The Turning of the Shrew: Conversion As a Literary Methodology Ellen Mary Crosby, Department of English Mcgill University, Montreal April, 2016

The Turning of the Shrew: Conversion as a Literary Methodology Ellen Mary Crosby, Department of English McGill University, Montreal April, 2016

A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Arts

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………..3

Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………....4

Introduction……………………………………………………………………....………12

Chapter 1: Another Dowry for Another Play….…………………………………………22

Chapter 2: The Role of the Superficial in Understanding Conversions………………….48

Chapter 3: The Relationship between Conversion and Typology……………………….69

Chapter 4: Writing in a Conversional Mode.….………………………………………....85

Conclusion…………………………………………………...………………………....104

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………108

Crosby 3

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my sincere appreciation of Dr. Paul Yachnin, my mentor throughout this project. Not only has he guided me through this journey, answering questions, providing feedback, and supplying me with any tools or resources I might need, but he was also the catalyst that led me to my subject. If it were not for Dr. Yachnin and the Early Modern Conversions Project, I would not have devised and then proposed this idea of understanding conversion as a literary methodology. Dr. Yachnin and the

Early Modern Conversions Project also provided me with financial support, awarding me stipends amounting to $13,000 over the past two years. The McGill English Department also granted me a $2,000 scholarship last year, for which I am extremely grateful. I am also indebted to the professors in the English Department at McGill University who have helped me to hone my skills as a scholar and influenced my ideas concerning

Shakespeare, early modern England, drama, and adaptation—especially Dr. Maggie

Kilgour, Dr. Erin Hurley, and Dr. Fiona Ritchie. I would also like to thank Dr. Tabitha

Sparks for her encouragement and guidance in the process of writing and submitting a

Master’s thesis. Lastly, I would like to thank my family and friends for supporting me throughout my two degrees and two theses—I will forever appreciate their support and willingness to listen to me talk about texts most of them have never and do not ever want to read.

Crosby 4

Abstract

My research undertakes the rethinking of the modern theory of adaptation in terms of the phenomenon of conversion. I argue that the idea of conversion can be used as a critical methodology for understanding the relationship between source texts and rewritings of those texts. There are various kinds of rewritings; those that bring to the surface latent ideas in their source texts, that change their sources internally and lastingly, are better described as conversions than as adaptations.

Conversion of a different kind was omnipresence in early modern England. Due to the religious vacillations between Catholicism and Protestantism from Henry VIII’s reign to that of James I, the people of early modern England were repeatedly faced with the decision to either convert religions or be persecuted for going against the monarch.

Furthermore, the conversions that took place based on a monarch’s wishes, rather than on an epiphany, forced people to consider whether or not true conversion was possible and what the consequences of forced conversion might be. Given the prominence of conversion in the social and political world of early modern England, we can say that both Shakespeare and Fletcher were writing in a culture of conversion, which influenced the topics and themes of their plays as well as the way they wrote them. The ubiquity of conversion and the anxieties surrounding it manifested themselves on the Elizabethan and

Jacobean stages. Indeed, Shakespeare’s Taming is not simply about Petruchio or about

Katherina, neither is Fletcher’s Tamer only about Petruchio or Maria; rather, these plays are equally concerned with the process of taming, which is another kind of transformation, similar to conversion. It is from these playwrights that I take my lead in exploring the methodology of literary conversion. Crosby 5

I explain precisely why using the word ‘conversion’ is a more fitting term for classifying and understanding certain kinds of rewritings. I use the relationship between

Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew and Fletcher’s The Tamer Tamed as a case study to show exactly how a play can convert another play and thus how conversion can operate as a literary methodology. I will compare this method of conversion to that of adaptation by analyzing the relationship between Taming and the Gil Junger’s 1999 film,

10 Things I Hate About You as well as the relationship between Taming and its eighteenth-century adaptations, John Lacy’s The Taming of the Shrew, Sauny the Scot and David Garrick’s Catharine and Petruchio. By doing so, I will demonstrate the ways in which ‘conversion’ and ‘adaptation’ share some similarities yet are significantly different. I will thus establish the value of conversion as a way of understanding the relationship among certain kinds of literary texts.

Both adaptations and conversions are valuable, but they are distinct, and the differences between these two kinds of texts are significant and are rooted in the religious connotation of the term conversion and the pseudo-scientific connotation of the term adaptation. Adaptation’s connotation seems to suggest some level of objectivity, most likely due to its association with the hard sciences. This assumed objectivity, of course, is not accurate, but that is the connotation the word ‘adaptation’ carries with it. Science is often invoked to imply the present moment or to gesture towards futurity; whereas, in the western world, religion is often associated with the past. Adaptation’s connotation makes it more fitting for texts such as 10 Things, which adapts Taming in order to demonstrate the social milieu of 1999 America. Similarly, Sauny and Catharine and Petruchio tell us about Restoration theatre practices, audiences, and bardolatry rather than changing the Crosby 6 way in which we understand Taming. Tamer, though, fundamentally alters Shakespeare’s text, and calling it a converting text rather than an adaptation lends Fletcher’s play the sense of durability and historical embeddedness that it has earned

I also compare Taming to one of its contemporary plays, The Taming of A Shrew, whose author and date are unknown, making its relationship to Taming—whether both plays were written by Shakespeare or whether one was an adaptation or poor copy of the other—unclear. Through this analysis, I show that Shakespeare’s play, despite having the opportunity to produce answers to particular questions in the same way that A Shrew does, instead creates ambiguities. These ambiguities make Taming open to interpretation, and when Fletcher interprets Shakespeare’s titular shrew as deceitful rather than obedient at the play’s end, he durably and dialogically changes Shakespeare’s play.

Shakespeare scholar Stanley Wells notes that several modern adaptations of Taming feature ironic portrayals of Katherina’s devotion speech, such as Mary Pickford’s famous wink to Bianca and The Widow in her 1929 film adaptation of Shakespeare’s play. Wells says that Fletcher “anticipated” these readings (203). Wells’s choice to use the word

Fletcher saw the potential for interpreting Katherina’s submission speech as a performance and wrote a play in which Katherina is not the submissive wife we are led to believe she will be in Shakespeare’s play. Wells is intuiting something important about

Tamer, that it has a significant relationship with Taming and that this relationship is connected to the way in which several modern adaptations produce the play, but he is not Crosby 7 fully grasping what is taking place. Tamer gives light to the possibility that Katherina is being facetious, ironic, or is outright lying in her submission speech and thusly rewrites

Taming. This Taming is new in that we are given a different character in Katherina, but it is also a returning to the old in that Katherina always could have been and had the potential to be the Katherina that Fletcher shows us. For this reason, Fletcher’s play is not merely a sequel to or adaptation of Shakespeare’s; Tamer converts Taming.

Résumé

Mon projet de recherche vise à repenser la théorie moderne d’adaptation en considérant le phénomène de conversion. Je soutiens que le concept de conversion peut

être utilisé comme méthodologie critique pour mieux comprendre la relation entre le texte d’origine et ses versions ré-imaginées. Il y a plusieurs types de réécritures, et celles qui ramènent à la surface des idées latentes présentes dans le texte d’origine, qui altèrent leurs sources profondément et permanemment, peuvent plus justement être appelées conversions qu’adaptations.

Un différent type de conversion était omniprésent en Angleterre au début des temps modernes. Les vacillations entre le catholicisme et le protestantisme dans ce pays du règne d’Henri VIII jusqu’à celui de Jacques I ont eu comme conséquence que le peuple anglais durant cette période fût souvent mis aux prises avec la décision difficile de soit se convertir à une différente religion, soit se faire persécuter pour le crime d’aller à l’encontre de leur monarque. De plus, les conversions qui eurent lieu durant ces périodes

étaient précipitées par les souhaits des monarques anglais, plutôt que par révélations et convictions personnelles, ce qui força le public anglais à considérer si une conversion Crosby 8 authentique était possible, et à évaluer les conséquences potentielles qu’une conversion forcée pourrait avoir face à l’individu et à la société. Étant donnée le rôle privilégié de la conversion dans les sphères sociales et politiques de l’Angleterre henricienne à jacobéenne, il est possible de dire que Shakespeare et Fletcher ont produit leurs œuvres dans un contexte culturel de conversion, ce qui influença manifestement la rédaction ainsi que les sujets et les thèmes de leurs pièces de théâtre. L’omniprésence de la conversion et des anxiétés qu’elle engendre devenait alors visible sur les scènes théâtrales

élisabéthaines et jacobéennes. Ainsi, ni la pièce The Taming of the Shrew de Shakespeare ni The Tamer Tamed de Fletcher ne s’intéressent uniquement aux personnages de

Petruchio et Katherina; il serait plus juste de dire que ces pièces sont également investies dans le processus d’apprivoisement, ce qui est d’ailleurs un autre type de transformation similaire à la conversion. L’œuvre de ces dramaturges représente un point de départ dans mon exploration de la méthodologie littéraire de la conversion.

Je compte expliquer avec précision pourquoi l’utilisation du mot «conversion» est plus juste pour la classification et l’analyse critique de certains types de ré-imaginations et réécritures littéraires. Je vais utiliser la relation entre la pièce The Taming of the Shrew et The Tamer Tamed comme étude de cas pour démontrer précisément comment une pièce de théâtre pourrait en convertir une autre, et ainsi comment la conversion peut fonctionner à titre de méthodologie littéraire. Je vais comparer cette méthode de conversion à celle d’adaptation en analysant la relation entre The Taming of the Shrew et le film 10 Things I Hate About You de 1999, ainsi que la relation entre Taming et ses adaptations au 18ième siècle, à la version cette pièce par John Lacy, Sauny the Scot or The

Taming of the Shrew, ainsi qu’à Catharine and Petruchio par David Garrick. En ce Crosby 9 faisant, je vais démontrer les similarités et différences importantes entre les méthodes d’analyse de conversion et d’adaptation. C’est ainsi que je compte établir la valeur de la conversion comme stratégie nous permettant de plus justement comprendre la relation entre différents types de textes littéraires.

L’adaptation et la conversion ont toutes deux des qualités importantes, mais les différences entre ces deux méthodes sont aussi considérables qu’elles sont subtiles, car elles prennent racine dans les connotations religieuses de la conversion et des connotations pseudo-scientifiques du terme adaptation. L’adaptation peut évoquer une mesure d’objectivité, ce qui peut être attribué à son association aux sciences dites dures.

Cette objectivité assumée, bien sûr, n’est pas toujours proprement réalisée, mais sa connotation affecte néanmoins les discours au sujet de l’adaptation. Les sciences sont souvent interpellées pour évoquer le moment présent ou encore pointer vers le futur, tandis que dans la société occidentale, la religion est souvent associée au passé. Ces connotations de l’adaptation rendent le terme plus approprié pour des textes tels que 10

Things, qui adapte Taming pour souligner un milieu social particulier aux États-Unis en

1999. Également, Sauny et Catharine and Petruchio nous informent au sujet du culte de

Shakespeare ainsi que des pratiques et audiences théâtrales à l’époque de Restauration monarchique, sans pour autant changer notre interprétation de la pièce d’origine. La pièce de Fletcher, par contre, altère fondamentalement le texte de Shakespeare, et la considérer comme texte converti plutôt qu’adapté la recentre comme texte indélébile et investi dans l’histoire littéraire dont il tire son inspiration.

Je vais aussi comparer Taming à l’une de ses pièces contemporaines, soit The

Taming of A Shrew, dont la date précise et l’auteur restent inconnus. Cette particularité de Crosby 10 la pièce rend sa relation à l’œuvre de Shakespeare mystérieuse, puisqu’il est impossible à ce jour de savoir si les deux partagent le même auteur, ou si l’une était l’inspiration de l’autre. Cette analyse va démontrer que la pièce de Shakespeare crée des ambiguïtés, bien qu’elle ait autant d’opportunités de résoudre des problématiques qu’A Shrew, pièce qui répond à ces mêmes questions. Ces ambiguïtés rendent The Taming of the Shrew plus libre d’interprétation, puisque quand Fletcher représente la mégère de Shakespeare comme étant trompeuse plutôt qu’obéissante au dénouement de la pièce, il change la pièce d’origine de manière dialogique et permanente.

Le spécialiste de Shakespeare Stanley Wells souligne que plusieurs adaptations modernes de Taming sont caractérisées par une présentation ironique du discours de dévouement de Katherina, comme par exemple le célèbre clin-d’œil de Mary Pickford à

Bianca et la Veuve dans son adaptation cinématographique de la pièce en 1929. Wells soutient que Fletcher anticipait ces interprétations (203). En utilisant le verbe «anticiper» pour décrire ce phénomène, Wells en assume trop. Fletcher, en fait, n’anticipait pas ces sortes de mise en scène; il percevait plutôt la possibilité d’interpréter la pièce de

Shakespeare de cette manière, et, en l’exposant, il convertit irrévocablement The Taming of the Shrew en altérant la façon dont le public la comprendra par après. Il aperçut le potentiel d’interpréter le discours de Katherina comme performance et écrivit une pièce dans laquelle Katherina n’est la femme soumise que l’on pourrait le croire dans la pièce d’origine. Wells a bien saisi un aspect important de Tamer, ce qui est sa relation significative avec Taming et que cette relation est bien connectée aux adaptations modernes de la pièce, mais il n’estime pas l’importance ou la nature exacte de cette série de relations. Tamer illumine la possibilité que Katherina est ironique, facétieuse ou Crosby 11 encore mensongère durant son discours de soumission, et ainsi cette pièce réinterprète et finalement réécrit Taming. Cette version de Taming est nouvelle car elle nous offre en

Katherina un nouveau personnage, mais elle est aussi un retour au passé car la Katherina de Shakespeare avait toujours le potentiel d’être la Katherina de Fletcher. Pour cette raison, la pièce de Fletcher n’est pas tout simplement une adaptation ou une suite à la pièce de Shakespeare : Tamer converti Taming. Crosby 12

Introduction

There have been several attempts to define and categorize the rewriting of a text—most books and anthologies focused on rewritings begin by acknowledging the various terms that can be used and the confusion around choosing each one. Daniel

Fischlin and Mark Fortier, editors of the anthology Adaptations of Shakespeare, use the term ‘adaptation’, but maintain, “Adaptation is not the right name for the work represented in this anthology, because there is no right name. There are only labels with more or less currency, connection to history, and connotations both helpful and misleading” (2-3). The first sentence of Ruby Cohn’s Modern Shakespeare Offshoots provides an alphabetical list of the myriad terms used to describe rewritings from

“abridgments” to “versions” (3). Ultimately, Fischlin and Fortier settle on ‘adaptation’,

Cohn chooses ‘offshoot’, and others, such as H.R. Coursen, designate these types of works, ‘translations’. Jennifer Drouin suggests that we maintain the use of the words

‘adaptation’ and ‘appropriation’, which are the two terms used most often—thought

Drouin maintains that because of this they are also often not defined or are misused—but we qualify them. Drouin puts forward the idea of using adjectives to describe precisely Crosby 13 what kind of adaptation or appropriation each rewriting is, which would allow for versatility. I propose a new term that should be used for specific kinds of rewritings: conversion. This is not to say that ‘conversion’ should supersede the aforementioned terms; however, it should be entered into this ongoing scholarly debate as it brings with it its own implications, its own “currency, connection to history, and connotations”. For the sake of clarity, I will use the word ‘adaptation’ as an umbrella term to refer to rewritings that other scholars might call appropriations, translations, offshoots, or versions.

