watervole | The Taming of the Shrew

I went to see Propellor's production of the Taming of the Shrew last night. A friend had a spare ticket and invited me at the last moment and I leapt at the chance. Propellor use an all male cast and it was interesting to see how this affected the performance. At first, the all-male cast added to the comedy effect. Bianca and Katherine were clearly played by men, right down to the hairy chest visible underneath the dresses. The actors didn't even wear wigs. Bianca was effeminate and girlish, and Kate was a vicious bully in her treatment of Bianca. This actually worked very well with male actors as Kate's rough physical treatment of Bianca seemed funnier than it might have done if female actors were involved.

Kate's treatment of Bianca is so bad, that initially one feels Petruccio's treatment of her is justified. But as the play develops, he bullies his servants as well as his wife and Kate's pleas for him to spare the servants are as ignored as her requests for him to give her food or rest. One has the sense that there is a point (where Kate thanks him for food which Petruccio then instructs Hortensio to eat) where if he had shown her kindness, he would have had a chance of winning her heart. It is clear that she has come to identify with the servants and to see her own cruelty in perspective. But Petruccio is so keen on gaining total victory that he fails to see what he is also losing.

By the end of the play, Kate is totally obediant. She is an automaton, moving in a daze. When she kisses him, there is no emotion in it at all - it is obedience, nothing else.

Petruccio's cruelty has gained him a slave, but he will never have a wife who loves him in any meaningful manner. He will never have a wife capable of independant thought or a woman who can add anything meaningful to his life.

I found this a very sharp contrast (a very disturbing one - I went to bed very late as it took me time to settle down) to the previous time I saw the play. It's capable of many interpretations and the previous occasion played it as Kate cottoning onto Petruccio's game and the two of them operating almost as a team and her deliberately aiding him in the bet.

It is quite possible that Shakespeare intended neither of these interpretations, that he really did mean that a man had a right to treat a wife as Petruccio treats Katherine. And yet - he frames the play within the scene where Christopher Sly is being fooled into thinking he is a Lord. It is presented as a play to Sly. Why do that unless Shakespeare himself is saying "This isn't real"?

What do other people feel about the play? What interpretations have you seen? What do you think Shakespeare intended?

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I heard of a production where Kate delivers the last speech - the how I love to be a subservient wife one - completely straight, but then she turns round to exit the stage and you see she's cut her wrists...

That's how this one felt - the same emotional devastation. The speech almost felt genuine (though with a strong sense of Stockholm Syndrome), but you know she's dead when she kisses him.

I once saw a televised master class on the play where Suzanne Bertish played Kate. At the end, she tipped Pettrucio over in his chair and moved off.

Given the other women in Shakespeare's plays, particularly in The Merchant of Venice, I don't think he was arguing for submissive women per se, but there are plenty of other beaten and abused women in his plays. Desdemona for example.

ps. And Jealousy is the villain in The Winter's Tale and Othello.

I've seen the Zeffirelli film version - which basically takes the "Kate and Petruccio as an early version of Beatrice and Benedick" approach and makes them a team in the end - and a stage version which was similar to yours, playing Kate's final submission as Stockholm syndrome.

As to authorial intentions; of course you have to consider the man of his times thing. As with the Merchant of Venice, where I'm quite sure Shakespeare did not mean the "hath not a Jew eyes..." etc. speech as a plea for tolerance, given Shylock's function as antagonist in the play, and the way the play entire is written. Being a genius, however, he didn't just write the traditional villain as being evil for the sake of being evil but fleshed him out, gave him a motive. As for Taming of the Shrew, it is a play within a play, sure, and I think there is a level of deliberate irony here - the completely submissive wife is an illusion as much as anything else Sly sees - but mostly I think he meant for his audience to sympathize with Petruccio and see the whole thing as some rough sort of sparring between the sexes, given that the understanding of marriage and the husband as lord and master really was a self evident fact to the Elizabethan world. No modern playwright would let Desdemona, no matter how much she loved Othello, die with the words "Nobody. I myself. Commend me to my kind lord" when Emilia asks her who killed her. Mind you, Emilia has a great speech about double standards for husbands and wives in the same play, but she's the sidekick, not the heroine. Hermione forgives her husband Leontes for some terrible actions. And even in a comedy like Much Ado, where you do have Beatrice and Benedick as definitely intended equals, you also have Hero forgiving Claudio for his rash accusations and condemnations.

