The Nine Worthies. A production in Stratford, Ontario, Canada, in the same year, directed by Peter Hinton, seems to have opted for many of the same exaggerations and stereotypes. It too was greeted by generally hostile press reviews.8 At the very end of the evening, a possible explanation of all this lifelessness became apparent. To my considerable surprise, and, I think, to everyone else’s in the audience, this Petruccio, who had prevailed over his bride with all the tenderness of a cave dweller, suddenly relented. Katherina submitted to him as in Shakespeare’s play, throwing her cap underfoot as she was commanded, and reciting her famous speech in praise of patriarchy as though she had never entertained any other thought on the matter. Petruccio raised her up and celebrated their newly found marital happiness with a loving kiss. How remarkable, I thought, that this angrily feminist production should choose to end with something like fidelity to Shakespeare’s script after all. But the play wasn’t over after all. Petruccio, alone with Katherina onstage, without motivation and wholly without tenderness, raped his newly married wife in full view of the audience. The acting company of the frame plot, having had more than enough, thereupon threw Petruccio/Sly’s gear out of their lorry onto the pavement and drove off. The action of leaving both Petruccio and Shakespeare’s play in the dust was reminiscent of the final gesture in Chicago Shakespeare’s 2010 production when the actor playing Katherina simply walked off, leaving their version of The Taming of the Shrew in tatters.

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Both plays declared in theatrical language that Shakespeare’s Shrew was simply beyond redemption. It had to be repudiated as an abysmal failure, a wounded trophy of sexist misogyny. This is what I call crossing a line. I do not expect many to agree with me, but to me that defines when adaptation, which I generally admire, becomes a way of refuting and defaming the premise of the Shakespearean original for what appear to be politically correct reasons. By way of gesturing to a better theatrical solution, let me say a word about a little-noticed production of Shrew by the Creation Theatre Company (UK)  – performed outdoors at Oxford Castle and directed by Heather Davies  – which I attended on a cold and rainy night in 2007, with a passel of friends making up most of the audience. The production was traditional in following Shakespeare’s text without a newly written frame plot, while at the same time the play was full of improvised funniness on a minimal set that made for a delightful evening.9 One trick I especially admired took place when the intermittent rain stared up afresh. At this point, one of the actors scuttled across the outdoor playing area under a huge white umbrella bearing a clearly printed legend: ‘Merde, il plu’ (‘Oh, shit, it’s raining’). The umbrella evidently had been prepared for such a contingency in anticipation of unsettled weather. And then, when we got around to Act 5 and we in the loyal but tiny audience were still there, getting colder and wetter, the company invited us all to adjourn to a tiny coffee shop immediately at hand. There, with the cast slightly outnumbering the audience, and where we were all together in a single room not five feet from the actors, Katherina threw down her cap and delivered her speech with witty irony and was picked up by an expansive and admiring Petruccio as though nothing too troublesome had occurred. We all knew that Katherina and Petruccio were both acting. Isn’t that what we came and paid to see? Wasn’t it all a delightful joke? What was the fussing over the play all about? An admiring review of a traditional interpretation is not to imply that adaptations are generally to be avoided. To the contrary, brilliant adaptations are numerous and are a vital

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part of the modern Shakespeare repertory. The wide range of adaptation concepts amply demonstrates that daring innovation continues to add to our pleasure in seeing how Shakespeare can be performed on modern stages. To cite adaptations that have been widely extolled as extraordinary, one need look no further than Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957) and Ran (1985). Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 Romeo + Juliet is especially inventive. Janet Suzman’s presentation of Othello, staged in 1987 and as a film in 1989, is strikingly adaptive, having been produced on the eve of South Africa’s shift away from strict racial apartheid. Margaret Litvin’s Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost (2011) decisively illustrates the use of this famous play in Arabic theatre and poetical rhetoric. Hamlet reappears variously as an operetta hero, a firebrand revolutionary and a dissident daring to challenge the corrupt authority of Nasser and other dictators. Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet 2000 (2000) offers rich witty elaboration of parallel details implicit in the overall concept; Ethan Hawke plays a Hamlet whose passion for being a film geek is a clever modern equivalent of Hamlet’s fascination with theatre and actors in Shakespeare’s play. Such clever parallels, offered without overt comment, allow audiences to see the joke for themselves. This strikes me as being at the heart of successful adaptation. The device of wit allows for a very wide range of situations. Shakespeare’s language can be altered or even eliminated. The setting can be of whatever kind the dramatist desires. What remains is an implied argument of a relevant connection: to changing fashions in sexual mores, to jealous rage, to gang warfare, to the battle of the sexes, to murderous ambition, to sibling rivalry, to fascism and to much more. Such analogies can be the vehicle of exploring Shakespeare’s amazing universality while paying attention to the various guises that that universality can so deftly reveal. What I object to is a denunciatory method that can turn adaptation into cultural warfare. On the question of whether the best solution for Shrew is simply to drop it permanently from the

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theatrical repertory, I offer an analogous phenomenon. I belong to a fine Gilbert and Sullivan company in Chicago, the managing directors of which have decided that, for the time being at least, we can no longer risk performing The Mikado. Angry demonstrators at other venues, prompted by the opera’s stereotyping of Japanese culture, have picketed recent productions. Our company, faced with similar challenges, recently managed to stage Princess Ida safely and successfully by a deft alteration of the ending: the Princess no longer yielded to male superiority at the opera’s conclusion, choosing instead to accept the capitulation of the King to her wiser rule. This comic alteration resembled the actual ending of another Gilbert and Sullivan show, Iolanthe, where an enterprising legal expert solves the otherwise insoluble resolution of the plot by inserting a ‘not’ into the commandment forbidding fairies from marrying a mortal under penalty of death: in the new decree, it is a crime for any fairy not to marry a mortal. Because The Mikado is resistant to such a simple modernizing, our company has opted to drop Gilbert and Sullivan’s most brilliant and successful opera from its repertory. A pity. We are honoured to include David Bevington’s revised paper from the Shakespeare Association of America seminar on ‘The Taming of the Shrew and its Afterlives’ in 2018. David’s kindness, wisdom, and enthusiasm in the seminar exemplified his career-long generosity as a scholar, and we are deeply grateful for his support for this volume as well as for his work on this paper before his untimely death in 2019. Special thanks to Peggy Bevington and Milla Cozart Riggio for their attentive care of David’s work and their assistance in sharing one of the final publications of his long and remarkable career.

Notes 1

Chris Jones, in The Chicago Tribune, 28 September 2017, gave this show a ‘somewhat recommended’ rating, calling it ‘a good-humored proto-feminist march into hostile territory’ with

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‘all kinds of shameless anachronisms’ that one might well see as ‘not fair to the play’. Other reviewers tended to be more favorable. The cast was characterized as ‘top hat’ by Hedy Weiss in her review in the Chicago Sun Times, also on 28 September. Tony Adler’s Reader review of 24 October 2017 viewed this production as ‘a hot mess’ that lacked ‘any real surprises’ and was more about ‘affirmation’ than ‘exploration,’ spending three hours to arrive ‘at a foregone conclusion’. 2

Mary Shen Barnidge, in Theater Review, 21 April 2010.

3

Barnidge, Theater Review, and Chris Jones, The Chicago Review, April 2010.

4

Tony Adler, Reader, for the production running through 4 June 2010. Among other pushings of the envelope of respectability, LaBute was disfellowshipped by the Church of Latter-Day Saints for three plays, staged at the Off-Broadway Douglas Fairbanks Theatre in 1999, that depicted various latter-day saints as having done disturbing and violent things. He has since formally left the church.

5

Barnidge, Theater Review, and Leah A. Zeldes, who, in her review of 18 April, found the production ‘deeply flawed’ and ‘stereotyped’, all culminating in a ‘ridiculous conclusion’. ‘Just about everything about this production is annoying,’ Zeldes wrote.

6

Barbara Hodgdon, ed. The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare, Arden Third Series (London: Arden/Bloomsbury, 2010), 1.2.126. All subsequent references to the play are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically.

7

Michael Billington, The Guardian Weekly, 2 May 2008.

8

For Christopher Hoile, reviewing the play in The Charlebois Post, 2 June 2008, the Stratford Canada production ‘presents such a deliberate misreading of the text that there is no “taming” in his version and no “shrew” ’. Hoile can find no rationale for the decision to present the Lord of the Induction as none other than Queen Elizabeth I. Thereafter, says Hoile, ‘Hinton reserves his major lunacy for the play itself’.

9

See Nicola Lisle’s review in The Oxford Times, 26 July 2007.

5 The Taming of the Shrew in Soviet Russia Ideological Dangers of Structural Instability Natalia Khomenko

The Induction of The Taming of the Shrew is an unsettling device.1 Examining the play’s structure, Annabel Patterson concludes: ‘There are simply no rules by which we can theoretically validate the choice of frame and center for ourselves, still less adjudicate those choices for each other.’2 The opening scenes in which a lord plays a practical joke on Christopher Sly, the drunken tinker, vastly complicate the audience’s relationship to the play. Does Sly’s disappearance after the end of Act  1, Scene 13 mean that the framing device is incomplete, especially since The Taming of a Shrew, potentially a direct source, uses its closing scene to wrap up the joke and restore order? Or is Sly metaphorically absorbed into the taming plot?4 Just how separate is the Induction from the taming plot?5 And what can 88

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the instability of the Induction offer to theatres, audiences and scholars negotiating their own relationship with Shakespeare as a playwright? In recent decades, scholarly studies of Shrew have begun charting a move from approaching the play as Shakespeare’s argument for benevolent socialization through education or game-playing6 to interrogating the power dynamics that shape its social performance. This chapter joins the ongoing interrogation of authorial intent and performance politics by examining the discussions of Shrew, with a focus on the Induction, in the intensely ideological context of post-revolutionary Russia. Soviet theatre, with its downtrodden masses coming to power and turning into new theatre audiences, paid close attention to the power hierarchies of the play and to the way in which they were foregrounded in the Induction, reading it as a potential entry point into Shakespeare’s own view of early modern class struggle.7 While not obviously ideologically useful, Shrew was one of the three Shakespearean plays recommended for immediate performance in the first bulletin released by the Repertory Division of the Theatre Bureau8 in April 1919.9 Presumably, the factors in the play’s favour were a relatively straightforward plot uncomplicated by any significant presence of religion or magic (both repudiated by communist thinkers), an absence of wise and benevolent monarchs, and its steady popularity in Russian theatres before the revolution. The play’s emphasis on the transformative power of theatre might have also contributed to its initial appeal, since, faced with the task of educating and disseminating political messages to the largely illiterate masses, Soviet culture-builders saw theatre as an immensely powerful and valuable tool. In an internal review of a 1923 production at the Second Studio of the Moscow Art Theatre, its director Valentin Smyshliaev argued for theatre-induced metamorphosis as the key message of the opening scenes: ‘The Induction leads the audience to understand and feel that theatre is a powerful magician, transforming our state of existence into another, more splendid state of existence.’10 But Soviet theatre was an ideologically charged space, with little room for magic that

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was not directly linked to class struggle and social reform, and demanded close scrutiny of all ‘states of existence’ implicated in this metatheatrical play. The inevitable question, of course, was whether the Induction was intended as the expression of Shakespeare’s own view of the class system and social mobility. What were workers and theatre audiences to make of a tradesman mockingly decked out as an aristocrat? And how might Sly’s encounter with the Lord affect their perception of the play’s larger argument or its author’s class allegiances? Throughout the Soviet era, approaches to interpreting and/or staging the Induction grew closely intertwined with the ongoing conversation about Shakespeare’s potential place in socialist culture, and his function in shaping the new socialist citizen. From the chaotic 1920s to the more liberal 1970s, the unsettled structure of Shrew created opportunities for re-evaluating the cultural and ideological value of Shakespearean drama and, ultimately, for mounting a resistance against the restraints of ideology-driven theatre.

‘A play so monstrously crude in its lesson’: Christopher Sly in the 1920s As Russian theatres filled with the newly liberated masses (largely illiterate and frequently lacking any cultural context for what they were watching), the urgent problem of creating appropriate repertory generated numerous debates among theatre directors and critics. Writing to his long-time friend and colleague Aleksandr Iuzhin about the Aleksandrinskii Theatre Shrew of 1919, Petr Gnedich, despite his own involvement with the production, found it puzzling that the show consistently sold out: ‘The audience members’, he wrote, ‘sit in their galoshes and winter hats and talk, not without some satisfaction, about potatoes and herring. And what in hell do they need Shakespeare for?’11 Gnedich’s rhetorical question demonstrated, more than anything, his scepticism

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about the new audience’s ability to understand and appreciate Shakespeare, and his view of theatre as a sacred space where material realities should not penetrate. But other theatre critics, viewing theatre as intimately engaged with post-revolutionary realities, asked the same question much more seriously, especially when the play was again staged by the smaller Zamoskvoretskii Theatre in Moscow just two months later, in March 1919. The all-round success of the second production gave rise to discernible anxiety about the Induction’s take on class struggle. Reading Shrew as an unequivocal affirmation of Elizabethan hierarchies, reviewers wondered, in the words of Iurii Sobolev, whether ‘this play so monstrously crude in its lesson – this comedy of the old man Shakespeare’ could be suitable for the new stage.12 In his review of the Zamoskvoretskii production, Sobolev interpreted the Induction as the statement of the author’s rejection of social mobility: ‘Shakespeare argues that the drunkard Sly – this “crude beast”13 – must forever remain Sly, whereas the Lord his master, who experiments with the possibility of refining [Sly’s] crude nature, will forever remain the Lord – a creature of higher order!’ For Sobolev, Shrew raised but quickly dismissed the possibility of social restructuring, justifying the disempowerment of the lower classes by presenting them as bestial. While unsurprising from a playwright seen, at the time, as a member of the aspirational bourgeoisie, this lesson directly contradicted the ideals of the Russian communists, who envisioned equality for all regardless of gender and class. Read in this way, the Induction identified Shakespeare as a sadly outdated playwright, rigidly constrained by the norms of his pre-revolutionary world. Sobolev still praised the entertainment value of the play, but ultimately warned that the audience’s enjoyment could only be made possible by recognizing the lesson intended by the author and consciously discarding it.14 Other critics took an even dimmer view of the play, worrying that the authorial intent of Shrew, as demonstrated in the Induction, was impossible to overlook. In a piece published in the same periodical a month later, Vera Stanevich cautioned

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repertory workers that, despite the importance of introducing the masses to pre-revolutionary culture, such plays ‘have little relevance for the people living in the era of social revolution’.15 To explain her critical view of the play, Stanevich offered an allegory of theatre as a life-giving stream over which the masses lean in order to drink – but also to see their own reflection in the water. In an Ovidian twist, Stanevich’s allegory assumed that the image appearing in the theatre-as-stream itself had transformative powers, and thus must be closely controlled. This argument was consistent with the broader post-revolutionary vision of theatre as a space of reforming the individual, where the right kind of performance could produce conscious, socially and politically aware subjects.16 But it also implied that allowing the eager masses to identify with the image of the drunken, beastly tinker in the Induction might stimulate an undesirable metamorphosis – not to a higher, more splendid plane of existence imagined by Smyshliaev, but to a debased, animalistic state. But the Induction could be used to imagine a metamorphosis of the author himself, reinvented by his supporters as not only useful but perhaps even sympathetic to the goals of the revolution. During the first turbulent decade, a strong faction headed by the first Commissar of Enlightenment, Anatoly Lunacharsky, advocated for tolerance when it came to the literary and dramatic canon, calling for productive appropriation by the new theatre. In the case of Shakespeare, this appropriation produced a rather curious phenomenon: a governmentally supported antiStratfordian trend extending into the early 1930s. The candidate for the role of Shakespeare preferred by the Soviet writers was Roger Manners, the Earl of Rutland, due largely to his association with Essex’s rebellion against Elizabeth I, which was interpreted as a revolt against tyrannical monarchy.17 In 1923, Feofan Shipulinskii, a prominent supporter of the anti-Stratfordian trend, used his review of Shrew at the Moscow Art Theatre to stage an imaginary encounter between Rutland, supposedly the real author of the play, and his frontman Shakespeare of Stratford – the original owner of the ‘code name’ that shielded the ‘rebellious poet’ for hundreds of years.18 The wording in the

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original is wonderfully evocative, aligning Rutland with the men who spent years and even decades in hiding, under code names (most famously, of course, Lenin, whose real last name was Ul’ianov), while preparing the ground for that ultimate rebellion, the overthrow of the capitalist world. In Shipulinskii’s reading, the Induction became an allegory of authorship: the joke played by the Lord in Shrew was seen as a reflection of Rutland’s masterfully woven illusion in which Shakespeare the inconsequential actor takes his place. Rutland, Shipulinskii wrote, ‘also had the occasion of encountering a filthy drunkard, destined to play a fateful and fantastical role both in his life and in his immortality. And he dressed this scoundrel in his own clothing, making him rich, elevated him to a formerly inaccessible position, invested him for three hundred years with fame that rarely befalls anyone.’ Shipulinskii’s interpretation addressed the concerns about the play (and its author) voiced by Sobolev and Stanovich, rereading the metatheatre of the Induction as an impassioned  – and wry  – critique of the self-satisfied bourgeois usurer from Stratford by a man inspired by his education and friendships to enter into a mutinous conspiracy against tyranny. Filtered through the antiStratfordian lens, the events of the Induction marked the author’s transformation into an ideologically useful figure that had never stopped, over the centuries, ‘being in tune with our rebellious era and our rebellious country’. The metatheatre of the Induction thus became a code that, when cracked, delivered the central message of the play  – the author’s gesture of comradeship, extended across time and re-positioning Soviet directors and audiences as the true inheritors of Shakespearean drama.

‘Our greatest ally’: Shrew and socialist realism Shakespeare’s position in Soviet culture changed radically by 1934  – the year when the First All-Union Congress of Soviet

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Writers took place, ushering in socialist realism as the official cultural ideology. In an effort to build global cultural capital in the 1930s, Soviet Russia claimed Shakespeare as a model for socialist realist writers, arguing that his plays not only accurately reflected his own historical context but also optimistically looked forward to the future communist revolution.19 Accordingly, all doubts and anti-Stratfordian theories of the 1920s were resolutely discarded; the new mandate of Soviet theatre was to gain cultural authority by recovering the absolutely authentic, really real Shakespeare. Even the most well-intentioned, ideologically informed tweaks were criticized as distortions. For instance, a 1936 article took to task a late-1920s production directed by Aleksandr Tuganov in Azerbaijan, which used the metatheatre of Shrew to stage an audience intervention in support of women’s liberation in the region: ‘After Katherina’s speech, an Azerbaijani woman from the audience would suddenly climb onto the stage where, announcing that she disagreed with the argument of the comedy, she would deliver a heated monologue supporting women of the East and urging them to take off the veil, get an education and take part in social life.’20 Although acknowledging that Katherina’s speech must have seemed singularly unproductive to a theatre group arguing for women’s liberation, the reviewer glibly dismissed the production as unsuccessful due to its poor understanding of ‘Shakespeare’s historicity’. He remained, however, entirely silent on what this historicity might entail and how it might affect a director’s staging of the speech. Herein lay the conundrum of socialist realist Shakespeare: scholars, critics and directors were permitted only to search for the ideological truth that was presumably contained in the text of Shakespearean drama, without admitting to generating meaning through textual interpretation or adaptation in performance. Shrew presented an obvious problem: the Induction not only contained an ideologically unpalatable encounter but also, by infinitely destabilizing the relationship between reality and illusion or performance, unsettled the very idea of achieving a singular and consistent version of truth.

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One of the most well-known productions of Shrew to emerge from the socialist realist approach (directed by Aleksei Popov at the Central Red Army Theatre in 1937) grappled at length with the problem presented by the Induction, eventually removing the Sly scenes altogether. As an unpublished record of Popov’s pre-production remarks witnesses, the director’s decision was informed by coming to recognize that ‘the Induction would have obstructed the play’s fundamental ideological conception which we want to reveal.’21 However, the argument that a part of the text disrupted the socialist realist vision of the play and therefore had to be removed created a further problem, since it suggested a need for adapting Shakespeare after all. In his remarks, Popov anticipated that problem by explaining: ‘We are firmly convinced that either the text of the Induction has been lost or Sly’s text never existed at all, that Sly’s text existed only as an improvisation.’22 In order to centre itself in the taming plot, Soviet theatre had to will the Induction entirely out of existence, imagining it as an imposture: either a replacement by an anonymous author for the lost original, or a misleading record of some clown’s witticisms, never intended to last beyond the performance.23 Popov’s production proved to be so popular that it remained on stage for years, thus coming to require a more formal explanation for choosing what the director himself called a potentially ‘ideologically suspicious’ piece.24 The 1940 companion volume to the production, edited by the leading Shakespearean scholar of the time, Mikhail Morozov, returned to the thorny question of the Induction, this time admitting to its existence but only as a regrettable error that the author himself intended to correct, an early sketch entirely overshadowed by the central plot of the play. In his essay for the volume, Grigorii Boiadzhiev envisioned an evolution of the authorial intent. In the beginning, Boiadzhiev asserted, Shakespeare was drawing on The Taming of a Shrew and its framing device in his desire to speak directly to the English people; it was thus entirely natural for him ‘to open the performance with something familiar and dear to the crowd facing the stage’.25 However, such was the force and vividness of

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Petruccio and Katherina that, upon entering the page, they could no longer be imagined as characters of a play-within-a-play; the taming plot thus came to the foreground, literally forcing Sly out of the play. In this compelling narrative, Shakespeare, seduced by his own characters, abandoned the originally intended frame so completely that the Induction slipped his mind and remained in the text as an unfortunate oversight. With this explanation in mind, Boiadzhiev concluded that retaining the Induction would constitute ‘the grossest perversion of Shakespeare’s intention, a demonstration of complete failure to understand Shakespearean comedy, and the disruption of every foundation of the Renaissance style’.26 This mysterious Renaissance style, as clarified elsewhere in the volume, was not early modern drama as such (which in any case embraced metatheatrical performance), but rather what socialist realism saw as ‘the high harmony of thought and feeling’ in Renaissance individuals, the harmony that would be brought to its ‘ultimate resolution’ in the ‘imminent Renaissance of the communist society’.27 The companion volume as a whole, reading the taming plot as an allegory of education, argued that Shrew modelled the production of the harmonious individual that could be profitably taken up by Soviet society. The Induction, threatening to destabilize both the perceived harmony and the audience’s relationship to the play, was deemed, as in Boiadzhiev’s description, a disruptive and even perverse presence that had to be banished from the Soviet stage.28 The 1961 black-and-white film that eventually emerged from Popov’s production took the final step of re-centring the taming plot by supplying a new, ideologically stable Induction to remind the audience of Shakespeare’s place in socialist realist culture.29 The film begins with a shot of a folio-sized volume, on the cover of which are printed, in Russian, the playwright’s name and the play title. The volume opens, however, to reveal not the text of the play but a blurb describing the original production at the Central Red Army Theatre. The camera moves to the face of the original director Aleksei Popov, who recounts, in slow and measured sentences, the plot of Shrew, its

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history in the Red Army Theatre, its transition to the screen, and – in a highly condensed summary of his essay in the 1940 volume – its meaning to the Soviet audience. As he speaks, the camera pans out, showing the entire cast of the film arranged around a glass table with a centrepiece of white tulips. They are holding sheets of paper – presumably their parts – and listening raptly to the venerable director’s explanation. Popov wraps up by reminding the actors that the play is implicated in the production of the exemplary Soviet subject: ‘The optimistic lifeaffirmation’ [radostnoe zhizneutverzhdenie] of Shakespeare’s play ‘makes the great playwright our ally in the struggle for creating strong, happy individuals, full of dignity  – the individuals around us today. All of this we need to remember now, and this is why our film is being made.’ During a highly unstable time, with Khrushchev’s Thaw rolling toward its conclusion, the new opening frames the play as an instrument of memory-keeping. The history of Soviet theatre merges inextricably with the text of Shakespearean drama under the front cover of the volume, while Shakespeare himself is claimed as a participant in the work of socialist realism and placed in the neat room with glowing actors where he truly belongs. Through the pointed reminder that even the Englishman Shakespeare speaks in the cheerful and optimistic voice of socialist realism, and in the voice of an established Soviet director at that, the new Induction undermines the very possibility of polyvocality, and of voices speaking outside or against the homogenous monolith of socialist realism.

Travelling actors against ideological Shakespeare Still, once the Induction was recognized as potentially subversive, it could be deployed by the more liberal-minded directors to resist ideological uses of Shakespeare. Some postStalinist productions thus cautiously resurrected the metatheatre

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of the Induction, undermining the socialist realist reading of the taming plot. In the late 1950s, the production staged by Tamara Gogava at the Krasnodar Dramatic Theatre in the Kuban region was framed by a new Induction and epilogue. As a contemporary review witnesses, it opened with a group of strolling players preparing to stage a performance at an inn, and closed with ‘the tired actors removing their white face paint and rouge, gathering up their modest theatre belongings’ and setting out on the next leg of their travels.30 The reviewer hastened to highlight the didactic value of the metatheatre, suggesting that the actors’ faces clearly demonstrated ‘that their modest labour brings them satisfaction and joy precisely because it is useful to people. In this way, the director makes another important point about the wholesome influence of art on human hearts and souls.’31 This highly conventional moral about the pleasures of work for others’ benefit fell flat in the context of the rest of the play; the reviewer offered no explanation as to how the taming plot, treated as a piece of entertainment, might improve the hearts and souls of the audience at an inn. Rather, the reviewer’s attempt to justify the new framing device suggests that reimagining the taming plot as a potentially commercial venture, as temporary and fragile as the paint on the actors’ faces, could produce a subtle undermining of theatre’s usefulness as an ideological tool. The same strategy was used in the 1970s production directed by Igor Vladimirov at the Lensovet Theatre in Leningrad, which seems to have been inspired, in part, by the playful metatheatre of the American musical Kiss Me, Kate (first staged on Broadway in 1948 and released as a film in 1953).32 In addition to introducing numerous musical numbers, the production used a small group of actors, led by Mikhail Boiarskii (later a celebrity), whose primary function lay in reminding the audience that they were watching a performance that openly refused to offer any wholesome social commentary. These actors stepped into the plot, when necessary, to double as servants – both in Baptista’s and Petruccio’s houses – or serve as part of a crowd, but their presence prevented any suspension of disbelief on the part of

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the audience. The audience was alerted to this strategy through the introduction of an alternative Induction, also in iambic pentameter, partly sung and partly recited by Boiarskii. The Induction commented on its own function, opening with the lines: ‘Allow us to begin the Induction. / The whole world is a theatre, / and people are actors in it: / As William Shakespeare pronounced a long time ago.’ This solemn attribution explicitly parodied the socialist realist painstaking construction of Shakespeare’s cultural authority, and was followed up with a mock-serious assertion that ‘This play is eternally of vital importance’ and an apology to the author ‘if anything’s amiss’. Not only was Shakespeare addressed by a familiar pronoun, but his first name was deliberately mispronounced, with the accent placed on the second syllable in order to fit it into iambic pentameter: the great playwright himself was exposed as a familiar, useful and malleable commodity. The refrain of the opening song transformed the initial paraphrase from As You Like It into a merry comment on the utterly un-Marxist social exploration enabled by theatre: ‘Actors, actors. . . / Today we are musketeers, / and tomorrow kings or fools.’ While the production initially appeared to position itself as ideologically sound by replacing the offending Induction with an appeal to Shakespeare’s authority, it ultimately used metatheatre to identify and undermine the Soviet reliance on Shakespearean drama as a tool of cultural policy. The new Induction reproduced and reinforced the original instability of the play, undermining the socialist realist vision of ‘strong, happy individuals, full of dignity’ reliably produced through a good, Shakespearecertified taming programme.

In lieu of conclusion In its focus on the Induction of Shrew, this chapter has had to set aside, for the most part, the problem of the taming plot itself. I have attempted to suggest, however, that any reading of the taming plot must necessarily take the Induction into

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account. Its metatheatre both challenges the interpreter’s position relative to the play as a whole and creates the space for interrogating Shakespeare’s cultural authority and the role of Shakespearean drama in educating – or taming – the audience. This interrogation is not limited to Soviet theatre with its highly distinctive set of ideologies. In the musical Kiss Me, Kate, where the framing tale has expanded to take up most of the space, leaving only a small kernel of the play embedded within, two mobsters console the lovelorn theatre director and advise him on how to attract ladies by performing a musical number entitled ‘Brush Up Your Shakespeare’. But their version of Shakespeare as cultural capital is a chaotic hodgepodge of allusions, comically pointing to the often haphazard and outof-context re-purposing of the plays. Moreover, the director’s attempt at taming his ex-wife (who is playing Katherina to his Petruchio) fails disastrously once it transcends the safe boundaries of the theatrical performance. Broadway and late Soviet theatre seem to have arrived at the same conclusion: the metatheatrical structure of Shrew opens up the possibility of asking questions about the cultural uses of Shakespearean drama and the lessons that the audience members (much like Sly awakening from his drunken sleep in the epilogue of The Taming of a Shrew) are expected to take home with them.

Notes 1

The research trips that made the writing of this essay possible were supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research of Canada and York University

2

Annabel Patterson, ‘Framing The Taming’ in Shakespeare and Cultural Traditions: The Selected Proceedings of the International Shakespeare Association World Congress, Tokyo, 1991, ed. Tetsuo Kishi, Roger Pringle and Stanley Wells (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994), 304–13, esp. 312.

3

Barbara Hodgdon, ed. The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare, Arden Third Series (London: Arden/Bloomsbury,

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2010). All subsequent references to the play are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically. 4

Barry Weller, for instance, argues that the frame plot remains unresolved as a deliberate comment on the fragility of Kate’s new identity. See ‘Induction and Inference: Theater, Transformation, and the Construction of Identity in The Taming of the Shrew’ in Creative Imitation: New Essays on Renaissance Literature in Honor of Thomas M. Greene, ed. David Quint, Margaret W. Ferguson, G.W. Pigman III and Wayne A. Rebhorn (Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1992), 297–329, esp. 324.

5

See Leah S. Marcus, ‘The Shrew as Editor/Editing Shrews’ in Gender and Power in Shrew-Taming Narratives, 1500–1700, ed. David Wootton and Graham Holderness (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 84–100.

6

See, for example, Dennis S. Brooks, “‘To Show Scorn Her Own Image”: The Varieties of Education in The Taming of the Shrew’, Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 48.1 (1994), 7–32; and Mary L. Hjelm, ‘Shakespeare Had a Plan’, Journal of the Georgia Philological Society 5 (2015), 52–76.

7

While gender also figured prominently in Soviet treatments of the play, I will be engaging with it only in relation to my discussion of the frame. See Laurence Senelick’s excellent article ‘A Five-Year Plan for The Taming of the Shrew’ in Shakespeare in the Worlds of Communism and Socialism, ed. Irena R. Makaryk and Joseph G. Price (Toronto: University of Toronto Press: 2006), 84–103, for a discussion that pays close attention to the ‘woman question’ in early Soviet Russia.

8

The Theatre Bureau was an official organization affiliated with the new government. One of its tasks was to coordinate repertory across all theatres of the country, which at this time were being nationalized.

9

The bulletin was reproduced in its entirety in the periodical Vestnik teatra [The Theatre Newsletter] 20 (13–15 April 1919), 9–10. The other two plays were Othello and King Lear.

10 RGALI (Russian State Archive of Literature and Art), 1980.10.2, sheet 7 (verso), 6 May 1923.

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11 From the letters of Gnedich to A.I. Iuzhin, in Russkii sovetskii teatr 1917–1921, ed. A.Z. Iufit (Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1968), 230–32, esp. 231. Gnedich, a well-known translator, playwright and theatre administrator, had produced the authoritative translation of the play in 1898. He was formally affiliated with the Theatre Division of the Commissariat of Enlightenment, but clearly did not fully subscribe to the optimistic view of bringing high culture to the masses. 12 Iurii Sobolev, ‘Zamoskvoretskii teatr S.R.D.: “Ukroshchenie stroptivoi” ’, Vestnik teatra 17 (1–2 April 1919), 12. 13 From the Russian translation of the Lord’s initial reaction to Sly: ‘O monstrous beast, how like a swine he lies!’ (Induction 1.33). 14 Sobolev’s unease regarding the lessons of the play was echoed, for example, in a 1927 review by V. Nizhegorodskii in Sovremennyi teatr [Contemporary theatre] 14 (6 December 1927), 221. The review briefly addressed the work of a theatre in Ivanovo-Voznesensk (an important centre of textile production about 300 kilometres from Moscow). The review complimented the staging but suggested that the play’s conclusion ‘might prompt baffled looks and remarks from the female textile workers of Ivanovo, who have well learned in the past (and even – let’s face it – in the present) all delights of spousal “taming” ’. This casual suggestion reveals the thorny issue of audience reception inherent in delivering this supposedly playful piece to those closely familiar with the less palatable realities simmering under the surface of the theatrical illusion. 15 Vera Stanevich, ‘Naturalizm na stsene’, in Vestnik teatra 25 (10–13 May 1919), 5. 16 Such involvement took a variety of forms, from festivals and mass performances to lectures and exhibitions that accompanied productions to encourage critical interpretation. 17 The main influence for the development of this theory in Soviet Russia was the Belgian writer Célestin Demblon, who published two books on the subject in 1912 and 1914. 18 Feofan Shipulinskii, ‘Ukroshchenie stroptivoi’ in Teatr i muzyka [Theatre and music] 7 (6 April 1923), 675–6, esp. 675. 19 See the detailed overview in Arkady Ostrovsky, ‘Shakespeare as a Founding Father of Socialist Realism: The Soviet Affair with

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Shakespeare’ in Shakespeare in the Worlds of Communism and Socialism, ed. Irena R. Makaryk and Joseph G. Price (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 56–83. 20 L. Glikshtein, ‘Shekspir na tiurkskoi stsene,’ Sovetskii teatr [Soviet theatre] 12 (1936), 38–40, esp. 39. The original article uses the umbrella term ‘Turkic,’ which I replaced with the more specific ‘Azerbaijani’ in my translation. 21 RGALI, 2422.1.141, sheet 15. This archival file comprises the records of Leonid Bakhromov, an actor at the Central Red Army Theatre, made during pre-production discussions and rehearsals in 1936–7. 22 Ibid. 23 It is worth noting that Iurii Zavadskii, replaced as the director of the theatre by Popov and exiled to Rostov, staged his own Taming in 1938 at the Rostov Dramatic Theatre dedicated to M. Gorky, preserving the Induction (Senelick dates the production to 1939). The production was not a success. As Zavadskii’s notes suggest, retaining the original Induction might have been intended as a pointed commentary on forced social performance, a dangerous direction to take during the era of the Great Purges. In the notes, the director attempts to mitigate this danger by remarking that in any case Shrew is largely composed of non-Shakespearean material. An unpublished version of these notes, presumably written after Zavadskii’s return to Moscow in 1939, is preserved at the Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum, fond 544, file number 222698/145. See discussion in Senelick, ‘Five-Year Plan’, 99–100. 24 Aleksei Popov, ‘Vstrecha teatra s Shekspirom’ [Our Theatre’s Meeting with Shakespeare], in Ukroshchenie stroptivoi v Tsentral’nom Teatre Krasnoi Armii, ed. M.M. Morozov (Vserossiiskoe teatral’noe obshchestvo, 1940), 29–40, esp. 29. 25 Grigorii Boiadzhiev, ‘Spektakl’ ‘Ukroshchenie stroptivoi’, in Ukroshchenie stroptivoi v Tsentral’nom Teatre Krasnoi Armii, 57–80, esp. 62–3. 26 Ibid., 63. 27 Popov, ‘Vstrecha teatra s Shekspirom’, 32. 28 This banishment is reproduced matter-of-factly in the early 1940s productions concerned with raising the audience’s

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patriotic spirits during the war, such as Mark Kurabelnik’s in 1943 (see Senelick, ‘Five-Year Plan’, 101), and Georgii Kryzhitskii’s in 1945. Kryzhitskii writes in his memoir Dorogi teatral’nye (Moscow: VTO, 1976) that he had to ‘give up the Induction with a heavy heart’ so as to direct all attention to the humanist message of the taming plot (316). 29 The film (released by Mosfilm) was directed by Sergei Kolosov, Popov’s former student. The full film can be found online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8_e7T9IplI. 30 A. Lomonosov, ‘ “Ukroshchenie stroptivoi”: Komediia V. Shekspira na stsene Krasnodarskogo kraevogo dramteatra’, Sovetskaia Kuban’ (6 September 1958). At RGALI, 970.25.1189, sheet 88. 31 Ibid. 32 The production, initially staged in 1970, was filmed for television in 1973 and has been made available online by Gosteleradiofond Rossii, on 6 July 2018: https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=KBgy7qRczvA. My references are to the 1973 version.