In order to understand why conversion is the most appropriate term for certain rewritings of texts, we must first understand exactly what a ‘conversion’ is and how it is different from other words with similar meanings. The Oxford English Dictionary recognizes three different ways in which ‘conversion’ can be construed and provides various definitions with greater levels of detail to each of these. The three main definitions are “Turning in position, direction, destination”, “Change in character, nature, form, or function”, and “Change by substitution of an equivalent in purport or value”

(“conversion”). Each of these definitions shares an important similarity—they all concern change. ‘Conversion’ and ‘change’ are often conflated due to the possible scope of meanings for the term ‘conversion’ and the relation each of these definitions has to

‘change’. There are distinct differences between them; however, ‘conversion’, is a subset of ‘change’ with specific criteria, whereas a change can refer to any kind of alteration.

A conversion is a turning and a returning, a transformation someone or something undergoes, whether that is a person changing his religious affiliation or the changing of one currency to the same value of a different currency. For a change to be considered a Crosby 14 conversion, it must be two things: durable and dialogical. Things that merely change can plausibly change back with ease, but conversion suggests greater endurance. For example, one might say that the direction of the wind changes over the course of the day, but one would not say that the wind converts its direction because conversion has this connotation of permanence. When using conversion to indicate that one turn[s] in position, direction, destination (conversion), the underlying assumption is that one will not immediately turn again. In this way, conversion, although not necessarily absolutely irreversible, does have a sense of durability.

Additionally, conversions are dialogical. A conversion results from a relationship between at least two persons or objects, and that which is converted must be altered internally. A conversion must be dialogical because it must involve an interaction between the internal and the externalan outside force must be the cause of the conversion, whether intentional or not. Although other forms of change, such as a metamorphosis, also often include two people or objects, the effect that the outside being has on the subject is only physical; for a change to be considered a conversion, it must affect the subjects interiority. A conversion must involve a change in ideas, perspective, or essence, and it can, but does not have to, involve physical change. Metamorphosis, by contrast, creates solely an external change. For example, when Diana metamorphoses

Actaeon into a stag, Actaeon does not change his way of thinking or view of the world, his interiority. In fact, he does not even realize that he has been transformed until he looks at himself in the reflection of a pool:

Poor me! he tried to say, but no words came, Crosby 15

only a groaning sound, by which he learned

that groaning was now speech; tears streamed down cheeks

that were no longer his: only his mind

was left unaltered by Dianas wrath. (III.254-8)

It is clear that Acteon neither realizes that he has been metamorphosed nor relates to his new body once he does. His cheeks are described as being no longer his, and, most significantly, his mind was left unaltered. This transformation is directly opposed to that of conversion in which ones mind is altered despite the fact that ones body can be precisely the same. This transformation is thrust upon Acteon; it is not the result of a dialogical relationship between his internal self and the external world. For these reasons, the transformation Acteon undergoes is a metamorphosis and not a conversion.

By contrast, one of the most emblematic examples of a conversion is Sauls conversion to Paul; in fact, the conversion of Paul is listed as one of the examples of

conversion in the OED: The festival of the Conversion of St. Paul, observed on Jan. 25

(conversion). Saul of Tarsus was one of Jesuss most fervent persecutors, but after Jesus speaks to him on the road to Damascus, Saul is blinded and has an ardent belief that Jesus is the Son of God; he has been converted. Saul becomes a fervent Christian and an apostle, and his name is changed to Paul. After three days, Ananias, one of Jesuss disciples, is instructed to go to Saul and restore his sight. At this point, Sauls transformation is directly opposed to that of Acteonafter Ananias heals Saul, his body is exactly as it was before his encounter with Jesus, but his mind, his perspective, his understanding of the world, has undergone a lasting, dialogical conversion. Acteon, Crosby 16 contrastingly, finds himself in a body that he does not identify as his own, but his mental faculties are the same as before his metamorphosis.

The example of Saul becoming Paul also demonstrates how a conversion is a turning toward something new and a returning to the old, how it is both prospective and retrospective. In the word conversion, the paradox of something being both new and simultaneously improved is realized. Thus, through a dialogical relationship between ones internal self and the external world, something within the internal is stirred or altered in a way that does not create something new out of nothing but rather creates something new out of what was always already there. When Saul undergoes his conversion and becomes Paul, he turns into a new version of himself, but he is also returning to the self that he has always had the potential to be. This archetypal model of conversion—wherein a person is converted—is only one kind of conversion. Paul underwent a conversion through his change in his way of viewing religion and the world around him as it pertained to God. By establishing how conversion is a kind of change that must be both durable and dialogical, I will show how it can be used as the basis for a new literary methodology.

Both conversions and adaptations rewrite a source text, but their effects and objectives differ. A conversion is a returning to the old and a simultaneous turning to something new; it is a reorientation. In this way, a conversion of a text is a very specific kind of rewriting. In the first chapter, I will examine the differences and similarities between the methodologies of ‘conversion’ and ‘adaptation’ by using the relationship between Taming and 10 Things, which demonstrates an adaptation, and Taming and

Tamer, which demonstrates a conversion. Typically, an adaptation manipulates its source Crosby 17 in a way that creates a commentary on the adaptor’s current climate, and, if they are different, the context in which the adaptation is set. For example, 10 Things is set in a contemporary American high school, and provides us with a late-twentieth-century North

American understanding of shrews, taming, feminism, and bardolatry. A conversion does this, too, but it can do even more. Adaptation and conversion share some similarities, but adaptation is limited in a specific way: both conversion and adaptations create a new text that use its source to comment on the time from which the rewriting comes, but a conversion also alters the way we understand the source text. An adaptation is solely prospective while a conversion is both prospective and retrospective—it tells us about the time from which the converting text comes and it goes back to the source text and alters it deeply. Fletcher’s play was only written twenty years after Shakespeare’s, but from it we get a text that both gives us a sense of the culture whence Fletcher’s play was written and a play that fundamentally changes Shakespeare’s play. From adaptations, we only receive a commentary on the context from which the adaptation comes.

In the second chapter, I will analyze how conversion of a different kind was omnipresence in early modern England. Due to the religious vacillations between

Catholicism and Protestantism from Henry VIII’s reign to that of James I, the people of early modern England were repeatedly faced with the decision to either convert religions or be persecuted for defying their monarch. Furthermore, the conversions that took place based on a monarch’s wishes, rather than on an epiphany, forced people to consider whether or not true conversion was possible and what the consequences of forced conversion might be. Given the prominence of conversion in the social and political world of early modern England, both Shakespeare and Fletcher were writing in a culture Crosby 18 of conversion, which influenced the topics and themes of their plays as well as the way they wrote them. The ubiquity of conversion and the anxieties surrounding it manifested themselves on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stages. Indeed, Shakespeare’s Taming is not simply about Petruchio or about Katherina, neither is Fletcher’s Tamer only about

Petruchio or Maria; rather, these plays are equally concerned with the process of taming, which is another kind of transformation akin to conversion. It is from these playwrights that I take my lead in exploring the methodology of literary conversion.

Furthermore, I will analyze the relationship between Taming and its eighteenth- century adaptations, John Lacy’s The Taming of the Shrew, Sauny the Scot and David

Garrick’s Catharine and Petruchio. This will provide another opportunity to examine the difference between a conversion, such as Fletcher’s play, and adaptations, such as Lacy’s and Garrick’s plays. What is significant about these Restoration adaptations is that they do not merely adapt Taming in order to make it better fit their culture, but they actually alter Shakespeare’s play in order to make it better fit Fletcher’s. This shows that

Fletcher’s play had such an impact on Shakespeare’s that playwrights and audiences alike preferred or at least were accustomed to viewing the shrew in the way Fletcher wrote her.

Additionally, by studying the production history of all of these plays, we can garner that

Fletcher not only converted the titular shrew of Shakespeare’s play but also changed its status from primary source to a prequel of sorts, since it was rarely if ever performed without Tamer and was said to have not been as well liked as Tamer when they were produced together (Munro xvii).

After describing the demonstrable impact Tamer had on Taming, the third chapter will address exactly how ‘conversion’ can be applied as a literary methodology and not Crosby 19 only understood as something humans undergo. I will demonstrate how a text can be converted through its relationship with its audience or with another text. For this to take place, the two tenets of conversion previously discussed are still necessary: there must be durability and there must be a dialogical relationship between the interiority of the text and the persons or other art objects exterior to it. In this case, Fletcher’s play, as a kind of sequel to and rewriting of Shakespeare’s, enters into a relationship with Taming and in so doing, converts it. I explain how an object can undergo a conversion and show that not all objects are capable of being converted, that this is something limited to works of art.

Furthermore, I also demonstrate that not all sequels and rewritings cause their source texts to undergo conversions.

Additionally in the third chapter, I will show how the longstanding system of typology relates to conversion and so has primed us to be able to use conversion as a literary methodology. Typology is the study of the relationship between the stories of the

Old Testament and the New Testament; it is a way of reading and learning signs that create prefigurative entities and our interpretations of them. For example, a typological reading figures Adam as a ‘type’ or foreshadowing of Christ. Typology, however, is about more than metaphors because these kinds of symbols typically exist for the sole purpose of symbolizing. In typology, the type is significant in and of itself—Adam holds his own meaning and is influential in his own right; his presence in the Bible does not exist wholly to foreshadow the coming of Christ. In this way, typology and conversion are related; both are interested in the prospective and retrospective, and both are concerned with something new making us understand a previously unseen but always present facet of something old. By studying the methodology of conversion, we can Crosby 20 practically see how the methodology of conversion can be applied to all kinds of art and literature—religious and not.

This chapter will also show the way in which the people of early modern England were especially primed to read, write, and think in this typological or conversional way.

With the Protestant reformation changing the way in which laypeople interacted with the

Bible and the consistent attempts to Christianize texts from Greek and Roman antiquity in the Renaissance, Joseph Galdon is correct in maintaining that the seventeenth-century reader was “Steeped in this typological way of thinking” (15). As such, it follows that both Shakespeare and Fletcher would be thinking and writing in a conversional mode, which created a space in which Shakespeare was able to write especially conversional art and Fletcher was able to seize upon it.

In the last chapter, I will explain that Shakespeare’s plays are so apt for conversion because of the ambiguities that Shakespeare designs in his plays—such as whether or not

Katherina wants to marry Petruchio or is sincere in her submission speech. I will compare

Taming to the folktales that provide us with both taming plots and the Sly plot and the anonymous play written and produced around the same time as Taming, The Taming of A

Shrew, to show how Shakespeare intentionally creates gaps in order to leave important questions unanswered. By doing so, Shakespeare opens his plays up to interpretation and, consequently, conversion. Furthermore, the ambiguities in Taming as compared to the folktales and A Shrew affect the way in which the audience understands any kind of lesson or message that can be derived from the play. Fletcher’s conversion of

Shakespeare’s play provides one way of understanding Taming, and whether or not there Crosby 21 still remain other interpretations, Fletcher elicits this one from of the ambiguities in

Shakespeare’s play, and as a result, Taming has been irreversibly changed.

‘anticipated’ assumes too much. Fletcher did not anticipate these kinds of stagings; rather, he saw the possibility of this kind of reading in Shakespeare’s play and exposed it, which irrevocably converted Taming and the way audiences would view it thereafter. He saw the potential for interpreting Katherina’s submission speech as a performance and wrote a play in which Katherina is not the submissive wife we are led to believe she will be in Shakespeare’s play. Wells is intuiting something important about Tamer, that it has a significant relationship with Taming and that this relationship is connected to the way in which several modern adaptations produce the play, but he is not fully grasping what is taking place. Tamer gives light to the possibility that Katherina is being facetious, ironic, or is outright lying in her submission speech and thusly rewrites Taming. This Taming is new in that we are given a different character in Katherina, but it is also a returning to the old in that Katherina always could have been and had the potential to be the Katherina that Fletcher shows us. For this reason, Fletcher’s play is not merely a sequel to or adaptation of Shakespeare’s; Tamer converts Taming.

Crosby 22

Chapter 1:

Another Dowry for Another Play

The study of adaptation has become increasingly popular over the past few decades, a fact to which Christy Desmet and Sujata Iyengar attest to the propagation of film studies

(2). There has been a drive to understand the relationship between rewritings and their source texts, how rewritings go about adapting their sources, and what the consequences of these rewritings are for the source, the rewriting, and the fields of literary, film, and drama studies. Across the several books, anthologies, and articles written on the topic of adaptations there has been a persistent problem of naming and qualifying. As delineated in the introduction, terms such as ‘adaptation’, ‘appropriation’, ‘offshoot’, ‘translation’, and ‘version’ have all been used to describe similar texts, and scholars usually go on to create subclassifications within their chosen terms. The purpose of this thesis is not to invalidate any of the other ways of designating rewritings or to seek to impose the term

‘conversion’ across the field: rather I seek to introduce this new term, which refers to very specific kinds of rewritings. In order to understand how the term ‘conversion’ can operate as the key term in a literary-historical methodology and fit into the conversation of rewritings in general, we must first look more broadly at the field of adaptation studies.

Ruby Cohn’s Modern Shakespeare Offshoots is a wonderful resource that enumerates hundreds of Shakespearean rewritings and classifies them into different groups. Cohn uses the term ‘offshoots’ for any kind of rewriting, and then divides this term into three different classes: (1) reduction/emendation, where just some lines are cut or placed Crosby 23 differently; (2) adaptation, in which there are substantial cuts of scenes and lines, alteration of language, and minor additions, but the new text is still relatively faithful to its source text; and (3) transformation, wherein characters are simplified or trundled through new events, there are new characters, and the ending is changed (3-4). Cohn focuses solely on the changes made to the text—how many changes, what kinds of changes—in order to classify these offshoots. Her book is a valuable resource for anyone looking to discover weird and wonderful rewritings of Shakespeare on stage and in film, but it is mainly concerned with reporting the degree of fidelity between each ‘offshoot’ and its source and not why the changes were made or what the consequences of those emendations are.

H.R. Coursen analyzes what he calls ‘translations’ of Shakespearean praxis by assessing the ability of Shakespeare’s scripts to be reformatted into different historical, social, and political contexts. Coursen discusses how plays can be reappropriated to new settings, focusing heavily on the political character of each chosen culture. Coursen asserts, “Unlike other works of art—painting and sculpture, for example—the plays of

Shakespeare permit us to inhabit them in our time and, inevitably, with our time” (22).

