ENG 201: Week 8: Taming of the Shrew, and Greenblatt, “Wooing, Wedding, and Repenting”
16 Dec.: Apologies for delays in returning reaction essays. By THURS, I swear!
Greenblatt, Ch. 4: Wooing, Wedding, and Repenting Greenblatt is engaging in speculative biography (which he admits to be speculative) grounded in solid literary and historical scholarship. However, that doesn’t mean his speculations are correct; his readings of the plays and the biographical data should not be mistaken for ironclad fact. Greenblatt uses both the plays as evidence, and the lack of evidence regarding the Shakespeares’ marriage to pain an unflattering portrait of the bard’s wife: the shotgun wedding, the underage, reluctant groom, the older, pregnant wife, the hastily arranged nuptials, the utter lack of primary evidence about their marriage: no love letters, no documents other than the will that leaves Anne Shakespeare “the second best bed.” Arguing from absence is difficult. It may be that WS was an entirely private person when it came to his personal relationships, and that he perhaps deliberately refused to mine them for his art and craft of playwriting.
Germaine Greer, Shakespeare’s Wife (New York: Harper Collins, 2008) Greer has a a fundamental insight to impart about the enterprise of literary biography. Someone must be blamed for the author's manifest faults, his silences, his aporias, his resolute refusals to be made transparent, or even visible. Bardolators in particular seem to have singled out Ann Hathaway for calumny, when she is spoken of at all: "The possibility that a wife might have been closer to their idol than they could ever be, understood him better than they ever could, could not be entertained" (1). Greer's project here is to right a wrong; to rehabilitate Ann Hathaway, often at the expense of William Shakespeare.
Greer at several points calls Ann H. a "puritan" and implies she had strong puritan leanings, and connections to the town corporation of Stratford, which is seen as some kind of puritan cabal (she uses this evidence in an attempt to debunk the current vogue for Shakespeare as recusant, and John Shakespeare as Catholic)
For Greer, Will is the absent husband, Ann the serious business woman (even though there's little even circumstantial evidence that she ran a business at New Place or their house in Stratford). She invents a narrative where WS's brother Gilbert helped Ann run a kind of haberdashery business, and thus makes Ann the primary breadwinner for her children, while William was off whoring and playing in London (even though the major evidence seems to be that Shakespeare eventually became wealthy not as a player, or playwright, but rather as a sharer in the theatre).
Greer suggests that Ann sent her "boy husband" away to London to seek his fortune.
Shakespeare's health, and perhaps his mental state were in decline, possibly from syphilis, according to Greer - thus explains why he took no part in public life in Stratford after returning there around 1611.
Taming of the Shrew
Global reactions, questions: Discomfort. This play has probably always made people uncomfortable since the beginning. Samuel Pepys, 1667: called it a “mean play” with some good parts. Reaction of George Bernard Shaw, 1888 (NCE 140) Reaction of A Quiller-Couch (137) Discomfort seems to revolve around the question of how seriously, literally, do we take Petruchio’s domination of Katherine?
Induction
Christopher Sly: refusing to pay for broken glassware, drunk, about to get picked up by the law. The lord and his retinue play a trick upon him and convince him that he is indeed a lord with a wife (who is a boy page dressed up like a woman—ahem, ‘theatre’ everyone!). His own pretentions to greatness: “Look in the chronicles: We came in with Richard Conqueror!” This and other references that are particular to (the Hackets, Wincot) places the action of the play firmly within England: although the Shrew play is set in Italy, the whole thing is framed by English problems, themes and concerns: again, marrying off daughters to suitable husbands; young men who want to marry well.
Everyone will behave solicitously toward him; the lord scripts everyone’s responses: “What is it your honor will command?” . . . etc. The boy dressed as a lady: “. . .if the boy have not a woman’s gift/To rain a shower of commanded tears/An onion will do . . .” What does this say about the way men and women relate to each other generally? Ind.2 Entertainment: “Dost thou love pictures? . . .” High-class renaissance pornography of rape and abduction: Io, Daphne—and Ovidian transformation.
Dream/Reality: Am I a lord, and have I such a lady?/Or do I dream? (Ind.2.66)
The play begins, and we are reminded yet again that what we watch is but a play within a play within a play
Why does Petruchio want to get married, and why to Katharina in particular? I.2.50-76 Cf. Cole Porter’s “Kiss Me Kate” and the song “I’ve Come to Wive it Wealthily in Padua” (NCE 396)
II.1 [See Kaja’s blog comment]: renaming is redefining. Calling her “Kate” is a kind of reinscribing of her identity, a mastering, and allows Petruchio to semiotically redefine her by punning on her name: superdainty cate (a delicacy)—note how she is practically starved and literally deprived of all delicacies in IV.1. Changing her from a “Wild Kate” into a “household Kate”: domestication
18 November [NB: essays returned; 2d essay due Fri] Audiences have had a love/hate relationship with this play, probably since the beginning and down through the centuries. As with other Shakespeare texts, we’re going to find contradictory evidence everywhere we look, especially if we are looking for the playwright’s attitude toward marriage, toward women, toward the violence inherent and potential within patriarchy. We discussed last time that how you view this play depends almost entirely on how you play it. Do we take Petruchio’s domination literally, as parody of patriarchy; do we read Kate’s eventual submission as the result of a kind of brainwashing and torture, or as a kind of collusive performance put on for her husband’s sake. Whether and how we view the Induction, I think, connects closely with this. Christopher Sly is convinced he’s in charge, that he’s the lord of the manor, when in fact he is the opposite.