6 Dissident Feminism at the End of the Franco Dictatorship The New Taming of the Shrew (1975) Juan F. Cerdá

The New Taming of the Shrew opened in Madrid at the Teatro Español in April 1975, coinciding (by chance, as explained by the director in different interviews) with the activities that commemorated the United Nations International Women’s Year.1 Director Juan Guerrero Zamora followed the Katherina/ Petruccio relationship (initial acquaintance, wedding, exile and taming process, return and wager scene) and also preserved every step of the Bianca subplot. The New Taming of the Shrew thus replicated the structure of Shakespeare’s play, but Guerrero introduced significant variations, such as the addition of songs used to gloss the plot and clarify the trajectory of the action; the 105

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supplementing of the cast with a number of silent actors also gave the production a communal feel. These extras were sometimes used as a sort of claque that reacted to the speeches of the main actors, helping to maintain the production’s energetic mood. They were also employed to emphasize the social dimension of the conflicts presented on this often very crowded stage. The political nature of this manoeuvre became especially obvious in the case of the female extras, whose cheering helped boost Katherina’s speeches, rewritten in The New Taming of the Shrew to articulate Guerrero’s appropriation of the gender dynamics of the ‘old’ Shrew. In the waning days of the Franco regime, when every dimension of culture was political, Guerrero’s production was a provocative, feminist deployment of Shakespeare’s Shrew and deserves to be better known as part of the play’s afterlives.

Cultural shifts at the end of the regime Within the framework of cultural diversity which was taking shape during more or less the last fifteen years of Franco’s regime, the Francoist elites maintained considerable influence over the cultural offer. Even when the regime liberalized the mechanisms for cultural control during the 1960s, it never actually gave them up and knew how to effectively pamper ‘cultural producers’ widely accepted by the public in order to ensure their complicity.2 Although Franco’s regime would keep a coercive eye over much of the country’s cultural production, Elisa Chuliá argues that by the mid-1970s most of what was artistically exciting in Spain was being produced by the ‘liberal’ dissidence. According to Chuliá, recurrent leakages in the cultural homogeneity of the late dictatorship reflect the regime’s obstinate interest in pleasing large crowds and its inability to effectively renovate

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cultural forms and contents.3 Regardless of the perceived quality of official or dissident cultures, what seems clear is that in the late 1960s and early 1970s the regime was unable to contain subversive discourses, by contrast with the tougher political and cultural climate of the previous decades. The relative cultural diversity of these late years was such, Chuliá argues, that the authorities began to perceive that dissidents were already dominating the culture of the regime: [I]n the mid-1970s the cultures with which dissidents and opponents felt identified . . . seemed to have taken over the public voice, edging to one side those who did not form part of it. Important men in Franco’s regime admitted as much with frustration  . . . this ‘spiral of silence’  . . . defined the progressive silencing of the Francoist discourse perceptible in the years prior to the dictator’s death.4 In the 1960s and 1970s the state-controlled television station Radio Televisión Española continued to broadcast shows like Revista para la mujer (Women’s Magazine, 1963–67), Para vosotras (For You, Women, 1964), Escuela de matrimonios (School for Marriage, 1967), Una mujer de su casa (A Woman at Home, 1972) and Pili, secretaria ideal (Pili, the Ideal Secretary, 1975), which reinforced the domestic values espoused by the Catholic Church during the first decades of the regime. The film industry also produced recurrent examples of the resilience of conservative discourse in the late years of the dictatorship, years that were characterized by the ‘promises of liberalization’, which came slowly to fruition only after the death of Franco in November 1975, and the ‘most violent repression’ which extended until the very end of the regime.5 Many films dealt in a moralistic manner with issues such as divorce and extramarital affairs, but it is also in these late years that Spanish cinema starts to deal with topics that had remained beyond the cultural bounds of the dictatorship. Topics such as abortion – in Aborto criminal (Criminal Abortion, 1973) and No matarás (Thou Shall Not Kill, 1974) – and prostitution – in

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Chicas de alquiler (Girls for Rent, 1974) and Las marginadas (Outcast Women, 1974)  – were featured, though mainly to condemn practices that continued to be punished with severe penalties by the regime. As Castro García points out, all these films were conceived within the ‘nostalgic perspective of the right wing which distrustfully looked at the changes undergone by Spanish society’; all of them try to reinforce the ‘triumph of a patriarchal worldview in which all the men end up choosing the “decent woman” ’ by consistently displaying the punishing of ‘vice and moral corruption’ within the stories.6 As much as the regime strove to uphold conservative values by promoting cultural products that reinforced official positions on gender politics, all of these films and TV shows signal the regime’s anxiety to counterbalance growing social unrest and an emerging dissident resistance. Since the passing of the Press Law in 1966, ‘the most far-reaching liberalising measure’, other cultural realms increasingly had started to challenge the dictatorship’s ‘logic of orthodoxy’.7 Such was the case with what Castro García calls the ‘metaphoric cinema’ of the late dictatorship. However elusively or obliquely, the productions of dissident filmmakers like Carlos Saura, Víctor Erice, Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón, Ricardo Franco, Jaime Chávarri and Emilio Gutiérrez Lázaro, all financed by maverick producer Elías Querejeta,8 dared to address problematic issues. By 1975, the last year of the regime, ideological diversity was barely controllable and official discourse was repeatedly breached by increasingly challenging productions attracting a growing number of spectators. In the theatrical domain, 1975 was the year of the Spanish premiere of Jesus Christ Superstar, the sacrilegious musical that became a box-office success, to the dismay of the authorities, and of Hair, which infused the Madrid theatre district with the foreign, countercultural, hippie vibes of the 1960s. The same year also saw the premiere of The New Taming of the Shrew, written and directed by the up-and-coming Juan Guerrero Zamora: a daring, decidedly feminist interpretation of Shakespeare’s classic that opened at the state-controlled Teatro Español in Madrid just a few

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months before the death of the dictator and the end of the regime. The chief goal of this chapter is to inspect the production within the changing social and cultural context of the end of the Spanish dictatorship by looking at the rewritten play-text, at its use of metatheatricality, at the director’s interviews, and at audience and critical reception. I argue that The New Taming of the Shrew is a significant production within the performance history of Shakespeare’s play for the way it intervenes at a crucial moment in Spanish social history and the way it uses the play to address key conflicts within the country’s changing perceptions of femininity and gender politics.

The New Taming of the Shrew (1975) Guerrero’s production is a close rendering of The Taming of the Shrew in terms of plot, structure, numbers and names of characters. The turn of dialogue and the length of the speeches also resemble the English play closely, but the text itself is paraphrased, updated to modern speech and, at times, reformulated strategically to subvert the conflict between Katherina and Petruccio. Academic consensus regarding the progressiveness or conservatism of Shakespeare’s play continues to be unresolved. Over the years John Bean, Ann Thompson, Lynda E. Boose, Diana Henderson, Barbara Hodgdon and Sarah Werner are just a few of the scholars to have addressed the play’s gender conflicts, constructing a hermeneutics of a play whose ambiguities are at least as persuasive as its certainties.9 Working with the creative freedom of the theatre practitioner, Guerrero appropriated the play to provide an interpretation that clearly sides with those who are uncomfortable with Shakespeare’s representation of gender relations: My New Shrew  . . . modifies the development and signification of its protagonist, Katherina, by constructing

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it as something more than a shrew. [She is presented] as a human being in possession of all her rights, who refuses to continue being reified in the same way that, in an androcentric civilization, women have been considered by men as an inert object or an ornament throughout centuries.10 The New Taming of the Shrew presented Petruccio as a broke go-getter whose interest in Katherina stems exclusively from her capacity to improve his economic and social status. His construction as a patently duplicitous character blocks off much of the romantic potential of the relationship with Katherina, a situation exacerbated by his demands for feminine domesticity and submission that clash with Katherina’s freespirited and shrewish nature. In this respect Guerrero’s text is more explicit than Shakespeare’s: katherina Mules were made to carry heavy loads! petruccio It is women, if I may, who were made to carry heavy loads. katherina I won’t be the mare that bears your burden . . . If I ever wanted, which I don’t, you would be mine and not me yours! I would own you and not you me! I won’t be the one that allows men to always be the owners. petruccio One way or another, Kate, you will marry me because I was born to tame you and to transform a wild Kate into a submissive Kate, just like the other domestic Kates.11

Feminist metatheatrics Together with the increased abruptness of the Katherina/ Petruccio conflict, another element that characterizes this adaptation and sets it further apart from Shakespeare’s play is

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its use of metatheatricality. Discussions about the dynamics of gender in The Taming of the Shrew have often dwelt on the role of the play’s metatheatrical frame. However incomplete, Sly and the Induction put the Katherina and Bianca plots at a different level of representation, somewhere below or beyond the ‘reality’ of the tinker. These, and other elements such as the carnivalesque, commedia dell’arte nature of the play, or the fact that Katherina would not have been played by a woman on the early modern stage, have been used as arguments to mitigate the roughness of the shrew-taming narrative and hence counteract those interpretations that characterize Shrew as a predominantly misogynistic play. For Graham Holderness, for example, that the Petruccio and Katherina relationship is presented as a play-within-the-play attenuates the seriousness of the gender conflict, which should not be taken at face value but, rather, as a performance, a ‘wonder’ as Lucentio puts it in the very last line of the play-text (5.2.195).12 Instead, The New Taming of the Shrew does away with Sly and the Induction altogether, amplifying the seriousness of the discussion of the ‘woman question’, as the metatheatrical framework does not dilute the problematic of the Katherina/Petruccio relationship, or at least not in the same way. As if taking a cue from Shakespeare’s own metatheatrical drive, the original Induction is replaced by an alternative set of alienating effects and metadramatic moments that shape the play’s articulation of the battle of the sexes in a different manner. In keeping with this production’s title, The New Taming of the Shrew explicitly distances itself from its source throughout the performance to establish its own autonomy. Before Katherina and Petruccio start their fighting, the play opens with a troupe of players who alert the audience that they are about to perform a play; and once the performance is set in motion, the players will occasionally remind the audience that they are performing Shakespeare’s play-text  – a text that is referred to explicitly as an imperfect and to some extent incongruent piece. One example is found in the discussion of Bianca’s choice of suitors before the wager scene:

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gremio Come on, Come on, let’s set the banquet! (To the audience) Don’t think, all of you, that what you have just seen is true. What happens here is that, in his play, Shakespeare established that the distinguished young lady would prefer this ungainly creature [Lucenzio]. But as soon as we perform another play, you’ll see how she chooses me.13 Here, The New Taming of the Shrew signals its status as an adaptation, but these metatheatrical ruptures also assert the new play’s own autonomy and lay the groundwork for its detachment from the source. We get some heavily rewritten excerpts of the play, some odd elements, and what are presented as minor inconsistencies of the original play-text: widow And what about calling me ‘widow’? Widow this, Widow that. You could just call me by my name! hortensio I can’t, my darling! Shakespeare didn’t give you a name!14 In these ways, The New Taming of the Shrew reflects on what is presented as the arbitrariness and datedness of Shakespeare’s play and of the gender structures inscribed in it. These metatheatrical manoeuvres, which explicitly present the production as an enactment of Shakespeare’s play, invest the performance with a sort of deterministic quality  – we are performing what Shakespeare is making us perform. But, ultimately, the production’s agenda is to denounce the imposition and constructedness of all gender identities and relations, a point that will be made explicit at the end of the production when Katherina’s ‘women are so simple’ speech is transformed into an unambiguous plea for gender equality in a clearly political moment that now loudly resounds as a cultural landmark of Spanish second-wave feminism.

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Back to the future: Katherina’s new agenda In The New Taming of the Shrew Katherina’s lines are rewritten to provide a steady supply of demands and vindications through which she addresses some of the central issues that shaped Spanish feminist discourse in the late dictatorship. The play is set in a distant past – at one point Katherina says, ‘I am a social victim of the sixteenth century’15 – yet by having the female protagonist complain about gender inequality through a rhetoric that is clearly topical to the Madrid audience, the production manages to make the point that the situation for women in Spain in 1975 is not far from that of Shakespeare’s time. The list of issues addressed by Katherina is such that extensive portions of the play-text would need to be quoted to fully represent the range and complexity of the character’s dissatisfaction. The inventory includes comments on arranged marriage, sexual independence, domesticity, women’s labour, emancipation, male accumulation of money and power, religious oppression, sexual abuse, domestic violence, lack of opportunities, infidelity, intellectual potential and clothing. Although delivered by Katherina individually, all are issues that acquire a communal tone when cheered or booed by the onstage female extras. At these moments in the play, Katherina speaks for all the women in Padua and, more immediately, in Madrid. For the most part the production maintains a comedic tone, but the taming process is performed as a traumatic experience for Katherina. On the way to Petruccio’s house, a long stage direction marks a change of mood that turns the busy and cheerful Padua into a ‘tempestuous night’ with thunder, wind, rain, the sound of a howling dog and a ‘hysteric ballet’ performed by the actors.16 Katherina falls from her horse on the way to the house and then the taming process itself is carried out through threats and physical abuse. Katherina is starved and made to undress, wash and show her almost naked

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body onstage, only to finally submit to Petruccio. Her capitulation is modulated on the way through the sun and moon scene on their way back to Padua, where Katherina indicates that she is only playing along because she understands that gender relations are ultimately make-believe, a point she makes by incorporating yet another disruptive metatheatrical moment in which she suggests that a truly independent self lies behind the appearance of female submission: petruccio Oh, how clear the moon shines. katherina You mean the sun. I’m burning up. petruccio What shines up there, Kate, is the moon. katherina What shines up there, my lord, is the sun. petruccio You contradict me again? By my mother’s son, it is the moon, a star, or whatever I determine! katherina Well, if it needs to be determined, it is actually a stage light. petruccio A stage light? I’ve never heard of such name among the constellations. katherina Right now there are no other constellations, other than the crickets in your head.17 After the production resolves the Bianca subplot, the wager scene has been rewritten entirely to articulate the play’s feminist climax: a ‘new’ Katherina walks into sixteenth-century Padua dressed in ‘jeans and perhaps black leather. Looking almost like a hippie but with none of the messiness. Commanding instead a rather studied ease and equally studied coquetry.’18 This new Katherina comes from the future to inform the rest of

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the characters about the new values that will prevail with the passing of time: petruccio Why are you dressed in such an extravagant, almost sinful manner, Kate? katherina Because in the age I come from, the body can hardly be a sin. petruccio In the age you . . . what? What does ‘in the age you come from’ mean? katherina A time very far away from yours. So far you couldn’t even imagine it. gremio This metaphysics can bring nothing good. [. . .] petruccio Am I to understand that, in that time you’re talking about, I won’t be your king? katherina If you mean it as a metaphor . . . petruccio Nor your lord? katherina It depends how and to what extent. petruccio Nor your master? katherina You won’t, for sure. widow I’m switching to your times, my lady! I’m sick of ours and of our men!19 The play closes with a rewritten and augmented version of the ‘women are so simple’ speech in which Katherina addresses the situation of women in the private and public spheres, demands

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an increase in the quantity and quality of jobs available for women, comments on the difficulties of balancing work and family and stresses the need for social and economic equality. The rhetoric of Katherina’s speech stands as a textbook example of Spanish dissident feminism of the 1970s, yet Petruccio still thinks the wager is his because Katherina was the only one to attend the call of the men. She corrects him: petruccio So I won the bet! katherina You will. In five centuries. Or perhaps six, I don’t know. When you become a little bit of a mother. You will never become more of a man. When you step down from your throne. You’ll never be higher up. When you share. You will never be more of a lord. petruccio Rubbish! With all this oratory, Katherina, you’re just trying to cover up for the fact that you knelt. katherina By God, he has understood nothing! I haven’t knelt or risen. I come to you. petruccio Because I commanded it! katherina No, dear love. Because of something much simpler. Because I love you. petruccio You have an answer for everything! katherina And now, will you come to my century? petruccio ( acceding ) Then, fair people of the city of Padua, so long! katherina Godspeed and thanks. Thanks also to Shakespeare because, trying to teach us how men are to tame women, he made us understand the way women will tame men.20

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Petruccio’s ignorance and stubbornness can be read as a symptom that Katherina’s revolution will yet have to be fought, but however thoroughly hostility and confrontation have characterized the relationship, reconciliation prevails and gives an optimistic feel to the end of the production. In this way the ever-redemptive power of romantic love provides a way out of the seriousness of the gender conflict and lays out a productive scenario for the future of social interactions between men and women. The lesson to take home in the 1975 International Women’s Year is that, as entertaining as it may be, Shakespeare’s play-text and its fossilized gender politics require subverting in the light of the changing social and political climate.

Contextualizing gender debates in the last days of the regime In hindsight, Guerrero’s reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s Shrew stands as an iconic example of the views that characterized the re-emergence of a Spanish feminism that had been effectively repressed by Church and State since the institution of the dictatorial regime in 1939. The vindications of what we could roughly call second-wave Spanish feminism, however, still stood far from poststructuralist deconstructions of gender and sexuality and from the class-, ethnicity-, and queer-inflected third-wave feminism that would emerge and have solidified, even at institutional levels, at the time of this writing. The New Shrew’s understanding of gender still rests on an essentialist male/female dichotomy that assumes fundamental biological differences: katherina There will be dissimilarities because we are different. But we won’t be dissimilar in value. You and I will be worth the same. A little or a lot, but the same.21

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This view is underlined by the director in one of the major conservative newspapers when he gave a straightforward account of his position in relation to Shakespeare’s play: There’s been a lot of water under the bridge since Shakespeare’s time and his thesis that a woman must submit to a man in all respects is untenable today. It is because of this that, with all due respect to the great English author, I find fault with his Shrew and I see myself in need of infusing [the play] with the right perspective, at a time in which gender relations are contemplated as a value system amongst equals, despite the differences of gender.22 The director’s understanding of gender within a stable, defined and unproblematized binary opposition is missing recent intersectional differentiations of the concept and the now more widely assumed perception of gender as a category characterized by ideology rather than biology. In this way, Guerrero’s views are exemplary of feminist positions that would slowly yet vigorously consolidate throughout the years of the democratic Transición but now can more clearly be contextualized as representative of the boundaries of the gender debates of the late Franco dictatorship. These views need to be understood within the difficulties encountered by any vindication of women’s rights happening at an especially tense moment in Spanish social history. With the possibility of censorship and retaliation at hand – the Teatro Español was, after all, financed and supervised by the regime  – Guerrero’s position should stand out even today as a decidedly brave contribution to the Spanish performance history of the play, in what can be seen as the earliest thorough reinterpretation of the play within a socalled ‘feminist perspective’: Shakespeare’s thesis . . . is indefensible. What my play-text suggests, in turn, is the correct terms in which male– female relations must develop. However different both

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are worth the same, and gender coexistence will only be truly fair and free the day when the equality of their value is acknowledged and put into practice, without women being reified as a mere object of pleasure or as an ornament.23 The director’s position regarding Shakespeare is clear. For Guerrero, Shrew is a sexist play whose gender politics need to be updated to promote a more egalitarian representation of male/ female relationships, a hopeful project that aligns ideologically with the emerging progressive discourses adopted by the clandestine Communist and Socialist parties, which would be legalized two years after this performance. The views expressed by Guerrero in these interviews are consistent with his production design, rewriting of the text, and uses of metatheatricality and alienating effects. He created an ideologically homogeneous spectacle that, surprisingly, managed to slip into the programme of the state-supervised Español, whose resources and funding provided one of the most grandiose productions of the 1974–5 season. In this way, at the ideological level, The New Taming of the Shrew belongs to the ‘liberal dissidence’ that, according to Chuliá, was producing the most exciting cultural products of the dying regime; but with its premiere at the national theatre, the production also was developed within the circuit of an official culture that provided ample visibility and potential impact. Negotiations with the Español were smooth and cooperative. In the newspapers Guerrero was grateful for the ‘extraordinary ease and wealth of resources’ provided by the General Director of Theatre, Mario Antolín, which suggests substantial ideological permissibility on behalf of the state officials.24 As much as the play incorporated the latest views and rhetoric of second-wave feminism, this New Taming of the Shrew stood just within the boundaries of what was ideologically acceptable for the regime. As might be expected, Guerrero’s production caused quite a stir.

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Shakespeare’s authority and critical anxiety There is ample evidence of positive reactions to Guerrero’s ‘dazzling and colourful spectacle’, including the ‘prolonged ovation’ at its premiere on 31 March 1975.25 Records indicate that the company performed two shows a day at least until 15 May, and there may have been other shows and later revivals.26 It is safe to say that the production was received by the Madrid audience with great interest. It is the ambivalent newspaper reviews that convey how the production challenged the spectators’ perception of what had been one of Shakespeare’s most performed plays on the Spanish stage.27 Reviewers were somewhat disoriented by how Guerrero tampered with the historical setting, infusing it with contemporary feminist rhetoric and producing an anachronistic effect: ‘It is a little strange to see this charming Katherina, devoted to the vindications of her gender, in a centuries-old atmosphere, if we relate the setting to the liberation movements of our modern-day women.’ But the reviews all acknowledged the novelty, topicality and effectiveness of Guerrero’s take on the classic: ‘The worth of the attempt is undeniable  . . . [This Shrew] is revolutionary and . . . almost totally new. That Petruccio gives in at the end indicates how much times have changed.’28 Times were indeed changing. At the time of the premiere, Spain was undergoing irreversible social transformations that would only develop further after the death of the dictator. But in 1975 the social climate regarding gender debates was still characterized by the sort of confrontation and dissent that produced ostensibly contradictory responses to the production in the (statesupervised) newspapers. The relatively progressive Pombo Angulo found Katherina ‘deliciously feminist’, while Adolfo Prego, reviewer of the conservative newspaper ABC , argued that Guerrero had ‘totally destroyed the content of the classical piece’.29 Even Prego, who had reacted quite sympathetically to the premiere, felt the need to defend Shakespeare’s genius and,

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while doing so, went on to sanction the gender politics of the early modern play by describing the ‘old’ Shrew as exemplary of a specific yet perfectly acceptable gender dynamics. ‘Shakespeare’, he wrote, ‘did not want to prove anything. He dived into a human circumstance and with his mighty imagination produced the definitive version of the fable in which the shrewish woman marries a man that is in favour of violent treatment.’30 The shadow of Shakespeare’s authority hovers over these reviews; Guerrero’s production is repeatedly measured against its source. The canonized playwright and the subversive director are scrutinized against each other with the result unanimous, regardless of the reviewer’s position on The New Shrew: Shakespeare’s talent is far superior to Guerrero’s updating of the play, even if the latter provides a fairer model for human interaction. Here again is Prego, who seemed more welcoming of the New Shrew’s revisionism: Guerrero Zamora has changed Shakespeare’s work for another, very much his own, but whose values, apart from being polemical, do not match those of the immortal genius of the universal theatre . . . From the golden balconies of the Español – so beautiful and so nineteenth-century – dressed with the sumptuous adornments of a wild and spectacular production, we saw Shakespeare vanish, little by little, as ideological propagandism started to rise.31 Even at its most progressive, the press thus looked to the past with nostalgia. It looked back to the nineteenth century, to Shakespeare’s time and, I would argue, to the earlier decades of the regime as idyllic periods in which the status quo would never have allowed threatening rewritings of rock-solid ideals. Prego’s praise of Shakespeare’s genius conceals a defence of gender hierarchies that the regime struggled to enforce until and beyond the end of the dictatorship. All of the reviews commented on the ideological problems of the rewriting, and Shakespeare’s superiority is attributed not so much to the Bard’s poetic expressiveness or theatrical craftsmanship as to

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the way the ‘old’ Shrew connects with the reviewers at the ideological level. Perhaps the effect was worsened by audience enthusiasm on the opening night, by the effective lavishness of the production design or by the overall success of the premiere; but the reviewers of the official press seemed uncomfortable with a spectacle that included so many vindications of what the regime had consistently suppressed and that the country could only pursue after the death of the dictator. Guerrero foresaw this reaction and politely defended his adaptation in an interview published the day before the premiere: ‘[My Shrew] is disrespectful to Shakespeare in a way that, I believe, would have earned his indulgence and perhaps even his joy.’32 The director clearly trusted that Shakespeare, had he lived in this complicated time, would have jumped on the bandwagon of social reform. Franco would die only a few months later, accelerating the profound social, political, economic, and cultural transformations in Spain that The New Taming of the Shrew was courageously anticipating.

Notes 1

This work is part of research project PGC2018-094427-B-I00, financed by the Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades. All translations are by the author.

2

Elisa Chuliá, ‘Cultural Diversity and the Development of a Pre-democratic Civil Society in Spain’ in Spain Transformed: The Late Franco Dictatorship, 1959–1975, ed. Nigel Townson (London: Palgrave, 2007), 164.

3

Ibid.

4

Ibid., 166.

5

Amanda Castro García, La representación de la mujer en el cine español de la Transición (1973–1982) (Oviedo: KRK, 2009), 35.

6

Ibid., 40–41.

7

Chuliá, ‘Cultural Diversity’, 174.

8

Castro García, La representación de la mujer, 44.

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123

See John C. Bean, ‘Comic Structure and the Humanizing of Kate in The Taming of the Shrew’ in The Woman’s Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Green and Carol Thomas Neely (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 65–78; Lynda E. Boose, ‘Scolding Brides and Bridling Scolds: Taming the Woman’s Unruly Member’, Shakespeare Quarterly 42.2 (1991), 179–213; Diana Henderson, ‘A Shrew for the Times, Revisited’ in Shakespeare: The Movie II. Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV, Video, and DVD , ed. Richard Burt and Lynda E. Boose (New York: Routledge, 2003), 120–39; Barbara Hodgdon, ‘Katherina Bound; or, Play(K)ating the Strictures of Everyday Life’, PMLA 107.3 (1992), 538–53; Ann Thompson, intro. and ed., The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare, second edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Sarah Werner, Shakespeare and Feminist Performance: Ideology on Stage (London: Routledge, 2001).

10 Juan Guerrero Zamora, ‘El estreno de mañana noche. La nueva fierecilla domada, de Guerrero Zamora, en el Español’, ABC , 30 March 1975, 54. 11 Juan Guerrero Zamora, La nueva fierecilla domada (1975), [audio recording] Madrid: Centro de Documentación Teatral. All transcription and translation to English by the author. 12 Graham Holderness, ed., The Taming of the Shrew (Shakespeare in Performance Series) (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1989). Quotation from final line of The Taming of the Shrew is from Barbara Hodgdon, ed., The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare, Arden Third Series (London: Arden/ Bloomsbury, 2010), 5.2.195. 13 Guerrero Zamora, La nueva fierecilla domada. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid.

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22 Guerrero Zamora, ‘El estreno de mañana noche’, 54. 23 Guerrero qtd. in Ángel Laborda, ‘La nueva fierecilla domada, de Guerrero Zamora, en el Español’ ABC , 19 March 1975, 72. 24 Ibid. 25 Elena Bandín, ‘The Taming of the Shrew revisitada por Juan Guerrero Zamora para el Teatro Español en 1975: una fiera sin domar’ in La traducción del futuro: mediación lingüística y cultural en el siglo XXI , ed. Luis Pegenaute, Janet DeCesaris, Mercè Tricás and Elisa Bernal (Madrid: PPU, 2008), 129. 26 Records collected in the Centro de Documentacion Teatral archive, Instituto Nacional de las Artes Escenicas y de la Musica. Available online: https://cdaem.mcu.es. 27 See Alfonso Par, Representaciones shakespearianas en España, 2 vols (Barcelona: Librería general de Victoriano Suárez y Biblioteca Balmes, 1936); also Keith Gregor, Shakespeare in the Spanish Theatre: 1772 to the Present (London: Continuum, 2010). 28 Manuel Pombo Angulo, ‘La fierecilla domada en el Teatro Español’, La Vanguardia Española, 8 April 1975, 55. 29 Pombo Angulo, ‘La fierecilla domada’, 55; Adolfo Prego, ‘La nueva fierecilla domada, de J. Guerrero Zamora’, ABC , 2 April 1975, 51. 30 Prego, ‘La nueva fierecilla domada’, 51. 31 Ibid. 32 Guerrero Zamora, ‘El estreno de mañana noche’, 54.

7 The Turn of the Shrew Cross-Gender Casting in the Twenty-First Century Peter Kirwan

All-female casting looks horribly like reverse chauvinism. The truth is that a sex change like this simply gets in the way of an always dodgy play about sexual politics and male chauvinism so our interest becomes not how well can they do it, but can they do it at all? Once you decide to have its complexity and its comedy attempted only by women you are dangerously close to a regime of gimmickry  – why not have it played entirely by penguins or by actors with no hair?1 Notwithstanding the enticing image of a production of The Taming of the Shrew performed by penguins, Sheridan Morley’s remarks on Phyllida Lloyd’s 2003 all-female production of the play are revealing of several prejudices and assumptions. Within three sentences, he manages to characterize the idea of an all-female Shrew as ridiculous, amateurish (‘can they do 125

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it?’), a gimmick and sexist against men. The ‘sex change’ – a confusingly inaccurate description, given that neither characters nor actors changed their sex – is read as a distraction that ‘gets in the way’ of a play about sexual politics and male chauvinism; the assumption presumably being that sexism and sexual politics are issues best addressed by men. Morley’s reaction to Lloyd’s production is an extreme example of the critical responses that attend productions that undertake significant gender reversal to put women in dominant positions, whether through having an all-female company or by casting women in roles written as male authority figures. Whereas all-male Shakespeare productions have an illustrious modern history, often feted for their apparent (re)discovery of nuances that can be attributed to the plays’ original staging conditions, productions which put female actors into positions of power remain more likely to attract the kinds of accusation of gimmickry epitomized by Morley.2 This is particularly the case for The Taming of the Shrew, a play whose subject matter has resulted in repeated calls for its removal from the repertory. Shrew scholarship is split between those who see the play as an important vehicle for examination of gender politics, both early modern and contemporary, and those who see the play as an irredeemable chauvinist relic that has no place on the modern stage, given its repeated reproduction of images of pre-/marital violence.3 Phyllis Rackin, in her discussion of the play’s enduring stage presence, argues that conventional post-Restoration casting practices have been key to this critical split: women playing Katherina have ‘bought into the fantasy’ in presenting the central relationship as a tempestuous one of music and passion, and in doing so have contributed to the normalization and naturalization of an image of abuse that early modern performances framed through the Induction and through single-sex casting.4 In the early twenty-first century, several productions of Shrew have used cross-gender casting to challenge the fundamentals of that image  – a man abusing a woman. This chapter focuses on two of the most prominent of these examples: Lloyd’s 2003 Globe production, in which a

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woman (playing a man) abused a woman (playing a woman); and Justin Audibert’s 2019 Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) production, in which a woman (playing a woman) abused a man (playing a man). This chapter explores the rationale and ramification of these productions’ choices as an attempt to solve the problem of the Shrew through disruption of the gendered power dynamic. Cross-gendering roles to address a problem of misogyny within a text is not without problems. Nora Williams has recently argued that ‘[if] we don’t intervene at a structural level, making changes to the scaffolding of a play . . . we are engaging in an “incomplete dramaturgy”: we’re taking a kind of shortcut . . . perhaps not really thinking through to the end of the decisions being made.’5 I adopt Williams’s important work here to distinguish between the desire for representation – which may risk being merely gestural – and the need for substantive reconsideration of how casting choices affect the play. Williams’s argument points to the lack of strategic thinking about different kinds of cross-gender casting, and I suggest that we can look to the better-established work on casting across race/ethnicity for a model. Ayanna Thompson’s Passing Strange reproduces the following taxonomy of casting practices drawn up by the NonTraditional Casting Project, which provide productive differentiation between strategic models for non-traditional casting with respect to an actor’s race/ethnicity: Colorblind Casting: a meritocratic model in which actors are cast without regard to race; the best actor for the best role6 Societal Casting: a socially informed model in which actors of colour are cast in roles originally conceived as being white if people of colour perform these roles in society as a whole Conceptual Casting: a conceptually conceived model in which actors of color are cast in roles to enhance the play’s social resonance

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Cross-Cultural Casting: another conceptually conceived model in which the entire world of the play is translated to a different culture and location.7 Equivalent categories can be applied to non-traditional casting according to gender: 1 Gender-indifferent casting,8 such as that employed by Michelle Terry’s ‘post-gender’ Globe Ensemble in 2018 and 2019, which fitted actors to roles irrespective of gender identity.9 2 Societal casting, long represented by (for example) the recasting of male servants as maids and the performance of gender-fluid characters (e.g. Ariel) by women, trans or non-binary people. This extends to characters such as the Doctor in Macbeth, where a gender change may be unremarkable to audiences, being played by women. 3 Conceptual casting, which casts non-traditionally in order to enhance the play’s social relevance and/or an individual character’s significance. This may involve a change in the character’s gender and pronouns, such as Tamsin Greig as Malvolia (National, 2017); or not, as in Cheek by Jowl’s all-male productions of As You Like It (1991) and Twelfth Night (2003). Such casting is usually designed to be noticed, and to generate interpretive significance through cognitive dissonance. 4 Translocation, in which the setting of the play is changed to explore different structures and power relations. Examples of this in relation to gender include Phyllida Lloyd’s Trilogy (Julius Caesar, Henry IV and The Tempest, Donmar, 2012–16), which featured an all-female cast playing inmates in a women’s prison who were putting on the plays. These categories admit of fluidity, partly as the intentions behind casting practices are not always explicit, and partly as the significance drawn by an audience from casting choices may

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differ from that intended by the production. The productions of Shrew in this chapter come from the third and fourth categories, using non-traditional casting to deliberately generate responses informed by cognitive dissonance between the actors and the roles (especially Katherina and Petruccio) that they played, through conceptual casting and/or translocation.