This is a wonderful description of what Coursen calls translations and what I call adaptations. Plays allow us to inhabit them via these adaptations that reconfigure the setting of particular plays to fit a specific cultural moment. Coursen argues that we use

Shakespeare’s plays to better understand how our society is progressing: “That so many

Shakespeare films appeared as the millennium was about to swing meant that the films were showing us where we were and were not” (10). In this way, Coursen views

Shakespeare as a kind of tool that the western world has used over the past four centuries Crosby 24 to better interpret where it stands. Many adaptations work in this way—they tell us about the moment from which they come. Their goal is not to tell us about their sources but rather about themselves.

Linda Hutcheon uses the term ‘adaptation’ to refer to these rewritings that Cohn and

Coursen call offshoots and translations respectively. Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation is not limited to Shakespearean adaptations and covers much more than film and television—it also explores adaptations in the forms of video games, pop music, graphic novels, and theme parks, among others. Hutcheon defines an adaptation as “a form of repetition without replication” (xviii). There are three distinct categories of adaptation, according to Hutcheon: (1) “An acknowledged transposition of a recognizable other work or works” by way of a change in genre, medium, or point of view, (2) “A creative and interpretive act of appropriation” that involves reinterpretation and recreation, and (3)

“An extended intertextual engagement with the adapted work” that allows us to engage with the adaptation as an adaptation, as a palimpsest (8). Hutcheon’s classifications are rather different from Cohn’s fidelity-based organization, and, unlike Coursen, Hutcheon does not figure herself as an adjudicator of adaptations. Rather, Hutcheon’s focus is on the result, on the outcome of the creation of each adaptation. Does it reanimate an old story that would be difficult to understand now? Does it help to preserve an oral tale? Or does it demonstrate the way in which content can be severed from form? In this way, A

Theory of Adaptation and this thesis share the goal of answering the question: what is the effect of these rewritings? It is through answering this question that I will demonstrate the way in which ‘conversion’ is the most suitable term for particular kinds of rewritings. Crosby 25

Adaptation studies first found its roots in observing an adaptation’s fidelity, and this method has come under fire, especially in Linda Hutcheon’s book. Hutcheon is adamant that an adaptation is significant as a work of art and not solely as an adaptation, that its merits do not stem from its likeness to its source. She repeats this idea several times throughout her book, maintaining, “an adaptation is a derivation that is not derivative—a work that is second without being secondary. It is its own palimpsestic thing” (9).

Jennifer Drouin aptly points out, however, that the study of fidelity itself is not the issue:

“Fidelity is an essential point of critical analysis precisely because the points of infidelity are where we are most likely to find moments of aesthetic or political contestation…

Attention to fidelity is not the real problem; rather, the problem lies in the assumption that infidelity equates with inferiority, which is not always the case” (50)

Drouin addresses the issues Shakespearean scholars face when discussing adaptation, rightly pointing out, “‘Adaptation’ is a term that many Shakespeareans bandy about, few define, and upon which no one agrees” (42). In “A Theory of Shakespearean

Adaptation”, she outlines the differences she understands between ‘adaptation’ and

‘appropriation’: “Whereas adaptation asks us to examine how Shakespeare is rewritten, appropriation forces us to examine why Shakespeare is rewritten, or, in other words, for what agenda is Shakespeare rewritten and whose interests does his appropriation serve”

(45). This is an important distinction to make. Using this terminology and these definitions, we could say that Cohn is more interested in adaptation, whereas Coursen and Hutcheon want to better understand appropriations, despite the fact that these are not the terms they use themselves. Drouin admits that it would be difficult to have all critics agree on just one set of terms, and she instead proposes an adjectival-based system of Crosby 26 classification, in which “one can always add a new adjective to the list, remaining open to newness while refusing to throw out analytic tools in the quest for inclusivity” (63). She asserts that this is important so that we can compare like works with one another, rather than “throwing everything into a hodgepodge” (60). The adjectival-based system is both clever and simple, and while all of the adjectives Drouin uses precede either ‘adaptation’ or ‘appropriation’ (e.g. theatrical adaptation, cinematic appropriation), I assert that the difference between conversions and adaptations or appropriations is so distinct that it cannot be a made into an adjective to describe the type of adaptation it is. Rather, it warrants its own term, definition, and place within this adjectival-based system equal to the places of ‘adaptation’ and ‘appropriation’. If we are to work within this adjectival system, there should also be theatrical, poetic, or novelistic conversions.

Mark Fortier and Daniel Fischlin explain that they use the term adaptation, not because they think it is exactly the right term, but because it is a better term than most others (2-3). Drouin admits that all appropriations are de facto adaptations, despite all adaptations not being appropriations and that adaptation is a more broadly encompassing word (45). I agree with this elucidation, and so, for the sake of clarity in this thesis, I will simply use the term adaptation to refer to rewritings of a text that I would not classify as conversions, rather than juggling the terms of several scholars simultaneously.

Better understanding the way in which adaptation, under its many names, is interpreted will help to shed light on the differences between it and conversion. An adaptation is focused more on the adaptation itself, the culture from which it derives, than on its source or the source’s culture; it is only prospective. A converting text, in contrast, turns toward something new, the culture from which the converting text comes, while Crosby 27 returning to and durably changing the old; it is both prospective and retrospective. The reason for creating an adaptation is to use a play whose characters, plot points, and setting are already familiar to the audience, and make certain changes to it in order to achieve a storytelling goal. The reason to watch an adaptation is not only to see how it has been adapted but to see how it has been adapted to inform us about us. Theatre is fundamentally mimetic as it is a representation, but the level of mimesis is heightened in adaptations because we are watching a representation of a representation. This amplified mimesis of having a representation of a representation provides us with more insight about ourselves and the way in which we have changed from previous ages and cultures than a production of the source text typically can. There have been dozens of film and theatre adaptations of Taming over the centuries, and analyzing the way in which most of them solely adapt and do not convert Shakespeare’s play will support the reason for bringing the term ‘conversion’ into the dialogue concerning rewritings.

***

10 Things I Hate About You is a 1999-film adaptation of Shakespeares Taming of the Shrew set in a contemporary American high school. In it, Gil Junger takes

Shakespeares play and updates it in a way that makes it more accessible and relatable to modern audiences while simultaneously demonstrating how 1999 America understands shrewishness, Shakespeare, bardolatry, and taming. Considering the drastic changes in setting and the fact that it was not advertised as a Shakespearean adaptation, it is fairly faithful, maintaining the two courting plots in the play and the personalities of the characters. It even keeps or only slightly alters the names of most of the main characters:

Katherina is Katherina although everyone but her father calls her Kat, Bianca is Bianca, Crosby 28

Petruchio of Verona is Patrick Verona, and the name of the town in Italy in which

Taming is set, Padua, is the name of the high school these characters attend.

Katherinas shrewishness, too, is adapted well; Kat is thought of as shrewish because she is a self-declared feminist, is opinionated, outspoken, defiant, and aggressive.

All of these attributes are made more extreme through her comparison to the seemingly meek and demure Bianca. 10 Things opens with such a comparison, but in this film, Kat is not only compared to her sister (who is equally as good as Shakespeares Bianca at feigning modesty) but the general population of women her age. The film opens with the peppy Barenaked Ladies pop song One Week and pans over a sunny Californian landscape before focusing on four teenage girls all smiling, chatting, and dancing to the music in their bright, shiny car. Kat pulls up alongside them in her dirty, old car, wearing dark clothing and a scowl and blasting Joan Jetts Bad Reputation. The song screeches at the four formerly giggling girls, I dont give a damn about my bad reputation, which serves to intimidate the other girls and sets up the Kat/Other Girls dichotomy immediately. This dichotomy is sustained throughout the film, especially when the two sisters are together. When Kat refuses to go to a party, Bianca asks her sister, Why cant you just be normal? (10 Things). It is clear that Kat, like Katherina, is viewed as unlikeable by her peers, and the other characters in the film borrow from Shakespeare and Fletcher as well as update some of the language in order to describe her. Shes called

the shrew and a mewling, rampaging wretch by Michael, and when Kats guidance counselor tries to inform Kat of her bad reputation, she says, You know some people Crosby 29

think of you as, and Kat, borrowing from Fletcher1, not Shakespeare, suggests,

tempestuous? (10 Things). Unfortunately, this is not how the staff member at Padua

High School finishes her sentence and instead tells Kat that shes most often referred to as a heinous bitch (10 Things).

Shakespeare plays a role in this film as the object of love and lust for Kats friend and as a mandatory part of high school education. He is brought up repeatedly by Kats friend, and the way the nerdy Michael (a kind of Tranio figure) is able to get her attention is by quoting lines from Macbeth to her. He then invites her to prom by pretending to be

Shakespeare. The two dress in Elizabethan garb for the prom and dance happily among their classmates who dress in contemporary clothing. Through these two characters, we have the opportunity to view contemporary American bardolatry. In this case, it is what makes a high school student an outcast, someone who is friends with the universally disliked shrew and who would not be asked to prom unless it was by another outcast.

This is ironic since Shakespeare is a mandatory part of every American high school students education. Shakespeare is still popular today, and as a result, high school students are required to read his plays, yet these students are deemed unpopular if they enjoy his poetry and plays.

1 In Tamer, Petruchio is said to have a “tempest” within him (1.1.21), Maria says that she has a new soul for taming Petruchio “Made of a north wind, nothing but tempest, / And like a tempest shall it make all ruins / Till I have run my will out” (1.2.77-9), and Petruchio makes this speech after Maria outwits him once again “women, if there be a storm at sea/ Worse than your tongues can make, and waves more broke / Than your dissembling faiths are, let me feel / Nothing but tempests, till they crack my keel” (4.4.233-6). Crosby 30

Shakespeare is also featured in Kats English class. At the beginning of the film,

Kat expresses her desire for her English class to feature more diverse authors, especially women writers, and her teacher dismisses her. Later in the film, Kats English teacher provides the bard with this introduction: I know Shakespeares a dead white guy, but he knows his shit, so we can overlook that (10 Things). The teacher rejects Kats request to read more from authors who are not simply dead white males, but, based on this introduction, it seems as though he does not value the traditional literary canon filled with dead white males either. Is he a contrarian? Does he take issue with dead white males for their race whereas Kat takes issue with their sex? Or does he simply not like Kat? Any and all of these are possible, especially considering the way in which he demeans Kats feelings of social inequalityhe dismisses her articulate request not to allow the patriarchy to dictate her education by saying,

Kat, I want to thank you for your point of view. I know how difficult it must be

for you to overcome all of those years of upper-middle class suburban white

oppression. It must be tough. But the next time you storm the PTA crusading for

better lunch meat or whatever it is you white girls complain about, ask them why

they cant buy a book written by a black man. (10 Things)

He faces a different kind of social inequality than Kat, and for that reason he belittles her request despite the fact that they both want the same thing: to read texts by diverse kinds of authors. After his speech, the teacher sends Kat to the principals office for pissing

[him] off (10 Things). Kats request to read Charlotte Bronte or Sylvia Plath is not only met with disrespect and antipathy, but it is actually the cause of her being punished. Crosby 31

Later in the film, the class is instructed to read some of Shakespeares sonnets and to write one of their own, and when Kat expresses her enthusiasm for the assignment, her teacher believes that she is mocking him and sends her to the principals office again.

Through her English class, we see how Kat is treated unfairly by her peers and the adults in her life, and we are reminded of the most common way that modern North Americans are introduced to Shakespearemandatory school readings. This film adapts a

Shakespeare play so that it works in a contemporary setting and in these scenes we see how shrewishness, Shakespeare, and bardolatry are understood in a 1999-American high school setting.

Patricks method of taming is quite different from Petruchios, which we can most likely attribute to the fact that a North American teenager could not deprive a fellow teenager of food, sleep, clothes, and her family in the same way Petruchio does with his wife. What Patrick does is more akin to subduing than taming, but it has a very similar effect. Patrick changes the way he acts in order to convince Kat that they would make a good couplehe stops smoking, pretends to listen to a particular kind of music, and tries to be friendlier. While attempting to court her, Patrick assumes that Kat is afraid of him, but she assures him that she is not, which draws similarities between Petruchio and

Katherinas courting in which Katherina repeatedly stands up to Petruchio. So the courting is similar, but the taming is different. Petruchio pretends that he deprives

Katherina of food, etc. out of love, for her benefit, but it is really for his own comfort.

Contrastingly, Patrick does things that Kat likes and he does not, but he does it all for money and his own long-term benefit, at least this is the case at the beginning of the film. Crosby 32

Shakespeare’s entire narrative is adapted so that it can fit into modern America. This film uses Taming, a famous and well-known play by a renowned author concerned with relationships—be they father-daughter, sister-sister, or husband-wife—and updates it to be more relatable to a modern audience. As such, 10 Things is a model adaptation, but it is not a conversion. A conversion does make a commentary on the context from which the converting text comes, but it also changes the way in which one interacts with and understands the original. After watching 10 Things, I may watch Taming and be reminded of the 1999 film, and analyzing the consequences of both texts may reinforce the idea that Taming was the right play to adapt for the basis of 10 Things; however, it does not fundamentally change how I understand Taming.

Both adaptations and conversions are valuable, but they are different, and the differences between these two kinds of texts are significant and are rooted in the religious connotation of the term conversion and the pseudo-scientific connotation of the term adaptation. Adaptation’s connotation seems to suggest some level of objectivity, most likely due to its association with the hard sciences. This assumed objectivity, of course, is not accurate, but that is the connotation the word ‘adaptation’ carries with it. Science is often invoked to imply the present moment or to gesture towards futurity; whereas, in the western world, religion is often associated with the past. Adaptation’s connotation makes it more fitting for texts such as 10 Things, which adapts Taming in order to demonstrate the social milieu of 1999 America. Tamer, though, fundamentally alters Shakespeare’s text, and calling it a converting text rather than an adaptation lends Fletcher’s play the sense of durability and historical embeddedness that it has earned.

*** Crosby 33

The Taming of the Shrew is one of Shakespeares earliest comedies, and in it, we have three plots, all of which Fletcher acts upon in order to convert Shakespeares play.

The three plots include the Sly plot, the courting plot, and the taming plot. The Sly plot is made up of the two induction scenes at the beginning of the play but does not have an end to its story. The most significant aspect of the Sly plot is that it frames the rest of the play as a play within a play. Tamer does not directly engage with the Sly plot in its response to

Shakespeares play, but, as will be discussed in Chapter 4, his lack of a response to it and the plot itself still facilitate the conversion of Taming by Tamer. The other two plots are in the play within the play, and they are both about courting and relationships; Gremios,

Hortensios, and Lucentios attempts at Biancas hand and Petruchios taming of

Katherina. It is these plots with which Fletcher directly engages. He responds to the taming plot by following Petruchio in his life after his marriage with Katherina. Rather than responding to the courting plot as well, Fletcher adapts it. He creates a new, younger sister who is meek and modest, a new handsome young man whom she would like to marry, and a new older, wealthy man who is also courting her and whom she does not want to marry. In this way, Fletcher both responds to and adapts Shakespeares plots, and the way in which he does these things actually converts the play as a whole.

