An evening at the Thee-uh-tuh for the Mannions last night. Shakespeare. Sort of.
Well, sort of sort of. The Bomb-itty of Errors, the hip-hop adaptation of The Comedy of Errors we saw at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, was more truer to the spirit of Shakespeare’s play than some of the museum-piece, word-for-word faithful, perfectly in period productions and high-concept, let’s make Shakespeare relevant to modern audiences exercises in directors’ and designers’ vanities I’ve seen. The hip-hop was good, the rapping was clever, the performances were excellent, and…
It was funny.
But this post isn’t about that. It’s about this.
Before the lights went down and the show began, I was reading through the program which does triple-duty as the program for the three plays in rep at HVSF this summer, Bomb-itty, Troilus and Cressida, and Taming of the Shrew, and includes, besides the cast lists and production credits, notes to the audience from each play’s director.
And the director’s note for Taming of the Shrew started off like this:
The Taming of the Shrew has been pleasing audiences for 400 years. And, why not? Tame a spirited woman, break her spirit, starve her, deprive her of sleep, train her to obey---what could be funnier?
Excuse me?
Spirited?
Kate the Curst, spirited?
Rosalind is spirited.
Beatrice is spirited.
Kate is…a shrew.
I almost wrote the b word.
But she’s that too.
At the start of the play, Kate is a mean-spirited, temper-tantrum-throwing, vindictive, selfish, jealous, spoiled little rich girl.
She is smart and witty but she uses her intelligence to devise ways of terrorizing her family and her wit to insult and brow-beat and bully everybody she comes in contact with.
And she hurts people.
As in she slaps them, pinches them, kicks them, throws things at them, and breaks things over their heads.
I can’t tell you how many directors, actors, college professors, and just plain Shakespeare fans, I’ve listened to tying themselves into intellectual knots trying to explain away Katherine’s shrewishness as an independent and intelligent woman’s understandable rebellion against the political, cultural, and economic constraints on a woman’s autonomy in Elizabethan England.
I know, you could write a book. Books have been written.
But there’s this. How does her rebellion justify her torturing her sister?
In one of her earliest scenes Kate drags Bianca on stage by the ear, after having tied her hands, and then proceeds to humiliate her in a dialog that comes titillatingly close to a lesbian S & M game.
When her father tells Bianca’s suitors he won’t let her get married until he’s found a husband for her big sister, he’s actually begging them to help him get this crazy lady out of his house.
But there’s more to it. Baptista can’t let Bianca get married first because Kate won’t allow it. She’s too jealous and selfish to stand to see her sister happy and successful. She makes it clear that if Bianca marries and moves out first, she’s going to make things even worse for Baptista.
She is not nice.
Which is oddly part of her attraction.
But she can’t go through life like this because she’s a danger to herself and others. Plus, she’s miserable.
Oh, and did I mention that The Taming of the Shrew is a comedy?
A particular kind of comedy. A farce. Which makes it practically a live-action cartoon. Worrying about Katherine’s emotional and physical well-being after she’s “tamed” as if she’s a real person is kind of like worrying about Woody when he falls off the roof in Toy Story 3.
Besides, if you’re going to worry about Kate as if she’s a real person, or at least a character in a realistic drama, then you should worry about the other characters that way too.
There’s a scene that takes place offstage in which Kate smashes a lute over the head of one of her sister’s would-be suitors.
In production, the actor playing the suitor will stagger out on stage with a prop lute down around his ears or his head sticking up through a hole in a broken-necked, unstrung guitar, at which point, if you’re thinking of this is a realistic play, you ought to be thinking, “Somebody get this poor guy to a hospital!” and “How come Kate isn’t being arrested for felonious assault?”
But nobody worries about Hortensio needing an X-ray and stitches. Most of the audience is thinking the dolt deserved it.
Kate deserves a good spanking. She doesn’t get it. What she gets is actually far more and worse than she deserves. She spends several scenes in the middle of the play facing the prospect of a life married to a madman.