The Shrew and conceptual casting: Shakespeare’s Globe (2003) Lloyd’s production utilized a single-sex company while retaining the traditional genders (signified in pronouns and costume) of the play’s characters.10 Shakespeare’s Globe had decided to create a female ensemble to accompany its all-male Original Practices productions, and the conscious choice to explore the effects of an all-female company aligns the production with the conceptual casting model.11 Lloyd’s production foregrounded its deliberate subversion of expectations with a framing device – a new prologue spoken by actor Ann Ogbomo: The first time this house hosted Shakespeare’s Shrew All parts were played by men; weird, yes, but true. And still today you’ll find our acting brothers Portraying sisters, daughters, and their mothers Vice-versa’s very rare. But in this odd piece, The girls do get the chance to wear the codpiece. Our new production, crammed with female talents, May help in some way to redress the balance.12 Ignoring the ensemble’s concurrent production of Richard III , the prologue deliberately draws attention to the ‘odd’ and ‘rare’ nature of the production, and speaks of it as an opportunity ‘to redress the balance’; it is the women’s turn. Yet it also points out the ‘weird’ convention of all-male productions, with an implicit sideways nod at the Globe’s own Original Practices productions.

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What is notably lacking from the prologue is any argument that women may bring something unique to the interpretation of Shrew; the stated aim is representation and ‘balance’. The production’s framing, then, invites its audience to read it against the tradition of all-male Shakespeare, seeing not just women but an absence of men; the production is to be read as much for what it is not as for what it is. Ultimately, this is what some reviewers did. Complaining about younger women playing older men, Lloyd Evans argued ‘the physical mismatch is extreme. It’s like watching the school play where slight frames and trilling voices struggle to imitate the breadth and rumble of maturity.’13 Evans’s chauvinist dismissal of female actors as ‘slight’ and ‘trilling’ offers a diminution of professional skill based on his sense of what is missing, the women compared unfavourably to the male actors that the production’s own prologue evoked.14 He read the ‘all-girl casting’ as designed to ‘soften the play’s moral impact’ in an era wary of giving offence, a sentiment shared by Morley’s complaint about the production’s ‘barriers of political and gender correctness’.15 For these reviewers, the all-female Shrew is representation for representation’s sake at the expense of artistic coherence, and the lack of men is an insurmountable problem. The production, of course, did not lack ‘men’; it rather lacked male actors. At stake here is a dependence on mimesis; the performances, behaviours, costumes and make-up all clearly coded the male characters as men, but the production made no attempt to conceal the voices and bodies of the female actors. There is a misogynist double standard here; the all-male productions of Propeller and Cheek by Jowl, in which hairy chests and deep voices are apparent in the male actors playing women, are routinely praised for not offering a travesty of womanhood;16 in female actors making the reverse transition, the physical qualities of the actor are treated as a lack of skill. Rhoda Koenig argued that Baptista and Gremio ‘both bearded, stick their stomachs out, and sound exactly like a stately headmistress . . . Janet McTeer’s Petruchio, despite swaggering, striding, and even miming a lengthy pee, is all woman – indeed

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the male mannerisms emphasize her femininity.’17 Koenig’s circular argument acknowledges that the mannerisms are ‘male’, yet reads these against the actors’ bodies to generate images of dominant women that reinforce the primacy of the actor’s body over the behaviours performed by that body. The need to somehow explain the disruption to mimesis by evoking stereotypes of unfeminine femininity attempts to explicate the production within a realist framework that was quite clearly not part of the production’s offer to its audience. Instead, the visibility and audibility of the actors’ gender was key to the undercurrent of satire that pervaded the production. Janet McTeer (Petruccio) explained in the production’s programme that as a group of women we can gently satirize men by exaggerating male behaviour  . . . We are presented with a macho, competitive society in which marriage is a matter of mercantile transaction. Within that, Petruchio is especially boysy, a lad. By keeping within the framework we can have the most fun in a post-feminist way by heightening male behaviour.18 Nicholas de Jongh was one of the few contemporary critics who read the production as satire, albeit disliking it for what he felt was a ‘reactionary, sadistic, male supremacist slant’ that made ‘satirical fun of the way men walk, talk and misbehave  . . . the production’s crude traditionalism proves rather disturbing’.19 He felt that the cross-gender casting was a form of tokenism that led to the entrenchment of gender stereotypes, where men would offer subtler, ‘psychological’ takes.20 The critical preference for a psychological approach privileges the craft of the individual actor, the development of realistic motivation and expression of character. McTeer, by contrast, appeals to the collective in her repeated use of the first-person plural, and eschews psychological realism in the deliberate attempt to exaggerate and heighten behaviour, closer to the ‘farcical theatrical performance rather than a

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representation of actual life’ of the play’s earliest performances as imagined by Rackin.21 As such, the production’s aims are predicated on fundamentally different terms to those on which most of the critics received it; the production depended upon the disruption of mimesis in the disjunct between female bodies and exaggerated male behaviours. To this end, the Induction scenes were cut; ‘we felt that the bravest thing was simply to play the play.’22 The all-female ensemble constitutes its own metatheatrical framing device, establishing the characters of the main business of Shrew as impersonations. McTeer’s Petruccio was a wish-fulfilment figure. He first appeared heaving himself out a trapdoor along with a heavily pregnant woman who tried to cling onto him; it was to her that he spoke ‘Verona, for a while I take my leave’23 before letting her fall back out of sight. From then on, his performance was marked by his taking up of space, swaggering across the full depth and width of the stage, and as he undertook to woo Katherina, Hortensio, Gremio and Grumio fell into line behind him, unconsciously taking on his mannerisms. The image of Petruccio peeing against a pillar particularly rattled reviewers, the Sunday Times using it as an example of the cast not knowing how to play men;24 what the reviewers missed was the hypnotic effect that Petruccio’s unabashed public performance of dominance, including marking his territory, had on the other men, whom Elizabeth Klett identified as ‘clearly awed by his masculine presence’, normalizing a culture of toxic masculinity in which his abuse of Kate could take place.25 The production’s key scene was Act  2, Scene 1. Kathryn Hunter  – much smaller than McTeer  – played Katherina as young and entitled, brutal in her violence against her sister, a lock of whose hair she yanked out. Her father clearly favoured Bianca, and Katherina’s acting out for his attention only deepened the tension between them. In this context, Petruccio’s casual confidence in Katherina’s company infuriated her, and she lashed out by punching him in the stomach and then flounced away, mocking him with ‘If you strike me you are no gentleman’ (2.1.224) in the assumption that her sex gave her immunity.

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Petruccio responded by containing her both physically and socially; first physically, using his greater height and build to restrain her effortlessly in his arms; and then socially, in his explanation that they had agreed she would continue to be shrewish in company. This led to Petruccio, Baptista and the rest cheering and clapping her every time she threw something or screamed, until finally she stormed off the stage, beaten, with the men applauding her ‘mimickry’ of high dudgeon. The ease with which Petruccio redefined the terms of social engagement extended his exaggerated performance of masculinity into one that, through comic satire, offered a vision of a world in which hyper-masculinity, through its appeal to other men, is used to silence women. The taming at Petruccio’s household took the form of training, with the presence of Petruccio’s dog Troilus (played by an actor) designed to align Petruccio’s treatment of her with that of a pet. Indeed, Act 4 was structured as a power struggle between woman and dog, first as the servants fawned over the whimpering dog after Katherina aimed a blow at it, then as Petruccio repeatedly gave her food to the animal, and then as she attempted to steal the dog’s bone. In these scenes, Petruccio seemed to feel that he was genuinely trying to teach her something, as if trying to help her out of her own vanity by teaching her to agree with him. When she was obedient, he stroked her hair; when she resisted his commands, his frustration led to screaming fights. By Act 4, Scene 5 she had learned to play the game; a canny textual change at 4.5.47 had her tell Vincentio that her eyes ‘have been so bedazzled by the moon’, with a pointed turn to Petruccio to check that the heavenly body was still that which they had previously agreed. The twist came in the final speech, as Katherina performed her practised obedience for the first six lines, but then repeatedly ignored Petruccio’s polite applause and attempts to stop her, and went on to perform an increasingly exaggerated version of female compliance, showing off her underskirts on ‘why are our bodies soft?’ (5.2.171), to Petruccio’s embarrassment, and forcing the other women into a position of compliance. Petruccio and Katherina then withdrew only to reappear having

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a screaming row in Italian, having fully embraced the stereotype of the fractious couple. In this final devolution into commedia stock figures, the production showed the strain of what Williams calls ‘incomplete dramaturgy’, the change of language and all-too-brief snapshot of Petruccio and Katherina’s future a bolted-on ending that tonally undermined Katherina’s subversive speech. The very divided nature of the critical response ranged from de Jongh’s reading of the couple ‘happily arguing’ in a way that validated the misogyny of the taming, to Lyn Gardner’s belief that Katherina was ‘redeemed’ by love, and Petruccio was ‘no longer at the centre of the universe, but a partner in it with Katherina, a woman who knows that there are many ways to keep the peace and still enjoy the war’.26 While from my perspective at sixteen years’ distance, Lloyd’s production offered a playful and compelling subversion of Shakespeare’s Shrew that rejected mimesis in order to satirize behaviours and structures of power, the incomplete rationale for its concept exposed it to the ingrained biases of critics unaccustomed to reading women’s bodies in this way. I agree with Anna Kamaralli’s assessment of the production as fundamentally ‘hamstrung . . . by the need to demonstrate faith in the comedy of the play . . . the fear [for women] is still there of being under different obligations, of being judged differently, and of having something exceptional to prove’, a fear borne out by the reviews.27 Yet the production’s boldness in challenging the alignment of gendered bodies with gendered behaviours had the effect of exposing precisely those critical biases about what constitutes ‘male’ and ‘female’ behaviours, setting an earlytwenty-first century trend for new approaches to the Shrew.

The Shrew and translocation: the RSC (2019) Justin Audibert’s 2019 RSC Shrew was cross-cast with concurrent productions of As You Like It and Measure for

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Measure, sharing a diverse ensemble.28 Audibert’s programme note discusses his decision to set the production in a world where women are the dominant sex: an alternative Elizabethan society organized as a matriarchy.29 The majority of the main roles were thus reinterpreted as characters (and played by actors) of the opposite sex. Audibert’s Shrew was actually the second UK production in 2019 to flip the genders of the characters. Jo Clifford, a trans theatre-maker, staged a version at Cardiff’s Sherman Theatre which imagined ‘a world where women are the dominant gender and marriage is undertaken as a business proposition’, and which invited female audience members to enter the studio first and take the best seats.30 Clifford’s hope was that ‘scenes, such as the one in which a mother auctions her sons off like property, will be shocking in a way that they perhaps wouldn’t be if played in the conventional way’.31 The exact same image was echoed by Audibert in the RSC programme: ‘it’s been fascinating to see how things feel when, for example, a mother sells off her two sons, as opposed to a father selling off his two daughters. We are somehow not shocked by the traditional version but when we see a mother selling her sons off it feels transgressive.’32 For both productions, which assume an audience complacent in regard to the play’s misogyny, especially in Audibert’s presumptive ‘we’, the intention was to deliberately court the recognition of difference. Audibert acknowledged the influence of Naomi Alderman’s novel The Power, situating the production in the realms of speculative fiction, a genre whose inherent subjunctivity was established in an important 1973 essay by Joanna Russ.33 More recently, Simon Spiegel specifically explores the applicability of Viktor Shklovsky’s ostranenie and Bertolt Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt to the ‘estrangement’ of sciencefiction as defined by Darko Suvin.34 Central to Spiegel’s analysis is the idea that ‘The formal framework of sf is not estrangement, but exactly its opposite, naturalization. On a formal level, sf does not estrange the familiar, but rather makes the strange familiar.’35 This is a valuable way of interpreting a production

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which aimed for cognitive dissociation  – not unlike Brecht’s v-effect, in Audibert’s stated desire to ‘make people think’ – but eschewed the models of formal disruption that characterize Brechtian theatre.36 As with Lloyd’s production, even the play’s own framing device of Christopher Sly was cut, presenting this world as unfiltered and internally cohesive, including casting strictly along gender lines. Unlike the Globe production, then, any effect of alienation was dependent on the audience’s assumed prior knowledge of an Elizabethan history and dominant patriarchal structures against which the inverted world of the production could be assessed. Audibert was ‘tired of sitting in rooms where men got the main share of lines’ and also didn’t ‘think the world needs to see any more imagery of men abusing women’.37 The most immediate effect of the production’s gender reversal was to make apparent the truth of Kamaralli’s argument that, in terms of noisiness, Katherina is not much of a shrew, speaking ‘a paltry eight per cent of her play’s lines’.38 What Kamaralli describes as ‘the puzzle of someone repeatedly described as having an uncontrollable tongue having so little to say’ was especially noticeable in Joseph Arkley’s performance as ‘Katherine’. Arkley’s performance was the antithesis of Hunter’s; where Hunter’s performance was characterized by shouting, smashing of crockery and other business designed to take up space on the stage, Arkley’s performance was restrained and quiet, privileging a passive resistance to the conventions of society rather than an active rebellion against them.39 As such, in addition to the audible difference of a production dominated by female voices, the relative quietness of Katherina/Katherine’s stage presence became readily apparent. Playing Katherine as quiet raised an interpretive difficulty for Michael Billington: ‘Even if you re-gender all the pronouns and imagine a Renaissance world where women hold sway, you can’t get away from the big issue: that the action hinges on physical and psychological dominance.’40 Taller than almost anyone else on stage, when Katherine did get angry and made

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violent gestures, he offered a genuine threat. The production deliberately chose not to portray the dominant sex as physically stronger, to the extent that when Katherine made a gesture as if to be violent, many of the women stepped back in fright. Similarly, while there were a limited number of moments where Claire Price’s Petruchia enacted some sort of physical restraint against Katherine – such as putting her arm around his neck while greeting Baptista at 2.1.285 – the taming was constructed almost entirely along psychological rather than physical lines. Thus, where Lloyd’s production established that physical restraint was a part of patriarchal control, Audibert’s production relied on Katherine’s self-control, his reluctance to step too far out of the gender role ascribed to him by this society. This raised a serious problem for the play, in that Katherine came pre-tamed. Rather than violently destructive in response to societal norms, Katherine was fundamentally compliant, but sullen and sulky about it. Rather than explore the detail of how a matriarchy might operate with reference to contemporary or historical examples of matrilineal societies, Audibert retained all of the power dynamics of a structural patriarchy but with a key tool of that system  – the threat of physical/ sexual violence – downplayed if not entirely removed. As such, the production epitomized the ethical failings of an ‘incomplete dramaturgy’ as it equated a male fantasy of victimization by women with the lived reality of female victimization by men, while drastically scaling down the level of threat and violence enacted against the men. This was in stark contrast to Edward Hall’s 2006 production for Propeller (revived in 2013), which used its all-male cast to enact extreme violence against Katherina, played by a male actor, in ways that indicted intimate partner violence as a consequence of a patriarchal system.41 Audibert hedged about his own intentions; in the pre-show interview at the live broadcast, he said that he wanted to try the gender reversal and see what happened, and let audiences make up their own minds.42 However, the

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production’s conception of how a matriarchy might work was too thin to offer a meaningful critique either of its own society, or of the more threatening patriarchy that it pastiched. To take the production on its own terms, the most valuable question it offered was how far any relationship begun on such unequal terms can ever be considered consensual. Price’s Petruchia was unabashedly attracted to Katherine on first sight, and the taming was driven by her genuine sadness that Katherine did not know how to behave properly. As such, rather than being an attempt to browbeat Katherine into submission, the taming here took on the aspect of (mostly) patient training. Petruchia insisted, persistently and smilingly, on the terms and conditions of their relationship, withholding food and clothes so that they would be the rewards for his good behaviour. There was some alignment here with the Globe production; in a world where his brother Bianco knew how to play the game of grooming himself and acting as eye candy to snag wealthy women, Katherine was spoiled and well-fed, first appearing chewing casually on a chicken leg. Petruchia’s withdrawal of creature comforts brought out the side of Katherine that longed for beautiful clothes and for a good meal, with which Petruchia was happy to reward him upon compliance. The severity of Katherine’s deprivation while at Petruchia’s household remained shocking, with Katherine stumbling about the floor begging for scraps and licking empty plates. In keeping with the speculative framing of the production, the result of this was an effective psychological reprogramming along the lines of 1984, in which, following a period of extreme abuse, Katherine reacted with almost robotic efficiency to Petruchia’s commands in the final scene. Yet what should implicitly have been a sinister change in Katherine’s personality was undercut by Petruchia and Katherine jumping into one another’s arms and beginning to tear one another’s clothes off in public after Katherine’s final speech. The apparently consensual passion, presented without any framing or obvious satire, implicitly validated the taming and psychological coercion.

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Conclusions Elizabeth Schafer, overviewing three productions of Shrew directed by women, argues that ‘it is still a very dangerous play’, in the tendency of productions to either make it ‘acceptable, even comfortable’ or to critique it in ways that depend on the audience’s assumption ‘that sensible men could never harbour such fantasies’.43 The strategies of cognitive dissonance deployed by the two productions I have focused on in this chapter both generated conflicting responses, dependent as they were on the audience’s ability (or willingness) to respond both to the bodies on stage and the imagined bodies that they inverted. At times this was made explicit – Arkley’s delivery of ‘I am ashamed that men are so simple / To offer war when they should kneel for peace’ (5.2.167–8) rang through as an overt critique of the problems of a (real) patriarchal society under the guise of acquiescence to the production’s matriarchy. The value of the line took full advantage of the subjunctive mood of the production, momentarily making our own patriarchal society strange. The value of non-traditional gender casting, despite the ‘it’s our turn’ tone of the Globe production’s prologue, goes beyond ‘mere’ representation to offer the potential for incisive critique of conventional gender norms. The conceptual and translocation models outlined above served to detach behaviours from bodies, to expose power structures, and to satirize fragile masculinity through exaggeration and inversion. But the divided critical responses and confused narratives that characterized these two productions are also a reminder that these models depend on good faith. The refusal of (mostly male) reviewers to take seriously the image of women on top may serve as a warning of the ongoing difficulties of countering the cultural baggage that attends the reception of Shrew, whatever a production’s intentions. And Audibert’s apolitical stance, resulting in a translocation that was only partially thought through, risked turning interpretive concept into aesthetic gimmick. For a production to be ‘crammed with

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female talents’ no longer needs apology or introduction, but if it is truly time for the ‘shrew’ to take her turn, then these productions demonstrate the need for both ethical criticism and ethical direction, as well as onstage representation.

Notes 1

Sheridan Morley, ‘The Taming of the Shrew’, The Lady, 9 September 2003.

2

On all-male productions, see Terri Power, Shakespeare and Gender in Practice (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016), 59–80; and several essays in James C. Bulman, ed., Shakespeare Re-Dressed (Madison: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2008).

3

See Penny Gay, As She Likes It (London: Routledge, 1994), 86–119; Elizabeth Schafer, ed., The Taming of the Shrew (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Barbara Hodgdon, ed., The Taming of the Shrew (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2010).

4

Phyllis Rackin, Shakespeare and Women (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), esp. 53–6.

5

Nora J. Williams, ‘ “Who will believe thee?”: Staging Early Modern Gendered Violence’, Britgrad, May 2019. Available online: https://norajwilliams.hcommons.org/britgrad-2019.

6

For this category in particular, it is important to note that this refers to casting practice, not audience interpretation; the very nature of a mixed economy in which audiences may be expected to read meaning into an actor’s race (or gender etc.) in one production but not in another precludes the possibility that audiences can be genuinely ‘blind’ to the semiotics of an actor’s body.

7

Ayanna Thompson, Passing Strange (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 76.

8

The evocation of ‘blindness’ in discussion of casting practices that (purportedly) do not discriminate in respect of race, gender, disability etc. has been itself accused of perpetuating ableist terminology. It is also an inaccurate metaphor, presenting as inability to see difference what is instead more properly a refusal

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to interpret difference. While for citational purposes I retain ‘colorblind’ in quotation of Thompson’s work, I choose in this essay to adopt the term ‘gender-indifferent’ as better representing the cognitive and political work implied in meritocratic casting practices. 9

Natasha Tripney, ‘Hamlet, thy name is woman: Why Michelle Terry’s Globe is staging post-gender Shakespeare’, Independent, 14 May 2018.

10 For a detailed analysis of this production, see Elizabeth Klett, ‘Re-dressing the Balance: All-Female Shakespeare at the Globe Theatre’ in Shakespeare Re-dressed, ed. James C. Bulman (Madison: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2008), 166–88. 11 Barry Kyle cast the production as its original director. He left the production before rehearsals began, though remained as the director of Richard III , and Lloyd replaced him. Lloyd returned to the play in 2016 with another all-female production for New York’s Shakespeare in the Park, with Janet McTeer reprising her role as Petruccio and Cush Jumbo playing Katherina. 12 Viewing notes taken from the archival video of the performance on 19 August 2003, held in the Shakespeare’s Globe archive. My thanks to Mel Chetwood for her assistance. 13 Lloyd Evans, ‘French Farce’, Spectator, 6 September 2003. 14 Power notes that the ‘vocal precision and performance of gender will be critiqued especially in cross-gender castings’ (Shakespeare and Gender in Practice, 88), though she does not consider the extent to which these critiques may be affected by chauvinism. 15 Morley, ‘Taming of the Shrew’. 16 The fullest account of Propeller’s all-male production of The Taming of the Shrew within the single-sex practices of that company is in Emma Poltrack’s doctoral thesis ‘The History and Working Practices of the Propeller Theatre Company (1997– 2011)’ (University of Warwick, 2013), 261–75. Available online: http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/77436/1/WRAP_Thesis_ Poltrack_2015.pdf. 17 Rhoda Koenig, ‘All-female “Shrew” emasculated by mannered male impersonations’, Independent, 22 August 2003. 18 Janet McTeer, ‘Playing Petruchio’, interview by Heather Neill. Production programme (2003), 16.

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19 Nicholas de Jongh, ‘Female Shrew vaults the gender gap but has no fresh insight’, Evening Standard, 22 August 2003. 20 Ibid. 21 Phyllis Rackin, Shakespeare and Women (Oxford: Oxford University Pres, 2005), 55. 22 McTeer, ‘Playing Petruchio’, 17. 23 Barbara Hodgdon, ed. The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare, Arden Third Series (London: Arden/Bloomsbury, 2010), 1.2.1. All subsequent references to the play are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically. All modifications to the text made for a particular performance are indicated with italics. 24 Anon, ‘The Taming of the Shrew’, Sunday Times, 31 August 2003. 25 Klett, ‘Re-dressing the Balance’, 180. 26 De Jongh, ‘Female Shrew’; Lyn Gardner, ‘The Taming of the Shrew’, Guardian, 23 August 2003. 27 Anna Kamaralli, Shakespeare and the Shrew (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 108. 28 For a detailed account of this production with particular attention to costume, see Ella Hawkins, ‘Review’, Shakespeare Bulletin 38.1 (2020). 29 Justin Audibert, ‘Creating a New World’, The Taming of the Shrew programme (2019). 30 Othniel Smith, ‘The Taming of the Shrew’, British Theatre Guide, 2019. Available online: https://www.britishtheatreguide. info/reviews/the-taming-of-t-sherman-theatre-17249. 31 Quoted in Natasha Tripney, ‘ “Women are the powerbrokers”: gender-flipping Shakespeare’s Shrew’, Guardian, 25 February 2019. 32 Audibert, ‘Creating a New World’. 33 Joanna Russ, ‘Speculations: The Subjunctivity of Science Fiction’, Extrapolation 15.1 (1973), 51–9. 34 Simon Spiegel, ‘Things Made Strange: On the Concept of “Estrangement” in Science Fiction Theory’, Science Fiction Studies 35.3 (2008), 369–85. 35 Spiegel, ‘Things Made Strange’, 372 (italics in original).

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36 Justin Audibert, pre-show interview before broadcast of The Taming of the Shrew to cinemas, 5 June 2019. I’m grateful to Amy Bromilow and Beth Sharrock for sharing their thoughts and memories of the RSC’s broadcast paratexts. 37 Audibert, qtd. in Tripney, ‘ “Women are the powerbrokers” ’. 38 Kamaralli, Shakespeare and the Shrew, 90. 39 Viewing notes taken from attendance of performances on 3 April 2019 and the live broadcast on 5 June 2019. 40 Michael Billington, ‘The Taming of the Shrew review – RSC’s battle of reversed sexes’, Guardian, 19 March 2019. 41 See Clare Smout’s incisive review in Shakespeare 3.2 (2007), 247–50. 42 Audibert, pre-show interview. 43 Elizabeth Schafer, Ms-Directing Shakespeare (London: Women’s Press, 1998), 71–2.

8 ‘My Tongue Will Tell the Anger of my Heart’ Staging and Challenging Irish Womanhood at the Globe (2016) Emer McHugh

This chapter examines Caroline Byrne’s 2016 production of The Taming of the Shrew at Shakespeare’s Globe and its use of Shrew to interrogate aspects of Irish commemorative culture, particularly the propensity to omit women’s contributions to the 1916 Easter Rising. The production does so through its relocation of the play to 1916 Ireland and its performance of a globalized, commoditized Irishness in a specifically British institution. Not only can this production be read in the context of the 1916 events, I also argue that this Shrew can be read in a broader postcolonial context, which takes into account 144

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discourses of engendering of Irish womanhood, and the embodiment of Ireland as the feminized figure of ‘Hibernia’.

Remembering Shakespeare, remembering 1916 This production of Shrew was announced as part of Emma Rice’s first season as artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe in early 2016. In a press release announcing final casting, the production was billed as marking ‘the centenary of the Easter Rising by revisiting 1916 Ireland and remembering the role of women in the fight for independence’.1 As Byrne later commented, ‘It’s not a play about the Easter Rising, but it attempts to chime with the experience of Irish women. The promises made in the [1916] Proclamation were not kept in the decades that followed and Irish women are still seeking equality to this day – much in the same way that Katherina is in Shrew.’2 Throughout, the production drew upon these promises, made by the Rising participants in the Proclamation: The Irish Republic is entitled to, and hereby claims, the allegiance of every Irishman and Irishwoman. The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and of all its parts, cherishing all the children of the nation equally and oblivious of the differences carefully fostered by an alien government, which have divided a minority from the majority in the past.3 To that end, the play was relocated to 1916 Dublin, and most of the cast and crew (including Byrne herself) were Irish nationals. Writing in Staging Trauma, Miriam Haughton elucidates the impact of patriarchal systems on the inclusion of women and other marginalized voices in cultural practice:

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Thousands of years of patriarchy leaves [sic] its structurally embedded legacies of discrimination to ensure that the operations of language, law, economics and governance prioritise the patriarchal and the capitalist, which are intertwined and interdependent, to the detriment of the rest. Histories written down and thus legitimised reflect such agendas. In this context, performance can act as a radical method of retrieval and significantly, operate as a language not wholly constructed from, and thus embedded in, that agenda.4 Haughton then asserts that ‘Multiple paradigms of female histories, experiences, and narratives become conditioned to exist at the margins and lurk along the periphery of social consciousness, cultural practice and political policy. These are the shadowed spaces of public discourse.’5 This chapter argues that Byrne’s production of Shrew emblematizes Haughton’s idea of performance as a method of retrieval: here, a retrieval of female histories, experiences and narratives through an engagement with a Shakespeare play that is largely considered to be one of his most misogynistic, as well as an interrogation of the methods of commemorating and remembering the foundational events in the history of the modern Irish state.6 The fact that a production of The Taming of the Shrew was performed in this manner at the Globe in 2016 is perhaps an example of a specifically English theatrical institution acknowledging its country’s histories, especially those pertaining to England’s relationship with Ireland. Prior to its opening at the Globe in June 2016, this production of Shrew received a lot of press attention based on Byrne’s interpretation of the play. This is notable, given that 1916 is a quite specific moment in modern Irish history that continues to be commemorated, appropriated, as well as, arguably, often misrepresented and misunderstood outside of an Irish context. This press attention was most notable in the Mail on Sunday two months beforehand, where Jonathan Bate was quoted in an article as saying: ‘Emma Rice is going to have to work very hard to make this [staging of The Shrew] seem convincing. Nothing is impossible in good theatre, but it does seem quite a

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stretch . . . Women did play a very powerful role in the Easter Rising but The Taming of the Shrew is a play about women submitting to male power.’7 Interestingly, this article was titled ‘Shakespeare’s bawdy comedy . . . about a massacre: How new Taming of the Shrew production highlights the 1916 Easter Rising’, which in itself imposes a narrative framework not just on the play (terming it a bawdy comedy), but also on the events of 1916 – which was a week-long armed insurrection by Irish republicans against British colonial powers rather than a massacre. Just as a commemorative culture has emerged around Shakespeare for centuries, so too has one emerged around the Easter Rising – in Roisín Higgins’ words, it ‘remains a resilient commemorative vehicle in Ireland’.8 In 2016, year-long campaigns commemorating both 1916 and Shakespeare’s death took place in Ireland and England respectively. Military parades, state-sponsored national conferences and Proclamation Day events served to mark the former across Ireland, whereas Royal Shakespeare Company television specials, arts and cultural programming by the BBC and other institutions, and multiple academic conferences (including the quinquennial World Shakespeare Congress, which took place in both Stratford-upon-Avon and London) characterized the marking of the latter in the United Kingdom. Shakespeare and 1916, in the most abstract sense, can be said to exemplify English and Irish culture respectively: both are crucial, or just obvious, elements of these countries’ cultural identities. As Mary E. Daly and Margaret O’Callaghan have stated, the Rising ‘has been the key site of memory in twentieth-century Ireland, rivalled only perhaps by the [Northern] border. The Rising has been embraced, repudiated, analysed, retold, contested, investigated, dismissed and lauded . . . 1916 has been a ground of contestation and a battle site for representation.’9 It is important to remember, as Andrew Murphy notes, that: the Rising entered Irish national(ist) mythology, serving, emotionally and psychologically, as the origin myth of the modern state. Commemoration and cultural memory

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intertwine in complex ways throughout this whole extended process. The mythologised Rising, theatricalised in its own historical moment, shadows the Tercentenary of the death of a Shakespeare seen as the supreme playwright.10 In the remembering and commemorating of the Rising events, it is difficult to extricate the history of the tense relationship between Ireland and England from such processes: in the case of the fiftieth anniversary of the events in 1966, Higgins asserts that the first victim of the Northern Irish Troubles was killed by loyalists in June of that year.11 She later comments that ‘Hostility towards 1966 was also generated by the subsequent events in Northern Ireland. In retrospect the fiftieth-anniversary commemorations seemed to glorify armed struggle. The conflict placed huge pressure on the generic myth of the Rising: one of heroic expression of the national identity.’12 This returns us to Daly and O’Callaghan’s idea of 1916 as ‘a battle site for representation’: how do we remember and retell the histories of the Irish state, and how does this in turn shape the performance and expression of Irish national identities? A reconstructed Elizabethan theatre on the Bankside in London, then, was an unexpected place to find a response to these questions  – a response which was inspired by a then-ongoing national campaign for equality and equity in Irish theatre, a response that was certainly not part of the formal state commemorations, and a response that operated at the intersection of the two commemorative cultures surrounding Shakespeare and the Rising. Caroline Byrne’s production thus entered this milieu.

‘The nation promised equality’: activism, performance and commemoration in 2016 In November 2015, Lian Bell posted the following on Facebook:

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Still mulling over the Abbey Theatre’s male-dominated programme for 2016  . . . Found myself seething, wrote a giant list of questions. So here is a barrage of thoughts & questions, if only to get them off my chest. Answers or more questions welcome. Deathly silence welcome too.13 Bell is a freelance set designer and stage manager, who is perhaps better known as the founder of the #WakingTheFeminists movement, the seeds of which were sown in the above post. #WakingTheFeminists was a year-long movement responding to the Abbey Theatre’s Waking the Nation season, the national theatre’s 1916 commemorative season which included only one female playwright and which was dominated by contributions from male playwrights and directors. From 2015 to 2016, the #WakingTheFeminists movement sought to change Irish theatre through a campaign for equality and equity, especially in anticipation of the important commemorative year. The movement’s website described their campaign as: A small group of volunteers [that] is working with leading arts organisations at the level of policy and governance to make sure gender equality becomes part of our sector’s DNA, something solid and irrefutable, knitted into the fabric of how we make theatre in Ireland.14 The campaign secured Arts Council funding in 2016 for research into gender equality within the infrastructures of the major theatre companies and festivals in Ireland, the results of which were published in 2017 as the report ‘Gender Counts: An analysis of Irish theatre 2006–2015’.15 It is too soon to assess the campaign’s long-term impact on the Irish theatre sector, and whether it will lead to lasting change. However, in the short term, the movement has already acted to interrogate and problematize methods of commemoration and remembrance in an Irish context, and of the ways in which the stories of nation-building have been told and interpreted.