Tamings main plot portrays Petruchios taming of Katherina. Petruchio travels from his home in Verona in order to wive it wealthily in Padua; / If wealthily then happily in Padua (1.2.72-3), which leads him to Katherina, a woman with a large dowry whom all the other suitors in Padua have deemed an unmarriageable shrew. In this comedy, Petruchio does not allow his wife to eat, sleep, or have new clothes and also Crosby 34 threatens to prevent her from seeing her family until she agrees with everything he says and does. He calls this taming. She fights back feistily at first, but eventually gives in, telling her husband that anything he says, she will believe, including that the sun is the moon and an old man is a young maid. In the final scene of the play, Katherina gives a long speech outlining her complete devotion to her husband. This controversial speech, called loving by some and repulsive by others, earns Petruchio the praise of the other men present for doing such a fine job of taming Katherina. Baptista, Katherinas father, is so impressed that in addition to the money Petruchio won for having the most obedient wife,

Baptista gives Petruchio another twenty thousand crowns, explaining that it is “Another dowry to another daughter, / For she is changed, as she had never been” (5.2.114-5).

The end of this play suggests that Petruchio has in fact tamed the curstest shrew

(2.1.302), that Petruchio has won, and Katherina is no longer the obdurate woman she once was. It appears as though Katherina has either been beaten into submission or has fallen in love with her captor and consequently relinquished all her desires to be an autonomous person. In Fletcher’s play, however, Fletcher asserts that neither was the case. Tamer figuratively rewrites Shakespeares play by creating a sequel to it that undermines its finale scene. Fletcher forces us to reconsider Katherinas taming and so her submission speech. In Fletchers play, Katherina has died, and Petruchio is betrothed to a new bride, the meek and modest Mariah. Tamer opens with some of the men in

Padua discussing the ominous future that lies ahead for Maria based on the rough disposition of Petruchio. They additionally remark upon the volatile nature of Petruchio and Katherina’s relationship. They assert that Petruchio was so rough because Katherina was rougher and that she was the dominant one in the relationship: Crosby 35

For yet the bare remembrance of his first wife

(I tell ye on my knowledge, and a truth too)

Will make him start in’s sleep, and very often

Cry out for cudgels, cowl-staves, anything,

Hiding his breeches out of fear her ghost

Should walk and wear ’em yet. (1.1.31-6)

They remark on the manner in which Katherina mistreated Petruchio throughout their marriage, calling her names and making jokes about Petruchios manhood. These comments cause us to rethink Katherina’s final speech in Taming. How could the subservient woman who wished to place her hand bellow her husband’s foot in order to demonstrate her absolute devotion to him and “do him ease” (5.2.179) have then been so abusive to that same husband? Fletcher’s play forces us to question the authenticity of

Katherina’s final speech in Taming and reconsider her skills as a manipulative actor rather than as an obedient wife.

If we take Fletchers description of the tumultuous relationship between Katherina and Petruchio to be true, then in Shakespeares play, Katherina is a shrew who falsifies a conversion to an obedient wife, and in Fletcher’s play, Maria, Petruchio’s new wife, is an obedient woman who falsifies a conversion to a shrew. Taming commences with a group of men discussing how unlucky any man would be to marry Katherina, saying that they would rather “cart” than court her (1.1.55), which Ann Thompson, editor of the New

Cambridge Shakespeare edition of the play explains, means that they would rather “treat her like a convicted prostitute by drawing her through the streets in an open cart” than have any kind of relationship with her (70). In Taming, Tranio anticipates Baptistas Crosby 36 attempts to marry off Katherina by not allowing Bianca to marry until her sister does by saying that Baptista must want to rid his hands of her because she is so curst and shrewd (1.1.172, 1.1.171). These men all agree that they would pity any man who had to wed Katherina. The parallel scene of Tamer, however, portrays another group of gossiping men, and these men all agree that they would pity any woman who had to wed

Petruchio. These men say that if they had to marry Petruchio, they would “learn to eat coals with an angry cat / And spit fire at him” because there would be “no safety else, nor moral wisdom / To be a wife and his” 1.1.25-6, 1.1.29-30). The group of gossiping men in the opening scene of Fletchers play believe that Marias father has done her a disservice by marrying her to such a man as Petruchio. Tranio, one of the characters found in both plays, says in the first scene of Tamer, I pity the poor gentlewoman

(1.1.8).

Clearly, Maria and Katherina are (in)famous for very different reasons, but they are equally aware of their respective reputations, and Maria decides to use hers to assist her cause in taming Petruchio. Marias adopted shrewish behaviour will show the rarer and the stranger in [her] and therefore be more powerful a tool in reaching her objective

(1.2.64). Maria wants to tame Petruchio, make him easy as a child so as not to become

that childish woman / That lives a prisoner to her husbands pleasure (1.2.114, 1.2.137-

9). Maria does not want to [become] a beast / Created for his use, not fellowship

(1.2.140-1). She asserts that she wants to be partners with Petruchio. She wants fellowship from him, not tyranny, and she believes that the way to achieve this is by taming him. Crosby 37

In order to achieve her goal, Maria sheds and dons her gentleness as easily as if it were a piece of clothing. Upon deciding she will tame Petruchio, she declares, I am no more the gentle, tame Maria; / Mistake me not, I have a new soul in me (1.2.75-6), and she immediately changes her attitude, repeatedly calling her sister a wench and an ass and making crude jokes (1.2.81, 87). Over the next several acts, Maria is resolute and strong, but in the final scene of the play, when she feels as though Petruchio has been tamed, she changes her attitude once again just as quickly as she did in the first act: I have done my worst, and have my end. Forgive me; / From this hour make me what you please. I have tamed ye, / And now am vowed your servant (5.4.44-6). Her change is so sudden that Petruchio does not believe her, she must reassure him, Look not strangely, /

Nor Fear what I say to you. (5.4.46-7). Petruchio reassures her that she will never again need her old tricks as he will never give her cause to use them (5.4.52), which is as close as Petruchio comes to promising to be kind and fair to her.

Fletchers play, like Shakespeares, supposedly ends happily with multiple weddings, but given the fact that Tamer casts doubt on the verity of Katherinas conversion in Taming, can we believe that Petruchios taming was successful? Are we able to finish the play believing that Maria and Petruchio will have a happily ever after when, despite Petruchios certainty that he and Katherina would have a quiet life / An awful rule and right supremacy / And, to be short, what not thats sweet and happy

(5.2.108-10), were instead unhappy? Similar to Katherinas final speech, Maria promises her devotion to Petruchio several times in the final scene of the play. Petruchio never Crosby 38

explicitly reciprocates this promise, and celebrates that he [has his] colt again (5.4.88), reminding us of the several comparisons Petruchio made between Katherina and various forms of property, including livestock. Additionally, Tamers final scene shows us the newlyweds first kiss, after Maria asks Petruchio to kiss her: Dare you kiss me?

(5.4.47). The classic line from Taming that inspired a musical, kiss me, Kate (5.2.180), is transformed here when Maria asks Petruchio to kiss her rather than Petruchio demanding it from his wife. Katherina is not in this play, but we are constantly reminded of her through her opposite, Maria, and the ghost of the volatile marriage of Petruchio and Katherina thusly haunts Fletchers comedy.

Katherina never appears in Tamer, and yet she is arguably one of its most important characters. Despite the fact that Fletcher wrote his play as a response to

Shakespeare’s, he omits its titular shrew and only recycles three of Shakespeare’s charactersPetruchio, Bianca, and Tranio. These characters do not greatly change from

Shakespeares play to Fletchers. Petruchio is an obnoxious man bent on having his wife submit to him in both plays, Biancas character follows along the trajectory Shakespeare started her on, and Tranio appears the same in both. The final-scene-Katherina is the character that Fletcher changesshe goes from being called a woman with virtue and obedience (Taming 5.1.118) to one with abundant stubbornness (Tamer 1.1.17)and yet she is the one that is absent in both person and name in Tamer. The bare remembrance of her in this play, however, serves to convert Shakespeares play. A conversion is a change that creates something new while simultaneously returning to Crosby 39

what it always could have beenKatherina was always a loud, opinionated, stubborn woman, so it would seem as though Fletchers play does not convert her since that is exactly how she was viewed. Through marriage, however, Katherina learned how and when to be stubborn, and through this matrimonial change, she learned to use to her advantage those of her qualities that others called flaws. Petruchio was said to have

tamed Katherina in Shakespeares play, but according to Fletchers, she never relented, and she was just as fierce during their marriage as she had been during their courtship.

This suggests that Petruchios taming school was a failure, that she never changed.

Seemingly paradoxically, Katherinas lack of a conversion is what causes the conversion of her play.

***

Petruchio remains the same, raucous, controlling, domineering man he was in

Taming when he appears in Tamer. Lucy Munro, editor of the New Mermaids edition of

Tamer, acknowledges that some critics believe Fletchers Petruchio is weaker than

Shakespeares, but this is the point. According to Munro: Throughout The Tamer Tamed

Petruchios reputation as the shrew-tamer par excellence is constantly invoked, but Maria refuses to endorse it (xiii). In Shakespeares play, Petruchio is called a devil, a very fiend (3.2.145), and in Fletchers he is called a dragon and a monster (1.1.7, 1.2.104).

Tamers gossipers, however, give us some mixed messages. Sophocles, Moroso, and

Tranio say that Petruchio was still in his first marriage and that he has a long-since- buried tempest within him as a result (1.1.37, 1.1.21), which suggests that Katherina Crosby 40

tamed Petruchio. If this is the case, if he was able to remain still throughout his marriage to Katherina, why is it that they think he will unleash this storm on his new wife who has a reputation for being quiet and agreeable? They make terrible predictions about

Marias future with Petruchio as a husband:

His very frown, if she but say her prayers

Louder than men talk treason, makes him tinder;

She must do nothing of herself, not eat,

Sleep, say Sir, how do ye, make her ready, piss,

Unless he bid her. (1.1.41-7)

Not only do they think Petruchio will rail at Maria, but Sophocles, a man whose name is associated with both wisdom and drama, wagers that Petruchio will bury [Maria] within the first three weeks of their marriage (1.1.47).

While Shakespeares play ends with a wager on the subservience of the mens wives, Fletchers opens with a wager on the destructiveness of a husband. The bet in

Shakespeares play comes at the conclusion and demonstrates the marvelous job

Petruchio has done of supposedly taming Katherina, and the bet in Fletchers play sets the stakes for the taming plot that will unfold. The meeker Maria is, the greater an effect her change of her attitude will have; likewise, the more these men inveigh Petruchios character, the more impressive his taming will be. Despite the at times contradictory and extremely negative introduction that Fletchers gossipers provide for Petruchio, he does not appear to be very different from Shakespeares Petruchio upon his first appearances in Crosby 41

the playhe remains confident, witty, and boisterous. Fletcher reuses this character for the fun of watching a man who just claimed to have tamed a woman be tamed himself, to watch the heros fall. He does not, nor does he need to, greatly adjust or change this character. He merely needs a large target, a swaggering woman-tamer at whom to poke fun, and he finds one readily made in Shakespeares Petruchio.

Similarly, Biancas character at the beginning of Taming appears to be vastly different from the Bianca we meet at the outset of Tamer; however, throughout

Shakespeares play, it is made increasingly clear that Bianca is not the obedient woman she is thought to be. Lucentio falls in love with Bianca upon first seeing her because of her demure appearance. Tranio is happily entertained by the bickering and name-calling taking place between Katherina and Hortensio and Gremio, but Lucentio is preoccupied with Biancas silence, for in it he sees Maids mild behaviour and sobriety (1.1.71). The

Bianca we see in the first two acts of the play is sickeningly goodshe asserts that she will humbly subscribe to her fathers will (1.1.81), and that she knows [her] duty to

[her] elders well (2.1.7). She is a perfect foil to her sistershe is quiet, she says she does not mind doing whatever her father wants of her, and she appears weak when faced with

Katherinas wrath.

In the latter half of the play, however, when we have the opportunity to see

Bianca without the company of her father and sister, she has a greater sense of agency; she is cunning, authoritative, and obstinate. When the disguised Lucentio and Hortensio are arguing over who will be first to tutor Bianca, she proclaims: Ill not be tied to hours nor ppointed times / But learn my lessons as I please myself (3.1.19-20). Thompson Crosby 42

notes, Biancas lines here echo those of Katherina in the first act, What, shall I be appointed hours? (1.1.103). Moreover, it is at this point in the play that Bianca begins to use her cunning to carry out a secret relationship with Lucentio. They come up with a plan together to get married without her father truly knowing whom she is marrying.

Bianca must feel the need to operate in secret because her father states that she will not choose her husband. Despite the fact that Baptista appears to favour Bianca and feels the need to create a ruse to help ensure that Katherina will get married, he says that Katherina will get a say in whom she marries and makes no such promise to Bianca. Despite these proclamations, Baptista marries Katherina to Petruchio based on what Petruchio, rather than Katherina, says. Meanwhile, Bianca, who said she would humbly submit to her fathers will and whom Baptista had not planned to allow to pick her own husband, marries the man of her choosing without her fathers knowledge or consent. In this way,

Bianca shows that she is capable of illicit behaviour, such as deliberately tricking her father, which causes us to question the sincerity of her professions of subservience in the first two acts of the play.

Furthermore, in the final scene of the play, Bianca engages in bawdy repartee that

Ann Thompson describes as out of key with her image as the stereotype romantic heroine Lucentio makes her out to be in the first scene of the play (155). And later in the final scene, the husbands bet on whose wife is the most obedient, and Bianca fails the test and her husband. She does not come when she is called, and when Katherina brings

Bianca and the Widow to the men, Bianca does not apologize for having ignored her summons and calls Lucentio a fool for having wagered on her obedience (5.2.129). Crosby 43

Due to the lack of stage directions in Shakespeares plays, we cannot know how

Biancas character in the first half of the play was portrayed, but in many modern productions of Taming, the difference between Biancas character from the beginning to the end of the play is minimized because Bianca is shown to be manipulative from the outset. Directors will often have Bianca cry louder about the hurts Katherina causes her when her father is present and stick her tongue out at Katherina behind her fathers back, which serve to show that Bianca is not simply the honest, dependent girl she pretends to be. This kind of portrayal of Bianca makes her seem as though she wants to have control over her own life as much as her sister does, but she goes about obtaining that control in an antithetical manner. Where Katherina loudly and angrily demands the right to make her own decisions, Bianca avoids the possibility of being denied what she wants by not asking for it. Instead, she manipulates situations and people to her will. In the end,

Katherina does not get to choose the man she marries and Bianca does, and all the while

Katherina is insulted while Bianca is praised.

Whether we are to understand Shakespeares Bianca as a manipulative actress or as a wholly obedient daughter who suddenly begins to lie and plot and eventually becomes a disobedient wife, it is clear that Bianca matures into a clever, self-serving woman, and in Fletchers play, this maturation continues. Fletchers Bianca spurs Maria on to tame Petruchio and helps her with her schemes from conception to completion.

Taming Petruchio, or men in general, is something that Bianca feels passionately about.

When Maria decides that she will tame Petruchio, Bianca salutes and encourages her:

All the several wrongs Crosby 44

Done by imperious husbands to their wives

These thousand years and upwards, strengthen thee!