The humor isn’t in watching Kate get “tamed” or having her spirit broken. Her spirit isn’t broken. If anything, her spirit strengthens. It just takes on a different, larger, more sympathetic character---sympathetic, as in she begins to sympathize with people she used to treat horribly. The humor is in Petruchio’s madman act, in his antics as he goes about “taming” her by showing her what life with her was like for everybody else.
Kate is “tamed” when she realizes that from other people’s point of view she’s been behaving like a madwoman.
The rest of the director’s note is a long apology---a long, long apology---for Kate’s final speech, the one in which she ostensibly makes the case that a wife’s proper place is on her knees in submission and gratitude to her husband, and an explanation of how he went about making the speech politically palatable to a 21st Century audience.
Look, if you’re worried about how you’re going to make the speech politically acceptable, don’t do the play.
If you feel you have to apologize for your female lead, don’t do the play.
Shakespeare wrote a lot of plays.
Do Much Ado instead. Do As You Like It.
Nobody will expect you to apologize for Beatrice or Rosalind.
But you know what?
You don’t have to apologize for Kate or the final speech.
The question is how serious is Kate herself in that speech? Has she truly been “tamed” or is she being ironic? Is she trying to pull a fast one on Petruchio and the other representatives of the patriarchy onstage or is she sincerely promising to be a good little domestic angel of the house?
Does she mean it or is she kidding?
Of course she’s kidding!
Like I said, it’s a comedy!
Her final speech is the closing gag. Husband and wives in Shakespeare’s day were rolling in the aisles of the Globe. Or would’ve rolled, if the Globe had aisles. The idea that wives are and ought to be subservient and totally submissive to their husbands is a joke that goes back to the Greeks at least. “Yeah, right,” would have been the standard response in 17th Century London.
If you want to know how Shakespeare and his audience viewed how a typical middle-class marriage worked, see The Merry Wives of Windsor. Mistresses Page and Ford run their domestic worlds, and their husbands are along for the ride. The measure of a happy marriage was how cheerfully and contentedly a husband could say, “Yes, dear.”
The cliches of TV sit-coms are not new. Shakespeare’s audience would have got Everybody Loves Raymond.
And of course all the men onstage, except Petruchio, take the speech seriously. They’re idiots.
Petruchio, however, should see exactly what Kate’s up to.
So should the audience.
She’s not just joking. She’s flirting.
With her husband.
Kate isn’t promising to be obedient. She’s telling Petruchio that she’s truly changed. She’s developed a sense of humor to match her wit and to match his. From here on out she’s going to play along. And that doesn’t mean she’s going to pretend to be a good little wife, meek, obedient, and totally undemanding. It means she’s going to be play-ful generally. She is going to enjoy life, control her temper, treat people the way she wants to be treated herself, and, by the way, with that in mind, the last speech is a call on Petruchio to do the same. And he agrees.
Kate ends her speech down on her knees but she needs to be there so that Petruchio has to bend to lift her up to her feet, and up to his level, for the final kiss.
And that kiss isn’t her reward for being a good girl. It’s the real kiss that seals their wedding vows. They’re both finally responding to “You may now kiss the bride.” This scene is the wedding that traditionally ends a comedy.
It’s a happy ending, not the conclusion of a tract on Elizabethan marriage.
If you don’t see it as a happy ending, you don’t see Taming of the Shrew as a comedy, which means you don’t think Shakespeare knew what he was doing, so don’t do the play.
If, however, you make the play funny enough, and cast the right actress as Kate, nobody’s going to care about the political import of the final speech.
Then you can use your director’s note to explain why you set your production of an Italianate farce in the cantina on Mos Eisely or in Paris during the Occupation.
A high school production of Taming of the Shrew, a hundred years ago. There’s a blogger you know in there somewhere in one of the comic servant roles he was famous for. One summer, a growth spurt, and a halfway decent haircut later he was playing John Proctor in The Crucible.
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