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In the light of the considerable efforts to mark and commemorate 1916, which was part of the wider remit of the Irish government’s ‘Decade of Centenaries’ programme, it becomes more pertinent than ever for scholars, artists and activists to question how Irish culture and history has been shaped by male voices and narratives at the expense of marginalized perspectives.16 Where marginalized identities fit into the narratives of Irish history, then, was a topic that certainly received public attention in Ireland in 2015 and 2016, particularly in the context of commemoration and the histories of the Irish nation. Haughton’s suggestion that performance can be used as a method of retrieval is crucial not only in the context of #WakingTheFeminists, but also with regard to other efforts that year to spotlight the contributions of women and queer people to the Rising, and to bring their stories to the forefront of 2016’s commemorations. Initiatives such as Mary McAuliffe’s ‘Women of 1916’ and Fearghus Ó Conchúir’s The Casement Project acted as counter-narratives as much as #WakingTheFeminists did. These counter-narratives reflect Emilie Pine’s assertion that ‘cultural representations do not always tell the “truth” they appear to tell. Instead, what culture often reveals are the demands of the present for a history that fits the needs of now, whether that need is for a dramatic “smoke-filled” streetscape, or merely a need for convenience.’17 The momentum of #WakingTheFeminists coincided with the passing of the 2015 marriage equality referendum, the passing of legislation to allow self-determination of gender for transgender citizens that same year, as well as then-ongoing island-wide grassroots activism to repeal the Eighth Amendment in the Irish Constitution, which essentially banned abortion in Ireland (a referendum to repeal was passed by public vote in May 2018).18 In this context, these commemorative initiatives’ focus on issues surrounding gender and sexuality seem to make Pine’s assertion rather appropriate and relevant within this framework. It is also within this framework that Byrne’s production can be analysed and examined: Byrne and her creative team use the play, I suggest, to ask the same questions (and address the same

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challenges) that many individuals posed in 2016. Whose stories are remembered? Who gets to tell these stories? Who is represented in these stories? These questions appear to have resonated among members of Shrew’s cast. When interviewed by Rona Kelly for the Globe’s Adopt an Actor series, the production’s original Katherina, Kathy Rose O’Brien (who was replaced by Aoife Duffin after becoming indisposed during one of the show’s previews) drew upon #WakingTheFeminists as a pertinent influence.19 O’Brien opined that #WakingTheFeminists ‘began a really strong conversation at home about women’s voices and how maybe we don’t maybe see them as important  . . . that’s maybe where the Irish angle really feels quite strong’.20 In this interview, she also highlighted the contextual element of setting Shrew in 1916 Ireland, emphasizing that ‘100 years ago in Ireland we had a proclamation for our independence which said, “We are equal.” But the past 100 years in Ireland . . . Irish women have not been equal. So I think Caroline and the team here are using that as a sort of way to interrogate equality.’21 It is significant that O’Brien considers what she calls ‘the Irish angle’ of the production in close alignment with feminist activism and the emphasis on reclaiming women’s voices. As well as this, two actors’ notebooks (held at the Globe’s Library and Archives) used for the production indicate this focus on interrogating equality, with reference to #WakingTheFeminists’ influence and its links to interrogating Irish commemorative culture in the context of the 1916 events. One notebook belongs to Genevieve Hulme-Beaman, who played Bianca and substituted for O’Brien as Katherina prior to Duffin’s casting, and the other does not provide an actor’s name but was presumably written and prepared by O’Brien, given the notebook’s focus on Katherina and the fact that Duffin replaced her at short notice. Hulme-Beaman’s notebook provides an insight into how #WakingTheFeminists informed the actor’s preparation for performance: in this notebook, each page of her script has a corresponding page on the right-hand side with handwritten notes and drawings by Hulme-Beaman, as well as pasted-in

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photographs for inspiration. The most pertinent inclusion in this notebook is in relation to Act 3, Scene 1, and particularly Bianca’s admonishing of Lucentio and Hortensio: ‘Why gentlemen, you do me double wrong / To strive for that which resteth in my choice / I am no breeching scholar in the schools, / I’ll not be tied to hours nor ’pointed times, / But learn my lessons as I please myself’ (3.1.16–20). On the opposite page, HulmeBeaman has pasted in pictures of the actress Audrey Hepburn, with handwritten speech bubbles that say: ‘Im [sic] leaving’ and ‘I don’t need to listen to you’.22 The use of Hepburn’s image is telling, especially considering that she, as Rachel Moseley argues, ‘was never constructed as a starlet sexualized through dress and performance for the male gaze’, and who arguably instead represents a fragile, so-called ‘sophisticated’ model of femininity. By ventriloquizing a classic Hollywood star such as Hepburn with defiant dialogue, it is evident that Hulme-Beaman interprets Bianca as someone who does not need the validation of men.23 In addition to these references to Hepburn, Hulme-Beaman has also written the words ‘#WTF’ and ‘ELEANOR METHVEN’ on the same page.24 The former note is in reference to the official acronym for #WakingTheFeminists; the latter references the Irish actress of the same name who was a prominent member of the movement, and who was known for coining the phrase ‘Oestrogen Rising’ (punning on the 1916 events) at the movement’s first public meeting in November 2015. It is evident, therefore, that Hulme-Beaman had been engaging with the ideas put forward by #WakingTheFeminists in preparation for her role in Shrew, and that she was modulating her interpretation and performance of Bianca through a feminist lens. It is also significant that she uses the movement (one that was formed in response to a method of commemoration) in order to prepare for a role at a theatre that is essentially an English heritage cultural institution: especially in a production that, in its relocating of Shrew to 1916 Ireland, purports to engage with Irish commemorative culture. These notebooks’ engagement with Irish commemorative culture in the context of 1916 is, moreover, evident in their

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similar treatment of Katherina’s submission speech at the play’s conclusion. In both notebooks, Hulme-Beaman and O’Brien make parallels between Katherina’s speech and the Easter Proclamation, but in different ways: Hulme-Beaman has pasted in a colour picture of the Proclamation opposite the speech, whereas O’Brien’s handwritten and Post-it notes on the speech read as follows: ‘using the Irish nationalist freedom language to make my point AM I YOUR SLAVE??? really? You want that?’; ‘TO THE PROCLAMATIONS [sic]’.25 Given the production’s emphasis on how ‘[t]he promises made in the [1916] Proclamation were not kept in the decades that followed’, it is therefore unsurprising that both Hulme-Beaman and O’Brien make explicit links between Katherina’s speech and the Proclamation itself, although perhaps this is based on an ironized interpretation of Katherina’s words. The speech itself (aimed at Bianca and the Widow) claims that, among other similar sentiments, ‘And when [a woman] 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?’ (5.2.163–6). This, of course, is in contrast to the language in the Proclamation and its promises of ‘equal rights and equal opportunities’. Additionally, in their performances of this speech, Duffin and Hulme-Beaman’s Katherinas spoke with anger and frustration following her treatment at the hands of Petruccio (as discussed further below). The pairing of both statements in these notebooks, in any case, was a deliberately jarring juxtaposition of two very different approaches to gender relations: an implication that they stand opposed to each other.

The Globe and the performance of Irishness on the English stage Patrick Lonergan defines Irishness as ‘a commodified abstraction that gives meaning to its purchaser instead of signifying the

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physical territory of a nation’, also highlighting ‘plays that are marketed or received internationally as corresponding to the Irish “brand”’.26 This production of Shrew, as such, dealt in a broad, globalized, commoditized Irishness. On the night I saw the production, upon which my comments are based, musicians played jigs and reels on the bodhrán, tin whistle, fiddle and guitar for the crowd’s pleasure as the performance was about to begin: the mood and atmosphere (perhaps intentionally) resembled that of an Irish traditional music session.27 The characters’ accents and dispositions varied from person to person, county to county, and region to region, presumably in an arbitrary fashion rather than intentional. Edward MacLiam’s Petruccio spoke in a Cork accent. Colm Gormley’s Hortensio spoke in a Northern burr. Aaron Heffernan’s Lucentio and Imogen Doel’s Tranio sported broad Dublin accents. Aoife Duffin’s Katherina and Genevieve Hulme-Beaman’s Bianca were both portrayed as upper-middle-class Dubliners. Costume designer Chiara Stephenson dressed these characters in either flat caps and breeches (in the case of Lucentio and Tranio), or as if they had just stepped out of a Bloomsday celebration (Raymond Keane’s Gremio and his boater hat and suit being an example of the latter). The production’s Irish Catholic context was brought to the fore in several aspects, such as Stephenson’s set design: during her wedding, Katherina sat on top of two staircases that folded together to display a neon-light cross. As well as this, Petruccio’s admission to Gremio that ‘me father dead’, as well as every subsequent mention of his father in the production, was met with numerous members of the cast blessing themselves with the sign of the cross. This performed Irishness received a lot of laughter from the audience who were present that night. The editing and adapting of Shrew’s text for performance also suggest a broad performance of Irishness. The text was edited to add elements of Hiberno-English throughout, peppering the script with such words and phrases as ‘Jaysus’ (a phonetic bastardization of ‘Jesus Christ’), ‘mo chara’ (my friend) and ‘Go raibh míle maith agat’ (a thousand thank yous to you

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all). But more pertinent in relation to a feminist reading of the production was the inclusion of additional original songs, with lyrics written by the production’s dramaturg Morna Regan. An example is the song ‘Numbered in the Song’ which, in Byrne’s words, remembers ‘all the women unsung by Irish history’ and appropriates W.B. Yeats’ poems ‘Easter 1916’ and ‘Adam’s Curse’ in doing so. Indeed, Byrne draws upon a line in ‘Easter 1916’ in stating ‘only the men are “numbered in the song”’ in its verses.28 The appropriation of ‘Adam’s Curse’ too is significant, given that it is a poem depicting Yeats’ conversation with Maud Gonne and her sister Kathleen Pilcher on the subject of beauty and creation, in which Yeats dominates the exchange, and in which Pilcher’s contribution does not appear at all. In the song, however, Gonne’s solitary contribution (‘Born woman is to know – / Although they do not talk of it at school – / That we must labour to be beautiful’ (ll.18–20)) is expanded upon and adapted in the lines that follow: the song instead suggests that to be born woman can transcend beyond the act of ‘labouring to be beautiful’ into one’s own fulfilment.29 The song was performed by Katherina at the beginning of the show, and there are three additional intertextual moments in the extracts that follow: I. Hearts with one purpose Trouble the living stream Trouble it and trouble it My mother’s refrain to me Stop when the water’s clean The past is freed from history The nation promised equality We are not numbered in the song.30 The opening verse’s ‘Trouble the living stream / Trouble it and trouble it / My mother’s refrain to me / Stop when the water’s clean’ not only directly references Yeats’ poem, but also recalls Katherina’s statement at the end of the play: ‘A woman moved

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is 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’ (5.2.148–51).31 Indeed, just before the interval of the show, as well as during the second half (when she tells the audience, ‘My tongue will tell the anger of my heart’), Katherina was seen either standing and splashing in, or sitting on the edge of, a tiny water pool at the front of the stage, making this metaphor of her ‘troubling the stream’ physically manifest. The second intertextual moment directly references the 1916 Proclamation: II. The cold earth takes nothing child Her graveyard lullaby Reach into the past again To set the future free All Proclaimed and promised me A hundred years ago A story still not finished till We are numbered in the song.32 The third moment is a clear allusion to Henry V’s opening Chorus in its focus on the performance space: III. Born woman is to know Spirit must be fulfilled The pain of it not A field left untilled. Can one man contain you all? One hearth, one little parlour When you would burst this Wooden O With all that you do harbour?33 At the outset, the song uses these intertextual elements to draw attention to three core aspects of the production: place, space and time.

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The song itself also acted as an ongoing theme throughout the production: as Byrne simply states in an interview, ‘It is a motif in the production, to be numbered in the song.’34 Duffin saw the song as an establishment of Katherina’s character, suggesting that: ‘it’s a really good opportunity in the opening when I come out and sing, [it] is kind of like, “Here she is. This is her” . . . They get an idea of who they are dealing with.’35 It is also worth pointing out that the production dispensed with Christopher Sly and the Induction in favour of Katherina performing the song after the musicians had left at the beginning, and that Katherina’s singing closed the first half and also concluded the show. Again, this was part of this Shrew placing women  – more specifically Katherina and her story  – at its heart, and it did so through an appropriation of a canonical male Irish writer’s words. With the inclusion of lyrics such as ‘The nation promised equality’, the song also threw into sharp relief the ongoing struggle for women’s rights in Ireland over the last hundred years. Yet, in more ways than one, even though this Shrew was set in a concrete time period (that being Ireland in 1916), it still offered a broad mixture of different aspects of Irish culture, regardless of nuance or consistency of region, chosen dialect or musical styles. Exploring the production’s emphasis on the experiences of women, as I do in the next section, provides some insight as to why this Shrew uses such a broad mixture of dialects and styles.

The Globe and the performance of (Irish) feminism From the outset, the production was sympathetic to Katherina’s plight, and suggested that her taming by Petruccio was unnecessary and cruel: as Duffin asserts, ‘There’s two things pulling at each other for me as an actor in [the play], and those things are: the rest of the characters in the play are in a comedy and Kate is in a tragedy.’36 From Katherina’s spoken-word

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songs, to her newspaper and her copy of the Easter Proclamation being ripped out of her hand by her own father, to the production refusing to shy away from the psychological and emotional abuse Petruccio subjects her to (she spent the second half in her torn wedding dress, sleeping on a bed with only Petruccio’s cowskin cape as a duvet), this Shrew emphasized the implications of a patriarchal Irish Catholic society to the lives of women. Katherina delivered her final speech – still in her torn and dirty wedding dress, ripping it off to reveal her undergarments  – in resignation, anger and frustration at the world she was forced to inhabit. Kneeling, Katherina stretched out her hand towards a confused, troubled-looking Petruccio, only for him to kneel with her on the floor of the stage. Miriam Haughton argues that ‘Patriarchy is traumatic for women and men, children and adults, the domestic and public spheres. It is visible and invisible, insidious in all networks and communities, so that all networks and communities continue to reproduce its strategies and hierarchies, under the guise of rationality, empowerment and social protection.’37 Katherina’s distress comes as the result of the trauma she has been subjected to throughout the production; an experience which has also been traumatic for Petruccio, who in this moment realizes the gravity of his actions towards his wife. Prior to the cast breaking into the jig at the end, the final image was of Katherina and Petruccio standing to face each other in the middle of the stage and the rest of the cast, with a significant editing of the play’s ending proposing an alternative direction for their relationship. The lines after Katherina’s final speech were cut (including Petruccio’s ‘Why, there’s a wench. Come and kiss me, Kate’ (5.2.186)); thus Katherina had the production’s final words, both through speech and through song. With the melody following the traditional Irish and Scottish farewell tune ‘The Parting Glass’,38 she tells Petruccio that: I will not go to war with thee Dulce et decorum est Walk over my carcass first

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My hand is open here for us A ballad of not lesser than But equal to and free In an august destiny That was Proclaimed And promised me.39 As with ‘Numbered in the Song’, the song directly references the 1916 Proclamation and its promises to ‘equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens’. As the production was set in the middle of the First World War, the song’s drawing on wartime imagery and slogans is thus unsurprising (‘I will not go to war with thee / Dulce et decorum est / Walk over my carcass first’): indeed, the words ‘Dulce et decorum est’ are now commonly associated with Wilfred Owen’s poem of the same name. These wartime motifs were used as part of Katherina’s exhortation to Petruccio to establish their relationship on a more equal footing: the lyric ‘My hand is open here for us’ is an inversion of the final line from Katherina’s final speech ‘My hand is ready, may it do him ease’ (5.2.185): what was a final declaration of submission to her husband has been adapted into an exhortation to stand together as equals instead. Another instance of this Shrew’s amplification of the presence of women was the decision to give the Widow (played by Amy Conroy) an expanded, more prominent role in this production. The Widow as played by Conroy was a constant presence throughout the show, often found on the side of the stage with a cigarette in hand: always watching, always waiting, quietly despairing at the misogyny unfolding in front of her (especially given that her future husband, Hortensio, frequently belittled her, either directly to her face – he sharply told her to ‘get in’ when she met Petruccio for the first time – or behind her back, despite the fact that the audience knew that she was onstage, listening). Throughout the production, she acted as a form of protector and ally for Katherina, providing unheard counsel and advice. As Petruccio and Katherina exited separately following their first scene together, Katherina

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immediately turned to the Widow for support as they departed the stage together. While Katherina sat alone on the top of the staircase waiting for Petruccio to begin the wedding proceedings, the Widow walked up the staircase to sit with and comfort her as she waited. This relationship between these two women was built to the point where the final scene appeared to be a battle between the Widow and Petruccio for Katherina’s soul: it is worth pointing out that the Widow’s distaste for Petruccio was quickly established after she walked in on Petruccio assaulting Grumio (Helen Norton), as he pulled his ears and pinned him to the ground. Of course, as I have outlined earlier, a meaningless victory for Petruccio was implied at the production’s end, with the Widow also visibly shocked and distraught at Katherina’s distress. It is also possible to apply a broader postcolonial lens to this production, which can be linked to its feminist outlook. The Irish Free State, as Mary McAuliffe suggests, ‘developed the traditional assumptions of Irish womanhood based on marriage and domesticity, reinforced by the Irish government, by the Catholic Church and by society’.40 Thus, patriarchy was inevitably enshrined into the forging of the Irish nation with then-Taoiseach Éamon de Valera’s 1937 Constitution, particularly aspects of Article 41. Article 41.2.1, which stated ‘the State recognizes that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved’, was strongly opposed by feminist activists and female senators.41 As Haughton argues, ‘the Irish Constitution explicitly rejects gender equality, most harshly evidenced through its restrictions on women’s rights to public space and financial independence, declaring as fundamental their role as mothers, and denying women legal dominion of their bodies.’42 Sure enough, the production drew upon such contexts – McAuliffe’s programme note for Shrew specifically highlights how the Constitution and Article 41 ‘was seen as a betrayal of the promises of equality in the 1916 Proclamation. Fundamentally it enshrined the domestic as the place for women in Irish society.’43 We could argue that Petruccio’s

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subjugation and abuse of Katherina here  – drawing on the broader context of how Irish Catholic society has subjugated Irish women – enacts this betrayal on stage. The production also drew upon, and subverted, the engendering rhetoric of national identity. The intertwining of nationalism and gender is a particularly relevant context here: as Marjorie Howes states, the narratives of such a relationship tend to focus on ‘the representation of the nation as a woman’.44 Highlighting the personification of Ireland as Hibernia in cartoons and magazines, Declan Kiberd adds that ‘Even the ageold notion of the land as female and the ruler as her lawful bridegroom conspired in the creation of this myth; and twentieth-century propaganda posters, depicting Hibernia as a beautiful maiden torn between the demands of thuggish republicans and solid Saxons, did nothing to dispel it.’45 It is possible to consider Katherina as a Hibernia-type figure, ‘a beautiful maiden’ brutalized and tormented by the thuggish Petruccio. However, this comparison is somewhat less clear-cut due to Katherina’s ‘froward’ personality and behaviour (although she is dressed in a conventionally feminine, ‘marriageable’ manner), and the matter of Petruccio’s Cork accent. Notably, the county is nicknamed ‘the Rebel County’, a nickname that has its origins in the fifteenth century owing to Cork rebels’ participation in the English Wars of the Roses, and is commonly associated with the county being ‘a hotbed of guerrilla activity’ during the Irish War of Independence (1919– 21) and its Irish Republican Army units’ opposition to the Anglo-Irish Treaty during the Irish Civil War (1922–3).46 Whereas there is no ‘solid Saxon’ or Englishman in the configuration, in the production’s final scenes it is the Widow, and her unapologetic shrewishness (positioning her as feminist), who is placed directly in opposition to Petruccio’s brutish behaviour. The production thus complicates what could have been a simplistic usage of the Hibernia/solid Saxon metaphor for Katherina and Petruccio’s relationship. It does so through its use of dialect, which is perhaps one of the outcomes of such a broad range of accents in the production. It also complicates the

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metaphor through the emphasis of a dichotomy between Petruccio and the Widow. However, given the production’s broadness in its presenting of Irishness – this being an Irishness that is not presented to or catering for an Irish audience – what I have read as subtlety might simply be inconsistency.

Conclusion: ‘My hand is open here for us’ It can be said that, although it did not premiere in an Irish theatre, Shrew spoke to particularly Irish concerns: this is reflected in the theatre-makers’ taking the #WakingTheFeminists movement as a starting point. Performing Irishness in an English context carries different implications compared to performing Irishness in Ireland: in relation to Shrew specifically, we cannot know for certain the extent to which the presence of Irishness would be as broad or generalized in an Irish theatre. We can be sure that, if it were, such images and constructions of Irishness would not depend upon retrograde notions of hegemonic Catholicism, nor that evocations of Irish folk culture would not necessarily have connotations with Riverdance. Additionally, as Haughton explains, ‘The staging involved [in performing trauma], particularly via embodied knowledge and viscerally affective encounters, creates a shared space for the unspeakable to struggle in its desire for articulation and acknowledgement.’47 Haughton’s assertion, I argue, is embodied in the unflinching depiction of Katherina’s trauma, as well as in the artistic decision to give Katherina the first and last words in the production. It is also embodied in how, in drawing our attention to how ‘the nation promised [women] equality’, this production draws explicitly on the traumatic effects that the Irish Catholic patriarchy has had on Irish society – we need only look at the histories of people imprisoned in Magdalene laundries, Christian Brothers industrial schools,

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and Mother and Baby Homes as an example.48 The production reinforces the importance of widening the net of how we frame, tell and remember the histories of our country  – especially the histories of Irish women. To paraphrase Katherina’s exhortation to the audience, we must remember to number women in the song.

Notes 1

‘Globe Theatre Press Release – Shakespeare’s Globe announces full cast for Caroline Byrne’s The Taming of the Shrew’. Available online: http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/uploads/ files/2016/04/12.04.16_shrew_casting_release_final.pdf.

2

Caroline Byrne and Danielle Pearson, ‘Confronting the Shrew’, programme for The Taming of the Shrew (London: Shakespeare’s Globe, 2016), 8. There are a number of different spellings of ‘Katherina’ used in relation to productions and remediations of Shrew: ‘Kate’, ‘Katherine’, ‘Katharina’, to name a few. I use ‘Katherina’ as used by Byrne throughout this chapter.

3

‘Proclamation of Independence – Department of Taoiseach’. Available online: https://www.taoiseach.gov.ie/eng/Historical_ Information/State_Commemorations/Proclamation_of_ Independence.html.

4

Miriam Haughton, Staging Trauma: Bodies in Shadow (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 25.

5

Haughton, Staging Trauma, 25.

6

For more on The Taming of the Shrew and misogyny, see Elizabeth Schafer, ‘Introduction’, in William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew (Shakespeare in Performance Series) (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 1–76; Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1983), 59–60, 113; and Penny Gay, As She Likes It: Shakespeare’s Unruly Women (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 86–119.

7

Chris Hastings, ‘Shakespeare’s Bawdy Comedy . . . about a Massacre: How New Taming of the Shrew Production

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Highlights the 1916 Easter Rising’, Mail on Sunday, 17 April 2016. Available online: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/ article-3543910/Shakespeare-s-bawdy-comedy-massacre-newTaming-Shrew-production-highlights-1916-Easter-rising.html. 8

Roisín Higgins, Transforming 1916: Meaning, Memory and the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Easter Rising (Cork: Cork University Press, 2012), 15.

9

Mary E. Daly and Margaret O’Callaghan, ‘Introduction: Irish Modernity and “the Patriot Dead” in 1966’, in 1916 in 1916: Commemorating the Easter Rising, ed. Mary E. Daly and Margaret O’Callaghan (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2007), 1–17: 3.

10 Andrew Murphy, ‘Shakespeare’s Rising: Ireland and the 1916 Tercentenary’, in Celebrating Shakespeare: Commemoration and Cultural Memory, ed. Clara Calvo and Coppélia Kahn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 161–81: 181. 11 Higgins, Transforming 1916, 1. 12 Ibid., 28. 13 Quoted in Sara Keating, ‘Changing the World, One Tweet at a Time’, Irish Times, 28 November 2015. Available online: http:// www.irishtimes.com/culture/stage/changing-the-world-onetweet-at-a-time-1.2446430. 14 ‘About The Campaign’, #WakingTheFeminists. Available online: http://www.wakingthefeminists.org/about-wtf/how-it-started/. 15 For access to the report, please see ‘Research Report Now Available’. Available online: http://www.wakingthefeminists.org/ research-report. 16 For more on the ‘Decade of Centenaries’ programme, see ‘About’, Decade of Centenaries. Available online: http://www. decadeofcentenaries.com/about. The programme seeks to ‘focus initially on the many significant centenaries occurring over the period 1912–1916 . . . Important events being commemorated include the Centenary of the Ulster Covenant, the foundation of the Irish Volunteers, the Home Rule and Land Bills, the 1913 Lockout, the 1916 Rising and many anniversaries relating to World War One, including the Gallipoli landings, the Somme offensive and the battle of Messines Ridge. Also of note will be the

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Literary Revival, the suffrage movement, the struggle for workers’ rights and many other key events and themes of the period.’ 17 Emilie Pine, The Politics of Irish Memory: Performing Remembrance in Contemporary Irish Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 2. 18 This was the Referendum on the Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy, which took place on 25 May 2018. This proposed the removal of Article 40.3.3 from the Constitution, which states: ‘The State acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right. This subsection shall not limit freedom to travel between the State and another state. This subsection shall not limit freedom to obtain or make available, in the State, subject to such conditions as may be laid down by law, information relating to services lawfully available in another state.’ It also proposed the replacing of that article with ‘Provision [which] may be made by law for the regulation of termination of pregnancy’. This referendum passed on 26 May 2018 with a majority of 66.4% in favour of removing the present article from the Constitution, with legislation for provision of the termination of pregnancy to be drafted by the Irish government. See ‘The Independent Guide to the Referendum on the Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy’. Available online: https://refcom2018.refcom.ie/refcom-guide2018-english.pdf. 19 Duffin herself had participated in the #WTF movement’s first public meeting in November 2015 by reading a statement on the behalf of the actress Olwen Fouéré. 20 ‘Adopt an Actor: Katherine Played by Kathy Rose O’Brien’. Available online: http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/discoveryspace/adopt-an-actor/archive/katherine-played-by-kathy-rose-obrien/rehearsals-1. 21 Ibid. 22 Shakespeare’s Globe Library and Archives, Shakespeare’s Globe Performance Archive, The Taming of the Shrew, 3 June 2016 [actor’s notebook for Genevieve Hulme-Beaman], SGT/THTR/ SM/1/2016/TS/2/2, 30.

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23 Rachel Moseley, ‘Dress, Class and Audrey Hepburn: The Significance of the Cinderella Story’, in Fashioning Film Stars: Dress, Culture, Identity, ed. Rachel Moseley (London: BFI Publishing, 2005), 116. 24 Shakespeare’s Globe Performance Archive, SGT/THTR/ SM/1/2016/TS/2/2, 30. 25 Shakespeare’s Globe Performance Archive, SGT/THTR/ SM/1/2016/TS/2/2, 66; Shakespeare’s Globe Performance Archive, The Taming of the Shrew, 3 June 2016 [actor’s notebook for Kathy Rose O’Brien], SGT/THTR/SM/1/2016/ TS/2/1, 37, 40. 26 Patrick Lonergan, Theatre and Globalization: Irish Drama in the Celtic Tiger Era (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 28. 27 This was the final night of the production, 6 August 2016. 28 Byrne and Pearson, ‘Confronting the Shrew’, 9. The lines Byrne references are as follows: ‘This other man I had dreamed / A drunken, vainglorious lout. / He had done most bitter wrong / To some who are near my heart, / Yet I number him in the song’ (ll.31–5). See W.B. Yeats, ‘Easter 1916’, in The Major Works, ed. Edward Larrissy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 85–7. 29 W.B. Yeats, ‘Adam’s Curse’, in The Major Works, ed. Edward Larrissy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 37–8. 30 Shakespeare’s Globe Library and Archives, Shakespeare’s Globe Performance Archive, The Taming of the Shrew, 3 June 2016 [prompt book], SGT/THTR/SM/1, 2. 31 The corresponding extract from ‘Easter 2016’ reads as follows: ‘Hearts with one purpose alone / Through summer and winter seem / Enchanted to a stone / To trouble the living stream’ (ll.42–5). See Yeats, ‘Easter 1916’, 86. 32 Shakespeare’s Globe Performance Archive, SGT/THTR/SM/1, 2. 33 Ibid. 34 Byrne and Pearson, ‘Confronting the Shrew’, 9. 35 ‘Adopt an Actor: Katherine Played by Aoife Duffin: Performances 3’. Available online: http://www. shakespearesglobe.com/discovery-space/adopt-an-actor/archive/ katherine-played-by-aoife-duffin/performances-3.

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36 ‘Adopt an Actor: Katherine Played By Aoife Duffin: Performances 1’. Available online: http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/ discovery-space/adopt-an-actor/archive/katherine-played-byaoife-duffin/performances-1. 37 Haughton, Staging Trauma, 217. 38 ‘Adopt an Actor: Katherine Played by Aoife Duffin: Performances 2’. Available online: http://www. shakespearesglobe.com/discovery-space/adopt-an-actor/archive/ katherine-played-by-aoife-duffin/performances-2. 39 Shakespeare’s Globe Performance Archive, SGT/THTR/SM/1, 74. 40 Mary McAuliffe, ‘ “The Unquiet Sisters”: Women, Politics and the Irish Free State Senate 1922–1936’, in Irish Feminisms: Past, Present, Future, ed. Clara Fischer and Mary McAuliffe (Dublin: Arlen House, 2015), 61. Ireland became known as the Irish Free State in 1922 following the Irish Civil War and the Anglo-Irish Treaty, which resulted in the partitioning of Ireland. It would be known as the Free State until 1937’s Constitution, after which the country was known as Ireland (or Éire in the Irish language). It was officially declared a republic in 1949. 41 Bunreacht na hÉireann – Constitution of Ireland (Dublin: The Stationery Office, 1937), 164. (This wording remains in the Irish Constitution to this day.) The Taoiseach (deriving from the Irish for ‘chieftain’ or ‘leader’) is head of the Irish government, whereas the President is the head of state, largely a ceremonial role. 42 Miriam Haughton, ‘Them the Breaks: #WakingTheFeminists and Staging the Easter/Estrogen Rising’, Contemporary Theatre Review 28.3 (2018), 350. 43 Mary McAuliffe, ‘A Proper Position in the Life of a Nation’, programme for The Taming of the Shrew (London: Shakespeare’s Globe, 2016), 12. 44 Marjorie Howes, Colonial Crossings: Figures in Irish Literary History (Dublin: Field Day Publications, 2006), 7. 45 Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of a Modern Nation (London: Vintage, 1996), 362. 46 For a full summary, please see ‘But Why Call it the “Rebel County”?’. Available online: https://northoltgrange.wordpress. com/2016/09/27/but-why-call-it-the-rebel-county/.

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47 Haughton, Staging Trauma, 2. 48 The past thirty years have seen abuse conducted by Roman Catholic orders in twentieth-century Ireland brought to light. In 1993, a mass grave of 133 corpses was found at a Dublin convent. Documentaries such as 1997’s Sex in a Cold Climate (Channel 4, dir. Steve Humphries) and 1999’s States of Fear (RT É , dir. Mary Raftery) illustrated the extent to which women and children were abused at Magdalene laundries, reformatories and industrial schools. The latter was instrumental to the launch of The Report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (The Ryan Report), which was published in 2009. The Irish government launched the McAleese Report into the Magdalene abuses, which was published in 2013 – however, to this day, survivors are still seeking adequate compensation. In 2014, the Irish local historian Catherine Corless uncovered 798 death records for children at the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, Co. Galway. In 2017, an investigative commission launched in 2015 found human and foetal remains buried in an old sewage system on the Tuam site.

PART THREE

Reclaiming the Shrew: Contemporary Transformations

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9 Telling the Anger of Her Heart (M)aligning the Stars in the Taylor and Zeffirelli Taming of the Shrew Films Milla Cozart Riggio

Why, sir, I trust I may have leave to speak, And speak I will. I am no child, no babe; . . . My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, Or else my heart concealing it will break, And, rather than it shall, I will be free Even to the uttermost, so I please, in words.1 An early comedy, The Taming of the Shrew is problematic. And yet it remains one of the most frequently produced, often filmed Shakespeare plays.2 Barbara Hodgdon proposed ‘rethinking how Shrew . . . gets . . . shaped, at particular historical moments, 171

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to secure or contest the sociocultural subjectivities at work in women’s lives’.3 This historical moment has been defined by #MeToo, a movement begun in 2006 by Tarana Burke which went viral on 15 October 2017, when actress Alyssa Milano tweeted: ‘If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write “me too” as a reply to this tweet.’4 Taking Hodgdon’s challenge, this paper rereads two iconic twentieth-century Shrew films from the perspective framed by #MeToo: Sam Taylor’s 1929 version, starring Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, and Franco Zeffirelli’s 1967 film, starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.5 Why, one may ask, revisit films produced before this movement began? Because #MeToo is also retrospective, reevaluating what has happened, encouraging women to speak out about behaviour that in the past might have seemed acceptable. Spawned partly by the more than eighty women who accused movie producer Harvey Weinstein of sexual harassment or rape, the movement has been directly connected with Hollywood stardom. The two big-budget Shrew films I examine both exploited the star status of couples who were engaged in marriages as contentious as the wooing of Katherina and Petruccio. Each marriage ended in divorce (Taylor and Burton twice married, twice divorced). The publicly staged power dynamics of the marriages colour the diegetic narratives. Does #MeToo change how we view these films? Voicing repressed anger, the negative earmark of the ‘scold’, or ‘shrew’,6 is a hallmark of #MeToo. In Act 4 of Shakespeare’s play, Katherina Minola (Kate) speaks what could be a credo for the movement: ‘My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, / Or else . . . it will break.’ Though by Act 5, Kate’s anger has given way to another tone, this pledge raises questions. Does Kate gain a voice that empowers her? And, if so, is she alone? #MeToo presumes a sisterhood of women supporting each other. Asking questions not only about how men treat women but about how women relate to and support each other points to Kate’s relationship to her sister, Bianca, with whom she is at odds throughout Shakespeare’s play. Does the

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tamed shrew create a bond with her sister or with other women? Burke’s 2006 #MeToo platform moved beyond the female collective to include a programme ‘for heal[ing] the perpetrators’ as part of ‘restorative’ and ‘transformative’ justice: ‘[I]f we’re ever going to heal in our community, we have to heal the perpetrators and heal the survivors, or else it’s just a continuous cycle.’7 Rejecting ‘passive empathy’, Burke’s healing process depended on active, listening empathy, accountability and reconciliation between equals. Within this frame, is Petruccio held accountable? What kind of reconciliation do the films portray between the warring spouses? Thinking in terms of community, sisterhood and healing, even of the perpetrators, provides a way of looking at Shakespeare’s Shrew that allows for recognition of its continued appeal as well as its problematics. The broader concept of the price women pay also includes the notion of husbands and fathers in the play ‘buying and selling’ wives and daughters within the domestic establishment (the Renaissance oikos), which figures heavily in Zeffirelli’s portrayal featuring an empowered Kate. In contrast, Sam Taylor calls on feminine stereotypes that, while they may initially seem to confer power, actually do not.