Thou hast a brave cause. (1.2.122-5)

This speech suggests that Bianca has suffered wrongs done by imperious husbands, and that she believes that gender-relations need altering. As a result, Bianca takes this taming incredibly seriously, so seriously that she is referred to as Colonel Bianca by the men in

Fletchers play (1.3.70).

Part of the reason Bianca is so steadfast in her role as Colonel of this taming project is that she wants more from this rebellion than simply to tame one womans husband. Bianca sees herself on a larger quest for womankind. She compares herself to

Aeneas, a heroic figure from antiquity, and this comparison is especially fitting considering the lack of romance in Virgils The Aeneid. Virgil created a standard by which epics were thereafter measured, but in his epic he left no room for love relations.

Early modern English writers such as Edmund Spenser in his Faerie Queene attempted to reconcile the idea that an epic figure could be partially motivated by love rather than being hindered by it, but Bianca relates to Aeneas and not one of Spensers characters precisely for the lack of romance in Aeneass quest, making her a unique early modern character. Unlike Aeneas who finds love after he founds Rome, Bianca does not want any kind of romance in her life at all. Maria wants to tame Petruchio so that she can have a happy marriage with him, but Bianca would rather live like a race of noble Amazons, /

Well root ourselves and to our endless glory / Live and despise base men (2.1.37-9).

From the meek (but possibly still manipulative) Bianca in the first act of Shakespeares Crosby 45

play to the strong and willful woman in Fletchers, Bianca undergoes a conceivable progression, but it would be wrong to call this development a conversion. A conversion requires a substantial change, and Bianca appears to have evolved naturally over time from undermining her father to wanting to shirk the company of men altogether.

Although we can see the natural progression that occurs in Bianca over the course of these plays, we do not see the development of her relationship with her husband in

Tamer. He, along with several other characters from Shakespeares play, does not appear in Fletchers. Instead, new characters are introduced who function in extremely similar ways to those who already shared this fictional world with Petruchio, Bianca, and Tranio.

Lucentio, Gremio, Hortensio, Baptista, and Grumio are absent from Fletcher’s story, but

Roland, Moroso, Sophocles, Petronius, and Jacques respectively replace their

Shakespearean counterparts. Because of the mass marriages that ended Taming and the need for comedies to end in weddings, a new lovesick young man attempting to attain the favour of a new desirable young woman are necessary additions to retain a secondary courting plot. Roland and Livia play these roles that act as parallels to Lucentio and

Bianca. This secondary plot is certainly similar to that of the Lucentio/Bianca plot of

Shakespeare’s play, both involving scheming and secrecy and culminating in a marriage to which the father of the bride has not explicitly consented. Similarly, Baptista, the father of Bianca and Katherina, is replaced by Petronius, the father of Livia and Maria.

Maria and Livia must have their own overbearing father in order for this play to make sense. Petronius wants to control his daughters behaviour just as much as Baptista does his, and he is just as easily duped. In this way, the secondary plot of Fletcher’s play is Crosby 46 more of an imitation of, than a sequel to, Shakespeare’s, so the addition of these characters is necessary as the same characters cannot play out the same plot again.

Bianca remains in Tamer, not to play the meek maid, but to play the rebel, and her husband, Lucentio, is absent. Without Lucentio or Hortensio from Taming, Petruchio is the only married man throughout the majority of the play, taking away the camaraderie and air of superiority he had at the end of Taming when he was viewed as the best husband among a group of married men. In Tamer, Petruchio still speaks, brags, and complains to a group of men, but he has to deal with his and Lucentio’s wives on his own while the others are preoccupied with wooing and other sports. Petruchios friend in the group of gossiping, competing, and betting men in Taming is named Hortensio, but in

Tamer, there is no Hortensio, and Petruchio instead has a friend named Sophocles.

Sophocles does not contend for Livia’s hand, which differentiates him from Hortensio, who was wooing Bianca. This distinction, however, would have worked for Fletchers play if he had chosen to retain Hortensio as a character since Hortensio marries the

Widow at the end of Taming and therefore would not be competing for Livia.

Sophocles’s name could easily be changed to Hortensio, and the play would make just as much sense and have an even stronger connection to Shakespeares. Similarly, the old, rich, ill-favoured suitor, Moroso, could easily be named Gremio, and Petruchios comedic servingman Jacques (a name of another Shakespearean character) could instead be called

Grumio. Some modern theatre companies that produce these two plays one after another do change the names of these characters and so have Hortensio, Gremio, and Grumio in both plays without Sophocles, Moroso, or Jacques. The same actors then play these men throughout the course of the two plays. Despite the fact that this works quite smoothly, it Crosby 47 is not what Fletcher wrote. Fletcher could have simply used Shakespeare’s character names for all of the corresponding characters, but he chose not to. Although Fletcher was not as experienced or renowned as Shakespeare, he was a talented seventeeth-century playwright, and his decision not to keep the majority of Shakespeares characters must have been purposeful. His use of Petruchio, Bianca, and Tranio, the plot he wrote, and the title he chose for his play clearly show that he intended for his play to be in dialogue with

Shakespeares; however, his choice to create new but similar characters suggests that he did want to create some distance between his play and Taming and perhaps between himself and Shakespeare.

Regardless of any distance Fletcher may have wanted to establish between his play and Shakespeares, he created a narrative that did not simply adapt Shakespeares play but that converted it and audiences understanding of it thereafter. He does not simply adapt the plots of Taming in order to make it better reflect 1611 England but to bring to the surface latent aspects of the play. By doing so, he lastingly and dialogically changes the way Katherina, the final scene, and the play in its entirety can be understood.

Crosby 48

Chapter 2:

The Role of the Superficial in Understanding Conversions

There are several different kinds of changes that take place in Taming, and change, of course, has always been ubiquitous, but Shakespeare was living in a culture bombarded with highly visible changes with incredibly high stakes. The sixteenth century was a time of religious turmoil in England. One morning, an Englishman could wake up in a Catholic country with a Catholic monarch, and the next he could wake up in a

Protestant country with a Protestant monarch. The two religions were touted as irreconcilable, and a monarch expected their citizens to practice the same faith he or she decreed. As a result, when a new monarch took the throne and declared that England would follow a new religion, citizens had to make an incredibly important decision: would they remain faithful to the religion they believed in and, if caught, be executed as a martyr or would they genuinely attempt to understand the new religion and convert to it?

Shakespeare did not experience this particular environment firsthand, but his parents did.

John Shakespeare was born 1531, which means that he was alive during the

Catholic and Protestant reigns of Henry VIII, the Protestant reign of Edward VI, the

Catholic reign of Mary I, and the Protestant reign of Elizabeth I. Henry VIII’s decision to change the religion of England from Catholicism to Protestantism was largely motivated by his desire to get an annulment from his first wife, Catherine of Aragon; his decision was more political than it was theological, so his version of Protestantism still upheld many Catholic values that other forms of Protestantism on the continent had shirked. The

Protestantism instated over the course of Edward’s short reign by his councilors—as Crosby 49

Edward was too young and too sickly to rule on his own—was quite different from that of his father’s. The most significant change took place when Edward died and his oldest half-sister Mary took the throne (after usurping Lady Jane Grey, who spent only nine days as Queen). Mary was a staunch Catholic, like her mother, and so overturned all of the Protestant doctrines that had been in place for twenty years. She is colloquially referred to as Bloody Mary because of the hundreds of Protestant martyrs who were executed on her orders. When she died five years later, her younger half-sister, Elizabeth, succeeded her. Elizabeth I reigned over England for the majority of Shakespeare’s life, and she reinstated Protestantism as the religion of England. James I, Elizabeth’s successor, was also Protestant, so Shakespeare had the good fortune of living without the constant oscillation with which his father grew up. Shakespeare was living in the aftermath of that experience, though, so he still would have seen the toll it took on the country and its people. He also would have experienced firsthand the anxiety that

Protestants in England experienced when Mary Queen of Scots, a Catholic, laid claim to the English throne. Nothing came of this threat—Mary was imprisoned and later executed for treason—but the idea of another change of state religion was certainly a worry for the people of early modern England. Additionally, Shakespeare was living during the time of widespread anxiety concerning Jewish converts abroad and in England itself.

The year that Taming was published, 1594, was also the year that Elizabeth I’s royal physician was hanged, drawn, and quartered for high treason; he was accused and convicted of attempting to poison the Queen, and his race and religion were allegedly the motivating factors for his attempted crime. Doctor Rodrigo Lopez was a converso from Crosby 50

Portugal. ‘Converso’ was the name given to Jews who converted to Christianity and to descendants of Jews who converted to Christianity. Lopez’s father was of Jewish descent, but he was a Catholic, and he raised Lopez as a Catholic. Lopez’s father was a royal physician in Portugal, and Lopez followed in his father’s footsteps. In the Portuguese

Inquisition, Lopez was accused of secretly practicing Judaism and was exiled from

Portugal. He moved to England in 1559 and shortly thereafter converted from

Catholicism to Protestantism. Edward I had issued an edict in 1290 that expelled all Jews from England and made it illegal for them to be in the country. If Lopez was admitted into the country, it must have been because he was deemed a converso rather than a Jew.

One who was of Jewish descent but practiced Christianity would never be called

Christian, only a converso. Janet Adelman explains:

For whatever theological category those conversos fit into, whether or not

they were thought to practice secret Jewish rites, they were typically

described not only in terms of their ‘sect’ (religious belief) and their

‘nation’ (in this context, usually the country in which they had most

recently lived) but also in terms of their ‘descent’; and the genealogical

language of ‘descent’ shades into what would become the newer language

of ‘race’. (9)

This distinction between religion, nationality, and geneology demonstrates the way in which the English continued to distinguish between people of Jewish descent and themselves despite the religious conversion they had undergone.

Lopez gained repute and notoriety over the 35 years that he lived as a Protestant in England; however, he would always be known as a man of Jewish descent. Despite Crosby 51 this, he became the physician to Elizabeth’s most trusted advisors and then to the Queen for 13 years. The Earl of Essex, who would later be accused, convicted, and executed for conspiring to murder the Queen himself a mere six years later, accused Lopez of high treason. Lopez’s last words were reportedly, “I love the Queen as well as I love Jesus

Christ” (Green 3)—a statement that led those who already believed him to be a secret

Jew and a traitor to feel even more resolve in their opinions of him.

This incident—the accusation and eventual execution of the Queen’s physician for conspiring to murder her—was infamous. After he was executed, allusions to or representations of Lopez appeared most notably in Game at Chess, The Whore of

Babylon, Faustus, and Lenten Stuff. Several scholars believe that this sordid affair spurred Christopher Marlowe to write The Jew of Malta and perhaps even Shakespeare to write The Merchant of Venice, both of which portray evil, villainous Jews. The feeling toward conversos, especially after this event, was one of anxiety and mistrust. Janet

Adleman explains that conversos were particularly dangerous because their Jewish race was not immediately visible in the same way that a Moor who converted would still be visibly of Moorish descent: “Moriscos, or converted Moors like Othello, were far less threatening to category stability than their Jewish counterparts. Since Morocco’s difference is secured by his complexion […] perhaps he can be allowed to make the claim of blood-sameness: he can, after all, do so without compromising visible racial difference” (16). Moriscos were visibly different, so there was less anxiety surrounding identifying them.

There were two main fears; the first was not knowing if a converso truly had converted to Christianity and was still secretly practicing Judaism. The second was not Crosby 52 knowing who was a converso because of the physical similarities between Jews and

Anglosaxons. In theatre, a difference between Jews and non-Jews was created to ensure the Jewish characters were always easily identified. A Jewish character in an early modern play wore a large, false nose and bright red hair. Outside of the theatre, the distinction was not as easy to make. It was difficult for early modern English people to discern who sitting beside them at Church was of Jewish descent and who was a ‘pure’

Christian, which many early modern English people feared: “conversion threatened to do away with the most reliable signs of difference, provoking a crisis in a very mixed society obsessively conceded with the purity of lineage” (Adelman 11). As a result, those who converted to Christianity or even those whose ancestors converted long ago and were raised Christian, were always relegated to the classification of ‘converso’.

Adelman shrewdly asserts, “despite the promises of a universalizing Christianity, the difference between Christian and Jew was too important a part of the mental map to be given up lightly” (11). The inability to be able to identify Jewish conversos or those who may have feigned upholding one sect of Christianity when in actuality they were secretly practicing another was a cause for serious concern in early modern England.

Even more worrisome was the idea that one could be a law-abiding citizen and yet could be misidentified as a pretender. Shakespeare makes public people’s ineptitude of accurately judging people by their appearances in Taming. He does not explicitly relate it to religion, but the uneasiness surrounding the inability to know one’s religious affiliation with absolute certainty manifests itself in this play in the multiple instances of cross- dressing that take place. Crosby 53

All of the changes that occur in Taming are superficial; none of them are true conversions. They all take place on surface level, and the reason that most of the other characters are duped by these changes is because of their bias towards thinking that one’s appearance denotes one’s person. This is a theme in Shakespearean comedies, especially those that involve cross-dressing. In As You Like It, Duke Senior, Orlando, and Phebe emphasize the importance of sight in the understanding of truth:

DUKE. If there be truth in sight, you are my daughter.

ORLANDO. If there be truth in sight, you are my Rosalind.

PHEBE. If sight and shape be true,

Why then, my love adieu! (5.4.112-115)

All three of these characters understand vision as a source of empirical evidence, which suggests that when Rosalind appears as Ganymede, they believe her to truly be

Ganymede. This awareness suggests that upon learning that Rosalind in disguise is

Ganymede, their understanding of gender as a concept existing in a dichotomous model is threatened. Scenes such as this lead Bruce Smith to assert, “Shakespeare’s comedies often invite the conclusion that masculinity is more like a suit of clothes that can be put on and taken off at will than a matter of biological destiny” (3), and this analogy of masculinity as a suit of clothes is reified in Rosalind’s ability to pass as a boy when she cross-dresses.

In the play within the play of Taming, status appears to quite literally be a suit of clothes that can be put on and taken off at will. Tranio, after all, “is changed into”

Lucentio when he dons Lucentio’s jacket. The only character that suggests otherwise is

Petruchio, but his motive for encouraging Katherina to disregard the significance their Crosby 54 society puts on one’s apparel is disingenuous; his controversial attitude toward fine clothes can be construed as merely one of his methods of taming. The gender cross- dressing that takes place in plays such as As You Like It and Twelfth Night work toward demonstrating the fluidity of gender; the class cross-dressing in Taming demonstrates the significance of clothing within the realm of the play within the play, while simultaneously showing the ease with which this significance can be countermanded for the characters of the Sly plot and the audience. As such, Taming reminds its audiences that there may not always be truth in sight.