III.2 The wedding: Why does Petruchio come dressed as a fool; why does he not allow Katherine to have her wedding feast? Cf. III.2.228 ff. Petruchio is there to show how he treats what is his: the abused, foolishly dressed servants, the diseased, ill-equipped horse.
IV.1 1:09 Petruchio enters, berating and abusing his servants. “He kills her in her own humor” P’s speech IV.1.178 ff. Training a hawk to hunt. Hawks are notoriously difficult birds to train; she must learn to “stoop” (180).
IV.3 (~1:25 in video) Kate fights back, reacts to her maltreatment (starvation, etc) The argument over the cap: “My tongue will tell the anger of my heart/Or else my heart, concealing it, will break,/And rather than it shall, I will be free/Even to the uttermost, as I please, in words.” (77-80). “. . you mean to make a puppet of me” (103). Her tongue, and her will, are at issue from the very beginning of the play. Petruchio: “You are still crossing it [i.e. my will] . . . It shall be what o’clock I say it is” (190-92).
IV.5: (1:39 in video) “Petruchio, the field is won” Forces her to call an old man a young woman. Petruchio has rearranged everything: night and day, man and woman. If this were a tragedy, he would wield power of life and death, but as this is a comedy, he has merely arbitrarily redefined language (which is even more disturbing, perhaps: words mean what I say they mean.)
V.2 The wager proposed by Petruchio on their wives. Remember this scene as you read Lucrece. How do they play this scene in the BBC production?
22 November: Language in Taming of the Shrew. We can look at this play as evidence of the place of men and women in Early Modern England if we want to, but there are limits to this approach. Shakespeare more than stops short of the cruelty of some of his source texts. Once notable example of this is a C16 ballad known as “The Merry Jest of a Shrewd and Curst Wife Lapped in Morel Skin for her Good Behavior” from ca. 1550. In this text the “shrewish” wife who will not remain silent is whipped and wrapped in a salted morel’s hide (a morel is a dark colored horse).
What Makes Katherine “curst”? Is it that she doesn’t want to be married, wants to exist outside or be exempt from the dictates of patriarchal culture? Hardly. She wants very much to be married, and is in fact angry that her father is at such pains to see Bianca married, but is making no similar efforts to find her a husband. What, will you not suffer me? Nay, now I see She is your treasure, she must have a husband; I must dance bare-foot on her wedding-day, And for your love to her lead apes in hell. Talk not to me; I will go sit and weep, Till I can find occasion of revenge. Exit KATHERINA [II.1.31-36]
Is she unchaste? (no).Is she violent? (a bit. . . ). She’s “curst” not because of how she behaves, but mostly because of how she speaks. And it is through language, first and foremost, that Petruchio comes to “change” Katharine into “Kate.” Petruchio’s first strategy of remaking Katherine into Kate changing here name, redefining what she is called (II.2). IV.3 : Petruchio sets about arbitrarily revaluing things (the cap, the gown); renaming the time of day (“It shall be what o’clock I say it is”) IV.3.80: Katherine’s last stand of resistance is “in words!” (80). “Belike you mean to make a puppet of me!” (103). IV.5: Sun and moon, man and woman, the basic binary categories of experience are arbitrarily rearranged by Petruchio, and Katherine finally assents to this. The speech in v.2 says basically to give all outward shows of obedience, to make gestures of subservience, “the name of sovereignty” - cf. the Franklin’s Tale
She knows that she was never free to do exactly as she wished, either with her body or will. But what she insisted on was her freedom to say as she wished, to speak her mind. It’s arguable that that was her only freedom. But it is the one freedom that is most important to curtail, and one that Early Modern England placed a high value upon. For the husband’s mastery over the wife’s body was more or less absolute, his mastery of the household property was without question, but the one thing the the culture seemed worried about most was the tongue, the voice, and langauge. Hence the accepted punishments for “curst” women, also known as “scolds” was a kind of literal muzzling: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/29117/29117-h/29117-h.htm#Page_276
[See also images on pp 290-91 of Bedford/St. Martin’s ToS]
But isn’t it just as possible that, having learned to say as her husband and the social context (i.e. the “world” mentioned 26 times or so in the play, the world within which all of us are to some degree constrained, if not trapped)—having learned to speak and act the part of the dutiful, submissive wife, to accede to whims like the cap, to say “whatever you say, dear,” that she will then be afforded more scope to think, more scope to wish, and therefore, more scope to act as she feels and wishes? Again, is it more important for Petruchio to be in charge, or think himself in charge?: “Am I a lord, and have a such a lady?” says Christopher Sly.