‘Tye her tongue up and pare down her nails’:8 Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks Sam Taylor’s 1929 Taming of the Shrew was a Pickfair production: filmed in Pickford-Fairbanks Studio, produced by Pickford and Elton corporations and distributed by United Artists.9 This first sound film of a Shakespeare play, sixty-four minutes long, relies on stylized action with minimal script. A Punch and Judy puppet show before a raucous Padua street audience replaces the Induction; the woman hits the man,

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lovingly pleading for kisses, calling him a fool. After he dons a fool’s cap (claiming ‘Now I’m handsome’), he beats her with his staff, muttering ‘Kiss me, Katherine’, then ‘I’ll tame you.’ She falls into his arms, saying, ‘You are wonderful’. This diegetic prelude foreshadows and sets the tone for the farce. Loosely based on David Garrick’s 1754 adaptation Catharine and Petruchio, the film omits the Lucentio/Tranio subplot, marrying Bianca (Dorothy Jordan) quietly to Hortensio (Geoffrey Wardwell). Garrick has them married when the play begins, but Sam Taylor uses Baptista’s (Edwin Maxwell) insistence that Kate be married before Bianca to motivate Petruccio’s wooing. As in Garrick, the ‘sun’ and ‘moon’ exchange is in the bedroom at night. Omitting the tailor scene and Petruccio’s insistence that Kate recognize an old man as a young woman, the film dissolves from a reconciliation scene in the bedroom to Kate’s final tribute to her husband, at a dinner with Petruccio lounging at the head of the table. Sam Taylor attempts to empower Kate. Mary Pickford receives top star billing, above Douglas Fairbanks. Taylor also gives Pickford a few added lines taken from Garrick, in which, framed in a window following the wooing scene, she threatens to tame Petruccio, using Shakespeare’s falconry term for Kate: Cath’rine shall tame this Haggard; – or if she fails, Shall tye her Tongue up, and pare down her Nails.10 However, Taylor omits more Garrick lines than he includes: Garrick’s Kate laments that she is ‘sent to be woo’d like a bear unto a stake’, then identifies Petruchio as the bear, whom she will ‘bait’. She verbally agrees to marry: ‘I will marry my Revenge, but I will tame him’, telling her father it is her ‘duty’ to obey him, while gloating that ‘sister Bianca / Now shall see the poor abandon’d Cath’rine . . . / can hold her head as high and be as proud / And make her husband stoop unto her lure / As she or e’er a wife in Padua.’11 Though omitting most of this dialogue, this semi-silent film does visually empower Pickford. She first appears centrally

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framed in a long shot holding a whip. Then she towers over Petruccio, cracking her whip at the top of the stairs, while he at the bottom laughingly cracks a bigger whip, which briefly disarms her. She overhears Petruccio’s ‘politicly begun my reign’ monologue (delivered to his dog sitting in her chair at the dinner table) and silently determines to beat him at his own game, over-matching each ploy to discomfort her in the bedroom. In this confrontation, Pickford triumphs over a confused Fairbanks. Kate appears to win, but does she? Pickford gets equal screen time and some personal agency. However, instead of empowering, Pickford’s star status weakens her character. Born in 1892, Pickford had begun acting under her birth name, ‘Baby Gladys Smith’, at age seven. Taking the name Mary Pickford (1907), she began acting in films in 1909 with director D.W. Griffith. Despite her adult career as a partner in the United Artists and Pickford production companies, her silent film image remained that of a childlike waif.12 Making the transition to talkies, she attempted to alter her screen image in Sam Taylor’s 1929 Coquette, for which she won an Academy Award. However, prioritizing audience expectations of the star over the demands of the character in Shrew, Taylor insisted on ‘the old Pickford tricks’. Resorting to infantilized moments of discovery or pouting and big-eyed childish expressions did, as Pickford herself suggested, turn her ‘tiger cat’ into a ‘spitting little kitten’,13 reinforcing ‘her earlier [America’s child Sweetheart] image’.14 Pickford  – a businesssavvy woman in a male-dominated industry, who produced films for another four decades – claimed that ‘the making of [Shrew] was my finish’; that is, the end of her stardom.15 And Petruccio? The only film in which Pickford and Fairbanks co-starred, Shrew did not go well.16 Fairbanks played Petruccio with typical swaggering bravado, wearing a bandana recalling The Thief of Baghdad (Raoul Walsh, 1924) and athletically performing his own stunts. However, tensions that had crept into their nine-year-old marriage led to Fairbanks bullying his wife on the set, becoming what Pickford called ‘another Petruchio in real life, but without the humour or the

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tongue-in-cheek playfulness of the man who broke Katherine’s shrewish spirit’.17 This film does not focus on buying and selling. Fairbanks does twice repeat ‘Twenty thousand crowns’ as he agrees to the bride price, but he offers nothing in return, and money is never mentioned again. Though the stately Minola home is contrasted to Petruccio’s derelict country estate, the household itself is essentially undefined and unimportant. However, Pickford does model two feminine stereotypes that evoke ‘healing the perpetrator’ and ‘sisterhood’, established furtively: the virginal nurturing mother and the subversive sister/woman who hides her strength behind pretended obeisance. After she wounds Petruccio with a joint stool, Kate takes pity on him. Throwing into the fire the whip that had phallically defined their battle, this ‘spitting  . . . kitten’ morphs into the eternal feminine mother, cradling the wounded Petruccio in a pose that recalls A.E. Foringer’s First World War poster ‘The Greatest Mother’ and re-imaging the Virgin Mary, who, secularized, provided the model for the idealized virginal wife of the nineteenth century.18 Nurturing her abuser seems to echo Tarana Burke’s 2006 #MeToo platform. However, where #MeToo presumes accountability and reconciliation between equal adults, Kate’s nurturing does not. In the dinner scene into which this image dissolves, Fairbanks has a bandage, rather than a bandana, wrapped around his head. The thief of Baghdad has become a wounded warrior, and the outspoken shrew has become the mother who comforts her husband like a child, a position in which apparent power is but another form of dependency. Transitioning from petulant child to nursing mother, Pickford’s Kate bypasses the role of wife as equal, her pitying sympathy (what Burke calls ‘passive empathy’) far from active, transformative empathy.19 Even this power gives way to hypocrisy, as she momentarily establishes a bond with her otherwise ignored sister. Pickford’s declamatory excess weakens her obviously insincere final speech, in which she winks at Bianca as she says women are obliged to ‘serve, love and obey’ (5.2.170).20 This gesture does

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FIGURE 1 Mary Pickford (Kate) depicted cradling Douglas Fairbanks (Petruccio), image superimposed over final credit ‘The End’. Sam Taylor, dir., The Taming of the Shrew (Pickford-Fairbanks Studio/The Elton Corporation, 1929, rereleased 1966).

not result in true empathy or community. She does omit the command not to ‘wound thy lord, thy king, thy governor’ from Shakespeare’s play (5.2.144), which Garrick had included. But the final cinematic focus is not on the bond between sisters but on her pretended compliance with her husband. Though the image of Kate as the nurturing mother is superimposed over the final credit (‘The End’), the action ends with her nestled, childlike, in Petruccio’s arms during a rousing drinking song celebrating marriage. Her power, if any, lies only in the wink that she made famous, not her speech. Her silence, masked by pretending to serve, resonates loudly in the present climate, encouraging women to speak out: voice matters; surreptitiously winking subverts but does not empower. This Kate politicly refashioned, if not tied up her tongue and pared down her nails

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as Pickford struggled futilely to retain her stardom and save the marriage, which ended in 1936.

‘I have work in hand’:21 Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton When relatively unknown Italian art historian and budding director Franco Zeffirelli decided to film The Taming of the Shrew, he considered Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren for the roles of Petruccio and Katherina. Persuaded that he needed an English couple for his ‘remaking’ of Sam Taylor’s 1929 film,22 Zeffirelli met Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in Dublin during one of their epic quarrels in February 1965. While Burton was eager to return to Shakespeare, Taylor was not so keen. Zeffirelli won her over by rescuing her pet bushbaby, which was precariously perched on a window curtain, while Burton watched, drink in hand.23 This Irish meeting encapsulates the power dynamic of Zeffirelli’s film: as in The Woman’s Prize, Fletcher’s sequel to Shakespeare’s play, it is effectively the (drunken) ‘tamer’ who is ‘tamed’, in a film in which women consistently overmaster men. Filmed entirely in Dino De Laurentiis’s Roman studio,24 this film omits 70 per cent of Shakespeare’s dialogue, including Hortensio’s advice to Kate to play along with Petruccio in Act 4, Scene 5 (l. 11), and all but one line – ‘This is a way to kill a wife with kindness’ – of Petruccio’s ‘Thus have I politicly begun my reign’ speech (4.1.177–200). Though it does not subvert the text it includes, the narrative (as in the 1929 film) is developed through added scenes without scripted dialogue. Like Pickford, Elizabeth Taylor received top billing. However, unlike Pickford, her star status empowered this former child actor, who had transitioned to adult roles unencumbered by Pickford’s image as a virginal waif. Quite the contrary. A year earlier she had portrayed the shrewish wife Martha in Mike Nichols’ film adaptation of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of

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Virginia Woolf (Warner Brothers, 1966), co-starring with Burton in a film that capitalized on their real-life notoriety and public quarrels. Her eroticized performance in Joseph Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra (Twentieth Century Fox, 1963) had paralleled her scandalous affair with and subsequent marriage to Burton, her co-star. Thus, Zeffirelli’s Shrew provided an opportunity to rehabilitate her image, or as Hodgdon puts it, ‘to transform not just the unruly Kate but Taylor herself from a published “scarlet woman” to a legitimate wife’.25 Zeffirelli tips the balance in Kate’s favour by not only subtly privileging women but also disparaging men. The Renaissance had many public punishments for women, particularly scolds and shrews.26 However, the only public punishments in the film are two recurrent images of shamed men, a ‘drunkard’ hanging in a basket above a ‘wifestealer’ in the stocks, both of whom may evoke the drunkard Petruccio who steals his own wife from their wedding. In general, Zeffirelli associates men with money, particularly with buying and selling wives and daughters, in the process implicitly reducing Petruccio’s status and turning him into a vulgar fortune seeker. Natasha Korda suggests that Shakespeare’s play ‘casts the marriage of Petruchio and Kate as an alliance between the gentry and mercantile classes, and thus between land and money, status and wealth,’ assuming that ‘Kate is a wealthy merchant’s daughter’.27 The play does not support this idea. Lucentio’s father Vincentio is described as a ‘merchant’ (1.1.12). Both Gremio and Tranio/‘Lucentio’ list argosies among their possessions. But the term is never used for Baptista, whom Tranio/‘Lucentio’ calls ‘a noble gentleman, / to whom my father is not all unknown’ (1.2.239–40), as Baptista will later affirm. Indeed both Lucentio and Petruccio’s patriarchal fathers are ‘well known throughout all Italy’ (2.1.69), simply by their given names of ‘Antonio’ (Petruccio’s deceased father) and Vincentio (Lucentio’s father).28 Addressing gathered suitors as ‘Gentlemen’, Baptista says of himself, ‘now I play a merchant’s part’, to which – referring to Kate  – Tranio/‘Lucentio’ replies, ‘ ‘Twas a commodity lay

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fretting [decaying] by you’ (2.1.330, 332). By playing the part of a merchant, Baptista implies that he is not a merchant. In a bidding war that affirms paternal authority, he continues to ‘play’ the merchant, selling Bianca to Tranio/‘Lucentio’: ‘your offer is the best, / And, let your father make her the assurance, / She is your own’ (2.1.390–92). Indeed, the household is the only social institution portrayed in Shrew,29 the only commercial exchange the buying and selling of Baptista’s two daughters in transactions that are complicated by the also transitional importance of marriage choice guided by love: Kate’s by her father’s (unenforced) insistence that Petruccio get ‘her love, for that is all in all’ (2.1.128), Bianca’s by the Lucentio/Tranio master/servant disguise that allows her simultaneously to be sold to the highest bidder and privately wooed for ‘love’. Suitors Gremio and Tranio/‘Lucentio’ both claim houses in the city filled with the fine commodities that characterize this commodity-oriented period,30 and lands in the country as well as merchant argosies.31 Though Petruccio has inherited ‘lands and goods’ from his father, which he has ‘bettered rather than decreased’, and offers to endow Kate upon her widowhood with ‘all my lands and leases whatsoever’ (2.1.116, 117, 124), he calls himself a ‘gentleman of Verona’ (2.1.47), the second largest city in the Veneto region. He has ‘crowns in [his] purse’, as he comes to ‘wive it wealthily in Padua / If wealthily then happily in Padua’, noting that ‘wealth is burden of my wooing dance’ (1.2.56, 74–5, 67). The heir of his well-known father, the suitor Petruccio seems equivalent in status to Baptista. his singleminded focus on money in marriage reflecting Shakespeare’s satire of commercially arranged marriages rather than his own poverty. At a time when ‘oeconomy’ signified ‘the management of the household rather than the generation of capital’,32 the households in The Taming of the Shrew are not socially or commercially polarized, merchant versus landed gentry, or even city versus country. The most striking aspect of their collective, elite social status is its ambiguous fluidity. Overall, they belong to what Romola Nuttall calls ‘the complexity of late-Elizabethan

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economic contexts, in which aristocratic systems persisted alongside product-based, mercantile structures’.33 Within this context, Shakespeare satirizes the one mercantile enterprise in the play: the buying and selling of women, which he associates with all the ‘gentlemen’, anticipating Master Ford’s corrective assertion in the later Merry Wives of Windsor that ‘money buys lands and wives are sold by fate’.34 Zeffirelli’s film exaggerates this monetary influence, reducing Petruccio’s status and making Baptista appear weak and foolish. The film emphasizes ‘love’ for sale, both in and (more honestly?) out of marriage, positioning a gigantic, sassy, buxom prostitute in positions of power strategically throughout. First seen with breasts bulging in an overhead window when Tranio says ‘suck the sweets of sweet philosophy’ (1.1.28), she is then central to a carnival parade that abruptly initiates the frolicking energy this film will sustain throughout, and finally is shown surrounded by young men – again centre frame in an elevated position on a balcony – several times during Bianca’s wedding dinner. This woman of towering height who also sells ‘love’ is treated more sympathetically than the men. When he thinks he might not win Katherina, Petruccio mutters ‘My twenty thousand crowns’. Katherina, frequently looking on, later watches ruefully as her father hands over her purchase price, a chest of money, to Petruccio. Men buy and sell wives, daughters and prostituted love that seems positioned as the commercial equivalent of arranged marriage. Baptista is a wealthy gentleman. Framed to imitate the facade of the Minola household in the 1929 film, his household is much more complete: equipped with treasures, a courtyard filled with fowl and a well-stocked woolshed/barn that figures prominently in the wooing. But under Baptista’s authority, this seemingly stable household is chaotic. At the mercy of both his daughters, Baptista is nervous and fearful, his servants often hiding from Katherina’s destructive wrath; disorder reigns. Petruccio’s household is worse: dusty and derelict, filled with ineffective servants who visibly tremble in fear before Petruccio.

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Petruccio is portrayed as a charming but vulgar, fortunehunting drunk, essentially blending Richard Burton’s own alcoholic history with Shakespeare’s Christopher Sly. The few scenes in which Petruccio is alone (twice when he is waking up) focus primarily on either his drunken hangovers or his vulgarity; the first implicitly likens him to the missing Sly, as servants strew a basin of water with rose petals, Petruccio’s toes protruding from dirty socks as he awakens from a drunken stupor.35 The wit with which Katherina later learns to play his linguistic games, positioned above or in front of him, marginalizes an often dazed Petruccio. Katherina, given subjectivity and agency, controls and orders her new home.36 She first sidelines Petruccio and then, in her final speech, accepts her role within the structure of his authority, which in the traditional sixteenth-century household would have granted her some autonomy. As Nuttall argues: ‘A less anachronistic view of the economic context  . . . gives woman an industrious place within the maintenance of the household  . . . within a patriarchal structure. . .in which she moves with relative autonomy and whose success depends on her capability.’37 In the staging, Elizabeth Taylor as Kate is given three empowering decisions. First, locked behind a door after the wooing scene, the rage she expresses in an added line (‘Of all things living a man’s the worst’) gives way silently to anticipatory pleasure. Here Kate accepts what she cannot change. Subsequently, she actively chooses. Following her husband on a donkey, she pauses at the arched entrance to Padua in the pouring rain and looks back. Framed against the male ‘drunkard’ and ‘wifestealer’, Kate decides to go forward: a choice not available either to Shakespeare’s Katherina or to Pickford. Zeffirelli probably took the arch from Taylor’s 1929 film, where a similar arch forms the entrance to Petruccio’s home. Unlike Zefirelli’s Kate, who chooses to go forward, Pickford is blown involuntarily back into the pig sty of Petruccio’s yard by a gale force wind that abruptly ends her attempt to return to her father’s home.

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FIGURE 2 Elizabeth Taylor (Kate) pauses before the city gate of Padua, as she decides to go forward rather than return to her father’s home. Behind her are two unidentified men punished as ‘Drunkard’ and ‘Wifestealer’ (detail). Franco Zeffirelli, dir., The Taming of the Shrew (Columbia Pictures, 1967).

The Zeffirelli Kate’s third, most important decision comes when, lying comfortably in the bed Petruccio attacked but did not destroy (while he is uncomfortably asleep on a table),38 Kate’s tears give way to what has become her signature knowing smile as she takes stock of the home she will control.39 When she visibly decides to own and order the house, she assumes power in the only institution portrayed in the play. Elizabeth Taylor is finally the tamer; the boorish Petruccio the tamed. Men buy and sell; however, Petruccio’s twenty thousand crowns do not confer authority. He throws coins ineffectively at his dishevelled servants, whom Kate civilizes, largely by dressing them appropriately as she works with them to clean the house, while Petruccio awkwardly takes Kate’s role as the marginalized onlooker. Elizabeth Taylor’s Kate civilizes Petruccio as well as his servants.40 However, in the end, Kate finally assumes power

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FIGURE 3 Elizabeth Taylor (Kate) subdues Bianca (Natasha Pyne) and the Widow (Bice Valori), final scene (detail). Franco Zeffirelli, dir., The Taming of the Shrew (Columbia Pictures, 1967).

alone. Like Queen Elizabeth I, who is reported to have claimed ‘I may have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king,’41 Kate uses the language of feminine weakness. Lacking text to counterbalance her acknowledged weakness, she establishes her authority cinematically rather than linguistically: centre frame, holding her sister and the Widow hostage on the ground beside her. Making a choice that surprised her director and husband, she commands.42 Once more, Petruccio is an onlooker, albeit an astonished, grateful one. Kate had given him a peck on the nose when he asked for a kiss in the street, made the suggestion that the ladies leave the room (Bianca’s role in the play), and dragged Bianca with the widow into the room for her final speech rather than wait for Petruccio to command her to do so. Now – after kissing him passionately – she forces him to fight through the laughing crowd to follow her. Thus, Taylor’s Kate has turned her public shaming to public power, operating within the acknowledged frame of masculine authority that the play affirms. Strategic cuts, including Bianca’s spirited reply to her

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husband, bolster the single-minded focus on Kate the wife and Elizabeth Taylor the iconic star. Taking control of the household, she has full authority. And what about sisterhood? From the beginning, Zeffirelli’s film has set Kate against Bianca, who is portrayed as hypocritically self-serving. Kate’s sister must finally bow to her will, as must the sarcastic Widow and, by implication, all the previously mocking women who have returned with her to the dining room. Kate’s power over women is the power of revenge. However, one moment modifies this. Kate raises Bianca from the floor and gives her a kiss as she turns to leave the room. Bianca then gathers half-a-dozen women to block Petruccio’s exit briefly, facilitating Kate’s departure as the Prostitute weeps on the balcony above. Thus, though she leaves – as she rules – alone, Elizabeth Taylor does acknowledge Natasha Pyne as Bianca and the collective women who ultimately serve her, providing an anticipatory #MeToo moment of unspoken sisterhood, significant though fleeting.

‘Her silence flouts me and I’ll be revenged’:43 Conclusion If nothing else, #MeToo has exposed the malingering underbelly of abusive sexual domination as a contemporary problem, sustained by collective silence, isolation and intimidation. The antidote? A chorus of female voices using social media to create a virtual community of sisters countering the isolating silence. Shakespeare’s Shrew presents two sisters who find their voices alternately: Kate the Shrew voices her anger for four acts but ends the play affirming her allegiance to her husband; Bianca appears obedient until Act 5, when she denounces her new husband as a ‘fool’ for betting on ‘a foolish duty’ (5.2.135, 131). Each sister speaks up alone. Both Sam Taylor and Zeffirelli silence Bianca at the end. Thus, evaluating how – or if – these films establish a sense of sisterhood means

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asking how film stars Mary Pickford and Elizabeth Taylor deal with their silent sisters, portrayed by lesser-known actresses. Both Pickford and Elizabeth Taylor are empowered and given agency by their directors. However, they use that agency in different ways, with resulting differences in the kinds and degrees of power they assume. Pickford outdoes Fairbanks in tearing apart their bedroom, and she establishes a momentary bond with her sister by her famous wink. However, after nurturing Petruccio as if he were a child, she ends the film cradled childishly in her husband’s arms, affirming the authority of her actual husband Douglas Fairbanks. In contrast, Elizabeth Taylor – firmly in control –gives relatively unknown actress Natasha Pyne a kiss as she departs, with additional women collectively supporting her exit. Though, unlike Pickford, Taylor did not subvert her final monologue, she turned it to her own centre-stage advantage, controlling even while kneeling before leaving her equally famous husband to fight through resisting women. Neither these films nor the play follow through on Katherina’s Act 4 vow to speak the anger of her heart. As romantic comedies they achieve reconciliation without acknowledging culpability. Reading these films through the #MeToo lens highlights the weakness beneath the apparent power of Pickford’s Kate, while reinforcing Elizabeth Taylor’s domestic mastery over her drunken mate. How the headstrong stars themselves might have raised their voices in this #MeToo moment, one can only guess.

Notes 1

Barbara Hodgdon, ed., The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare, Arden Third Series (London: Arden/Bloomsbury, 2010), 4.3.75–6, 79–82. All subsequent references to the play are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically.

2

In 2006, Diana E. Henderson reported more than twenty film and video versions excluding spin-offs (‘The Return of the

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Shrew: New Media, Old Stories, and Shakespearean Comedy’ in Collaborations with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare across Time and Media (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 155 n.1), putting this film in the class of the major tragedies, beyond other comedies. See also ‘A Shrew for our Times’ in Shakespeare the Movie: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV, and Video, ed. Lynda E. Boose and Richard Burt (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 148. There have been at least half a dozen more since 2006. 3

Barbara Hodgdon, ‘Katherina Bound; Or, Play(K)ating the Strictures of Everyday Life’, PMLA 107.3 (Special Topic: Performance; May 1992), 538.

4

Michelle Rodino-Colocino, ‘Me too, #MeToo: countering cruelty with empathy’, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15.1 (2018), 97–101 (97–8).

5

Sam Taylor, dir., The Taming of the Shrew (Pickford/United Artists/Elton Corporation, distributed by United Artists, 1929) [film]; Franco Zeffirelli, dir., The Taming of the Shrew (Columbia Pictures, 1967) [film].

6

See Linda E. Boose, ‘Scolding Brides and Bridling Scolds: Taming the Woman’s Unruly Member’, Shakespeare Quarterly 42.2 (Summer 1991), 179–213.

7

Ibid.

8

Act 1 in David Garrick, Catharine and Petruchio: A Comedy, in Three Acts (London, 1756). Available online: https://quod.lib. umich.edu/e/ecco/004799379.0001.000/1:6?rgn=div1;view=fullt ext.

9

United Artists was co-founded in 1919 by Fairbanks and Pickford with D.W. Griffith and Charlie Chaplin. ‘Pickfair’, the name of the mansion Fairbanks gave Pickford, informally designates Pickford-Fairbanks Studio, which with the Elton Corporation (a Pickford production company) produced the film that Hodgdon identified incorrectly as a Columbia Pictures production. The Fairbanks husband and wife team financed and produced Taming. Pickford supervised the restoration and re-release in 1966, anticipating the Zeffirelli film. Copyrighted by Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr, this is the only version

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commercially available now. Seven minutes were removed from the film in the restoration. 10 Garrick, Catharine and Petruchio, Act 1. 11 Ibid. 12 Hodgdon notes that she appears at the top of the stairs before a frieze depicting Herod’s Slaughter of the Innocents, ‘perfectly troping her image as a grown woman pretending to be a little girl’; see Hodgdon, ‘Katherina Bound’, 543. 13 Both quotations come from Mary Pickford, Sunshine and Shadow (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955), 186. 14 Sonya Freeman Loftis, ‘Mary Pickford as Shakespearean Shrew: Redefining the Image of America’s Sweetheart’, Shakespeare Bulletin 28.3 (Fall 2010), 331–45; quotation 331. 15 Pickford, Sunshine and Shadow, 187. Pickford sustained her career despite alcoholism. She starred in three films after Shrew, which she also produced: Marshall Neilan’s Forever Yours, 1930; Sam Taylor’s Kiki, 1931; and Frank Borzage’s Secrets, 1933, the last one forty-six years before her death. 16 Pickford did make a cameo appearance in Fairbanks’ 1926 The Black Pirate (dir. Albert Parker). 17 Pickford, Sunshine and Shadow, 186. See also Gary Carey, Doug and Mary: A Biography of Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1977), 185–7. 18 The Foringer poster quotes Michelangelo’s famous sculpture of the Pieta, with a wounded soldier on a stretcher in the pose of the dead Christ, cradled by a Red Cross nurse; Fairbanks rests his head, childlike, on Pickford’s breast. The term ‘eternal feminine’ comes from the last line of Goethe’s Doctor Faustus, Part II (1831): ‘Das Ewig-Weibliche / zieht uns hinan’ (‘the eternal feminine / leads us upward’). Goethe’s eternal feminine principle, derived from Dante’s ‘blessed damosel’, became a model for nineteenth-century idealized womanhood, secularizing the Virgin Mary, the asexual nurturing image that Pickford projects. For a discussion of the nineteenth-century ideal, see Milla Cozart Riggio, ‘Virgins without Veils: Dickens’ Moral Madonnas,’ unpublished paper, delivered at the International Congress of Medieval Studies, The Medieval Institute, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan, May 1990.

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19 Hodgdon says ‘that gives the Oedipal scenario a curious gender spin’; see Hodgdon, ‘Katherina Bound’, 544. However, Kate is portrayed as iconic mother not father. In a parallel, Pickford describes the role ‘where I served [Fairbanks] best’ as one in which she took care of him. See Pickford, Sunshine and Shadow, 184. 20 Henderson, Collaborations with the Past, 159–65, also focuses on the star power of these two actresses, but she reads Pickford’s role as establishing equality with Petruccio and bonding with her sister. 21 Portia at 3.4.57 in John Drakakis, ed. The Merchant of Venice, Arden Third Series (London and New York: Arden, 2011). Though beyond the scope of this chapter, there is an interesting comparison between Elizabeth Taylor’s Kate and Portia, as heads of households. 22 Zeffirelli at times cinematically imitates the earlier black and white film that he aimed to remake. Burton and Taylor also financed this film, released as a Burton–Zeffirelli production. 23 Franco Zeffirelli, Zeffirelli: The Autobiography of Franco Zeffirelli (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986), 200–1. 24 See Graham Holderness, Chapter III: ‘Zeffirelli’ in The Taming of the Shrew (Shakespeare in Performance Series) (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1989), 49–73. 25 Hodgdon, ‘Katherina Bound’, 545, traces this history in more detail. 26 See, for instance, Boose, ‘Scolding Brides and Bridling Scolds’. 27 Natasha Korda, ‘Household Kates: Domesticating Commodities in The Taming of the Shrew’, Shakespeare Quarterly 47.2 (1996), 62. The 1980 Jonathan Miller BBC production bills Baptista as a ‘Merchant of Padua’. 28 For a more detailed look at how these class distinctions resonated in early modern England, see Erin Kelly’s essay in this volume. 29 In his creation of teeming Padua streets, Zeffirelli does show a bustling city replete with street vendors and mercantile exchange as a backdrop to the narrative.

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30 See, for instance, Lena Cowen Orlin, ‘The Performance of Things in The Taming of the Shrew’ in The Taming of the Shrew: Critical Essays, ed. Dana Aspinall (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 23–69. 31 Indeed, neither Baptista Minola nor Petruccio claims mercantile ties, as do other suitors. 32 See Romola Nuttall, ‘The Taming of the Shrew: Afterlives and Oeconomics’ in this volume. 33 Quoted from Romola Nuttall, ‘The Taming of the Shrew: Afterlives and Oeconomics’, paper prepared for ‘The Taming of the Shrew and its Afterlives’ seminar, Cóppelia Kahn and Linda Woodbridge, conveners, Shakespeare Association of America Annual Meeting, Los Angeles, CA, April 2018. Paper revised for publication in this volume. Also see Korda, ‘Household Kates’, 109–13; Karen Newman, Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991); and Lynda E. Boose, ‘The Taming of the Shrew, good husbandry, and enclosure’ in Shakespeare Reread: The Texts in New Contexts, ed. Russ McDonald (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 193–225. 34 ‘By fate’ signifies choice based on destiny and character, rather than parental, commercial arrangement. Act 5, Scene 5, l. 227 in Giorgio Melchiori, ed. The Merry Wives of Windsor, Arden Third Series (London and New York: Arden, 1999). 35 The Lord orders a ‘silver basin / Full of rose-water and bestrewed with flowers’ for Sly (Induction, ll. 54–5). Mei Zhu also notes this link between Burton’s portrayal and Christopher Sly: Mei Zhu, ‘Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew and the Tradition of Screwball Comedy” CLCWeb: Comparative Liberature and Culture 6.1 (2004), https://doi. org/10.7771/1481-4374.1209. 36 Henderson also notes the importance of ‘money’ and Taylor’s assumption of household authority, but she reads these differently. See Henderson, Collaborations with the Past. 192. 37 Nuttall, ‘Afterlives and Oeconomics’, revised for publication in this volume; quotation is from the paper presented at the SAA.

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38 Taylor has just hit Burton over the head with a warming pan, echoing Pickford’s hitting Fairbanks with a stool, though with different results. 39 A fourth decisive moment occurs at Bianca’s wedding dinner. Kate and Petruccio sullenly ignore each other, Kate visibly annoyed, and then transition to muted mutual desire. Kate looks longingly at children playing, then at Petruccio, who puts down his drink. This sequence ends with the characteristic Elizabeth Taylor smile, perhaps motivating Kate’s sincerity in her closing monologue. Hodgdon relates this sequence to Elizabeth Taylor’s childbearing history; see ‘Katherina Bound’, 545–6. 40 Burton’s portrayal reinforces Coppélia Kahn’s reading of Shakespeare’s play as a satire ‘of the male urge to control women’: Man’s Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 104. 41 See Carole Levin, The Heart and Stomach of a King (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 1. See also ibid., ch. 6, ‘Elizabeth as King and Queen’, 121–48. 42 Zeffirelli had expected her to follow the ‘usual’ pattern of winking that Pickford initiated. Taylor’s choice to deliver this tribute sincerely reportedly brought Burton to tears. See Zeffirelli, Zeffirelli, 216. 43 Hodgdon, ed., The Taming of the Shrew (London and New York: Arden/Bloomsbury, 2010), 2.1.29.

10 ‘The Right Foundation’ Remaking Marriage in a Black Adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew Joyce Green MacDonald

It’s entirely possible that one major reason for The Taming of the Shrew’s continuing popularity in performance is that it raises unsettling questions about the nature and practice of bourgeois marriage, and about the gender roles of participants in the institution. We can trace a history of this audience dissatisfaction in the play’s many adaptations, which often attack the early modern formations of gender that underlie the original’s notion of married life head-on. In John Fletcher’s continuation, The Woman’s Prize, or The Tamer Tamed (first performed c. 1611), for example, Katherina and Bianca are replaced by two sisters, Maria and Livia, who support each other rather than compete with one another, as both rebel against the marital hands their father has dealt them. Maria, 192

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Petruchio’s second wife, will go so far as to deny him (and herself) the intimate ‘delights’1 of marriage in order to make him understand the errors of his domineering ways with the late Katherina. Livia loves the rakish young Rowland, and has no intention of marrying Moroso, the old but rich man her father has chosen for her. She knows that Moroso’s money can’t ‘kisse’ her from ‘Behind, / Laid out upon a Petticote; or graspe me / While I cry, O good thank you.’2 Not quite twenty years after Shrew, The Woman’s Prize is ready to dispute Shakespeare by insisting that it’s wrong for men to bully their wives and that women both crave and have a right to sexual satisfaction in marriage. But even these stark departures from The Taming of the Shrew’s plot fall short of truly questioning its acceptance of fathers’ rights to set the rules for marriage and family life. Accepting Livia’s runaway match with Rowland as a fait accompli – she’s already had sex with him, so he can’t very well marry her off to another man if she’s no longer a virgin  – the sisters’ father, Petronius, asserts his continuing authority over her intimate life by vowing to cut her annual income in half if they don’t make him a grandfather within the year. As Fletcher’s modern editor Lucy Munro remarks, it is probably ‘unrealistic’ to expect a seventeenth-century playwright to be able to imagine an alternative to the ‘patriarchal structures’ of his own time: ‘while marriage may have been a problematic institution, it was the only one available.’3 Munro is right, of course, but the degree to which even adaptations of Shrew that begin from dissatisfaction with its characters’ relegation to a utilitarian view of sex and marriage leave its patriarchal structures intact is nonetheless striking. In this chapter, I will argue that Gary Hardwick’s 2003 film, Deliver Us From Eva, mounts a more effective challenge to the foundations of male domination that underlie the Shrew tradition. Most obviously, Hardwick’s film works to decentre male privilege by making a group of sisters and their lovers and friends, instead of the members of Padua’s male-controlled female property exchange, the protagonists of its comedy of love and marriage. (Both lead characters’ fathers are dead.)