Cross-dressing is a normal occurrence in Shakespearean comedies, but in Taming, the majority of cross-dressing that takes place is class cross-dressing rather than gender cross-dressing. There is one instance of gender cross-dressing in the Sly plot. The Lord asks his page, Bartholomew, to dress as a lady and pretend to be Sly’s wife. As much as

Bartholomew’s gender cross-dressing complicates the role of women in the play, especially that of Katherina, which will be discussed in greater detail in the Chapter 4, the several instances of class cross-dressing further problematizes our understanding of what constitutes a genuine change in this play. In the Sly plot, Sly is dressed up as a Lord and led to believe that he is of a higher class than he is. There are other characters who also dress up as someone of a different class, but they all do so intentionally and revert back to being themselves without issue. Lucentio, Tranio, the Merchant, and Hortensio, all disguise themselves at some point in the courting plot, but the cross-dressing of these characters does not change the outcome of the play in any way, which is evidenced by the lackluster responses each person is met with when he reveals that he was in disguise.

Hortensio’s foray into playing the role of a music teacher is so inconsequential that he Crosby 55 does not even have a reveal, he simply stops appearing on stage as Bianca’s music instructor and instead goes to visit Petruchio and Katherina as himself. The other characters all have reveal moments, but none of these have a significant effect on the plot.

Lucentio dresses up as Cambio so that he can pretend to be a Latin tutor for

Bianca and have the chance to get to know her. Tranio dresses up as Lucentio so that he can formally court Bianca for his master. Tranio and Lucentio convince a travelling merchant to play the part of Lucentio’s father, Vincentio, so that he can vouch for

Lucentio (who is being played by Tranio) in the marriage agreement with Baptista.

Baptista agrees to the marriage between Lucentio and Bianca, and although he does this under the mistaken belief that Tranio is Lucentio, he agrees based on Lucentio’s name and money, not on Tranio’s personality. Because of this, there is really no reason for

Lucentio and Bianca to marry in secret, yet they do. Lucentio’s father is perfectly fine with the match between his son and Bianca once he finds out about it, so they only had to use the Merchant because they did not know if or when Vincentio would arrive in Padua.

All of this dressing up was not because Lucentio and Bianca found themselves in a

Romeo and Juliet-type situation where their parents forbid them to be together—as a result, when everyone’s identities are revealed, no one is upset, and no plot is changed.

Lucentio and Bianca are married, a match about which both Baptista and Vincentio are perfectly happy.

These instances of class cross-dressing do not bear any significance on the plot of the play, but they are included because they show the ease with which one can change into or at least impersonate someone else. After hatching his plant to woo Bianca, Crosby 56

Lucentio tells Biondello that Tranio is dressing up as him and he is dressing as someone of a lower class because he has killed a man. This lie does not include a reason for why he would commit murder, but Lucentio invents this fiction in order to explain to

Biondello that, as a result, “Tranio is changed into Lucentio” (1.1.227). Like the cross- dressing, this lie has no effect on the plot—Lucentio presumably could have told his servant that he was pretending to be Bianca’s music teacher in order to court her, but instead he fabricates this story. Biondello accepts the story of Lucentio killing a man just as Baptista accepts that Lucentio is Cambio and Tranio is Lucentio; in this subplot, deceit is common and easily carried out.

Immediately after this exchange between Lucentio, Tranio, and Biondello, the

Lord interrupts to ask Sly, who does not seem to be paying attention, if he is enjoying the play. The emphasis put on Tranio “changing” so easily by simply exchanging coats with

Lucentio as well as Biondello trusting in Lucentio’s falsehood is made farcical when watching the Lord dressed in servant’s clothes speak with Sly dressed in the Lord’s clothes. Sly does not pass as a lord. His language, his desires, and his ignorance prevent him from doing so. Tranio, however, does pass. While Tranio-as-Lucentio eloquently proclaims his right to woo Bianca alongside Gremio and Hortensio, Gremio remarks:

“this gentleman will out-talk us all!” (1.2.241). Clearly, Tranio is able to speak in a way that is expected of one of Lucentio’s station. The idea that Sly, who clearly does not pass, is sitting in the Lord’s clothing watching this play in which several characters pretend to be of a different class and does not seem to question the situation in which he has found himself, makes him an even sillier character and also undermines the cross-dressing that occurs in the taming and courting plots of the play. Crosby 57

Furthermore, Tranio, despite being outed as the son of a sail-maker by the fifth act

(5.1.60), continues to be treated as a gentleman. He sits at the table with Baptista,

Hortensio, Petruchio, and Lucentio at Lucentio’s wedding feast, and is referred to as

“Signor Tranio” (5.2.49). This is reminiscent of the way the Duke in Twelfth Night continues to refer to Viola as Cesario even after he has discovered that she is Viola and after he has asked her to marry him:

Cesario, come,

For so you shall be while you are a man;

But when in other habits you are seen,

Orsino’s mistress, and his fancy’s queen. (5.1.371-374).

Duke Orsino evidently views gender as a performance to the degree that he asserts that

Viola is still a man while she is in her “masculine usurped attire” (5.1.242), but will be a woman when she is “in other habits”. Gender is clearly just a matter of appearances for the Duke, and this disregard for the significance of anatomy in the classification of persons as either male or female is similar to the way in which the characters of Taming disregard Tranio’s status in the fifth act because of his dress and eloquent speech.

Presumably, Tranio is still dressed as Lucentio in this scene, and because of his clothing and his adeptness at speaking and acting like a nobleman, the other characters continue to treat him as such despite their knowledge that he is of a lower class.

***

In addition to the several instances of class cross-dressing that occur in the courting plot, clothing also play a significant role in Katherina’s taming. Petruchio is late for his and Katherina’s wedding, but even more insulting than his tardiness is his outfit. Crosby 58

Petruchio is wearing a random assortment of old, informal, mismatched clothes and accessories and arrives on an old, sickly, lame horse. Tranio and Baptista encourage him to change his clothes, but Petruchio refuses because he asserts that Katherina is marrying him and not his clothes, so it should not matter what he is wearing:

To me she's married, not unto my clothes

Could I repair what she will wear in me,

As I can change these poor accoutrements,

'Twere well for Kate and better for myself. (3.2.107-10)

Petruchio is emphasizing the insignificance of clothing on one’s person. He maintains that it is simple for one to change his clothing but that that does not denote any kind of deeper change within the person himself. Katherina will affect him, and he will not be able to change the effects she has on him as easily as he can change his clothes. Petruchio is explaining to Tranio, Baptista, Sly, the Lord, and the audience that there is a difference between superficial changes of appearance and deeper changes of one’s personality. In this early play of Shakespeare’s, he writes a line very similar to one he will later write in one of his most renowned plays. Tranio’s observation, “He hath some meaning in his mad attire” (3.2.114) is incredibly close to Polonius’s observation about Hamlet,

“Though this be madness yet there is method in’t” (2.2.202-3). Both Tranio and Polonius are trying to see through these characters’ “antic dispositions” (Hamlet 1.5.170), and although Tranio does appreciate that Petruchio is trying to make a statement, he still tries to persuade Petruchio to change his mind and his clothes but is unsuccessful.

Additionally, after inhibiting Kate from eating and sleeping, Petruchio hires a tailor to make clothes for Kate and finds fictitious faults with each piece so as to deprive Crosby 59 her of fashionable clothes. The necessities of eating and sleeping are supplemented by the desire for fine clothing in Petruchio’s taming plot, showing the significance of clothing in the lives of these nobles in this culture. Again, Petruchio uses this opportunity to make a point about the folly of placing too much value on appearance:

What, is the jay more precious than the lark,

Because his feathers are more beautiful?

Or is the adder better than the eel,

Because his painted skin contents the eye?

O, no, good Kate; neither art thou the worse

For this poor furniture and mean array. (4.3.169-74)

Your value, Petruchio explains, is not linked to your wardrobe. Sly is supposed to be watching these two instances of Petruchio’s didactic speeches on the meaninglessness of one’s attire. The clothes Sly wears act as an important part of the Lord’s trick. If they offered him wine and called him “lord”, but they were all better dressed than him, he most likely would not have believed them, but his dress in combination with their assertions that he is a lord convince him that he is. Then he watches a play in which a man repeatedly rails on the insignificance of dress, on the value of one’s mind over one’s appearance, and Sly does not appear to begin to doubt the veracity of his supposed station. Because of this, Sly becomes even more of a joke, and his gullibility causes us to question whether or not we should believe the changes that take place in the characters of the play within the play, most significantly, Katherina.

The concept of not being able to identify conversos and secret Catholics under

Elizabeth’s reign was legitimately worth fearing as empirical evidence could lead you to Crosby 60 wrongly trust in someone who was not practicing the faith of the Church of England.

Worse yet, it could lead someone else to mistrust you. Whether or not your neighbour believed that you genuinely converted from Catholicism to Protestantism when Elizabeth succeeded Mary was a matter of life and death. If someone accused you of secretly maintaining a faith other than Protestantism under Elizabeth’s reign, you could very well be executed because of it. Conversions were a serious matter, and the notion of fake conversions was fearsome. Tranio’s feigned “change” into Lucentio is easy—could a

Jew’s conversion to Christianity be just as easy to simulate, or a Catholic’s to

Protestantism? Shakespeare is watching his countrymen roust out people living among them who appear to be trustworthy Protestants but are convicted of being heathens, and that anxiety toward the sincerity of change is manifested in Taming. The ability of

Lucentio, Tranio, Hortensio, and the Merchant to pass is disturbing as imitation and reality can too often be confused.

There is a famous idiom—art imitates life—which is often used in a positive light, but this fact sometimes becomes problematic when art too closely imitates life. The second Earl of Essex rebelled against Elizabeth I in 1601, and the night before the failed uprising, Essex supporters paid The Lord Chamberlain’s Men to produce Richard II, a play about the usurpation and eventual murder of a monarch. Elizabeth, like Richard II, was criticized for giving too much power to some of her advisors, advisors who were not well liked. The Essex rebellion against Elizabeth began with the pretense of scourging the court of her advisors, but, as the lawyer prosecuting Essex suggested, it most likely would have escalated to something more sinister: Crosby 61

I protest upon my soul and conscience I do believe she should not have long lived

after she had been in your power. Note but the precedents of former ages, how

long lived Richard the Second after he was surprised in the same manner? The

pretense was alike for the removing of certain counsellors, but yet shortly after it

cost him his life. (Chambers 2:325).

Richard II was rarely performed for Elizabeth or at the Globe during her reign.

Apparently, Elizabeth deemed this art too closely relating to her life, and did not want to pay homage to the idea of forcing a monarch to abdicate his throne as a form of entertainment. Similarly, while King George III suffered from mental illness, King Lear was not performed because the depiction of a deranged king was uncomfortably analogous to early nineteenth-century England’s political situation. Politicians have used works of art to support or undermine ideas or people for millennia because they understand the power of art’s mimetic powers. Therefore, having a knowledge of a piece of art’s popularity and the way in which it was interpreted by its various audiences is crucial to fully understanding its meaning and significance.

***

The production history of Taming and Tamer, especially over the two and a half centuries after the plays were written, demonstrates that Tamer had a demonstrable impact on the way in which Taming was interpreted and enjoyed by its seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and early-nineteenth-century audiences. The fact that Taming was adapted by both John Lacy and David Garrick and that these playwrights altered Shakespeare’s play in ways that made it better fit Fletcher’s rather than merely rewriting it to better suit the Crosby 62 language, dress, and customs of the Restoration shows that Fletcher’s play truly did convert Shakespeare’s.

Tamer was most likely first produced in 1611, which is just two years prior to the assumed dates Fletcher and Shakespeare collaborated on Cardenia, Henry VIII, and The

Two Nobel Kinsmen. In 1611, Shakespeare was the principal playwright for The King’s

Men, and Fletcher was an emerging playwright who had not yet had much success on his own and was better known for his collaborations with Francis Beaumont. Stanley Wells, however, recognizes, “There is no sign that in writing [Tamer] Fletcher stood in the relation of pupil or apprentice to Shakespeare” (205). By writing a response to one of

Shakespeare’s plays, a feat that no other playwright attempted until the Restoration,

Fletcher tells us about his own culture and converts Shakespeare’s play. Through Tamer,

Fletcher acknowledges and reinforces the popularity of plays that showcased the battle of the sexes, and, as Wells proposes, suggests that this could demonstrate “a point of transition. Shakespeare was in his mid-forties and his output was beginning to dwindle”

(205). In this way, Fletcher provides us with insight into the climate of London playgoers and playwrights alike, while simultaneously rewriting Shakespeare’s play by altering the sense of an inevitable happy ending for Katherina and Petruchio. This then converts the play and the way we understand it.

Fletcher’s play is often thought of as a sequel to Shakespeare’s but the production history of the two plays suggests otherwise. Outside the realm of the play, Tamer converted Taming’s status from original to prequel. Taming was one of the least produced

Shakespearean comedies in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. It only gained popularity in the nineteenth century during the Victorian era, which propagated Crosby 63 thinking about gender and sexuality more stringently than had been done in the early modern and Restoration periods. Shakespeare’s play in which a husband starves his wife, deprives her of sleep, disallows her from choosing her own wardrobe, and threatens to prevent her from seeing her family in order to make her more submissive, was not nearly as favoured in Shakespeare’s time as it was in the Victorian era or as it is today. In fact,

Taming was the only Shakespearean play that provoked a “reply” during his lifetime

(Rackin 52), and that reply was far more popular than the original to which it was responding.

Throughout the entire seventeenth century, Taming was recorded as being produced just three times, all three of which took place before the Puritans closed the theatres in

1642. The first of these three recorded productions in the first half of the seventeenth century was when it was produced as part of a double bill with Tamer for Charles I. The court was said to have “likt” Taming but “very well likt” Tamer (Munro xvii). Taming is not recorded as having been produced once in the second half of the seventeenth century, the entirety of the eighteenth century, and for the first half of the nineteenth century

(Haring-Smith 44). Although many of Shakespeare’s plays were adapted throughout the

Restoration and those adaptations were staged more than the originals, Taming was one of the plays that was significantly adapted, not merely its language updated, and it was one of the last plays to be reinstated in the nineteenth century. Tamer, by itself, was performed frequently, and Charles II watched it twice during his reign (Munro xix); however, when Charles II watched Tamer, it was produced alongside John Lacy’s Sauny the Scot: The Taming of the Shrew, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s play (Munro xix). Crosby 64

Lacy’s adaptation is set in England instead of Italy and replaces Petruchio’s servingman Grumio with a Scot named Sauny, whom Lacy himself played. A lot of the play’s comedy derives from Sauny and his Scottishness. He speaks with a thick Scottish brogue so that he often sounds silly or unintelligible, and he provides ample opportunity for the English to make fun of the Scottish. Scotland and England had been embroiled in skirmishes for decades by the time that Lacy wrote this play, so his audiences would have enjoyed the fun he was poking at their neighbours. Additionally, by making the Lucentio figure, in this play called Winlove, a French tutor rather than a Latin tutor to Bianca,

Lacy creates the opportunity to make France the butt of several of his jokes as well, which was very important in the long-eighteenth century as England was establishing itself as a country of culture and art comparable to and distinct from France.

Other than the Scot, he major change from Shakespeare’s version to Lacy’s is the shrew figure. Lacy’s shrew is named Margaret and nicknamed Peg. She steals jewelry from her sister, calls her a slut, and says that she wishes she could “slit her tongue” (13).