Which is to say: all these men wrong their women and they do confess their wrongs, but the women are expected to forgive them; meanwhile, you don't have examples of women wronging their men (unless they're falsely accused of same) and the men instantly granting forgiveness.

Oh, and in the very first comedy, The Comedy of Errors, you have one woman lecturing another on how her constant nagging probably drove her husband to infidelity and out of the house. Given this was written by a young man who just left his wife and kids back in Stratford.... well.

Although the 'man of his time' point is a fair one, the culture may not have been as mysognistic as we think. I found the following in Wikipedia.

The first known adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew was entitled The Woman's Prize, or The Tamer Tamed, a sequel and reply written by John Fletcher, perhaps around 1611. In Fletcher's play, the newly-widowed Petruchio is remarried to a bride who "tames" him with the help of her friends, driving him from his house and refusing to consummate their marriage until he promises to respect her and endeavor to satisfy her. When the two plays were revived together, in 1633 and in the Restoration era, Fletcher's play proved more popular than Shakespeare

PS. Love the icon!

I haven't seen it played this way, but I've read an interpretation of it that reads Kate as a victim of Baptista's abusive parenting, and Petruchio as a deprogrammer/redeemer. I rather like that interpretation, myself, but then I would.

kalypso_v and I saw a version along those lines a few years ago, and it was very effective.

Thank you, that's interesting to hear.

Wasn't there an implication that Kate had never been helped to get over the death of her mother? Or was that me filling in the back story?

I think, from the point of view of that Petruchio, Kate's like a high-spirited horse; he has to break her in, but not break her, because a broken horse/wife would have no appeal for him (in that case, he'd only be in it for the money).

We do get the comments of two "ordinary women" at the end of the play - Bianca and the widow:
WIDOW: Lord, let me never have a cause to sigh,
Till I be brought to such a silly pass!
BIANCA: Fie! what a foolish duty call you this?
LUCENTIO: I would your duty were as foolish too:
The wisdom of your duty, fair Bianca,
Hath cost me an hundred crowns since supper-time.
BIANCA: The more fool you, for laying on my duty.

Bianca, earlier seen as the "good" girl, sees Kate's behaviour as ridiculous, and making one's wife the subject of a bet just foolish.

If I were presenting the play as the breaking of Kate, I'd show Bianca as a shocked witness in the final scene, resolving never to submit to what's happened to her sister.

That was certainly the implication both of us read into it -- that, and that there'd been a certain amount of Bianca being their father's obvious favourite.

I felt that it was being played as Petruchio looking for a wife who will be his *partner* in the business of running his estate, someone who will acknowledge him as the one with the authority to make the final decision, but his deputy rather than his property. And at the start of the play Kate's not capable of being a partner. So he's walking a very fine line between teaching her to co-operate, and destroying the spirit that makes her attractive to him.

That was me, not signed in...

I saw the production last year in Liverpool, and the same company did the unintentionally amusing "Winter's Tale" the year before.

I sometimes find Edward Hall's interpretation of the male as female role in Shakespeare overly-literal but the cast is a good ensemble. In particular I enjoy whoever it is who played Kate in this production. He's a very good actor ~~but terribly plain~~. All that said I enjoyed this production but came out of it relatively shell-shocked. Caroline explained that it was a rather radical reading of the play but as I'd not seen it before I wasn't really qualified to judge.

The version I saw played it as ironic all the way through, up until the final speech, which was very bizarre. All the way through the relationship had been a tongue-in-cheek sort of game between the two of them, ironically sending up the straight interpretation of the play, but then the final scene was a complete turn-around, played seriously rather than ironically, and seemed to make no sense as it wasn't in keeping either with the character of Katherine or with the relationship as they'd been played up til that point.

The Taming of the Shrew

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