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As it unfolds, Deliver Us From Eva proves itself willing to interrogate the performance of masculinity as much as, if not more than, Shrew judges femininity.4 Like The Woman’s Prize, it celebrates the value of sexual pleasure for women as well as for men, and sees that pleasure as the shared property of both partners to the marriage bond. But most importantly, by setting the play’s coupling conflicts within a family of black women seeking to integrate their romantic loves with their loyalty to each other and to their female-headed household, Deliver Us From Eva asks us to reimagine received notions of the connections between women’s race and their eligibility for romance. Reading backwards from Hardwick’s story of the four beautiful Dandridge sisters and their lives in modern Los Angeles toward the Renaissance, the significance of the film heroines’ blackness to an alternative notion of femininity becomes clearer. The very name of Shakespeare’s Bianca – Italian for ‘white’ – relies on the Petrarchan commonplace that associated fairness with beauty and proper feminine comportment. (Shakespeare inverts this conventionally direct correlation between fairness and beauty in the so-called ‘Dark Lady’ sonnets, which he was probably also working on in the early 1590s.) This association, of course, turns out not to hold true in the play, as Bianca’s passive-aggressive swipes at her sister let us know as early as Act 2, Scene 1; her later Latin lesson with the disguised Lucentio, which contrasts lines from Heroides 1, detailing Penelope’s faithful longing for the absent Ulysses, with her own teasing of the lovesick young man, further suggests that she is not what she seems to be. Playing with her name one last time, Petruccio mocks Lucentio, too: he wins the bet on wives’ obedience, even though Lucentio is the one who finally ‘hit the white’.5 There are no black women in The Taming of the Shrew, but such play with the physical and moral attributes of ‘fair Bianca’ (1.2.165, 5.2.133) does invoke its period’s racialized vocabulary of female desirability6 – a vocabulary which here proves to be entirely unreliable. By the 1590s, this racialized vocabulary was applying to real black women as well as to fictional white ones.

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Winthrop Jordan has argued that the beginning of the English slave trade in the sixteenth century heightened the effect of existing travellers’ tales about African bodies and sexualities and existing beliefs about the moral valences of ‘black’ and ‘white’, pushing them toward an explicit denigration that would help ideologically justify slavery.7 Historian Jennifer Morgan offers another expression of this interconnection of belief and the practices that resulted from it when she notes how deeply ‘racialist discourse’ has been shaped by and expressed through beliefs about sex and gender.8 In the transatlantic shadow of slave culture, black women – whether enslaved or free – were regarded as both inferior, by reason of their race, and as defective women, the foil and opposite of all that was ‘fair’. When it dispenses with male control over women, Deliver Us From Eva comically undermines the patriarchal norms that drive shrew plays. And by centring black women and making them objects of men’s love as well as their desire, the film also redresses the effects of a history of gender-specific racial debasement whose opening expressions we can see in Renaissance poetic vocabularies of ‘fair’ and ‘black’. Morgan and other literary critics and historians have noted the degree to which women of colour and perhaps black women in particular have been erased from cultural archives.9 To write black women’s presence back into history, as they are comically reinscribed in Deliver Us From Eva, requires us to rematerialize stories that have been deliberately effaced. Shakespearean adaptation can be a form of this rematerialization, a kind of self-authorized and self-authorizing remembering that works to challenge the plays’ formation within and even investment in discourses of erasure. Unlike The Woman’s Prize, which explicitly defines itself as a sequel to its Shakespearean original, Deliver Us From Eva never makes any direct reference to The Taming of the Shrew at all. Still, however, the film’s portrayal of an elder sister whose abrasive personality drives potential suitors away, thereby complicating other men’s access to her more conventionally desirable younger sisters, clearly has Shakespeare on its mind.10

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Deliver Us From Eva begins its rematerialization of a fugitive blackness that has the potential to redress both Shrew’s untenable Renaissance gender politics and black women’s ensuing dismissal from representation with its opening credits. A group of men and women perform Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson’s ‘You’re All I Need to Get By’, which was originally recorded by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell in 1968 and stayed at number one on the Billboard R & B charts for five weeks. The song declares that romantic love is all that matters in a move that would have had special significance for black audiences searching for all kinds of solidarity in that tumultuous year. At the end of the credit sequence, the performers go over to a book on a lectern, open its front cover, and the film begins  – with those same singers and dancers revealed to be the actors in the film. Eva’s opening strikes a very different chord than Shrew’s Induction, with its nameless Lord, whose social privilege entitles him to conduct an impromptu social experiment on a ‘drunken man’ (Ind. 1.35). Will Ashford and Simpson’s joyous assertion of complete mutuality between emotional equals carry over into the story that book apparently contained, the story we’re about to see? In the film, the three younger sisters are happily partnered, the two of them who are married living in the family home with their husbands, but the eldest daughter, Eva – who took over leadership of the family (and began accumulating a joint financial fund) at the age of eighteen after both parents were killed in a traffic accident – remains single. Her first love asked her to choose between him and her sisters, she explains, and when she chose her sisters, ‘he dumped me’. She has a lingering sadness over the rejection but she is not sorry she chose to stay and support her younger sisters: ‘They needed me.’ Her life is busy and useful, with her career as a city health inspector, and volunteer activities leading her church choir and convening a book club. She is a little bossy – she corrects the pastor at her church when she misquotes the Bible and offers her suggestions for her next sermon – and disdainful of most of the men she meets, but she has a life that works.

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The Dandridge sisters’ female-oriented family is comically replicated in the beauty salon where one of them works. Ormandy’s is ‘a female sanctuary . . . the way the whole world ought to be,’ the owner declares. (Mike, the boyfriend who is trying to get Eva’s middle sister Bethany to let him move in without marriage, feels differently about Ormandy’s, calling it a ‘man hell’.) Her sisters’ partners find Eva so overbearing that they hatch a plan to pay a local lothario, Raymond, to woo her and get her to leave town with him. With Eva out of the way, the men hope to find it easier to privatize their relationships, and to get access to their partners’ share of the family’s joint estate. But the film’s family dynamics operate very differently from the play’s. Eva’s sisters are happy to discover that she seems to be falling for a new man, and eagerly welcome him into the family circle – a response that frustrates her brothers-in-laws’ plot to get her to leave. Reversing the pattern of The Taming of the Shrew, in which the newly married Kate leaves her father’s house and goes to a place where she knows no one – not even her new husband – the sisters in Deliver Us From Eva assume that their family can and will expand to contain another loved partner, and that this expanded community is expected and normal. After the effective starvation economy of Shakespeare’s play, Hardwick’s film portrays an emotional world where there is enough fully reciprocated love to go around: between Eva and her sisters, between her sisters and their lovers, and between Eva and Raymond, who ends by following her to Chicago and declaring his feelings for her. While such an ending reinforces Shrew’s heterosexual pair-bonding norm and will sadly work to reduce the sisters’ female community by removing Eva from it, the film’s resolution can only come about when Raymond lets go of his privilege as what the sisters’ partners call a ‘real man,’ and admits he has fallen in love. Beyond its validation of both the men’s loving desire for their partners and the sisters’ love for Eva, the movie also gestures toward another context pointing to its interest in rewriting the racial as well as the patriarchal terms that drive

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The Taming of the Shrew. Eva and her sisters share a surname with the iconic black 1950s movie star Dorothy Dandridge, the first black woman to be nominated for an Academy Award as Best Actress. As does its sideways awareness of Shakespeare, the movie’s borrowing of Dorothy Dandridge’s name functions as an example of what Judith Butler calls ‘an appropriation that seeks to make over the terms of domination, a making over which is itself a kind of agency, a power in and as discourse, in and as performance which repeats in order to remake – and sometimes succeeds’.11 In recirculating Dorothy Dandridge’s name, the film rejects the social suppression of black women by casually identifying itself with a powerful counter-discourse of beauty, desirability and fame.12 The ways in which the film addresses Shrew’s plot in order to create an implicitly feminist history for black women and for black love extends to its treatment of its genre of romantic comedy, from which characters like the Dandridge sisters have largely been absent. We might think of the female stars of romantic comedy as modern descendants of Shakespeare’s Katherina (if we can forget her last scene): bossy, talkative, energetic, self-absorbed, and somewhat off-centre.13 But whether these romantic comedy movie heroines are embodied as they were in their first classic Hollywood iterations by actresses like Clara Bow, Carole Lombard and Barbara Stanwyck, or from the late 1980s to past the turn of the twenty-first century by Meg Ryan, Julia Roberts, Kate Hudson or Katherine Heigl, they were white. Whiteness served a film genre as it had earlier served a literary genre about female beauty and desirability.14 The representational whiteness of romantic comedy heroines moved beyond their physical images to colonize the notion of romance itself, rendering the modern racially and ethnically diverse cities in which the heroines’ adventures are frequently set as virtually devoid of people of colour. When black women did appear in these Hollywood rom-coms, they were usually sidekicks or office buddies, sometimes even complete strangers, but rarely truly integrated into the action of the main plot.15 Black people’s phantom or ancillary presence in movies about white people

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serves to make the romantic dilemmas of these white people, as well as  – paradoxically  – the otherwise unmarked whiteness that structures and valorizes their heroism, beauty and readiness for love, visible.16 Several romantic comedies with all – or nearly all – black casts were released in the fifteen or so years before Deliver Us From Eva, running happily parallel along the mostly-white grounds that supported ideas about love and marriage in medium-to-large-budget Hollywood romantic comedies.17 In the best of these films, focusing on black would-be lovers and shifting the terrain of romantic comedy’s imagined communities to black spaces went beyond merely transposing the genre’s tropes to engage in a kind of world-building. Eva reports to two white men at work, but her life is clearly organized around her black family, friends, and institutional involvements. Deliver Us From Eva’s re-setting of The Taming of the Shrew oppositionally rereads the history of black women’s erasure from representation – particularly from representation in love stories  – to name a ‘counter-memory’18 of community connection and familial nurture as the basis of Eva’s present. Ashford and Simpson declare that they have the right foundation, a foundation that begins before the opening of the film to gesture toward the possibility of a loving romantic future for all. If the happy sociability of Deliver Us From Eva’s black sisters and friends silently corrects Katherina’s unhappy isolation in The Taming of the Shrew, the film does its most interesting work with the masculinity of Raymond and the men who solicit him to get Eva out of their lives. At first, he declines their offer – ‘I’m a lover, not a con man’ – but once he sees her in action in her professional role, he is intrigued by the challenge she presents: ‘Man, if I can get that woman, I’ll go down in the player Hall of Fame.’ In a characterization that may recall Petruccio’s rootlessness after his father’s death, Raymond is a loner who tends to bounce from job to job and place to place, getting by on his wit and formidable charm. He begins by poking at Eva’s class status,

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using the refrigerated truck he drives for his job as a butcher’s delivery man to take her on their first date, instead of the snazzy red vintage convertible he drives to her house (‘Saves wear and tear,’ he explains with a smile.) At the restaurant he seeks to throw her further off-balance by pretending to choke on his food, and she is so embarrassed by the scene his supposed neardeath creates that she wants them to leave immediately. The place they chose is one of the few places she feels safe patronizing; her reputation as a health inspector is so fearful, she tells him, that ‘Most places I won’t even go to – they try to poison me.’ Back in the truck, she writes him off as yet another one in her string of awful dates with men who aren’t good enough for her, bluntly telling him, ‘My job pays more than yours does.’ But because they are actually attracted to each other, and because Raymond is unusually skilled at reading her, she agrees to see him again. Slowly, they build a relationship and he finds that he’s falling for her, despite her occasional high-handedness, her out-of-tune singing along to Chaka Khan’s ‘Sweet Thing’ on the radio, and her awkward inability to tell a joke. Still, he doesn’t defend her fully to her brothers-in-law, partly because he knows how much they dislike her  – ‘We didn’t say she was a bad person,’ one of them explains; ‘we said she was an irritating person’ – and partly because he is protecting the depth of his own feelings for her. They had pushed him to sleep with her quickly so as to speed up the process of getting her to agree to leave town with him. But Raymond hesitated, realizing that sex would make him vulnerable. What viewers and readers of The Taming of the Shrew have had to project into a play that would otherwise feel pretty emotionally bleak – the belief that Katherina and Petruccio are sexually and emotionally connected to each other – Deliver Us From Eva makes an explicit part of the script. When Raymond and Eva finally do become lovers, after sharing their stories of loss and moving forward, she offers him companionship as well as sex: ‘I could be your really good friend.’ The next day, she strolls into Ormandy’s in a casual midriff-baring outfit instead of her usual neutral-coloured professional separates,

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uses slang instead of her typical sharply enunciated standard English, and exults – to her friends’ glee – that she and Raymond had ‘burned a hole through the floor!’ Eva’s brothers-in-law are also emotionally connected to their wives, even as they plot against Eva; Tim, married to the second sister Kareenah, wants to have a baby, while Dwayne loves holding his wife, the youngest sister Jacqui, close as much as he loves having sex with her. (He resents being called away from home for an emergency meeting about Raymond’s early progress with Eva: ‘Me and my wife were cuddling!’ he tells the other men in some annoyance, then corrects himself for public consumption. ‘I mean, I was hitting it real manly and I didn’t get to finish!’) It seems, though, that they are connected to the three younger Dandridge sisters in a narrower way than the women are to each other. The main advantage Tim sees in getting Raymond to lure Eva away is that he and the other men could more thoroughly privatize their relationships. ‘We can have all their love!’ one of them exclaims as they hatch the plot; they seem to believe that the sisters can be bound to each other, or to them, but not to both. But once the sisters realize that Eva has fallen in love with Raymond, their impulses are quite different. They want to welcome him into the family, to honour her by recommitting themselves to the work and study her sacrifices made possible for them, and to celebrate her happiness by signing over the entire family fund to her. One might compare their open-hearted gesture of delight and gratitude with Petronius’s threat, in Fletcher, to halve Livia’s dowry if she doesn’t conceive quickly. As the Dandridge sisters restage love, imagining it as elastic and inclusive, they also revalue money. For his part, Raymond is so taken with Eva and with the idea of making a permanent home that he starts his own Tupperware collection. But, enraged that Eva has decided to turn down the new job in Chicago so she can stay in Los Angeles with Raymond, the brothers develop a far-fetched solution to the derailment of their plan: they kidnap Raymond and imprison him in a warehouse long enough to convince Eva that he was killed and his body completely incinerated in a

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flaming car wreck. (Mike, the boyfriend of the third sister Bethany, is a policeman who falsifies the accident report.) This way, supposedly, she would realize that with no reason to stay home she might as well start over somewhere else. However, Raymond escapes and interrupts his own funeral service, where he confesses the original plot to Eva. He apologizes for what he did, but tells her that he’s in love with her and is now a changed man. Her reaction is to punch him and walk out of the church, and her sisters follow her. At this point, we see how sharply the men’s interests actually diverge from the sisters’. It apparently never occurred to them that faking Raymond’s death was probably too high a price to pay for pushing Eva out of her role as de facto head of their blended household, or that the women they love would grieve with her for her loss and rage against the men for their cruelty. The kind of masculine authority they admired in Raymond and sought in their own relationships is exposed as a brutal and rather stupid sham. At this point, Deliver Us From Eva could have veered off into a truly radical direction – having the sisters throw their partners out, say, and starting over with just the four of them. Instead, it backs down from its own demonstration that any legitimacy in the men’s desire to have more authority over their own households is overwhelmed by the thoughtless extremity with which they feel entitled to pursue it. Some weeks after the fake funeral, Eva’s brothers-in-law are still apologizing to her and her sisters, but she herself has let go of her anger. She tells them she is sorry for the times she was ‘a pain in the ass’ and that her sisters still love them. But not until they are sure that Eva has made her peace will the sisters take their lovers back and move forward in their relationships: Bethany accepting Mike’s proposal of marriage, Tim’s wife Kareenah agreeing to try to get pregnant, and Jacqui promising to begin reading her textbooks to Dwayne again. They dissolve the family fund and split it equally among the sisters, and Eva leaves for Chicago still estranged from Raymond. The goal of family separation that served as the pretext for the whole plot against her actually feels anticlimactic when it arrives.

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The film’s final scene opens with Eva in Chicago at her new job. She’s called down into the lobby of her building where she finds Raymond, trying to stay astride a white horse named Romeo. (Back in Los Angeles before her parents died, Eva had ridden regularly and wanted to be a trainer; Romeo was her regular mount at the stable she frequented.) He tells her he’s sold his house, quit his job, paid to board Romeo in the area for a year, and wants her to take him back. He has sacrificed his role as a man’s man and willingly disrupted his life in the same way he and the other men assumed Eva would give up her far more stable and comfortable life to follow him. She considers only a moment before kissing him, mounting Romeo  – with Raymond awkwardly swinging up behind her – and riding off up a broad metropolitan avenue, in front of a beaming audience of people from her office building. The film proper ends with this reversal of Shrew’s gender script; the man and not the woman is the one vowing devotion. Eva and Raymond exit to the sounds of Stevie Wonder’s 1969 hit ‘My Cherie Amour’. The film freezes into a still photograph of the final image in the book from the opening credits, which now closes with ‘The End’ embossed on its back cover. The classic soul love songs that open and close the movie bracket Eva and Raymond’s story between sounds and sentiments that first entered popular culture almost thirty-five years before its release. This stylistic belatedness serves as a kind of aural induction, completely containing the action as the Induction in Shrew, with its disappearing Christopher Sly, does not. The film’s invocation of Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder asks us to understand Eva and Raymond’s contemporary love story in relation to the historical and cultural past. The soundtrack, especially its opening and closing songs by titanic figures in the history of American pop music, locates Eva and Raymond’s love story inside a pre-integration society that pulled black people of all classes together (Mike is a cop, Dwayne is a mailman, and Tim, whose wife Kareenah is a medical student, seems more securely middle-class than either) and united them behind the struggle for civil rights which formed so much of the

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backdrop for American soul music of the mid to late 1960s.19 This is to say that just like the film’s revival of the Dandridge name and its emphasis on emotional connection, the music that opens and closes the film remembers a different kind of historical context than the ones that denigrated blackness or barred black women from the social imaginary of romantic love. The shared racial and romantic intimacy the soundtrack conjures is so powerful that it can escape the realm of memory and parade down a public street. The civil rights movement that made the film-Dandridges’ progress possible and hosted their loyalty to one another and to their community is far in the characters’ past, more active during their late parents’ lifetimes than during their own. In hearkening back to a period whose activist politics had forced real structural changes designed to weaken the foundations of white supremacy – such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the Voting Rights Act of 1965  – the film succeeds in connecting the Dandridge sisters’ sororal present to a collective, progressive time before, a time whose values and accomplishments boldly contradicted the stories that white people had told about black ones up to that time. But in the present world of Deliver Us From Eva, white people aren’t the intended audience. Black people are, especially black women, as the film draws on materials from a vast archive – institutions and cultural productions that include Chaka Khan as well as Shakespeare (and not only The Taming of the Shrew but that white horse named Romeo) – to generate and to praise a meaningful past of its own. To be honest, Deliver Us From Eva’s rewriting of the relations between gender, race, class and romantic love is not as entirely utopian as I’d like it to be. After the closing credits, the film includes a short scene where Telly, the one male hairdresser at Ormandy’s, is talking to his girlfriend on the phone. We have been led to believe that Telly is gay. Earlier in the film, when Mike comes into the shop to talk to Bethany, Telly flirts with him but when Mike tells him that he doesn’t ‘go that way’, Telly says resignedly, ‘Damn, let me call headquarters’, and mimes picking up his phone: ‘Hello? Yeah, it’s me. Yeah. Take Mike off

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the list.’ In the woman’s space of the salon, the coercive rules of male heterosexual dominance that Mike is trying to use against Eva are exposed as laughably irrelevant, as he’s pinched by a female customer and playfully regarded as a mark for secret gay recruitment strategies. Yet, even though it uses female sexual aggression and male homosexuality to challenge the shaky patriarchal logic of the brothers-in-laws’ plot against Eva, the film eventually steps back from Telly’s apparent refusal to comply with heterosexual norms. In a scene after the final credits, we learn that he’s only pretending to be gay, because ‘In LA, a straight hairdresser is an unemployed hairdresser.’ A truly sexually dissident gender performance capable of undermining the brothers’ simple-minded reading of Eva’s situation  – she ‘just needs a man’ – is revealed to be not quite so dissident after all, since at least one man survives who can successfully manipulate women for his own economic advantage. A partial induction of its own, half-bracketing the film’s complete enclosure by Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, Telly’s quick phone conversation reopens the door to the kind of masculine performance we have just seen exiled from the front of the movie’s mind. Black characters can lead The Taming of the Shrew to the water of gender equity, it seems, but can’t make it drink – or at least, not the full trough.

Notes 1

John Fletcher, The Woman’s Prize, or The Tamer Tamed in Comedies and Tragedies Written by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher (London, 1647), 99.

2

Ibid., 98.

3

John Fletcher, The Tamer Tamed or: The Woman’s Prize (1611), ed. Lucy Munro (London: Methuen/New Mermaids, 2010), xv.

4

Deliver Us From Eva (2003), [Film] Dir. Gary Hardwick, USA: Focus Features.

5

Barbara Hodgdon, ed. The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare, Arden Third Series (London: Arden/Bloomsbury,

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2010), 5.2.192. All subsequent references to the play are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically. 6

Here, see Kim Hall’s foundational discussion in Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 62–122.

7

Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Towards the Negro, 1550–1812, second edition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 24–43.

8

Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 15.

9

See, for example, Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), and Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007).

10 In Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, tr. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), Gérard Genette characterizes this indirect reference by one text to another that has preceded it as ‘transformation’. The later text may not directly refer at all to its original, but is ‘unable to exist’ without that original, and evokes it ‘more or less perceptibly without necessarily speaking of it or citing it’ (5). 11 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993), 137. 12 The recirculation of Dandridge’s image continues in a 2013 song by Janelle Monáe, ‘Dorothy Dandridge Eyes’. 13 Critical histories of romantic comedy on film include Claire Mortimer, Romantic Comedy (London: Routledge, 2010); Cherry Potter, I Love You, But. . .: Romance, Comedy, and the Movies (London: Methuen, 2002), and Kathrina Glitre, Hollywood Romantic Comedy: States of the Union, 1934–1965 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006). 14 On the whiteness of the genre, see Linda Mizejewski, ‘Queen Latifah, Unruly Women, and the Bodies of Romantic Comedy’, Genders 46 (2007); and Karen Bowdre, ‘Romantic Comedies and the Raced Body’ in Falling in Love Again: Romantic

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Comedy in Contemporary Cinema, ed. Stacey Abbott and Deborah Jermyn (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), 105–16. 15 Ironically, Gabrielle Union played one of these sidekick roles in the earlier teen comedy reiteration of The Taming of the Shrew, 10 Things I Hate About You (Touchstone Pictures, 1999). 16 See Tania Modleski’s classic discussion, ‘Cinema and the Dark Continent: Race and Gender in Popular Film,’ rpt. in Feminist Film Theory: A Reader, ed. Sue Thornham (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 321–35; and Janell Hobson, ‘Viewing in the Dark: Toward a Black Feminist Approach to Film,’ Women’s Studies Quarterly 30.1–2 (2002), 46–8. On the social effects of accepting whiteness as the ‘natural, inevitable, ordinary way of being human’ (44) see Richard Dyer, ‘White’, Screen 29.4 (1988), 44–65. 17 For discussions of some of these films, see Grace Barber-Plantie, ‘Why 1992–2002 was the Golden Age of the Black Romantic Comedy’, British Film Institute, 6 December 2016. Available online: http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/features/ boomerang-brown-sugar-black-romantic-comedies; and Mia L. Mask, ‘Buppy Love in an Urban World,’ Cineaste 25.2 (2000), 41–5. 18 bell hooks, ‘The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators’ in Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 131. hooks’ essay is a useful companion to Modleski, ‘Cinema and the Dark Continent’ and Hobson, ‘Viewing in the Dark’. 19 On the history of soul music and its political implications, see Shana L. Redmond, Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora (New York: New York University Press, 2013); and Joshua Clark Davis, ‘For the Records: How African American Consumers and Music Retailers Created Commercial Public Space in the 1960s and 1970s South’, Southern Cultures 17.4 (2011), 71–90.

11 Taming the Internet Katherina, Bianca, and Digital Girlhood Jennifer Flaherty

Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew is the subject of three literary web series distributed on YouTube: Kate the Cursed1 (Canada, 2014), Shrew That2 (USA, 2015), and Call Me Katie3 (Australia, 2015). The series update Shakespeare’s settings and characters, presenting their Katherinas as students who create vlog (video log) projects in the style of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries.4 By reworking the plot of The Taming of the Shrew in the video format typical of real-life YouTube vloggers, the series invite their viewers to follow and comment on the channels of the characters, allowing the stories and audience interactions to unfold in short episodes posted over several months. Through their transformations of the relationships between the main characters, the series function as critical readings of the play that move between eliminating and illuminating the darker aspects of Shakespeare’s taming narrative. As texts produced 208

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primarily by young women for audiences of young women, they also connect their readings of Taming of the Shrew to examinations of contemporary girlhood. Kate the Cursed, Shrew That, and Call Me Katie use Shakespeare’s characters as a way of challenging gender expectations for young women and starting conversations about sexuality and sexual assault. Because these series were all created by small digital production companies composed primarily of young women, the creators of these three Shrew series position their works as part of a larger trend of digital adaptations of Shakespeare in the age of spreadable media.5 The communities depicted in the web series extend to include the viewers, sometimes through Q&A sessions with the characters and sometimes through interactions on sites such as Twitter or Tumblr. Like all YouTube videos, the various Shrew web series come with what Christy Desmet describes as ‘ample paratexts’6 in the form of viewer comments and dialogues with the authors. Posted comments and linked video responses can provide insight into how audiences process internet content, dissecting the connections between Shakespeare and the contemporary world. As the authors of Spreadable Media explain, YouTube gives us a chance to ‘watch audiences doing the work of being an audience member: the [labour] of making meaning, of connecting media with their lived realities and their personal and interpersonal identities’.7 Because the three Shrew series are adaptations of a well-known story presented as if they were depicting the lives of real young women instead of fictional characters, they invite a range of comments. While some comments are tongue-in-cheek responses that suspend disbelief and address the characters as real people, others focus on how a series adapts the Shakespearean plot points. For example, the same viewer left two comments on a video in the Kate the Cursed series, one that speaks to the character directly to compliment the bracelets she wears and one that notes that the video is a good adaptation of Katherina’s final speech from The Taming of the Shrew.8 It can be difficult to ascertain whether the commenters on these videos all belong to the series target audience of young women; Desmet notes that

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‘the disembodied comments attached to [YouTube Shakespeare] videos are of uncertain provenance, often off-hand, and sometimes sparse’.9 Most of the viewer comments on the three Shrew series come from viewers whose user information at least suggests that they are young women, however. Young women are also the primary speakers in the video responses that I have found to the three series on YouTube. The result is a continually evolving multimedia conversation about how Shakespeare relates to the struggles of the contemporary teenage girl. The series’ emphasis on creating online communities that showcase a variety of depictions of gender and girlhood helps to counter an inherent sense of competition and comparison between the ways that Katherina and Bianca perform femininity in Shakespeare’s text and its critical history. Deanne Williams notes that ‘The Taming of the Shrew calls attention to the status of girlhood as a performance’10 and establishes a contrast between Katherina and Bianca for the characters and critics who compare Katherina’s taming with Bianca’s ‘reverse transformation, from obedience to resistance’11 over the course of the play. Due to the opposite trajectories of Katherina, from ‘curst and shrewd’12 to ‘obedient’ wife (5.2.68), and Bianca, from ‘modest girl’ (1.1.155) to ‘froward’ wife (5.2.125), the praise of one sister often comes at the expense of the other. Through repeated comparisons between the two sisters, The Taming of the Shrew establishes a dichotomous expression of femininity, which has largely been compounded by a reception history in which critics and readers sometimes mount attacks or defences of the characters in their work. If Carol Thomas Neely once divided the world of Othello criticism into ‘Othello critics’ and ‘Iago critics’,13 similar preferences emerge when critics of The Taming of the Shrew incorporate denouncements or defences of Katherina or Bianca into their work. In her Familiar Talks on Shakespeare’s Comedies, Elizabeth Wormeley Latimer labels Bianca ‘sly’ and ‘artificial’, arguing that although ‘common opinion, we see, admires the stage heroine Bianca . . . half a dozen Biancas are not worth that shrewish Katherine’.14 The practice continues today in adaptation. As Sheila Cavanagh

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notes in this volume, the 2016 novel Vinegar Girl expresses sympathy and preference for the Katherina character while presenting the Bianca character (‘Bunny’) as flighty and inconsequential. The practice of tying praise for one female character to disapproval of the other is a troubling pattern that particularly haunts Shrew, and it affects performance choices for productions that ask audiences simultaneously to feel anger over Petruccio’s treatment of Katherina and laugh at slapstick scenes that show Bianca in pain.15 Richard Burt argues that teen film 10 Things I Hate About You establishes the same binary comparison when it ‘reproduces yet another version of the contentious, competitive split between women that these teen films consistently put on display’ by ‘playing out the good girl/bad girl opposition’.16 Michael Friedman challenges this assertion, arguing that ‘instead of switching places, as Katherine and her sister do in The Taming of the Shrew, both Kat and Bianca move towards each other on the feminist spectrum until they meet in the middle’.17 The rivalry that characterizes their interactions at the beginning of the film is replaced by a mutually respectful relationship by the end. If the three YouTube Shrews have a predecessor in the rich afterlife of taming narratives, it is 10 Things, which works similarly to transform the setting and language of Shakespeare’s play to fit a school environment, and alter the ending to appeal to target audiences of young women. The three Shrew series follow the example of 10 Things and avoid presenting one sister as inherently better or worse than the other. Although none of these series includes much racial diversity, all of them emphasize the need to show a broad spectrum of girlhood, reflecting a need for content that portrays the ‘multiple, complex, multilayered, contestatory, and contradictory girlhoods’ articulated by Sarah Projansky in her study Spectacular Girls.18 Kate the Cursed emphasizes economic diversity by calling attention to the differences in wealth and status of the characters’ parents, with special attention to the difficulties faced by Kate’s best friend, who left Kate’s neighbourhood when her family lost money. Shrew

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That’s Bianca is asexual, and the character comes out to her sister during an episode of the show.19 Call Me Katie includes a non-binary character named Will,20 which is short for either ‘Willow or William’21 depending on the day, as well as several LGBT characters. Each Shrew series thus expands the cast of supporting characters to portray Katherina and Bianca as part of a larger community that includes more young women and diverse characters of all genders. While the practice of adapting The Taming of the Shrew as a coded way for authors to address and shape the behaviour of young women dates back at least to Mary Cowden Clarke’s ‘The Shrew and the Demure’,22 the user-generated format of YouTube provides a forum for young women themselves to develop, share and respond to the play and its adaptations. Stephen O’Neill argues that ‘YouTube Shakespeare videos should be regarded as a form of Shakespeare criticism in, and of, the present.’23 O’Neill’s description of ‘the metadata that make up our newly networked Shakespeare’24 aligns with ‘the vast web of adaptations, allusions and (re)productions that comprises the ever-changing cultural phenomenon we call “Shakespeare”’ described by Douglas Lanier.25 The web series Call Me Katie and its sequel Nothing Like the Sun26 have inspired nearly as many submissions to the fan-fiction site An Archive of Our Own as has Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. These YouTube Shrews take a different approach to the plotline than that employed by the authors detailed in Erin E. Kelly’s study of taming narratives (in the present volume), however. All of the series focus on the evolutions of their Katherina characters, and some of them even demonstrate her responses to behaviours designed to mimic those of Petruccio in the text. For example, Petruccio’s approach to depriving Katherina of sleep and food in Shrew is the inspiration for a plotline in Kate the Cursed, in which James, the Petruccio character, invites Kate and their other friends on a poorly planned weekend trip to a cabin with bedbugs and limited food options. But none of the texts features a deliberate and successful ‘taming’ of its Katherina character. Instead, most of the ‘taming’ taking place

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in each story involves young men learning how to cease their damaging behaviour towards young women. Although these series were all filmed and released before the rise of the #MeToo movement in 2017, each of them explores the effects of sexual harassment and/or assault through their respective Bianca character. Rather than portraying Bianca’s experience of having several guys interested in dating her as simply a happy or enviable one, they choose to emphasize the confusions and potential dangers of dating in high school and college. All of the series use characters based on Gremio and Hortensio, the two suitors who pursue Shakespeare’s Bianca after she has told Katherina that ‘I never yet beheld that special face, which I could fancy more than any other’ to demonstrate how young women deal with attention from men (2.1.11–12). While not all of the suitor characters are presented as potential predators, the Bianca character sometimes deals with unwanted affection from a friend, as Brittany from Kate the Cursed does when her best friend Hudson feels ‘friend-zoned’. Or she might have to navigate some challenging mixed signals, as Bianca from Call Me Katie does when George, who had often asked her out before she was allowed to date, abruptly stops pursuing her when she is given permission to date (because he has developed feelings for his best friend, also named George). Bianca from Shrew That has to deal with the challenges of dating while asexual, telling Luke, ‘I’m asexual. I’m not sexually attracted to people. I think you’re really great, and I love hanging out with you, but I don’t want to be pressured into something I don’t want to do.’27 While she does agree to meet Luke for a lunch date, she explains that she might never want to move past watching superhero movies and reading Shakespeare with him. We also see the series using Bianca’s suitors to highlight overt actions that make her uncomfortable; each series includes examples of male behaviour that cross lines and hurt the female characters. In Shrew That, Bianca uses the rule that she can’t date until Kate does to avoid the attentions of Greg, the Gremio character, who will not accept no for an answer when he tries to walk her home after a party. While Greg’s physical