There is certainly more violence in this play, with the Hortensio character actually bleeding from Peg hitting him over the head with his lute and threats from Petruchio that cause Peg to ask, “Why, you will not murder me, Sirrah?” (19). Laura J. Rosenthal examines the evolution of gender relations in Restoration drama in “Reading Masks”, and she points to Lacy’s adaptation to make the argument that Restoration adaptations of

Renaissance plays often have their female characters endure new and greater forms of violence (148-9). This seems to be the case for Peg whose life is threatened until she succumbs to Petruchio’s will. With these alterations, Lacy is not changing the way in which we understand Shakespeare’s play; rather, he is telling us more about seventeenth- Crosby 65 century England—the kind of comedy they enjoyed, their treatment of women, and their attitude toward Shakespeare. That is why Lacy’s play is an adaptation and not a conversion, but it helps to support the assertion that Fletcher’s play was a conversion as several of the emendations that are made to Shakespeare’s play are a result of the impact that Tamer had on Taming.

In Sauny the Scot, Peg convinces Petruchio that he has tamed her by calling the sun the moon and an old man a maid, which mirrors the scene that Katherina and

Petruchio share in Taming. When Peg and Petruchio return to Peg’s father’s house, however, she is not the quiet, obedient woman that Katherina is upon her return to

Baptista’s house. Peg says that she was never tamed: “I am resolv’d now I’m got Home again I’ll be reveng’d” (56). Following these proclamations, Peg attempts to defy

Petruchio by refusing to speak to him. When she shuts her mouth to him, he says that it is because she has a toothache and sends for someone to pull out her teeth. When she still remains silent, he says that it is because she has died and puts her in a coffin and orders that she be interred. When she breaks her silence to save herself from being buried alive,

Petruchio says, “A Miracle! … liv’st thou my poor Peg?”, to which she responds “Yes, that I do, and will to be your tormentor” (64). Clearly, she still plans on attempting to tame or at least torment her husband. Finally, Petruchio outwits her by declaring that her response indicates that she has been possessed by a demon and commands that she be buried alive in order to kill it. At this point, she relents, saying that she has been tamed.

Considering her vehemence just a few lines above, the fact that she has already lied to

Petruchio regarding her taming, and the fact that her submission speech, loosely borrowed from Shakespeare, is only three lines long, Peg’s taming is unconvincing. Crosby 66

Consequently, it becomes incredibly easy to imagine that Petruchio’s first marriage was as tempestuous as Fletcher says it is in his sequel. Furthermore, Petruchio concludes the epilogue saying, “I’ve Tam’d the Shrew, but will not be asham’d, / If next you see the very Tamer Tam’d” (Munro xix). Lacy sets us up for a viewing of Tamer by actually using its title.

Later in the Restoration, David Garrick also adapted Shakespeare’s play. Garrick was a famed Shakespearean restorer and actor in the eighteenth century, and one of the reasons he was so beloved is that he believed in adhering as closely as possible to

Shakespeare’s original texts. In the prologue to his restoration of The Winter’s Tale,

Garrick writes, “’Tis my chief wish, my joy, my only plan / To lose no drop of that immortal man” (ll.54-5). This goal is also made evident in Garrick’s subtitles and advertisements in which he maintains that the changes he makes are “few and trifling”

(“To the Reader” l.1). The title page for Catharine and Petruchio is the only instance in seven different title pages Pedicord and Bergman’s The Plays of David Garrick:

Garrick’s Adaptations of Shakespeare in which Shakespeare’s name or the title of his play is not given top billing and Drury Lane, the theatre house at which Garrick’s play was performed, is instead given prominence. Additionally, Shakespeare’s name in this title page is smaller than it is in the others. Garrick’s restorations of Macbeth, Romeo and

Juliet, and King Lear are said to be “by Shakespeare” (Pedicord and Bergmann 2, 76,

302), while the plays whose titles or genres have been adapted are said to be “taken” or

“alter’d” from Shakespeare (Pedicord and Bergmann 152, 188, 222, 288). The subtitle to

Garrick’s Antony and Cleopatra is “Written by William Shakespeare: Fitted for the Stage by Abridging Only” (Rosenthal “Lear” 332). This is compared to John Lacy’s play, Crosby 67 which was attributed to Shakespeare but “alter’d and improv’d by Mr. Lacey” (emphasis mine) (Lacy 1). The notion that Shakespeare’s plays could be improved upon was nearing sacrilege by the end of the eighteenth century and an idea that Garrick was partially responsible for championing. In her article “Rewriting King Lear”, Rosenthal writes, it was “Garrick [who] sensed a demand for the authentic Shakespeare on stage” (332). This appears to be true—except in the case of Taming. The changes Garrick made to this play were not “few and trifling”. He condensed the play into three acts, he cut the Sly and

Bianca plots entirely (Bianca is married to Hortensio before the play begins so there is no

Lucentio, Tranio, Vincentio, or Merchant), and he, like Lacy, adapts the character of

Catharine by giving us insight into her motives.

Garrick’s Catharine, like Lacy’s Peg, vows vengeance on her husband. Garrick gives Catharine an aside and a soliloquy, which provide us with greater insight into her character and her motivations, both of which, in this case, cause us to doubt the veracity of her taming. During Catharine and Petruchio’s courting scene, Catharine says in an aside, “A plague upon his impudence! I’m vexed; / I’ll marry my revenge, but I will tame him” (1.1.243-4). We are now provided with a reason for her to want to marry Petruchio; like Fletcher’s Maria, she plans to marry him so that she can then be the one to tame him, which simultaneously shows us that she plans to lie to her husband. Lacy’s and Garrick’s shrews, with their proclivity toward lying and vengeance, act as the perfect set up to

Fletcher’s version of Petruchio’s first wife. This indicates that Fletcher’s play had such an impact on the way that Shakespeare’s play and character were interpreted that people adapted Taming in order to make it better introduce Tamer. Crosby 68

Shakespeare’s play was not viewed as the original and Fletcher’s the ‘reply’ at this time; rather, Fletcher’s was the principal text, and Shakespeare’s became a prequel.

Furthermore, Taming was one of the only plays that warranted real adaptation by Garrick.

For two and a half centuries, Shakespeare’s play was merely a setup for Fletcher’s, that is, when it was even produced at all, and the versions of Shakespeares play that were performed adapted Shakespeares play in order to set up Fletchers. After the late- eighteenth century, however, Fletcher’s play disappeared and did not re-emerge until the late-twentieth century. Regardless of Tamers absence from the stage for two centuries, it still had a lasting effect on Taming. Tamer changed the way people watched and responded to Shakespeares play, and it undoubtedly changed the way the actors playing

Shakespeares characters performed those roles. Fletchers play had a profound and lasting impact on Shakespeares, and this impact converted Taming. Tamer made

Katherina a resilient actress rather than a Stockholm syndrome victim, it made Petruchio a humbled if not temperamental spouse rather than a tyrannical husband, and it made

Taming into a prequel rather than an original. Fletchers play was not merely a response, and it was not an adaptation; Tamer converted Taming.

Crosby 69

Chapter 3:

The Relationship between Conversion and Typology

Plays that I would call conversions of texts are often called adaptations, but adaptations are fundamentally limited to the prospective and conversion is fundamentally open to both the prospective and the retrospective. The word ‘conversion’ smacks of religion, but so too does western literature. Conversion is an historical phenomenon, and Shakespeare and Fletcher are working from a culture in which the rewriting of texts is a Christian practice. The religious vacillation of England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries led to the rewriting and reinterpretation of Christian texts, and the Renaissance drew upon ancient Greek and Roman culture in a way that refigured the pantheon and pagan stories in a Christian world, both of which contributed to a culture in which conversion was pervasive. Laypeople were encouraged to read and interpret the Bible themselves, and authors rewrote the stories of Virgil and Ovid with moral connotations that did not exist in the originals. When Dante rewrites Virgil as a precursor to

Christianity, he figures him as a part of conversional literary economy. This attitude towards texts and their ability to be reinterpreted contributes to our understanding of how conversion functions as a methodology. Shakespeare and Fletcher found themselves surrounded by works that attempted to convert their classical sources into Christian contexts, and this influenced their subjects and their methods of writing.

In previous chapters, I have explained how a conversion is different from a change or a transformation—it is durable and dialogical—and the fact that a conversion must be dialogical is why it is typically only used to speak about people. A person has the interiority that is needed to engage in a conversion that an inanimate object such as a chair does not. However, particular Crosby 70 kinds of inanimate objects do have that interiority. Walter Benjamin maintains in “The Work of

Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” that art objects that are experienced firsthand have an aura, an appearance of magical or supernatural force arising from their uniqueness.

Historically, all works of art had an ‘aura’, but while Benjamin is writing, technological advances have led to the mass reproduction of pieces of art in the form of prints as well as the creation of the camera for both photography and film. When art is produced in these ways,

Benjamin argues, there is an absence of any traditional or ritualistic value in art, and therefore these works would inherently be based on the practice of politics. If art is produced solely for political propaganda, then it is no longer a true art object and becomes an object of use. The aura includes a sensory experience of distance between the reader and the work of art; you must actually be able to see the art to fully appreciate it and understand its aura. A mere photograph or some other visual device that has the ability to zoom or otherwise distort the piece of art prevents one from truly experiencing it or its aura.

When art is mass-produced, Benjamin asserts that the reproductions would not have the authenticity or authority—the aura—that original pieces of art derive from the historical space and time in which they were created. That is to say that the Mona Lisa has an aura that prints of it do not. Furthermore, art created for the sole purpose of being reproduced, especially political propagandist art, would never have that authenticity or authority. Benjamin discusses the motivation to create and experience art throughout history, contending that until his time, art was bound up with ritual because the aura of art could only be experienced when one was physically experiencing it; it required potential viewers to make a pilgrimage to to experience particular pieces of art. In the age of mechanical reproduction there are exhibitions, which Benjamin considers to be a kind of antithesis to pilgrimage. Pilgrimages are difficult journeys one Crosby 71 undertakes in order to have a particular experience, whereas the goal of an exhibition is to make it easy for as many people as possible to view its art. To Benjamin, art is not meant to be easily accessible, though. It is something you must work to understand, and that is where art’s inherent value lies; there is something inside it worth understanding, the aura.

Benjamin’s explanation of the function of the aura complements Hannah Arendt’s discussion of objects of utility and art objects in her book, The Human Condition. Benjamin is interested in the interiority of a piece of art that he thinks is lacking from mechanically reproduced art. Arendt asserts that works of art are reified thoughts, and this supports the concept that they have an interiority because, at their core, art objects are made from thought, and thought is ongoing and convertible. Arendt makes a distinction between objects of utility, such as a bookshelf or, in terms of Benjamin’s essay, pieces of art that are produced for political propaganda, and art objects, which she contends are reified thoughts. Arendt emphasizes the differences between works of art and objects of utility; first, we do not ‘use’ art objects, and, second, they have a greater permanence than “the activity by which they were produced and potentially even more permanent than the lives of their authors” (96).

Arendt does not go on to discuss what this means for art objects or what the consequences are of identifying the differences between art objects and objects of utility; rather, she merely makes a distinction between them. If art objects are reified thoughts, then they have the interiority needed to have a dialogical relationship with a person or another art object. In an effort to more clearly explain what she means by ‘reified thought’, Arendt distinguishes between thought and cognition: “Cognition always pursues a definite aim … but once this aim is reached, the cognitive process has come to an end. Thought, on the contrary, has neither an end nor an aim outside itself” (170). Thought’s “processes permeate the whole of human existence” (171), Crosby 72 and thoughts similarly permeate and inhabit works of art. Thought is the interiority that is converted in a human—when Saul converts to Christianity and becomes Paul, it is not his physical person that changes but his thoughts, his perspective on the world and God. Thought is the key to conversion, and the argument that art objects are reified thoughts supports the idea that they too can undergo conversion. If the thoughts and concepts in a text enter into a dialogical relationship with an external force, such as another thinking being or reified thought, a conversion can ensue. This is evident in the dialogical relationship between Shakespeare’s The

Taming of the Shrew and John Fletcher’s The Tamer Tamed, in which the latter converts the former by refiguring Shakespeare’s characters and presumed happy ending as well as the role of the play itself in performance history.

***

‘Conversion’ is not typically understood as a methodology that can be applied to texts; however, an examination of the practice of typology will help to illuminate the way in which conversion can be used as a methodology for examining the relationships between texts or between texts and people. The practice of reading the stories of the Torah and the Old Testament in relation to the New Testament is called typology, and it is bound up with the methodology of conversion. Conversion is an historical phenomenon, and Shakespeare and Fletcher are working from a culture in which the rewriting of texts is a Christian practice. Joseph Galdon explains typology as a “world view, a way of looking at persons and events in the light of a theology of history which postulates the presence and the relevance of an eternal God at every individual moment of time” (5). In this way, typology, like conversion, is a method of returning to the old while simultaneously turning to something new. Galdon elucidates: Crosby 73

the events and personages of Jewish history became, above and beyond their own

historical reality, types and figures of spiritual realities still to come and to be

accomplished in the historical context of the New Testament. This was the tradition

which stood behind the reading and the understanding of the Bible in the seventeenth

century, as well as in all ages which preceded it. (17)

To be sure, the Bible had been read this way for centuries before the early modern period, but in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the practice of typology was even more pronounced due to the wide readership of the Bible and the urge to Christianize the ancient Greek and Roman texts that were being reexamined in the Renaissance.

Let us begin by discussing what ‘typology’ means. Typology is, in its most common sense, the practice of identifying the connections and foreshadowings between the Old

Testament and the New. Through typology, we identify types and anti-types, “in typological exegesis, the ‘type’ is usually applied to the Old Testament ‘shadow’ and the ‘antitype’ to the

New Testament fulfillment” (20). Typology is often thought to be synonymous with ‘metaphor’,

‘allusion, or ‘allegory’, and although they share similarities, these terms have distinct functions.

First, typology must be relatively explicit and intelligible. Galdon explains, “frequent biblical allusion, even a biblical emphasis placed on the Bible, is not strict typology. Occasional, fragmentary and merely illustrative use of images derived from the Bible is not typology” (27).

Second, similar to the way adaptation and conversion are both prospective but only conversion is retrospective, typology does not diminish the importance of the type in order to bolster the antitype. A symbol’s whole existence is based on signifying something else, whereas typology values both the type and the anti-type; Adam is viewed as a type predicting Christ, but that does not undermine Adam’s significance or value as Adam. The type in typology both exists in and of Crosby 74 itself and points towards its antitype: “It is foolish to maintain that they [the types] were understood and comprehensible only in the New Testament … The Exodus had a meaning complete in itself, yet was seen as ‘more complete and meaningful’ in the light of the New

Testament antitype or fulfillment” (Galdon 31). In this way, typology is retrospective and prospective rather than being solely prospective because it maintains the existence of the type regardless of the importance of the antitype.

