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Ryan Farrar, Northern Arizona University the Noble Exposure Of Ryan Farrar, Northern Arizona University The Noble Exposure of Christopher Sly in The Taming of the Shrew The carnivalesque Induction of William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew serves as an exposé of ideological privilege, detailing the shortcomings of England’s rigid social stratum and metatheatrically laying bare how the fiction of playacting mirrors the fictions governing the everyday life of the play’s audiences. Despite the jesting spirit of the Induction, the prank that elevates the lowly tinker Christopher Sly to the rank of a lord challenges the status of birth on which the English nobility staked its claim to authority and luxury. As Sly begins to assume the airs of a lord, however imperfectly, he displays that a person of lower rank can put on the performance of a nobleman and infiltrate the boundaries that insulate the higher ranks and prevent the commoners’ access to wealth and prestige. Prior to the prank, Sly speaks through prose, exemplified in his bickering with the hostess, but after, his speech magically transforms into verse, which is often used by Shakespeare’s noble characters, once the Lord and his men persuade him that he has always lived as a lord. As Wayne Rebhorn asserts, “the Lord’s reidentification of Christopher Sly as a nobleman after a change in dress and situation indicates the arbitrariness of class distinctions.”1 On the stage, Sly mingles with nobles as an equal, both in privilege and in manners. Despite its function as a derisive joke, the presentation of Sly as a nobleman threatens to level the entitlements reserved for the aristocracy as the stage’s imaginary space brings awareness to social inequality through the fantasy that the prank rouses. The subplot’s surface attempt to disparage social climbers can both appease the upper ranks and can cause them worry regarding the relative facility with which it portrays the capacity for social mimicry to occur, particularly through dress. As a plot device designed to appease the 1. Wayne Rebhorn, “Petruchio’s ‘Rope Tricks’: The Taming of the Shrew and the Renaissance Discourse of Rhetoric.” Modern Philology 92.3 (1995): 320. higher ranks, the prank on Sly appears to poke fun at those wanting to reach beyond their station—people scorned by the nobility as “presumptuous”—by reinforcing the sumptuary laws that outlawed their aspiration.2 This interpretation could be a likely one that gratifies the authorities’ sense of separation from commoners and the developing merchant class. As Greenblatt contends, “Conspicuous consumption that was tolerated, even admired, in the aristocratic elite was denounced as sinful and monstrous in less exalted social circles.”3 Yet, for the aristocrats to view the lower ranks as overweening and to discourage their mimicry acknowledges a fear of its transgressive power since, as the play suggests, to dress like nobility is to show how rank is merely defined by costume and behavior as opposed to any authentic virtues passed through bloodlines. More likely than the conservative reading, especially considering Sly’s change from prose to verse, the trick enacted on Sly mischievously ricochets back onto the Lord. The interpellative act that replaces Sly’s identity as a tinker with that of a nobleman itself tinkers with the subject formation process, revealing the artificiality of birth in determining social placement. Before the prank on Sly even occurs, Shakespeare illustrates a discrepancy of dystopian proportions in contrasting the wealth and resources between the Lord and commoners. For instance, there is a disquieting strangeness in the play surrounding the close proximity and juxtaposition of the Lord’s estate with the common alehouse where Sly drinks and the Induction begins. The nearness brings together two exceedingly disparate locations for the purpose of highlighting the gross economic disparity between the two cultures. This stark difference in the 2. David Bevington, ed., Necessary Shakespeare, near lxxx. In his section entitled “Shakespeare’s World: A Visual Portfolio,” Plate 6, Bevington features illustrations portraying the strictures of social dress reflecting proper rank. The illustrations feature “a workman carrying his tools; ‘a presumptuous woman,’ gaudily attired beyond her appointed station; and a ‘gentleman,’ privileged to wear his apparel.” 