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aggression is limited to lightly shoving the Lucentio character (Luke) a few times, Bianca documents his persistence in pursuing her at the party and notes her discomfort with him as the reason that she reinstates a no-dating rule that hasn’t applied since high school. Kate the Cursed also uses the Gremio character as a threatening figure when Kate reveals that Graham, her father’s legal assistant who has already graduated from college, has been relentlessly pursuing her sixteen-yearold sister Brittany. When Kate steals Brittany’s phone to check her messages, she finds an ‘entire conversation with someone Britt has just labelled “creep” ’28 before noting that the conversation includes no responses from Brittany and consists entirely of Graham asking Brittany to move in with him. While the three series challenge the idea that some types of femininity are better than others, they all portray some types of masculinity as potentially counterproductive or harmful. Call Me Katie takes the portrayal of unwanted attention further when the Hortensio character (Harry) escalates from creating a sexist ‘Guide to Women’29 video to trying to kiss Bianca after she has refused him, in an episode that comes with a trigger warning for sexual harassment.30 The ‘paratext’ of comments on the Call Me Katie series demonstrates that Harry’s actions are both unacceptable and familiar to viewers. Some of the comments acknowledge that the series is an adaptation of a Shakespeare play, such as one viewer who responded to the ‘Guide to Women’ video with ‘i’ve never liked hortensio less than in this version’31 and another who posted, ‘Oh yeahh girl! I love that this adaptation gives depth and more girl power to Bianca’32 after Bianca denounces his actions. The majority of the viewer responses don’t mention Shakespeare at all, however. Instead, Harry’s situation serves as a way for viewers and characters to explore issues of consent, sexism and harassment. When Harry suggests using agreement and flattery to get women to let men ‘cop a feel’, a viewer responded that ‘being with someone isn’t about getting an opportunity to “cop a feel” or saying whatever just to make them feel good. It’s human interfuckingaction. Don’t lie to her. All that does is

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make her like someone that you aren’t!’33 One commenter connects Harry’s attempt to kiss Bianca over her objections with a broader statement about sex in the media, stating, ‘I hate how pop culture represents kissing without consent as an “act of romance”, it’s not. I am so proud of Bianca for standing up for herself.’34 Others address Bianca directly: I am so sorry Bianca, you and all the other girls this happens to don’t deserve this L God this show so accurately portrays shitheads like Harry and Peter who are just horrible and don’t understand consent or anything ugh I feel so gross just from watching, but at the same time I’m glad the show showed this, it’s an important message.35 This comment addresses Bianca as if she were a real highschool girl who had suffered a traumatic experience, while simultaneously acknowledging that this is a fictional series that is taking a stance against assault and harassment. Because the conceit in these videos is that these characters are real people vlogging about their lives, commenting viewers can choose to adhere to the conceit by posting directly to the character rather than commenting on the text as a work of fiction. The viewer comments complement the reactions of the characters in the web series, who find out about Harry’s assault on Bianca after the viewers do. When Katie attempts to defend Bianca by causing a scene when Harry shows up at Will’s birthday party, her outburst resembles the anger towards Harry initially expressed by viewers. Despite understanding her reaction and perspective, however, the characters and the viewers commenting on the confrontation video agree that Katie handles the situation badly. As one viewer explains, Katie ‘was definitely in the wrong; making a huge scene like that. It ruined the atmosphere for everyone not involved, most importantly Will. Yes, Bianca does have a right to be angry, but at least she did the considerate thing and confronted him away from everyone.’36 Similarly, when the Petruccio character (Peter) posts a video

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defending Harry that reveals a history of abuse in Harry’s family, the viewer responses state that the sympathy they feel for Harry does not excuse his actions or negate the need for change. Their comments anticipate the way Bianca uses the same approach in her next interaction with Harry – clear that he crossed a line that she was uncomfortable with, but willing to cautiously forgive him. Each of the Shrew series uses their Petruccio character and Bianca’s suitors to demonstrate how the actions of men can have negative effects on young women. They also show the vast majority of the male characters, usually led by their own circles of friends with participation from the online viewers through Q & A sessions and viewer comments, changing their approaches and becoming better communicators. The ‘taming’ of each young man involves interventions or discussions rather than humiliation, starvation or any of the other taming devices in Shakespeare’s narrative. There is a hopefulness to the scenes of individuals or groups of young people who defend the characters who have been hurt and work with the offending characters to improve their behaviour. The videos are not just modelling good and bad behaviours so that viewers can learn from a male taming narrative. They also focus on demonstrating how friends and family members can create a supportive environment for young men and women to counter or prevent traumatic experiences. The means by which the creators of these series transform Shakespeare’s texts might at first glance seem ‘denunciatory’, to borrow David Bevington’s term from this collection. Like the productions Bevington examines in his chapter, the YouTube Shrews drastically revise the taming narrative and call attention to the more problematic elements of Shakespeare’s text. Call Me Katie even opens with a video entitled ‘Classic Literature and the Patriarchy’ in which Katie recites Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 for an audition to the school play and then specifically denounces Shakespeare’s treatment of his mistress: This is so bad. Shakespeare or the persona or whatever thinks he’s so great for loving his ugly girlfriend? You’re not special, Shakespeare, you’re sexist. Oh, someone call the

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police, I’m criticizing Shakespeare. Well, I’m sorry, but it has to be done. It is so straight white male of him to expect women to fit into this narrow, unachievable definition of beauty and then to say that when we don’t, we’re ugly, and then to act so morally superior when he accepts a slightly less-than-perfect woman . . . and I get that it was 400 years ago, but people don’t seem to realize that this is a deeply flawed sonnet yet. And that’s just wrong. So there. So get off your high horse Shakespeare! Thanks!37 Yet rather than serve as a true evisceration of Shakespeare’s sonnet and a representation of the views of the creators, Katie’s anger serves to establish her persona. Her rant against the sonnet serves the same function as her rebellion against The Game of Life in a later episode – a means of using cultural readings of literature and pop culture to challenge existing social structures. The fact that she assumes the worst of the narrator, the poem, and the poet without understanding the context of the lines sets up her rush to publicly denounce Harry after his actions towards Bianca, as well as her anger at Peter during various points in the series. The creators of the series, who understand the poem better than Katie does, as evidenced by the fact that they named the sequel series Nothing Like the Sun, use Katie’s misreading of the poem to start a conversation with the viewers, allowing them to respond with their own comments. Some commenters identified with her attempt to take down the patriarchy while remaining sceptical of her reading of the poem, as evidenced by the comments ‘Me 5 minutes into English class’38 and ‘I love this video and the way you read against the grain and challenge the dominant discourse. Someone should always question Shakespeare. One thing I will say however, is that sonnet 130 is written in a more satirical tone than many of Shakespeare’s other works’.39 Others were more direct in their criticism of her reading of the poem: That is NOT what Shakespeare’s saying! He’s saying that the idealized version of a woman that pretty much all love

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poems of that time were about isn’t what real women are like, and that even if the woman he loved has bad breath and a voice that isn’t music – even if she’s a PERSON – that doesn’t mean he doesn’t love her and think she’s beautiful . . . sorry. It’s my favorite sonnet, I have to defend it.40 The defence of the sonnet in this comment was echoed in several others who introduced their own (more positive) readings of the sonnet. Because viewers of literary web series are usually expected to have some familiarity with and enthusiasm for the author of the source text, the creators likely expected that a rant against Shakespeare in the first episode of a Shakespeare vlog would engage the audience and prompt a few comments challenging the ideas of the main character. The episode speaks to a larger question explored by the many analyses of readings, performances and adaptations of Taming of the Shrew in this volume. Why engage with a text that could be condemned as ‘sexist’ or ‘deeply flawed’? Katie’s criticism of Sonnet 130 echoes the descriptors (‘horrible’, ‘misogynistic’, ‘unredeemable’, ‘degrading’) that some real-life Shakespeareans used for The Taming of the Shrew in 2019 when Russell Slater posted to the Shakespeare Friends Facebook page to ask about strategies for directing the play.41 The problems associated with The Taming of the Shrew are more complicated than Katie’s rushed judgement of Sonnet 130, however, and the young creators of these web series have chosen to embrace the difficult subject matter by reworking a play known for its controversial portrayal of gender and power. Responding to the challenges of the play by transforming the setting and rewriting major plot points, the series are neither attacking nor defending Shakespeare. Instead, they are using his familiarity to tell stories that resonate with young women. The young women creating these literary web series combine Shakespeare criticism with current social commentary, starting conversations (in-text and among viewers) about girlhood, identity, and sexual assault. In these three Shrew adaptations, the emphasis is not on ‘taming’ shrews, female or

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male, but instead on using Shakespeare and social media to discuss how interactions can become better for girls everywhere.

Notes 1

Golden Moose Productions, Kate the Cursed, posted from 25 January 2014 to 15 October 2014. YouTube. https://www. youtube.com/playlist?list=PLefCfFxyeRWv0sy4bO3U0qkiIkypC 4Hl1.

2

Nerd Degree Burns, Shrew That, posted from 4 March 2015 to 8 May 2015. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= KbT5Zm-q7MA&index=2.

3

Discordia Productions (Formerly Fat Goat Productions), Call Me Katie, posted from 16 March 2015 to 15 December 2016. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocZnTA8b_dQ.

4

Pemberley Digital, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, posted from 9 April 2012 to 19 August 2015. YouTube. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=KisuGP2lcPs.

5

For more on the subject of media consumption and distribution, see Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford and Joshua Green, Spreadable Media (New York: New York University Press, 2013).

6

Christy Desmet, ‘YouTube Shakespeare, Appropriation, and the Rhetorics of Invention’ in OuterSpears: Shakespeare, Intermedia, and the Limits of Adaptation, ed. Daniel Fischlin (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 53.

7

Jenkins, Ford and Green, Spreadable Media, 187.

8

Mic Doj, comments on Golden Moose Productions, ‘Kate the Cursed: Episode 29’, 28 September 2014.

9

Desmet, ‘YouTube Shakespeare’, 53.

10 Deanne Williams, Shakespeare and the Performance of Girlhood (New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 41. 11 Ibid., 42. 12 Barbara Hodgdon, ed., The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare, Arden Third Series (London: Arden/Bloomsbury, 2010), 1.1.179. All subsequent references to the play are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically.

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13 Carol Thomas Neely, ‘Women and Men in Othello’ in William Shakespeare’s Othello: Modern Critical Interpretations, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), 79–104. Neely went on to label herself an ‘Emilia critic’. 14 Elizabeth Wormeley Latimer, qtd in Women Reading Shakespeare 1660–1900: An Anthology of Criticism, ed. Ann Thompson and Sasha Roberts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 201. 15 Propeller’s 2006 all-male production of The Taming of the Shrew is a good example of this strategy. 16 Richard Burt, ‘Afterword: Te(e)n Things I Hate about Girlene Shakesploitation Flicks in the Late 1990s, or Not So Fast Times at Shakespeare High’ in Spectacular Shakespeare: Critical Theory and Popular Culture, ed. Courtney Lehmann and Lisa S. Starks (Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002), 207. 17 Michael D. Friedman, ‘The Feminist as Shrew in 10 Things I Hate About You’, Shakespeare Bulletin 22.2 (2004), 59. 18 Sarah Projansky, Spectacular Girls (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 226. 19 Nerd Degree Burns, ‘Shrew That: Episode 4’, 13 March 2015. 20 Will is loosely based on William Shakespeare, and it is revealed in the sequel series that they have cheated on their girlfriend Annie (Anne Hathaway), which leaves room for Bianca to explore her own sexuality (including her potential asexuality) when she begins dating Annie. 21 Discordia Productions, ‘Call Me Katie: Episode 39’, 25 July 2015. 22 Mary Cowden Clarke, The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines, vol. 2 (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1907). Depending on how the reader interprets the youth of the wives in John Fletcher’s The Woman’s Prize, this practice could be said to have originated much earlier. 23 Stephen O’Neill, Shakespeare and YouTube: New Media Forms of the Bard (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 231. 24 Ibid. 25 Douglas Lanier, ‘Shakespearean Rhizomatics’, Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation, ed. Alexa Huang and Elizabeth Rivlin (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), 29.

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26 Discordia Productions (Formerly Fat Goat Productions), Nothing Like the Sun, posted from 1 December 2016 to 18 February 2017. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/ playlist?list=PLxx2-9ONuap5AvReDEoAmTEAiukHn0iBY. 27 Nerd Degree Burns, ‘Shrew That: Episode 18’, 1 May 2015. 28 Golden Moose Productions, ‘Kate the Cursed: Episode 5’, 22 February 2014. 29 Discordia Productions, ‘Call Me Katie: Episode 12’, 30 April 2015. 30 Discordia Productions, ‘Call Me Katie: Episode 19’, 27 May 2015. 31 Chiara M, comment on Discordia Productions, ‘Call Me Katie: Episode 12’, 30 April 2015. 32 Lucy LaPlaca, comment on Discordia Productions, ‘Call Me Katie: Episode 19’, 27 May 2015. 33 Spencer Jin, comment on Discordia Productions, ‘Call Me Katie: Episode 12’, 30 April 2015. 34 itsjenitals, comment on Discordia Productions, ‘Call Me Katie: Episode 19’, 27 May 2015. 35 Mary Sanders, comment on Discordia Productions, ‘Call Me Katie: Episode 19’, 27 May 2015. 36 aidygiz1, comment on Discordia Productions, ‘Call Me Katie: Episode 39’, 25 July 2015. 37 Discordia Productions, ‘Call Me Katie: Episode 1’, 15 March 2015. 38 NS, comment on Discordia Productions, ‘Call Me Katie: Episode 1’, 15 March 2015. 39 Sarah B, comment on Discordia Productions, ‘Call Me Katie: Episode 1’, 15 March 2015. 40 Hope Napier, comment on Discordia Productions, ‘Call Me Katie: Episode 1’, 15 March 2015. 41 Various authors, comments on Russell Slater’s post, ‘You are directing a production of “The Taming of the Shrew” ’, 2 February 2019. Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/photo. php?fbid=10156962124194393&set=gm.2079425655429890& type=3&theater&ifg=1

12 ‘Kate of My Consolation’ Mary Cowden Clarke and Anne Tyler Revisit The Taming of the Shrew Sheila T. Cavanagh

The Taming of the Shrew probably has never been an easy text for many of its readers or audiences. As the premise of John Fletcher’s roughly contemporaneous 1611 The Woman’s Prize or The Tamer Tamed suggests,1 at least some viewers have recognized misogynistic elements in the drama since Shakespeare’s time.2 The essays in this volume demonstrate varied ways that writers, arts practitioners and audiences contend with the play’s apparently harsh treatment of Katherina, its perpetuation of gender stereotypes, and its traditional categorization as a comedy despite its challenging human interactions. As other scholars and I have argued,3 cinematic versions of the play in particular frequently ameliorate its more controversial elements in order to reduce potential audience discomfort with the narrative. Barbara 222

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Hodgdon comments on common rationales for altering the plot: ‘Reconfigurations attempt to save the play, and its author, from the apparently coercive no-choice politics of its ending,’4 while Douglas Lanier notes one typical interpretive turn in cinematic Shrews: ‘Film versions of Shrew have tended to treat the play not as a tale of masculine domination so much as a tale of two strong-willed lovers forging a romantic modus vivendi.’5 Richard Burt makes a comparable point about the teen Shrew film 10 Things I Hate About You: ‘Domestic violence is euphemized, shrunk to the lovers harmlessly and joyfully throwing paint at each other in an amusement park.’6 As these critical responses indicate, Shrew is frequently changed in ways that suppress or redirect audience distaste. Other scholars highlight the interpretive decisions necessitated by the tendency for film versions to omit the Induction and other references to Christopher Sly. As Magdalena Cies´lak notes, for example, Without the luxury of treating the Katherina/Petruchio subplot as an ale-induced vision of a rude tinker, an adaptation must find its own way of ‘apologizing for’, or justifying, or subverting the play’s problematic content. Although the Induction is so fundamental for any critical approach to the play, it is typically absent from film adaptations.7 Diana Henderson similarly remarks about the ramifications for Shrew films to omit the scenes with Christopher Sly: ‘The erasure of the Christopher Sly induction from filmed versions of Shrew removes the play’s most common theatrical “excuse” for its gender politics (i.e., it’s all a prank, or a drunkard’s wish fulfillment).’8 While the absence of Christopher Sly eliminates one avenue that sometimes helps productions make Shrew palatable, getting rid of his frequently confusing presence makes it easier to adapt the story to a variety of reimagined configurations. The kinds of alterations noted above are neither surprising nor limited to film and television versions of the play. Softening

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Shrew’s rough edges and abandoning the Induction, however, typically reduces the moral and characterological complexity of Shakespeare’s drama. This chapter will examine the techniques Anne Tyler uses to decrease the play’s controversial elements in Vinegar Girl,9 her recent ‘retold’ novelization of the play, in conjunction with Mary Cowden Clarke’s edgier nineteenthcentury Shrew prequel in The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines,10 exploring how these historically distanced female authors contend with the challenges inherent in Shakespeare’s comedy. Both Tyler and Clarke create back stories in order to ‘explain’ the behaviour displayed by Shakespeare’s characters. These two authors, writing more than a century apart, fashion distinctive framing narratives for the relationship between Katherina/Kate and Petruccio where they each minimize or refashion the discomfiture frequently prompted by Shakespeare’s text. While this essay offers no nostalgia for some critics’ desire for textual fidelity,11 it still recognizes that the changes these adaptations make to their source texts may disguise or erase significant features found in Shakespeare. Clarke and Tyler, for instance, each transform aspects of Taming of the Shrew that have long provoked controversy. By doing so, they provide fictive explanations for troublesome elements of Shakespeare’s text, but simultaneously obscure their audiences’ awareness of textual difficulties. Clarke takes more risks than Tyler does, however, suggesting that twenty-first-century society may seem less willing to contend with the more troubling aspects of Shakespeare’s Shrew. Clarke offers a prequel to the play, while Tyler creates a ‘cover’ version, that she terms a ‘retelling’. When Lanier discusses cover versions in his essay about Vinegar Girl and other titles in the Hogarth Press Shakespeare series, he argues that ‘the cover version works to revive the original in the public imagination, renew its status as an original, and refresh the content or style of the original for a new generation, saving it from the curse of obsolescence.’12 He notes, moreover, that ‘There is an inevitable tension between the cover version as homage and the cover as substitute.’13 Lanier’s points seem

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pertinent to both of the texts considered here, although, in her discussion of Clarke’s work, Sarah Annes Brown suggests that the best prequels differ from sequels or cover versions: The successful prequel, I would argue, is an essentially subversive form. A sequel can interest and surprise us without making us view the original in a different way, simply by introducing further characters and incidents, or by moving on to the next generation. A successful sequel can be an imitation or pastiche of the original, such as the sequels that have been written to many popular mainstream novels. But in a prequel, where the end of the story is already known, this freedom simply to expand is lacking.14 Tyler and Clarke may or may not agree with Brown’s analysis of prequels, but neither author makes overt efforts to be subversive. Still, Clarke paints a darker portrait than Tyler presents, while Vinegar Girl dodges most of the challenges inherent in Shakespeare’s Shrew. Reading the texts in concert with each other makes the comparative blandness of Vinegar Girl inescapable. Tyler’s novel, which appeared as part of the Hogarth series launched during the 2016 Shakespeare anniversary year, moves the narrative from Italy to Baltimore, where Katherina’s father works as an avid, but largely ignored, scientist in a lab adjacent to the Johns Hopkins University campus.15 The narrative does not take particular advantage of its placement in Baltimore, however, apart from providing a vaguely ‘American’ setting. Instead, the city where Tyler conventionally sets her stories offers a convenient backdrop to draw from as the author crafts a scenario intended to plausibly cover Taming of the Shrew. This strategy works well in certain regards, but displaces Shakespeare’s Minolas from their environment within a wealthy, interconnected society into the ‘Battista’ family’s much more circumscribed domestic and professional domains. Tyler, for instance, offers significant alterations to the central family’s circumstances, which subvert many of the societal

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influences operating in Shakespeare’s Italy. Shrew’s Petruccio, for instance, is initially drawn to Katherina because she has the means to further his goal to ‘wive it wealthily in Padua’.16 By contrast, in the Hogarth version, ‘Kate’ works as a teacher’s assistant at an early childhood development centre, while Bianca transforms into ‘Bunny’, a flirtatious, irrepressible and irresponsible teenager. Kate’s employment is often in jeopardy, despite her supervisor’s unsuccessful admonitions to develop ‘Tact. Restraint. Diplomacy.’17 Clarke’s prequel occurs before Petruccio enters the action, but in Vinegar Girl, he becomes Louis Battista’s invaluable assistant, Pyotr Cherbakov, who faces deportation since his devotion to science precludes simultaneous attention to legal formalities.18 Recalling Shakespeare’s Shrew, the sisters’ mother is deceased, a detail that both Tyler and Clarke present as crucial to the development of the story. In Tyler’s version, Kate ‘wished she had had a mother. Well, she had had a mother, but she wished she’d had one who had taught her how to get along in the world better.’19 In each text, the attention paid to Battista/Baptista’s wife reveals innumerable cultural suppositions underlying these back stories. Shakespeare’s plays are, of course, noteworthy for their regular excision of maternal figures, which offers obvious fodder for imagining these characters’ previous lives. While Shrew’s Induction appears to alert audiences to the overtly fictional nature of the drama they are about to see, Tyler and Clarke each suggest that Katherina’s demeanour and behaviour make – more realistic narrative ‘sense’ with descriptions of the young woman’s elided mother. Presumably, Katherina’s behaviour can be justified if audiences learn what happened before Baptista ends up as the only parent actively overseeing Katherina and Bianca. While this strategy creates other tensions within the texts, it is a common manoeuvre undertaken by those choosing to modernize the play. Hence, Tyler imagines a deceased mother named Thea who suffered from significant mental and emotional problems that kept her hospitalized for much of Kate’s childhood:20

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Kate had never quite understood why Bunny existed, even. Their mother  – a frail, muted, pink-and-gold blonde with Bunny’s same asterisk eyes  – had spent the first fourteen years of Kate’s life checking in and out of various ‘rest facilities’, as they were called. Then, all at once, Bunny was born. It was hard for Kate to imagine how her parents considered this to be a good idea.21 Thea soon dies from heart trouble caused by an experimental drug regime, however, leaving two children and many questions behind. Louis Battista reputedly always spent more time in his lab than at home; thus, the young Kate, long an only child, was predominantly kept under the care of a housekeeper.22 Tyler’s text makes it clear that Kate was keenly aware of her mother’s absence during her childhood and puzzled by her parents’ decision to have another child despite such unpromising circumstances, not knowing that her mother had rebounded emotionally during the treatment that eventually led to her death.23 Any domestic stability offered by Mrs Larkin, the housekeeper, has disappeared by the time of Vinegar Girl, however. The resulting household manifests numerous eccentricities such as the family’s monotonous, unappetizing dinners of ‘meat mash . . . puréed into a grayish sort of paste to be served throughout the week’.24 While Tyler’s Kate often demonstrates responses suggestive of some kind of social anxiety or atypical neurological status25 and is frequently called into her employer’s office for behavioural violations, this Kate remains the steadiest, most reliable member of her family’s household, in stark contrast to Katherina Minola. The problems caused by absent mothers is exacerbated in these texts by the women’s stereotypically hapless fathers and their limited access to other helpful adults. Even after the death of his wife, for example, Tyler’s Battista pays little attention to either daughter, because he continually believes he is on the cusp of a significant scientific breakthrough.26 Clarke’s Baptista similarly cedes oversight over his children, but this decision follows his repeated inability to corral Katherina into socially

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acceptable behaviour: ‘She was not only acerb and disrespectful in speech; but she indulged in all sorts of perverse contemplations.’27 Clarke’s backstory provides additional detail about the deceased mother of the young girls and indicates broader societal involvement in their domestic arrangements than Tyler presents. Aunt Antonia expresses more interest in Katherina and Bianca than Tyler’s Aunt Thelma does and Clarke’s Minolas are presented as being part of a social network that is well aware of the family’s strengths and eccentricities. Clarke, like Shakespeare, therefore, emphasizes the family’s place within society, while Tyler largely keeps this household separate from the outside world. Clarke’s narrative focuses initially upon the circumstances leading to the Minola parents’ marriage. Like the mismatched sibling pair of Katherina and Bianca, their mother (Claudia) grew up with a sister (Antonia) who differed greatly from her in temperament. Antonia demonstrates none of the selfishness or hopes for grandeur associated with Claudia: [Claudia] thought so charming a face as she beheld every day in the glass, needed but to be more seen to bring a host of lovers; and this it was that made her so anxious to frequent the most crowded places.28 Instead, the elder sibling makes many sacrifices in support of those around her, while Claudia happily weds the wealthy Baptista and regularly reminds her sister of her financial superiority.29 Throughout this period, Claudia demonstrates an attraction towards religion that appears to be related to pageantry and social advancement; eventually, however, her contact with the church completely consumes her. After her children are born, her health deteriorates: By the time her two little girls had reached an age most to require her active superintendence, she had become a confirmed invalid; never leaving her arm-chair, but for her bed; or her bed, but for her arm-chair.30

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Before long, Claudia shows few signs of interest in anyone other than herself or her religious advisor: While she should have been watching the defects in her child’s temper, and striving to counteract them by substituting or developing better feelings, she was engaged in reading the lives of the saints or listening to a history of the miraculous transit of the house of Loretto.31 From this perspective, the physically and emotionally absent mother clearly shoulders much of the blame for her elder daughter’s personality quirks. Her devotion to religion, however, stands in sharp contrast to Shakespeare’s Minolas, who only repair to church for Katherina’s wedding. Even before the invalid Claudia’s abrupt and unexpected death, Katherina has already developed a caustic style with others. Baptista quickly determines that he cannot restrain his daughter’s behaviour and sends both children away for a convent education. Due to his social position and his desire not to punish Bianca for Katherina’s rebelliousness, he chooses the comparatively lenient Ladies of the Holy Petticoat Convent, where rich families expect their children to be pampered while being prepared to become wives of high standing, over the more regimented Sisters of Humility Convent.32 Kate’s irascibility immediately interferes with this trajectory, however, and she begins to spend considerable time in solitary confinement: Here, shut up in darkness, and debarred from all society, she was left to reflect upon her errors, and to learn repentance. She did neither; but she suffered intensely. The confinement enraged her; the silence oppressed her; the darkness dismayed her.33 None of this convent’s residents actually receive a proper education.34 During Katherina’s sojourn there, she primarily learns that she will be punished severely if she does not meet the behavioural expectations placed upon her. The nuns’ tactics,

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moreover, closely resemble those chosen later by Petruccio in Shakespeare’s play, who ‘rails, and swears, and rates’ at Kate while depriving her of food, sleep, and company (4.1.173). Strikingly, while these punishments in the convent typically fail, Katherina’s outraged response shifts toward the erotic when one perpetrator of such indignities in the convent is male rather than a nun: At first she panted, struggled, and strove her utmost, to prevent his effecting his purpose, her face, all the while, crimson with rage. But after a time she grew deadly pale . . . A quite new and strange set of emotions overwhelm her, and hold her, as it were, paralysed in speech and motion. A perplexed feeling of shame and surprise take possession of her, at finding herself completely overcome – mastered. As the strong, manly arms hold her firmly, constrained there to abide his will, she feels her spirit as well as her body give way, and own itself vanquished.35 As Brown remarks, Clarke crafts this episode carefully, detailing Katherina’s sexualized response to male, physical domination: There is something cool, almost forensic, about the way Katherine’s experience is described, a precision in the build-up of clauses which is judicious rather than dramatic or breathless. There is no sense that the narrator is caught up in the heroine’s excitement. Cowden Clarke simultaneously follows and interrogates the romantic template of the masterful man to whom the heroine yields with delight.36 While Katherina resists similar treatment by the nuns, she here shows herself ready to accept – and enjoy – testosterone-driven domination. Clarke’s text, therefore, prepares audiences to interpret Katherina’s later capitulation to Petruccio – and his harsh manipulation  – as moments where she can reach the sexual fulfilment hinted at in Clarke’s prequel.

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Clarke and Tyler regularly employ broad strokes as they refashion the lives and motivations of many figures in the play. They typically craft answers for questions that Shakespeare leaves ambiguous, such as whether Kate is actually a ‘shrew’ and whether Petruccio is sadistic. They also generally flatten characters and occasionally eliminate awkward personality traits. Clarke’s Katherina shares more qualities with Shakespeare’s than Tyler’s does, but both versions dramatically alter the other figures in the narrative and redirect their readers’ attention to actions and individuals outside of Shakespeare’s creation. As a consequence, these fictive representations lose the complexity and dynamism found in Shakespeare. Tyler’s recreation aligns with the many film versions of Shrew which opt to present the narrative as a love story. Clarke’s Shrew prequel is harsher than Tyler’s cover version, placing blame for Katherina’s bad temper on choices made by her parents and the nuns as well as the young woman’s temperamental inclinations. Petruccio only appears through narrative foreshadowing in Clarke’s story, but in Vinegar Girl, Pyotr/ Petruccio is kind and attentive to Kate. He is more abrupt than the Americans he encounters, but most people respond to him positively and he never demonstrates the anger or manipulation associated with his early modern predecessor. Both he and Dr Battista are undeniably ham-fisted in their clumsy orchestration of Kate’s marriage, but Pyotr’s affection for her always rings true and he attracts considerable admiration from the other people in his life. He lives rent-free, for example, since he carries his landlady between car and wheelchair and changes her lightbulbs.37 Katherina/Kate also transforms in these two versions. As noted, Katherina retains her sharp tongue in Clarke’s rendition: In short, poor Katharina was becoming, fast, a settled naughty child; a little reprobate, hardened in her contumacy – her rebellious ways of thinking and speaking. Always in disgrace; never repenting. Perpetually being punished; never amending.38

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She expresses considerable anger at everyone around her. Her deportment conforms with incidents from Taming of the Shrew, although she does not physically threaten her sister as Katherina does in Shrew (1.2). Tyler’s central character evinces little similar vituperation, however. She finds many social and professional situations challenging,39 but is generally blind-sided and slow to comprehend when her employer or her students’ parents raise questions about her interpersonal interactions.40 Her students appear to like her,41 but the bluntness that truncated her university education interferes with her professional reputation. Apart from social awkwardness, however, this Kate displays relatively little ‘shrewish’ behaviour. She thinks through her decisions carefully, and delivers Kate’s controversial final speech by acknowledging the work undertaken by her father and husband without deprecating herself.42 The epilogue, which introduces Kate’s and Pyotr’s son, shows a contented family with a successful mother whose marriage allows her to concentrate on her love of botany. Unlike Clarke’s Katherina, who seems poised to relive the abuse perpetrated by the nuns as soon as she encounters Petruccio, Tyler’s central figure leads a pleasant life. Her eccentricities never diminish, but she finds love, companionship and a situation that corresponds with her needs and desires. In contrast with the controversies surrounding Shakespeare’s conclusion, Tyler’s novel ends with satisfaction. Fletcher’s early modern play proposes an unfortunate ending to the marriage of Shakespeare’s Kate and Petruccio. Tyler’s rendition could hardly be more positive. Petruccio’s behaviour similarly loses its edge in Vinegar Girl. While Pyotr’s decision to join Battista’s plan to use Kate as the means to salvage his visa seems ill-advised, he always approaches her kindly and with respect. His words and actions indicate that he genuinely cares for her and sees this manoeuvre as a way to address several people’s needs. Unlike Shakespeare’s Petruccio, who famously keeps his wife awake, starving and off-balance while threatening her with violence (2.1), Pyotr invariably projects a calm demeanour, except when Bunny’s hapless boyfriend threatens the lab by stealing all of the mice

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being studied there.43 The scientist’s anger when this occurs seems completely understandable, unlike Petruccio’s staged confrontation with the tailor in Shrew (4.2). As Lanier remarks, this characterization helps Tyler avoid contemporary issues with this play: ‘Portraying Pyotr as comically inept rather than misogynistically motivated allows Tyler to sidestep the problem of Petruccio’s shrew-taming project for modern readers.’44 While Clarke does not present Petruccio, she transfers his maliciousness to those punishing Katherina and apparently signals Kate’s forthcoming pleasure in Petruccio’s masculine, though abusive, strength. Like the other characters, Bianca/Bunny loses complexity in these reinterpretations of the play. In performance, Shakespeare’s Bianca sometimes deserves her positive reputation; sometimes she is merely counterfeiting. Clarke displaces part of the detail distinguishing between Shakespeare’s two sisters onto their mother and aunt. As the title of her prequel ‘Katherina and Bianca: The Shrew and the Demure’ indicates, this Bianca remains flat in comparison to her elder sister. Tyler’s flighty and self-absorbed Bunny resembles one of the ways that Bianca is presented on stage. The intermittent bookishness and frequent eagerness to please (at least before marriage) that Shakespeare crafts vanishes here. When Kate’s son reveals that Bunny eventually marries her fitness trainer and moves to New Jersey,45 there is little indication that any of the other characters – or the reader – are likely to miss her. Bunny is more of a misfit than Kate in this environment. In contrast to Shakespeare’s Bianca, Bunny does not receive much attention, let alone favouritism from her father. Here, Kate’s little sister predominantly serves as a caricature demanding attention from the other characters, largely because she has not yet reached an age where she can legally live in the manner she prefers. Clarke’s Baptista more closely resembles Shakespeare’s than Tyler’s does, although Clarke does not say much about him after he marries Claudia. Productions of Shrew often present this parent as hapless and ineffectual, without any idea of how to contend with his rambunctious daughter. Occasionally,

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performances suggest that Katherina is right to suspect that he favours Bianca. His apparent lack of business interests adds to the humour included in Katherina’s claim that men in the play work hard: 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 labour both by sea and land, To watch the night in storms, the day in cold, Whilst thou liest warm at home, secure and safe. (5.2.152–7) In reality, his primary obligation appears to be maintaining societal expectations, such as furnishing an elaborate feast after Katherina’s wedding. Kate’s father in Vinegar Girl is unusual because his characterization is more detailed than that provided by Shakespeare, although his representation remains largely implausible and cartoonish. His decision to match Kate with Pyotr provides a situation-comedy solution to the problem of Pyotr’s evaporating legal status, just as his inability to oversee Bunny’s life resembles innumerable comic portrayals of bumbling fathers. Clarke and Tyler both suggest that the daughters’ mother was no better equipped in parenting skills, whereas Shakespeare gives no overt indication, other than presumption, that Katherina and Bianca actually had a mother. Tyler’s sitcom model facilitates her presentation of this narrative as a quirky romantic comedy. In contrast, recent exposés, such as the scandals behind Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries,46 increase the sinister connotations associated with Clarke’s depiction of convent cruelty. While tales of such institutional abuse may have been more suppressed in the nineteenth century, Katherina’s apparently sadistic treatment in this text, combined with her masochistic delight at some of the abuse, suggests that Clarke is actively resisting the benign interpretations of Taming of the Shrew that Tyler and many directors choose to invoke. Unlike

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Tyler, Clarke crafts a Katherina whose behaviour may warrant criticism, but she does not present a young woman who deserves her punishment and she suggests that the neglect shown by Katherina’s mother and Claudia’s devotion to the church rather than her family contributes to Katherina’s tempestuous personality. Clarke noticeably does not choose to emphasize comedic elements of this narrative, unlike many of her successors. Whereas Tyler’s twenty-first-century Shrew offers a fairly sanitized narrative, Clarke’s rendition from a century earlier carries more narrative bite. The Taming of the Shrew is not the only Shakespearean play that attracts contextualization through backstories or other manoeuvres, but the central tenet of the story makes such alterations particularly common in modern times. While this is understandable, it is also unfortunate because much of the strength of Shakespearean drama emerges through its resistance to easy interpretive moves. The romantic comedy versions of Shrew turn the play into an entertainment that passive viewers can enjoy without expending much thought. A socially awkward Kate is less challenging than an explosive ‘shrew’, while a sadistically tinged Petruccio confronts audiences with meatier substance than his mellow counterpart. A one-dimensional Bianca and a befuddled or distracted Baptista are largely alleviated from much responsibility for the ways Katherina’s life is manipulated. The resulting narrative might be more attractive to general audiences, but it loses much of what makes Shrew rich and thought-provoking, even though it is frequently disturbing. On its own, Vinegar Girl illustrates contemporary tendencies to drain controversy from this drama. This common tactic is even more striking in conjunction with Clarke’s nineteenth-century Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines, which opts for a harsher narrative. Twenty-first-century experiences of abuse by religious authority figures make Clarke’s representation of Shrew potentially as volatile as the early modern version, even though she defuses other situations. The generic classification of Shrew as a comedy often creates either audience consternation or directorial deracination of problematic

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elements of the text. Shrew may anger readers and viewers, but it simultaneously rewards those who encounter it with a nuanced rendition of a difficult, but recognizable, environment. Neither Clarke nor Tyler presents a comparable narrative. Instead, Tyler offers a benign, fairly charming, love story, while Clarke suggests that Kate enjoys harsh treatment when it comes from an attractive man. These texts may interest readers, but they are unlikely to generate the depth of discussion engendered by readings and productions of The Taming of the Shrew.

