From the outset, Kate is set up so that her "taming" will be acceptable, will not seem merely cruel. Such an unresolved paradox reveals Shakespeare to be less proto-feminist (as one recent critic has claimed) than simply aware of the co-existence of contradictory ideas within the Elizabethan status quo, which The Taming of the Shrew thereby implicitly accepts. Because this was an emblem of the Gallic Hercules, it appealed especially to the French, who conflated it with the image of the Libyan Hercules supposedly responsible for the founding of France and used it as a figure for a number of their kings and rulers. 82)—and a new concern for those beneath her—"she waded through the dirt to pluck [Petruchio] off [Grumio]" (IV. After Katherine and Petruchio exit to the bridal chamber, one of the servants reports that Petruchio is "making a sermon of continency" to Katherine, while she sits bewildered, "as one new risen from a dream. "
Many critics study the play's exploration of gender relations through the lens of Elizabethan culture and social conventions. What does she do as soon as she obtains sovereignty? Hibbard, George R., "'The Taming of the Shrew': A Social Comedy, " in Shakespearean Essays, edited by Alwin Thaler and Norman Sanders, University of Tennessee Press, 1964, pp. Muriel Bradbrook made clear what a new thing Shakespeare was making. Her speech steals the show. Oxford: n. p., 1865. Second, what is at stake in Shakespeare's decision to identify his protagonist so firmly with rhetoric just shortly after Petruchio's first appearance on stage? His tall figure was dressed in a dirty white suit and down-at-heel black boots. Shakespeare begins The Taming of the Shrew with the Induction, whose purpose seems to be establishing that the rest of the play will be a play-within-a-play. The energy is obvious in the eagerness of the male characters arriving in Padua to take on a set of problems regarded by the Paduans as hopeless, and in the demands they confidently make upon themselves in order to cope with them.
In any case, the spunky spirit Petruchio so admired early in the play has not been vanquished but has been redirected. Servants, leave me and her alone. The presence of this dimension also counters assumptions that Katherine is tamed in any facile way, and prompts critics and directors to see her notorious submission speech as defiantly ironic (rather than facetious, as a farcical interpretation might play it), although some concede that she may be knowingly complicit at the end of the play so as to satisfy, in a purely pro forma way, the theatrical conventions of romantic comedy. He wisely shifts domestic roles only when he and Kate are where his contradictory reaction to her negative behavior can become part of a consistent program in which not only his words but also his actions provide a positive pattern for his wife to imitate. In revealing the arbitrary nature of the gender distinctions authored and authorized by a patriarchal society, The Taming of the Shrew simultaneously exposes the sexual politics inscribed in a discourse that took pains to identify rhetoric as the exclusive province of men, despite the feeling that it was fundamentally female. Clearly it is for actors and director to decide how to play this, but, whatever decision they make, the scene has to make sense in relation to the end of the play. Katherine's "conversion" in the fourth act, her alignment of her will with that of Petruchio, is marked by her agreeing to speak as he wishes her to speak. Even more, Katherine's obedience speech, with its elaborate appeal to political and social sanctities, would lack its sense of full-chord resolution if it punctuated something less energetic than farce. Baptista agrees to the marriage. Where the page resembles Kate, Christopher Sly also resembles Petruchio; where Kate's character seems to contain elements of the page and the hostess, Petruchio's seems to contain elements of the lord and Sly, a transference which proves significant. The recommendations to the actors about the "modesties" and "merry passion" (Ind.
Anne Barton, introduction to The Taming of the Shrew in The Riverside Shakespeare, p. 106. Ne'er ask me what raiment I'll wear, for I have no more doublets than backs, no more stockings than legs, nor no more shoes than feet …. As one of Lucentio's servants, Biondello is aware of Lucentio and Tranio's ploy of changing identities but is not immediately told the reason for it. The romantic humanization of Katherine is expressed, not in such reflective speeches as might be given to Viola, but through the resilience and energy of her co-operation with Petruchio's madcap words and actions. In the fifteenth century, the humanist Lorenzo Valla sees him as the guide and teacher (or duke) of the people ("rector et dux populi"), and in the next century Vives repeats this notion. The role of dietician and physician that Petruchio adopts properly belongs to the wife, who, Tilney advises, should have the qualities of a cook, a physician, and a surgeon;15 Vives, in fact, specifies that the wife should know "what maner dyet is good or bad, what meates are holsome to take, what to eschewe, and howe longe, and of what fassion. 10-12 (1117b-19b), Problemata XXVIII (949a-50a); b) Aristotle, Historia Animalium IX.
Jewel similarly attacks the orators' performance as déclassé, for his auditors are not wise men, "not serious men, not philosophers, but the filth of the people, mobs. " "Katherine the curst" saw language only as a medium of sharp and offensive combat, a means of preserving the present personality by protecting the vulnerable inner self from exposure, assault, and change; Petruchio's sophistic language, however, has taught her that "futuristic versions" of the self can be imaged and assumed, thus healing the dysfunctional portions of the personality. Just as both Renaissance legal doctrine and The Taming of the Shrew focus on the will in connection with rape, so does the discourse of rhetoric. It is this kind of "Ovidian" banquet (so-called for its associations with Ovid's Ars Amatoria [Kermode 90]) that Shakespeare's Venus contemplates in Adonis: Had I no eyes but ears, my ears would love That inward beauty and invisible; Or were I deaf, thy outward parts would move Each part in me that were but sensible: Though neither eyes nor ears, to hear nor see, Yet should I be in love by touching thee. The Hostess must, in Shakespeare's theatre, have been played by a boy actor.
In Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, edited by Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, pp. In regard to the first: given the tremendous uncertainty, from the time of initial productions and revivals of The Taming of the Shrew to now, about the relationship between The Shrew and A Shrew—which is the source of the other, whether either is the source of the other, whether one or both draw directly or indirectly from yet a third play now lost, etc. He also analyses the verse and prose of the Sly scenes, making an excellent point about the 'new' Sly's blank verse, 'a step up to an assumed dignity and style', which is then exploited 'by inserting into this new frame fragments of the old Sly that we used to know … The incongruity between style and subject-matter is now so marked that it re-creates on the plane of language the visual effect of Sly sitting up in bed, newly washed and nobly attired. Not surprisingly, neo-Platonic ideas about women and love were reflected chiefly in the area of dramatic and non-dramatic poetry (see Harrison), and on this subject Ficino was recalled for what he had to say about contemplating beauty, since this was crucial to the attainment of spiritual growth. If Shakespeare's plays exemplify what humankind can achieve at its most vital, most thoughtful, and most sympathetic, not only a source of received wisdom but also a resource for those at odds with the received culture, The Taming of the Shrew remains an embarrassment to many who profess and call themselves Shakespearians. Anne Righter, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (1962), p. 104. In act 4, scene 5, as they return to Padua for Bianca's wedding, Katherine again contradicts Petruchio, saying that the sun is shining when he has commented on the brightness of the moon.
"15 Moreover, the orator himself is repeatedly identified as a ruler. Watkins, W. "Shakespeare's Banquet of Sense. " And the symbolic actions that frame it help us believe in the freedom and sincerity with which Kate delivers it.
At various points in the play, Katherine's exclusion from or participation in banquets or dinner parties becomes an issue. Although Petruchio does attempt to tame Kate with words, she defeats him in the wooing scene, where she matches or even bests him in repartee, responding to his phallic aggression with witty rejoinders stressing his sexual inadequacy, and replying to his self-identification as a gentleman by labeling his "crest" the sign of the fool, a "coxcomb" (2. Nearly every effort to define or describe farce since Dryden—carefully collected in Leo Hughes's A Century of English Farce—has been couched in negatives. In each case, however, these initial impressions are misleading. N7v-N8 is repeated almost verbatim nearly half a century later in Robert Cleaver, A godlie forme of householde government: for the ordering of private families, according to the direction of Gods word (London, 1598), pp. 18 Such interpretations, however, seem obviously erroneous. This, with the special ability of acting to embrace and give form to violence, is the mutuality they share. I, p. 112 (italics in the text). Within this situation, farce celebrates the virtues of energy, ingenuity, and resilience, virtues that disrupt the static dilemma and work to resolve it.
Perfect love—or at least spiritual rather than physical union—was doubtless one of the topics of Petruchio's "sermon on continency. " Each suggests, specifically, that, first, one can play only a compatible role and that, second, the role-playing succeeds only if all parties exhibit sufficient selflessness. I wish also to record my thanks to the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada for a grant that funded part of this research. Although critics have located a significant number of meanings in Grumio's reference to "rope tricks, " they have left two important questions unanswered. But then he sinks into illusion and is never undeceived. Not unless struck do I sing. ] For it is the chiefest point of a houswife to cherishe hir husbande, who being sicke, will haue the best appetite to the meat of hys wyues dressing" (sig. Marvin T. Herrick, Italian Comedy in the Renaisance (Urbana: Illinois UP, 1960), p. 137. Lucentio responds appropriately, comparing Bianca with Minerva (not only the Roman goddess of wisdom but the "mythical originator of musical instruments" [Waldo and Herbert 197]), an equation restated by Hortensio in 3. Perkins, p. 691; Cleaver, pp. Predictably, Tillyard, in Shakespeare's Early Comedies, supports the theory that Sly once had an epilogue, p. 74. Like Hercules, Petruchio epitomizes just those traits of the orator which identify him with masculine force and political power, and present him as leading and dragging, penetrating and possessing his subject.
Grumio, Draw thy weapon, we are beset with thieves; Rescue thy mistress, if thou be a man, Fear not, sweet wench, they shall not touch thee, Kate: I'll buckler thee against a million. The players seemed to move helplessly through a cold and inhospitable landscape. Anthony Holden's 2002 William Shakespeare: An Illustrated Biography offers read ers an honest attempt to present the facts of Shakespeare's life, separate from the legends that surround the playwright. The Works of Thomas Middleton. Hérou (Rouen, 1890), 1:6; Vives, De ratione (n. 8 above; OO 2:93); and Antoine Furetière, Nouvelle allégorique, ou Histoire des derniers troubles arrivés au royaume de l'Éloquence, ed. Although their principal aim was to prove Shakespeare's sole authorship of the play, they do make some points material to my case. Women possess no political power (with the obvious exception of monarchs) and they are not empowered to own land.
For others, however, the obvious artificiality of both Sly's transformation into a nobleman and the page's transformation into a woman are meant to indicate that Katherine's transformation is equally artificial. O'Neill play, with "The" Crossword Clue Wall Street. Clifford Leech, "Shakespeare's Prologues and Epilogues", in Studies in Honor of T. Baldwin, ed. This clue last appeared October 8, 2022 in the WSJ Crossword. But equally one could say that fellowship is resolved into actors playing a new kind of role, that of audience. London: Oxford UP for the Malone Soc., 1914. Moreover, all this aggression is associated with a character whose adult masculinity is at issue: he claims at one point that he does not "woo like a babe" (2. Huston cities, respectively, J. D. Wilson, Shakespeare's Happy Comedies (Evanston: Northwestern Univ.
Her violent reaction to Grumio's tantalizing game with beef and mustard is to beat him, with words which could be from a woman in the later plays of the tetralogy: Sorrow on thee and all the pack of you That triumph thus upon my misery! Then the music of a violin was heard, and as the lights went up the audience watched the entrance from one end of the playing space of a group of nineteenth-century travelling players.