Director's Notes

The Loyola Schools Review volume 2 (Humanities Edition):2002 A POSTCOLONIAL VIEW OF SHAKESPEARE’S SHREW: A DIRECTOR’S NARRATIVE RICARDO G. ABAD Fine Arts Program Ateneo de Manila University Philippines Abstract A Filipino Ateneo production in January 2002 of The Taming of the Shrew –Ang Pagpapaamo sa Maldita in Filipino translation -- becomes the site to reflect on Philippine-American relations during the early U.S. colonial period in the Philippines. In the production, Petruchio is an American military officer and Katherina is the daughter of a wealthy merchant in a provincial town. Both are not simply characters but representations of their respective countries. Petruchio is the brash, American military officer who attempts to discipline the feisty Filipina named Katherina, and the entire taming process is seen as an illustration of the American colonial policy called “benevolent assimilation" or "white love." This paper describes the postcolonial discourse implicit in the production that also uses the theater conventions of the time, the zarzuela and the bodabil, to counterpoint the action of the play. Katherina's final speech on marital fidelity is performed in the declamatory style learned by Filipinos from their American teachers: it is at once a slavish devotion to American tutelage and a mockery of it. Petruchio hears the speech and believe Katherina has been tamed. But Filipino audiences recognize the opposite: what may be goose to the colonizer is gander to the colonized. Aims What I wanted to do with Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew was to stage the play in the eyes of Philippine history. How the production eventually became a postcolonial discourse of Philippine-American relations at the turn of the 20th century was a fortuitous convergence of several events and ideas. In this paper, I provide a narrative of these events and ideas, and articulate how these influenced my reading of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. In this reading, the taming of the shrew is seen as a metaphor for the attempted taming of the Filipino by the American colonial power in the Philippines during the first decade and a half of the last century. It is a reading that represents the business of reinterpreting Shakespeare, and this business, to paraphrase Loomba and Orkin (1998:3), is part of the business of reinterpreting and changing our Filipino social world. Locating the Period The decision to locate the play during the early American colonial period, circa 1900- 1915, was, so to speak, in the air. The year 2001 marked the centennial of the arrival to the Philippines of the Thomasites, a group of American teachers, upright (and white) women and men, who taught young Filipinos in public schools to speak, read, and write English. The United States Embassy in Manila celebrated the event with much fanfare, and even commissioned Tanghalang Pilipino of the Cultural Center of the Philippines, to 2 stage One Hundred Songs of Mary Helen Fee, a play based on the letters of one of these teachers. The previous year, 2000, marked the centennial of the American occupation of the Philippines. The United States Embassy understandably avoided fanfare to commemorate the event – and so did the Philippine government, spent as it was, I guess, honoring for the last three years, the country’s struggle against and emancipation from Spain, the other colonial power. How the state could honor its heroes against Spain yet remained relatively mute about the Filipino heroes who battled Admiral George Dewey and American forces in many parts of the country was an issue I thought appropriate to address in some way. The Philippine-American War, observes Mojares (1999:1), has remained “marginal to popular consciousness” despite much scholarship in the field, and the peculiarities of cultural memory, not passage of time, seem to be the culprit. Ideas from the Academe, Arts, and a Photograph The worlds of the academe and the stage were not, however, as mute as the state in drawing attention to the American occupation. Historians were among the most active. In addition to Mojares’ work on the war against the Americans in a provincial city were several new accounts of the American colonial presence. Among these were Frank Golay’s Face of Empire: Unites States-Philippine Relations, 1898-1946 (1997), Epifanio San Juan Jr.’s After Postcolonialism: Remapping Philippines-United States Confrontations, (1999), and Vicente Rafael’s White Love and Other Events in Philippine History (2000). Photo anthologies also celebrated the period, two of which were compiled by Jonathan Best: Philippine Picture Postcards, 1900-1920 (1994) and A Philippine Album: American Era Photographs, 1900-1930 (1998). Philippine theater also made attempts to confront American colonial power in recent years. Several came from the Cultural Center’s Tanghalang Pilipino: among them: Nick Joaquin’s Aguinaldo (1998), El Camino Real (2001), and Luna (2002). Repertory Philippines staged the musical Miong (1998) and Dulaang UP (University of the Philippines) mounted, among others, Anton Juan’s The Price of Redemption (2000) and more recently, Bienvenido Lumbera’s Hibik at Himagsik nina Virginia Lactaw (2002). In 1997, through my company, Tanghalang Ateneo, I staged a rock opera based on perhaps the most well known piece of seditious theater during the American period, Aurelio Tolentino’s Kahapon, Ngayon at Bukas. In 1999, I again drew on American colonialism for inspiration in a production of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, translated into Filipino the National Artist Rolando S. Tinio. Staged in the style of a traditional komedya, I had Portia, Bassanio, Antonio and the rest of the Christians (the bearers of the new order) speak in English while Shylock and his household (the supposed representatives of the old order) spoke in Filipino. The sympathies of the audience, as expected, went to Shylock rather than to Portia and her ilk (for a discussion of the production, see Reyes 1999). What put all these things together, however, was a photograph of an American governor and his Filipino wife, a shot taken in the 1930s (see Figure 1). I found the picture in the files of American Historical Collection at the Ateneo de Manila University. What struck me most about the photograph were the body positions of the officer and the lady. The 3 American official, dressed in formal military clothes was seated in foreground, while his Filipino wife sat behind the official, part of her body hidden from full view. The photograph displayed a relationship between non-equals, but more than this, seemed to typify the ideal marriage that an orthodox or literal reading of Taming would advocate. The Filipina wife, in western dress, was to me a vivid image of the tamed Katherina in this orthodox reading. In turn, the American official, tall, stern looking and resplendent in his white military-like gala uniform, suggested an image of Petruchio, tamer of shrews. It dawned on me then that in my production, Petruchio would be a military officer of the American army assigned to the Philippines, and Katherina, the Filipina woman who would eventually become Petruchio’s wife. Figure 1. The American Official and his Wife (photo courtesy of the American Historical Collection, Ateneo de Manila University) But what would motivate Katherina to marry Petruchio, endure the many tests of obedience, and later “submit” to her husband? The path to an answer, I found, came from an ethnographic account of Philippine rural life, Fenella Cannel’s (1999) anthropological study of power and intimacy in Bicol, a province located south of the Manila, a province with its own compelling history of opposition to American colonial rule. Love and Marriage – Philippine Style Women in Bicol, writes Cannell (1999:29-47), understand two kinds of love. One is “true love” (tunay na pagkamoot), and the other is “learnt love” (pagkamoot na naadalan 4 sana) – the use of the tag-word sana meaning “just” or “only”. The second kind prevails in arranged or forced marriages, and by using the word sana, women can stress that in the course of their marriage, one “just” learns to love one’s husband. These women enter into marriage in filial obedience to their parents’ wishes, and start out their marital life as “reluctant wives” – i.e., in hostile exchange with their husbands on words, food, and sex - - until they achieve natotoodan, a kind of mutual accommodation, or a state of learning to love one’s husband in spite of what has gone before. In my reading of Taming of the Shrew, Katherina undergoes a similar process: she is forced into marriage with a man she hardly knows, and towards the end finds a way to accommodate to a life with the brash Petruchio. She has not become submissive, and neither does she assert matriarchal power. Like the women of Bicol, she would find her voice in a marital relationship. And like many Shakespearean heroines, as Judy Celine Ick argues in Unsex Me Here (1999), Katherina, now the Bicolano woman, would manage to negotiate her own power and identity in the nooks and crannies of a masculine world. Such was brown love. From Brown Love to White Love But Taming is more than just a woman-man thing, a battle of agencies. It is also a battle of structures, metaphor for the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized – in this instance, the relationship between Americans and Filipinos during the American colonial period. And why the American and not the Spanish period? The Spanish governed with the weapons of faith and force. Petruchio does not; in fact, he carries neither a cross nor a sword. The Americans instead ruled with the weapons of love and discipline, inspired by the policy of what President William McKinley calls “benevolent assimilation” and what Vicente Rafael (2000:19-51) re-terms as “benevolent bondage” or “white love”.

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