Notes 1

Barry Gaines and Margaret Mauer, Three Shrew Plays: Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew; with The Anonymous The Taming of a Shrew, and Fletcher’s The Tamer Tamed (London: Hackett Classics, 2010).

2

Magdalena Cies´lak makes a similar point: ‘Fletcher might suggest that Shakespeare’s contemporaries were also disturbed by the play’s tone.’ Magdalena Cies´lak, Screening Gender in Shakespeare’s Comedies: Film and Television Adaptations in The Twenty-first Century (New York: Lexington Books, 2019), 175.

3

Sheila T. Cavanagh, ‘Whose Play is It Anyway?: Viewing the Shrew Pedagogically’ in MLA Approaches to Teaching Taming of the Shrew, ed. Grace Tiffany and Margaret Dupois (New York, The Modern Language Association of America, 2013), 181–8.

4

Barbara Hodgdon, The Shakespeare Trade: Performances and Appropriations (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 1.

5

Douglas M. Lanier, ‘Shakespearean Comedy on Screen’ in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Comedy, ed. Heather Hirschfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 418.

6

Richard Burt, ‘Afterward: Te(e)n Things I Hate about Girlene Shakesploitation Flicks in the Late 1990s, or Not So Fast Times at Shakespeare High’ in Spectacular Shakespeare: Critical Theory and Popular Culture, ed. Courtney Lehmann and Lisa S.

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Starks (Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002), 214. 7

Cies´lak, Screening Gender, 181.

8

Diana Henderson, ‘A Shrew for the Times’ in Shakespeare the Movie: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV, and Video, ed. Richard Burt and Lynda E. Boose (New York: Routledge, 1997), 148–9.

9

Anne Tyler, Vinegar Girl (London: Hogarth Press, 2016).

10 Mary Cowden Clarke, The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines, vol. 2 (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1907). 11 For a discussion of the controversies about ‘fidelity’ in adaptation studies, see Thomas Leitch, The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 7. 12 Douglas Lanier, ‘The Hogarth Shakespeare Series: Redeeming Shakespeare’s Literariness’ in Shakespeare and Millennial Fiction, ed. Andrew James Hartley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 233. 13 Lanier, ‘Hogarth Shakespeare Series’, 233. 14 Sarah Annes Brown, ‘The Prequel as Palinode: Mary Cowden Clarke’s Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines’, Shakespeare Survey: An Annual Survey of Shakespeare Studies and Production 58 (2005), 95. 15 Tyler, Vinegar Girl, 10. 16 Barbara Hodgdon, ed. The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare, Arden Third Series (London: Arden/Bloomsbury, 2010), 1.2.74. All subsequent references to the play are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically. 17 Tyler, Vinegar Girl, 34. 18 Douglas Lanier mistakenly claims that Kate’s father is never named in the novel (Hogarth Shakespeare Series, 40). Dr Battista is, however, identified as Louis Battista (Tyler, Vinegar Girl, 12) and his grandson Louie appears to be named after him (233). 19 Tyler, Vinegar Girl, 36. 20 Ibid., 108–9. 21 Ibid., 42.

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22 Ibid., 45. 23 Ibid., 108. 24 Ibid., 44. 25 Ibid., 34. 26 Ibid., 79. 27 Clarke, Girlhood, 99. 28 Ibid., 81. 29 Ibid., 83–5. 30 Ibid., 90. 31 Ibid., 90–91. 32 Ibid., 106. 33 Ibid., 109. 34 Ibid., 117–18. 35 Ibid., 147. 36 Brown, ‘Prequel’, 97. 37 Tyler, Vinegar Girl, 155. 38 Clarke, Girlhood, 94. 39 Tyler, Vinegar Girl, 39. 40 Ibid., 32. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., 231–2. 43 Ibid., 229. 44 Lanier, ‘Hogarth Shakespeare Series’, 240. 45 Tyler, Vinegar Girl, 235. 46 Erin Blakemore, ‘How Ireland Turned “Fallen Women” Into Slaves’, History.com, 21 July 2019 (updated) and 12 March 2018. Available online: https://www.history.com/news/ magdalene-laundry-ireland-asylum-abuse.

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF PARATEXTS, PRODUCTIONS AND ADAPTATIONS

‘Aarne-Thompson tale type 901’ in Jan Harold Brunvand, The Taming of the Shrew: A Comparative Study of Oral and Literary Versions. New York: Garland, 1991; also ‘The Folktale Origin of The Taming of the Shrew,’ Shakespeare Quarterly 17.4 (1966), 345–59. Aleksandrinskii Theatre, Moscow, USSR . The Taming of the Shrew, 1919. Alexander, Bill, dir., The Taming of the Shrew. Royal Shakespeare Company, UK , 1992. ‘An Easy Way to Tame a Shrew’ accessible through The English Broadside Ballad Archive, https://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/ ballad/35795/citation, which dates it to approximately 1672–96. Audibert, Justin, dir., The Taming of the Shrew. Royal Shakespeare Company, UK , 2019. Bogdanov, Michael, dir., The Taming of the Shrew. Royal Shakespeare Company, UK , 1978. Byrne, Caroline, dir., The Taming of the Shrew. Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, UK , 2016. Clarke, Mary Cowden, The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines, vol. 2. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1907. Clifford, Jo, dir. The Taming of the Shrew. Sherman Theatre, Cardiff, UK , 2019. Davies, Heather, dir., The Taming of the Shrew. Creation Theatre Company, Oxford, UK , 2007. Discordia Productions (Formerly Fat Goat Productions), Call Me Katie, posted 16 March 2015 to 15 December 2016 [YouTube video]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocZnTA8b_dQ. 239

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Doran, Gregory, dir., The Taming of the Shrew. Royal Shakespeare Company, UK , 2003. Edwards, Gale, dir., The Taming of the Shrew. Royal Shakespeare Company, UK , 1995. Fletcher, John. The Tamer Tamed or: The Woman’s Prize (1611), ed. Lucy Munro. London: Methuen/New Mermaids, 2010. Gaines, Barbara, dir., The Taming of the Shrew. Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Chicago, USA , 2017. Garrick, David. Catharine and Petruchio: A Comedy, in Three Acts. London: J. and R. Tonson, 1756. Ann Arbor: Text Creation Partnership, 2011. http://name.umdl.umich. edu/004799379.0001.000 Gogava, Tamara, dir., The Taming of the Shrew. Krasnodar Dramatic Theatre, Kuban region, USSR , late 1950s. Golden Moose Productions, Kate the Cursed, posted 25 January 2014 to 15 October 2014 [YouTube video]. https://www.youtube. com/playlist?list=PLefCfFxyeRWv0sy4bO3U0qkiIkypC4Hl1 Guerrero Zamora, Juan, writer and dir., The New Taming of the Shrew. Teatro Español, Madrid, Spain, 1975. Hall, Edward and Dugald Bruce-Lockhart, dirs, The Taming of the Shrew. Propeller at Theatre Royal, Nottingham, UK , 2006/2013. Hardwick, Gary. Deliver Us From Eva [film]. Focus Features (USA ), 2003. Junger, Gil. 10 Things I Hate About You [film]. Touchstone Pictures (USA ), 1999. Kolosov, Sergey, dir., Ukroshchenie Stroptivov (‘The Taming of the Shrew’) [film]. MosFilm (USSR ), 1961. Lacey, John. Sauny the Scott; or, The Taming of the Shrew: A Comedy (1667). London: E. Whitlock, 1698. Ann Arbor: Text Creation Partnership, 2011. http://name.umdl.umich.edu/ A48052.0001.001 Lloyd, Phyllida, dir., The Taming of the Shrew. Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, UK , 2003. Lloyd, Phillida, dir., The Taming of the Shrew. Delacorte Theater, New York, USA , 2016. Lydgate, John. Disguising at Hertford. In John Lydgate: Mummings and Entertainments, ed. Claire Sponsler. TEAMS Middle English Texts Series, Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2010. A mery play betwene Johan Johan the husbande, Tyb his wyfe, [and] syr Iha[n]n the preest. London, 1533; STC 13298.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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‘Merry jeste of a shrewde and curste wyfe, lapped in morrelles skin, for her good behavyour,’ anonymous. London, 1580?; STC 14621. Morrison, Conall, dir., The Taming of the Shrew. Royal Shakespeare Company, UK , 2008. Nerd Degree Burns, Shrew That, posted 4 March 2015 to 8 May 2015 [YouTube video]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= KbT5Zm-q7MA . Osborn, Ron and Jeff Reno, writers. Moonlighting. Season 3, Episode 7, ‘Atomic Shakespeare’. Dir. Will MacKenzie. Aired 11/25/1986 on ABC (USA ). A Pleasant Conceited History, Called the Taming of a Shrew (1594), anonymous, ed. Stephen Roy Miller. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Popov, Aleksei, dir., The Taming of the Shrew. Central Red Army Theatre, Moscow, USSR , 1937. Rourke, Josie, dir., The Taming of the Shrew (adapt. Neil LaBute). Chicago Shakespeare Theater, USA , 2010. Smyshliaev, Valentin, dir., The Taming of the Shrew. Moscow Art Theatre, USSR , 1923. Taylor, Sam. The Taming of the Shrew [film]. Pickford/United Artists (USA ), 1929. Tom Tyler and His Wife (1560s?). London, 1661; Wing T1792. Tuganov, Aleksandr, dir., The Taming of the Shrew. Baku State Theatre, Azerbaijian, USSR , 1930s. Tyler, Anne. Vinegar Girl. London: Hogarth Press, 2016. Vladimirov, Igor, dir., The Taming of the Shrew. Lensovet Theatre, Leningrad, USSR , 1970, 1973. Wainwright, Sally, writer. ShakespeaRe-Told. Season 1, Episode 3, ‘The Taming of the Shrew.’ Dir. David Richards. Aired 11/21/2005 on BBC One (UK ). Zamoskvoretskii Theatre, Moscow, USSR . The Taming of the Shrew, 1919. Zeffirelli, Franco. The Taming of the Shrew [film]. Columbia Pictures (USA & Italy), 1967.

INDEX

10 Things I Hate About You (1999) 207 n.15, 211, 220 n.17, 223, 240 1975 International Women’s Year 105, 117 Aarne-Thompson tale type 901 20, 239 Abbey Theatre (Dublin) 149 abuse 2–3, 12 n.4, 12 n.8, 12 n.9, 29, 35 n.21, 113, 126–7, 132, 136–8, 140 n.5, 158, 161, 168 n.48, 176, 185, 206 n.9, 216, 223, 232–5, 238 n.46 adaptation studies scholarship 2, 3, 7, 9, 12 n.6, 13 n.11, 14 n.21, 14 n.27, 34 n.15, 72 n.22, 209–10, 212, 219 n.6, 219 n.9, 220 n.16, 220 n.25, 223–4, 236 n.5, 237 n.12 Adler, Tony 81, 87 n.1, 87 n.4 Albanese, Denise 15 n.32 Aleksandrinskii Theatre 108, 239 Alexander, Bill 58, 59, 62, 68, 239 An Easy Way to Tame a Shrew 21, 32 n.8, 239 anti-Stratfordians 92–9 Ashford and Simpson 196, 199 242

Audibert, Justin 1, 8, 11 n.1, 14 n.24, 127, 134–7, 139–40, 142 n.29, 142 n.32, 143 n.36, 143 n.37, 143 n.42, 239 Austin, J.L. 55 n.34 Baker, David 63, 71 n.20 Barnidge, Mary Shen 75–6, 81 n.2, 81 n.3 Bate, Jonathan 8, 50 n.4, 146–7 battle of the sexes 2, 5, 19, 28, 30, 31 n.1, 33 n.11, 48, 79, 85, 111, 143 n.40 Bean, John 109, 123 n.9 Beaumont and Fletcher folio (1647) 29, 234 n.18 beauty 68, 80, 138, 155–6, 161, 194, 197–9, 217–8 Bevington, David 6, 8, 9, 14 n.20, 33 n.10, 77–87, 216 Billington, Michael 74 n.34, 82, 87 n.7, 136, 143 n.40 Bogdanov, Michael 14 n.24, 239 Boiadzhiev, Grigorii 95–6, 103 n.25 Boiarskii, Mikhail 98–9 Boose, Lynda 12, 44, 51 n.10, 55 n.35, 63, 71 n.19, 109, 123 n.9, 187 n.2, 187 n.6,

INDEX

187 n.26, 190 n.33, 237 n.8. Brooks, Dennis S. 52 n.11, 101 n.6 Brown, Sarah Annes 225, 230, 237 n.14, 238 n.36 Brunvand, Jan Harold 20, 32 n.4, 32 n.5, 239 Burke, Tarana 172, 173, 176 Burt, Richard 123 n.9, 187 n.2, 211, 220 n.16, 223, 236 n.6, 237 n.8 Butler, Judith 198, 206 n.11 Byrne, Caroline 8, 9, 14 n.24, 14 n.26, 144–68, 239 Call Me Katie (Australia, 2015) 208–21 Castro-Garcia, Amanda 108, 122 n.5, 122 n.6, 122 n.8 Catharine and Petruchio (1754) 4, 13 n.16, 174, 187 n.8, 188 n.10, 188 n.11, 240 Cavanagh, Sheila 10, 11, 14 n.30, 210–11, 222–38, 236 n.3 Central Red Army Theatre 95–7, 103 n.21, 241 Cerdá, Juan 8, 105–24 Cheek by Jowl Theatre Company 128, 130 Chicago (US) 6, 77–83, 197, 201–3, 240–1 Chicago Shakespeare Theatre 6, 78–83, 240, 241 Christensen, Ann 66, 73 n.29 Chuliá, Elisa 106–7, 119, 122 n.2, 122 n.3, 122 n.4, 122 n.7

243

Cies´lak, Magdalena 223, 236 n.2, 237 n.7 civil rights movement (US) 203–4, 207 n.19 Clarke, Mary Cowden 10, 212, 220 n.22, 222–38, 239 class 5, 20, 24, 30, 34 n.19, 58–9, 63, 89, 90–1, 117, 154, 166 n.23, 179, 189 n.28, 199, 203–4 Cleaver, Robert – 61, 65–6, 70 n.10, 73 n.27, 73 n.28 Clifford, Jo 135, 239 comedy, classification of 1, 9–11, 14 n.25, 30, 78–9, 82, 91, 94, 96, 125, 134, 147, 157, 163 n.7, 171, 187, 190 n.35, 193, 198, 206 n.13, 206 n.14, 207 n.17, 222–4, 234–5, 236 n.2 commedia del’ arte 82, 111, 134 Congress of Soviet Writers, First All Union (1934) 93–4 Conroy, Amy 159 COVID-19 pandemic 2, 12 n.8 Dandridge, Dorothy 198, 204, 206 n.12 Davies, Heather 84, 239 De Jongh, Nicholas 82, 131, 134, 142 n.9, 142 n.20, 142 n.26 Deliver Us From Eva (2003) 10, 193–205, 205 n.4, 240 Desmet, Christy 209–10, 219 n.6, 219 n.9 Disguising at Hertford 22, 32 n.9, 240

244

INDEX

Dolan, Frances E. 13 n.15, 32 n.7, 35 n.21, 54 n.26, 61, 71 n.12 domestic space 2, 12 n.8, 23, 26, 29, 36–8, 43, 45, 47, 50 n.2, 59, 61, 63–6, 71 n.12, 73 n.31, 107, 110, 113, 158, 160, 173, 176, 182–3, 186, 196–7, 200–1, 225, 227–8 Doran, Gregory 69–70, 240 Duffin, Aoife 151–4, 157, 165 n.19, 166 n.35, 167 n.36, 167 n.38 Easter Rising (1916) 8, 14 n.25, 144–5, 147, 163 n.7 economics/œconomics 5, 6, 20, 24, 50 n.2, 57–74, 110, 116, 122, 146, 181, 182, 190 n.32, 205, 206 n.6, 211 Edwards, Gale 14 n.24, 240 Elizabeth I, Queen 33, 87 n.8, 92, 184, 191 n.41 English Broadside Ballad Archive 32 n.8, 239 Erasmus, Desiderius 36, 38, 40–1, 43, 47–9, 54 n.18, 54 n.26 female agency 7, 61, 63, 66, 69, 71 n.21, 126–43, 175, 182, 186, 198 femininity 44, 71, 109–10, 131, 152, 161, 173, 176, 184, 188 n.18, 190 n.33, 194, 210, 214 feminism 9, 12 n.4, 30–1, 35 n.21, 68, 71 n.15, 79,

83, 86, 105–24, 131, 149–52, 154, 157, 160–7, 198, 207 n.16, 211, 220 n.17 Flaherty, Jennifer 10, 208–21 Fletcher, John 4–6, 24, 28–31, 33 n.13, 34 n.18, 69, 178, 192–5, 201, 205 n.1, 205 n.3, 220 n.22, 222, 232, 236 n.1, 236 n.2, 240 food 5, 21–2, 36–56, 71 n.16, 73 n.24, 133, 138, 200, 212, 230 Franco regime (Spain) 8, 106–7, 118, 122, 122 n.2 Gaines, Barbara 78–80, 240 Gargantua and Pantagruel (1535) 41–2, 54 n.21, 54 n.24 Garrick, David 4, 13 n.16, 174, 177, 187 n.8, 188 n.10, 240 Gay, Penny 31 n.1, 140 n.3, 163 n.6 Gaye, Marvin 196, 203, 205 girlhood 38–9, 48, 53 n.13, 55 n.32, 188 n.12, 208–21, 222–38 Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines, The 10, 220 n.22, 224–36, 237 n.10, 237 n.14, 238 n.27, 238 n.38, 239 Gnedich, Petr 90, 102 n.10 Gogava, Tamara 98, 240 Goldstein, David 5–6, 12 n.9, 13 n.17, 36–49, 49 n.1, 50 n.3, 51 n.7, 53 n.14

INDEX

Guerrero Zamora, Juan 105–22, 123 n.10, 123 n.11, 124 n.23, 240 Hall, Edward 137 Hardwick, Gary 10, 193–205, 205 n.4, 240 Hastings, Chris 14 n.25, 163 n.7 Haughton, Miriam 145–6, 150, 158, 160, 162, 163 n.4, 163 n.5, 167 n.37, 167 n.42, 168 n.47 Hawkes, David 65, 70 n.6, 73 n.26 Henderson, Diana 1, 12 n.3, 12 n.5, 109, 123 n.9, 186 n.2, 189 n.20, 190 n.36, 223, 237 n.8 Heywood, John 33 n.10 Hogarth Press Shakespeare 224, 225, 226, 237 n.12, 237 n.13, 237 n.18, 238 n.44, 241 Higgins, Roisin 147–8, 164 n.8, 164 n.11 Hinton, Peter 83, 87 n.8 Hodgdon, Barbara 6, 12 n.4, 12 n.9, 13 n.10, 13 n.19, 34 n.17, 54 n.27, 55 n.29, 56 n.39, 58, 70 n.3, 70 n.7, 71 n.13, 87 n.6, 100 n.3, 109, 123 n.9, 123 n.12, 140 n.3, 142 n.23, 171–2, 186 n.1, 187 n.3, 188 n.12, 189 n.19, 189 n.25, 191 n.39, 191 n.43, 205 n.5, 219 n.12, 223, 236 n.4, 237 n.16

245

Holderness, Graham 31 n.1, 51 n.10, 72 n.23, 101 n.5, 111, 123 n.12, 189 n.24 Hulme-Beaman, Genevieve 151–4, 165 n.22 Humanism 5, 36–49, 51 n.6, 51 n.10, 52 n.11, 53 n.12, 54 n.26, 55 n.31, 104 n.28 Jeanneret, Michael 37, 42, 51 n.5, 54 n.24 Jordan, Winthrop 195, 206 n.7 Junger, Gil 207, 211, 220 n.16, 223, 240 Kahn, Coppelia 12 n.4, 35 n.21, 164 n.10, 190 n.33, 191 n.40 Kamaralli, Anna 134, 136, 142 n.27, 143 n.38 Kate the Cursed (Canada, 2014) 208–21 Kelly, Erin E. 4, 5, 19–35, 189 n.28, 212 Kelly, Rona 11 n.1, 151 Khomenko, Natalia 8, 14 n.23, 88–104 Kidnie, M.J. 2, 3, 7, 9, 12 n.6, 13 n.11, 14 n.21, 14 n.27, 70 n.4, 72 n.22 Kirwan, Peter 8, 9, 32 n.3, 125–43 Kiss Me Kate (1953) 98, 100 Kolosov, Sergei 104 n.29, 240 Korda, Natasha 44, 50 n.2, 51 n.10, 55 n.37, 63–4, 71 n.17, 73 n.31, 179, 189 n.27, 190 n.33

246

INDEX

Krasnodar Dramatic Theatre (USSR) 98, 104 n.30, 240 LaBute, Neil 79, 80, 81, 87 n.4, 241 Lacy, John 4, 13 n.16, 240 Lanier, Douglas 37, 38, 45, 51 n.7, 55 n.36, 212, 220 n.25, 223–4, 233, 236 n.5, 237 n.12, 237 n.13, 237 n.18, 238 n.44 Leitch, Thomas 237 n.11 Lensovet Theatre (Leningrad) 98, 241 Lizzie Bennett Diaries, The 208, 219 n.4 Lloyd, Phyllida 8, 14 n.24, 78, 125–40, 141 n.11, 240 Lonergan, Patrick 153, 166 n.26 Lupton, Julia Reinhard 39, 48, 53 n.14, 56 n.40 Lydgate, John 22, 32 n.9, 240 macaronic 43–4, 54 n.28 McAuliffe, Mary 150, 160, 167 n.40, 167 n.43 MacDonald, Joyce Green 10, 14 n.29, 192–207 McHugh, Emer 8, 9, 14 n.24, 14 n.26, 144–68 McTeer, Janet 130–2, 141 n.11, 141 n.18, 142 n.22 Maguire, Laurie 3, 12 n.12, 12 n.13 Marino, James 34 n.15, 72 n.22 masculinity 2, 82, 132–4, 139, 141 n.17, 184, 191, 194,

199, 202, 205, 214, 223, 233 A mery play between Johan Johan the husbande, Tyb his wyfe, [and] syr Iha[n] n the preest 22–3, 26, 33 n.10, 33 n.11, 240 ‘A Merry Jeste of a Shrewde and Curste Wyfe, Lapped in Morrelles Skin, for her Good Behavyour’ 4, 13 n.15, 21, 32 n.7, 241 #MeToo movement 2, 10, 13 n.14, 172–3, 176, 185, 186, 187 n.4, 213 Miller, Stephen Roy 13 n.15, 34 n.16, 72 n.23, 241 money 21, 59, 62, 65–7, 71 n.15, 73 n.25, 113, 176, 179–81, 190 n.36, 193, 201, 211 Moonlighting 13 n.16, 241 More, Sir Thomas 36, 42–3, 48–9, 51, 54 n.25 Morgan, Jennifer 195, 206 n.8 Morley, Sheridan 125–6, 130, 140 n.1, 141 n.15 Morrison, Conall 81–4, 241 Moscow Art Theatre 89, 92, 241 Munro, Lucy 13 n.15, 34 n.18, 193, 205 n.3 Neely, Carole Thomas 123 n.9, 210, 220 n.13 Newman, Karen 63, 71 n.18, 190 n.33 The New Taming of the Shrew (Madrid, 1975) 8, 105–24, 240

INDEX

Nothing Like the Sun (2016–17) 212, 217, 221 n.26 Nuttall, Romola 5, 6, 50 n.2, 57–74, 180–1, 182, 190 n.32, 190 n.33, 190 n.37 oikos 5, 59–68, 173 O’Neill, Stephen 212, 220 n.23, 220 n.24 Orlin, Lena Cowan 32 n.3, 50 n.2, 51 n.10, 55 n.37, 190 n.30 Ovid 44, 55 n.30, 55 n.31 Oxford English Dictionary (OED) 33 n.11, 70 n.1, 70 n.2, 71 n.16 Patterson, Annabel 83, 95 n.1 Pickford, Mary 172–89, 241 Plato 42, 45 A Pleasant Conceited History, Called the Taming of a Shrew 4, 13 n.15, 21, 22, 24–6, 29 n.16, 34 n.15, 34 n.16, 62–7, 69 n.22, 70 n.32, 72 n.22, 72 n.23, 73 n.32, 88, 95, 100, 236 n.1, 241 political correctness 84, 130 politics 37, 57, 61, 73 n.24, 78, 89, 92, 106, 122 of adaptation 6–11, 77–9, 81–3, 84, 85, 88–105, 105–24, 144–68 gender 6–11, 73 n.31, 106–9, 112, 117, 119, 121–2, 125–6, 130, 146, 167 n.40, 196, 223

247

of memory/commemoration 144–68, 165 n.17 of race and representation 141 n.8, 192–207 Pombo Angulo, Manuel 120, 124 n.28, 124 n.29 Popov, Aleksei 95–7, 103 n.23, 103 n.24, 103 n.27, 241 Prego, Adolfo 120–1, 124 n.29, 124 n.30 Propeller Theatre Company 32 n.3, 130, 137, 141 n.16, 220 n.15, 240 Purnis, Jan 31 n.1, 38, 51 n.10 querelle des femmes 31, 35 n.20 Rabelais, Francois 36, 41–3, 48, 49, 54 n.21, 54 n.24 race 10, 127, 140 n.6, 140 n.8, 192–207 Rackin, Phyllis 126, 131–2, 140 n.4, 142 n.21 Rastell, John 22, 23, 33 n.12 Rebhorn, Wayne 52 n.11, 55 n.33, 101 n.4 Renaissance 5, 19, 34 n.14, 50 n.1, 51 n.5, 52 n. 11, 54 n.24, 71 n.18, 73 n. 25, 96, 101 n.4, 136, 173, 179, 190 n.33, 194–6 Rice, Emma 1, 11 n.2, 14 n.28, 145, 146 Riggio, Milla Cozart 10, 86, 171–91, 188 n.18 Rourke, Josie 79, 241 Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) 1, 6, 14 n.24, 58, 69, 81, 83, 127, 134, 135,

248

INDEX

143 n.36, 147, 239, 240, 241 Russ, Joanna 135, 142 n.33 Sauny the Scott (1667) 4, 13 n.16, 240 Schafer, Elizabeth 31 n.2, 139, 140 n.3, 143 n.43, 163 n.6 sexual assault/harassment 2, 78, 137, 172, 213–15, 218 sexuality 10, 117, 150, 205, 209, 220 n.20 sexism 3, 80–1, 83–4, 113, 119, 126, 216, 218 Shakespeare Association of America 86, 190 n.33 Shakespeare, William As You Like It 99, 128 n.3, 134 Comedy of Errors 36, 50 n.3 Coriolanus 36 Hamlet 85 Henry IV, Part 1 36, 50 n.3, 128 Henry VI 22 Henry VIII 37 King Lear 101 n.9 Macbeth 37, 128 Much Ado About Nothing 77 Othello 85, 101 n.9, 210, 220 n.13 Romeo and Juliet 77 The Tempest 37, 50 n.3, 128 Timon of Athens 37, 51 n.4, 51 n.7 Titus Andronicus 36, 37, 50 n.4

Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre (UK) 1, 8, 9, 11 n.2, 14 n.24, 14 n.28, 32 n.3, 78, 125–43, 144–68, 239, 240 ShakespeaRe-Told 240 Sherman Theatre (Cardiff, UK) 135, 142 n.30, 239 Shipulinski, Feofan 92–3, 102 n.18 Shrew That (USA, 2015) 208–21 Sly, Christopher 25–7, 30, 43, 45, 55 n.37, 58–9, 81–3, 88, 90, 91, 95–6, 100, 102 n.13, 111, 136, 157, 182, 190 n.35, 203, 223 Smith, Sir Thomas 61, 70 n.11 Smyshliaev, Valentin 89, 92, 241 Sobolev, Iurii 91, 93, 102 n.12, 102 n.14 Soviet socialist realism 93–9, 102 n.19 submission speech, Katherina (Act 5, Scene 2) 3, 9, 49, 52 n.11, 60, 64, 66–7, 70 n.7, 133, 139, 153, 156, 158–9, 176–7, 234 suffrage movement, women’s 78, 79, 165 n.16 The Tamer Tamed, or: The Woman’s Prize 4, 5, 6, 13 n.15, 24–6, 34 n.15, 34 n.16, 64–5, 68, 72 n.22, 72 n.23, 73 n.32, 88, 95, 100, 178, 192–3, 194, 195, 201, 205 n.1,

INDEX

205 n.3, 222, 236 n.1, 241 taming speech, Petruccio (Act 4, Scene 1) 175, 178, 230 Taylor, Elizabeth 178–9, 182–5, 186, 189 n.21, 189 n.22, 190 n.36, 191 n.38, 191 n.39, 191 n.42, 241 Taylor, Sam 171–2, 174–5, 178, 182, 185, 187 n.5, 188 n.15, 241 Teatro Espanol (Madrid) 105, 108, 118–19, 121 Terry, Michelle 128, 141 n.9 Thompson, Ann 72 n.23, 109, 123 n.9, 220 n.14 Thompson, Ayanna 7, 127–8, 140 n.7, 141 n.8 Tom Tyler and his Wife 23, 24, 26, 33 n.13, 241 Traister, Rebecca 2, 12 n.7 Tuganov, Aleksandr 94, 241 Tyler, Anne 10, 222–38, 241 Utopia (1516) 42–3, 48, 54 n.25 Vinegar Girl (2016) 10, 211, 224–8, 231–6, 237 n.9, 241 Vladimirov, Igor 98, 241 #WakingTheFeminists movement 149–50, 151, 152, 162, 164 n.14, 164 n.15, 165 n.19, 167 n.42

249

Werner, Sarah 109, 123 n.9 Williams, Deanne 44, 53 n.13, 55 n.32, 210, 219 n.10, 219 n.11 Williams, Nora 127, 134, 140 n.5 The Woman’s Prize, or: The Tamer Tamed 4, 5, 6, 13 n.15, 24–6, 34 n.15, 34 n.16, 64–5, 68, 72 n.22, 72 n.23, 73 n.32, 88, 95, 100, 178, 192–3, 194, 195, 201, 205 n.1, 222, 236 n.1, 240 women’s liberation movements 94, 120 Wonder, Stevie 203, 205 Woodbridge, Linda 71 n.15, 190 n.33 Wootton, David 31 n.1, 51 n.10, 101 n.5 World Shakespeare Congress (2016) 100 n.2, 147 Xenophon 60, 61, 65, 67, 70 n.8, 70 n.9, 74 n.33 Yeats, William Butler 155, 157, 166 n.28, 166 n.29, 166 n.31 Zamoskvoretskii Theatre (Moscow, USSR) 91, 102 n.12, 241 Zeffirelli, Franco 171–3, 178–85, 187 n.5, 187 n.9, 189 n.22, 189 n.23, 189 n.28 191 n.42, 241

250

251

252

253

254