3. Stephen Greenblatt, introduction to The Norton Shakespeare: Tragedies, eds. Stephen Greenblatt et al., (New York: Norton, 1997), 5. allocation of wealth is a kind of precursor for themes that predominate later dystopian works such as H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1908), and Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974). In these more modern works, where the gulf of wealth is particularly vast, the upper-crusts of society divert affluence and agency away from the lower, struggling classes and hoard it for themselves. The positioning of the estate and the alehouse highlights a similar imbalance in the different livelihoods. While Sly initially strikes audiences and critics as a knavish rascal, like Falstaff, in trying to cheat the hostess out of compensation for ale glasses that he allegedly damages, it is possible that his inability to pay for them extends beyond his pride and may also depend upon his lack of access to monetary resources. When he tries to identify himself to the Lord and his men as a tinker, he admits being in debt for what appears as an irresponsible reliance on drink: “If [the fat alewife of Wincot] say I am not fourteen pence on the score for sheer ale, score me up for the lyingest knave in Christendom” ([Induction.ii.22-24]). While the tinker’s impoverishment may be attributed to laziness and squandering, perhaps prompted by alcoholism, an economic cause presents itself in how Sly’s poverty greatly contrasts with the Lord’s extravagant wealth. Sly seems bumbling and brash, but the reason as to why he came to such a despondent state may not be entirely under his own control. As a dystopian contrast to the tinker, the possessions of the Lord are numerous and exceedingly luxurious. Once Sly passes out from too much drinking, the Lord returns from a hunt with numerous dogs that, given their accolades, are prized purebreds only available to the richest of the populaion. Not only is the Lord surrounded by high-caliber hounds, he has servingmen and huntsmen standing at attention to receive his every instruction and entertain his mischief. While one would expect a gap in funds to exist between the ranks, Shakespeare’s presentation of Sly and the Lord accentuates a tremendous chasm. Thus, while it may be easy to criticize Sly for being irresponsible, since he did break the glasses and refuses to pay for them, the portrait of the estate and the alehouse together shows that the Lord’s grandeur is surfeited to the point that his status may play a part in bereaving the tinker of opportunities to earn an adequate sum of money that would compensate the hostess. The allocation of resources thus appears to overwhelmingly favor the aristocracy. Accompanying the economic gulf are prejudicial attitudes that reinforce the separation of ranks in a fashion that dehumanizes the lower ranks. Upon first encountering Sly, the Lord makes derogatory comments about the tinker that undermine his association with virtuousness as a noble. Rather than sympathize with the man’s poor condition, the Lord is quick to distinguish his greatness from the latter’s baseness as he contemptuously declares Sly to be a “monstrous beast” that “like a swine he lies!” and appraises his appearance in the most negative terms: “Grim death, how foul and loathsome is thine image!” ([Induction.i.33-34]). His disgust reflects the sense of natural superiority that nobles feel they hold over people of lower station. It also exposes the dehumanizing lack of respect and sympathy with which they regard their lowers as grotesque animals. Lacking the money to pay for broken glasses and noticeably drunk, Sly does not strike the Lord as a man with a great deal of self-esteem or personal care, and the tinker’s condition becomes a source of egotistical, classist pleasure for the Lord as the former’s dejection elevates his own estimation. Sly is low, and the occupation of a tinker would be commonly portrayed by a dirty, slovenly appearance; however, Sly’s eventual performance as a lord diminishes the normative superiority of the aristocracy in contradiction of their prejudice. Thus, while the audience may either appreciate Sly as a reflection of their own love for drink and hyperbolic sense of self-importance or disparage him as a degenerate wretch, the Lord’s rush to judgment exposes his character as being discriminatory and callous towards those less fortunate. Prior to his transformation into a nobleman, Sly’s behavior already begins to undermine the prestige vested in the aristocracy. In Sly’s drunken chatter with the hostess, he demonstrates how arbitrarily ideology endows the aristocracy with authority and privilege when he nonchalantly bestows an illegitimate title on himself. He claims Richard Conqueror as an ancestor and while his claim certainly highlights his ignorance and ridiculousness as a commoner, the fact that Sly draws from names commonly associated with nobility at the time diminishes the renown that imbues monarchical heritage. His claim transgresses against the prominent order by commandeering the aristocracy’s signifiers. Sly’s combination of forename and surname effectively points out how kings and men devoutly honored in the upper ranks are neither unique nor inherently eminent figures of history. In appealing to a fictitious lineage, Sly subconsciously shows how any heroic, legendary figure is preserved only through empty, interchangeable signifiers. Defending his lineage to the hostess, Sly may draw sneers and jibes in the way that he seems to invent a noble lineage as he goes, but there is something admirable in how his antic exclamations underscore that aristocratic privilege does not exist as a natural, God- sanctioned order.
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