Paul J. Korshin, author of Typologies in England, supports Galdon’s description of typology and goes on to delineate three different kinds of typology: conventional, applied, and abstract. Conventional typology is used only when reading the Bible and is “concerned with demonstrating the existence of a typological relationship between the Old and New Testaments”

(77). Applied typology is the method of finding Christian morals and types in non-religious works or using religious types to describe people, particularly political figures. In the case of applied typology, the act of finding Christian morals and types in non-religious texts is the job of the author. The author rewrites a previous story or redescribes an important figure through a intentionally-Christian framework. Abstract typology is, according to the author who gave it this designation, “more properly typology abstracted from its traditional contexts but retaining some of the foreshadowing quality” (Korshin 91). This categorization is slightly more slippery to grasp than the other two, but it essentially refers to a way of seeing Christian types and narratives in a supposedly secular text. In the case of applied typology, the onus of interpreting the religious in the text is on the reader, not the author, whereas in conventional typology it is the author who inserts the theological undertones into the text. Korshin stresses that abstract typology cannot be universally applied; rather, it must involve significant interpretation: “Abstracted typology is valuable only when it illuminates authorial intention and deepens our perception of the meaning Crosby 75 of a work” (93). The onus of finding the religious is on the reader, but there must be strong evidence to see a particular theme or character reflected as Christian types.

There can be no doubt that typology and conversion are closely related to one another in both subject and practice. Typology is, in its most basic sense, understanding the connection between the Old and New Testaments as well as finding the religious in the non-religious by reinterpreting the old and thereby creating something new from within it. In this chapter, I will examine the three kinds of typology Korshin defines. There is the emblematic example of conventional typology in the Bible, applied typology is evident in the practice of rewriting classical texts into a Christian framework as was extremely popular in the early modern period, and, something akin to applied typology is evident in the relationship between Taming and

Tamer. I am not arguing for the ability to see the religious in either of these plays; rather, I argue that Fletcher’s play illuminates a possible meaning of Shakespeare’s, which enduringly changes the way we view it, thus deepening our perception of it. In a way, this is an abstraction of abstract typology. This is the way in which I am using conversion. Conversion and typology share similarities in their religious connotations and their goals of reshaping the old in a way that maintains its value and provides a deeper meaning to it that simultaneously makes it something new, and viewing them in relation to one another can help to elucidate the way in which conversion is not merely something that occurs in a person but can take place in a text.

***

The Bible I will use to discuss conventional typology is the King James Bible (KJB) because it is itself an embodiment of conversion. The KJB was printed in 1611, the same year that Tamer was first produced, and this Bible was widely printed, read, and discussed. It came from a culture that was better able to read, allowed women to read, and had greater access to Crosby 76 bibles. Additionally, the KJB, and Protestantism in general, encouraged people to interpret the

Bible themselves, and this practice of interpretation would become incredibly important in the fashioning of the self, the country, and texts because this emphasis on interpretation supported typological or conversional readings. The KJB represents a broader and closer interest in typology among ordinary English people, and through understanding their relationship with typology and the practice of interpretation, we will be able to better understand Fletcher’s conversion of Shakespeare’s play.

Regardless of the religious fervor of the people of England in the Middle Ages, Biblical literacy was low because illiteracy was so high, with typically only nobility having the ability to read. With the rise of humanism—the belief in the value of all people and of critical thinking rather than yielding to dogma—education became more accessible to children of lower class families in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. With the dissolution of the monasteries, there was more money available to the English government, and some of that money went to funding public grammar schools. Additionally, bible readership increased drastically when Henry VIII’s reign ended in 1547 as women were able to read the Bible again: “Henry VIII may have banned women from reading the Bible, but by the late sixteenth century, Bible reading had become central to female domestic and public life” (Wilcox 452). The women reading the Bible would have been nobility as girls of lower classes did not typically attend grammar schools, but with more boys of lower classes and women of higher classes learning how to read, literacy in general and biblical literacy in particular increased drastically in the early modern period.

Furthermore, prior to the sixteenth century, the Bible was almost exclusively available in

Greek, Latin, Hebrew, or Arabic, making them even more difficult to read. There were translations of parts of the Bible—only the gospels or only the New or the Old Testament—but Crosby 77 these were not widely distributed or read among laypeople prior to the sixteenth century. The complete Bible was translated into English in both the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in multiple versions. Lastly, because monks and scribes printed Bibles individually prior to the invention of the printing press, there were not many Bibles in circulation to be read. Following

1485, the Bible was printed at a much higher volume. Many more people now had the ability to read and a Bible to read in their own vernacular. With all of these hindrances to reading the Bible from earlier time periods overcome, the people of early modern England keenly read the Bible, and with the advent of Protestantism, they began to read it in a new way.

The Protestant Reformation encouraged people to read and interpret the Bible rather than learn about their religion through the interpretations of the priests and bishops of the Catholic

Church. This was one of the reasons for the creation of the KJB:

In the case of the KJB, while the Protestant principle that the Bible should be

readily available in the vernacular led to the sacred text being ‘Newly Translated’

and thus reinterpreted, the project also fed into the equally Protestant practice of

individual response to the scriptures. The KJB was thus both the result of an

interpretative process and the means to continuing reinterpretation by others.

(Wilcox 461)

The Bible in Early Modern England discusses the prevalence of the KJB and other religious texts throughout the seventeenth century as compared to earlier centuries, stating: “Regardless of the levels of reading literacy in the early modern period, biblical literacy was high” (Wilcox 452).

Literacy in general was on the rise, but biblical literacy was obviously considered an entirely different category and particularly high. Crosby 78

There were several versions of the Bible printed in the sixteenth century, the Tyndale

Bible and the Great Bible being among them. William Tyndale was the first to translate Greek and Hebrew biblical texts to English. He translated the entire New Testament and approximately half of the Old Testament before he was executed for heresy due to his interpretation of the

Bible. The Tyndale Bible, however, was very influential on all subsequent English translations of the Bible. The Great Bible was the first authorized Bible; it was authorized by Henry VIII and commissioned by Lord Thomas Cromwell. It used much of the Tyndale Bible, subtracting the portions that had offended the bishops and translating the parts of the Old Testament that

Tyndale had not had a chance to translate. Rather than translating from the original languages, however, they translated it from German and Latin versions. The KJB was authorized by King

James and aimed to fix all perceived problems with past English translations in regards to certain

Protestant doctrines.

The expansive breadth of the KJB’s readership is significant in order to understand the conversional culture Fletcher and Shakespeare were writing in. The KJB was printed at a time of transition—the transition from old religious traditions to new reforms, from the inaccessibility of the word of God to the widespread access to it, from the didacticism of priests to the encouragement of personal reflection and interpretation. The Bible itself is an example of typology due to the way that it reinterprets the stories of the Torah to prefigure the coming of

Christ. For this reason, typology is inherent in any bible, but the KJB championed typology even more acutely precisely because it was borne out of a desire to help readers interpret its meaning for themselves. Wilcox claims, “In its mingling of tradition and innovation, the KJB is utterly in keeping with the self-consciously transitional atmosphere of the period of its creation and publication” (459), but it is more than the KJB simply being “in keeping” with the early modern Crosby 79

English culture, even if it is “utterly” so. The KJB epitomized, embodied, and encouraged many of the changes that were taking place. It was through this Bible that laypeople were able to read the Bible themselves, a Bible specifically written for Protestants. The stories found in this Bible were old, but they were made new through this translation. The most significant aspect of the

KJB, for the purposes of this thesis, is the way in which it influenced its readers to interpret it.

The unique intricacies of the languages and previous texts with which the translators were working made interpretation a necessary part of the process of translating the Bible into

English. In different languages, certain words or phrases either have several different meanings, making it impossible to tell which one(s) the author intended, or there is no direct translation to the word. For these reasons, translators must try to interpret the meaning of the text in order to present it in a different language. The translators of the KJB wrote a note to the readers at the beginning of the Bible explaining why this difficulty with translation is in fact beneficial:

“Translation it is that openeth the window, to let in the light; that breaketh the shell, that we might eat the kernel; that putteth aside the curtain, that we may look into the most holy place”

(qtd. in Wilcox 456). Translation is a means of revelation, according to these translators.

Through translations, they assert, the heart of the subject becomes visible. This attitude toward translation promotes typology, as the argument for both is the same: by reading a text in a different way, you will discover new layers of meaning within it.

Galdon asserts that the seventeenth-century reader was “Steeped in this typological way of thinking and looking at scripture” (15). More and more people in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were able to read, and upon acquiring this skill, they read the Bible. The

KJB in particular encouraged them to interpret the Bible individually. King James instructed the translators not to leave their own comments in the KJB, as other translators had done with Crosby 80 previous versions. The reader was meant to discern possible links and moral teachings for himself with the guidance of ministers and the language used by the translators. This encouragement of individual thought created an environment of readers habitually applying personal interpretations to the texts they read.

***

At the same time that the readership of the Bible was increasing, the rereading of classical and pagan texts through a Christian framework was becoming more and more influential. Although this practice was employed prior to the early modern period as well, the proliferation of it during the Renaissance demonstrates that there was a shift in the way that people read and understood texts. The English Renaissance did not commence until the late- fifteenth century and reached its pinnacle a century later. Unlike the Italian Renaissance, which began in the late-fourteenth century and was focused more on visual arts, the English

Renaissance was dominated by literature and music. The increase of the rate of literacy, the invention of the printing press, and the introduction of Protestantism certainly all contributed to the Renaissance of classical texts. Because of the influence that Protestantism in general and the

KJB specifically had on people interpreting texts themselves, when texts from antiquity were

‘reborn’, they were most often reimagined in a new way—namely a Christian way. The English people sought to understand classical texts on a deeper level in order to find the Christian morals that might be hidden within them. This was done for two reasons, the first being that Christians believed that one method of proving the almightiness of God was by showing that he was ever- present throughout time. Therefore, if they read Him and biblical figures into stories dating back from antiquity, they would show his omnipresence: “Theologians in search of the origins of

Christianity found them in the lore, languages, and literatures of gentile theology and, as they Crosby 81 found these origins, they decided that they must be shadowy types of the true religion that was still to come” (Korshin 5). Danny Praet provides an example of this: “Christianity incorporated aspects and functions of Greco-Roman gods by projecting them on Christian figures. Maria took over the tyrionymical aspect of Isis and was venerated as Queen of Heaven” (44), and, of course,

“Hercules, Pan, Orpheus, Ceres, Achilles, Aeneas, and dozens of other characters became pre-

Christian types of Christ” (Korshin 5).

The second reason to find Christian morals in pagan texts was to make these beautiful pieces of art more appropriate reading or viewing material for the strict Christian. Many early modern English writers rewrote famous Ovidian myths in a Christian framework, which led to them being viewed as morally good Christian texts. Ovid’s Metamorphoses explains how particular plants, animals, rivers, or traditions came into being. This desire to provide origin stories, to give meaning to things, was the main objective of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In a

Christian society, the origin of all things is God, so this aspect of Ovid’s stories is less important, or, to an extent, sacrilegious. Instead, writers allegorized these narratives in a way that Ovid had not intended. They searched the poem for morals, and they took these opportunities to teach

Christian lessons through this classical text. For the writers who pillaged Ovid to find

Christianity in it, it was the ability to find a moral in the myth that legitimized the myth and the rewriting of it.

These writers did not simply choose between the different allegories that could plausibly go along with each myth; rather, they presented all of them at once. They seem to believe that each story has potentiality, and the allegorizers have to have some imagination and playfulness to find these kinds of stories within the narrative. George Sandys’s 1630 translation of Ovid’s

Metamorphoses demonstrates this urge to moralize Ovid’s stories. Sandys is interested in the Crosby 82 allegorical bases of the stories, and he comments on them throughout his translation. The myth of Narcissus was one of the most commonly rewritten narratives. It was evidently important to early modern English writers, most likely because the Renaissance was changing the way people were reflecting upon themselves, so they could relate to Narcissus. The Reformation and urbanization were large changes in England, and both encouraged people to think for themselves and about themselves as individuals. There was a greater chance that an individual could move up or down in classes, and creativity and imagination were lauded attributes, which meant that people were becoming more individualistic. Stephen Greenblatt has famously noted that in the

Renaissance, there was “an increased self-consciousness about the fashioning of the human identity as a manipulable, artful process” (2). Narcissus is set up as a cautionary tale of what happens when one focuses too much on oneself, when one is vain, and when one does not reproduce. These cautions are given through a Christian framework guided by the sin of pride.

Sandys proclaims that Narcissus becomes too enamoured with bodily things, and this is a sin, which is why he is punished. The soul is so alienated from the body in doting upon itself, that he forgets his higher nature. The notion of the soul and sin are entirely anachronistic concepts to impose on Narcissus, but in so imposing them, Christians hijack this classic story for themselves. TH, a sixteenth-century writer famous for only signing his works ‘TH’ and so not having his identity known, rewrote the story of Narcissus. He sees Narcissus as prideful like

Lucifer. As an angel, Lucifer was gifted, but he forgets that those gifts were given to him by

God, and then abuses those gifts. While Ovid often tells the stories of people becoming things they are already like—a stony-hearted woman becoming stone—TH reads Narcissus as a paradox; something good becomes bad. Like the angels that fell in the Bible, Narcissus was good, but he becomes bad because he abuses his gifts. Other sixteenth-century writers attribute Crosby 83

Narcissus’s punishment to his denial of God’s instructions to go forth and multiply. By falling in love with himself, Narcissus essentially refuses to procreate and spread his seed. This is seen as prideful and unnatural. Again, this pride links Narcissus to the angels who fall from God’s grace.

In these reappropriations of Narcissus’s story, Narcissus’s character is made to fit into Christian morality and teachings.

These early modern rewriters of classical texts often provided introductions to their texts, explaining to the reader what lessons they should be taking from their work. As such, these rewritings clearly fit into Korshin’s category of applied typology, in which the author finds and makes connections between texts and Biblical narratives or figures and delineates them for their readers. It also supports Galdon’s claim that the people of early modern England were “steeped” in this typological, interpretive way of thinking. Consequently, readers were inclined to think more critically than they had before, to find connections between texts, to interpret texts in a new light. This is what led to abstract typology.

***

Abstract typology is the process of finding religious types and narratives in secular stories. Although the author may have intended for some biblical allusion to be in his text, with abstract typology, it is the reader’s responsibility to find it. Using conversion as a methodology for understanding the relationship between texts is similar to typology in general because they both require interpretation, but abstract typology in particular is especially linked to textual conversion because the onus of interpretation on the reader. The purpose of abstract typology is to find religious types and narratives in texts; however, if abstract typology is abstracted from religion altogether, it becomes even more similar to the process of literary conversion and so can help us realize how it is possible for a person or text to convert another text. Crosby 84

Because of the way in which Fletcher describes Katherina and her relationship with

Petruchio in his play, we as audience members are forced to rethink the authenticity of the taming that takes place in Shakespeare’s play. Rather than the traditional happy ending found in

Shakespearean comedies, Fletcher’s play forces us to question the future of not only Petruchio and Kate, but of all the young couples in the final scene. Fletcher converts Shakespeare’s play by reinterpreting Katherina and her ‘taming’ in the same way that abstract typology uncovers new facets of a text through interpretation. Of course, conversion and typology, even abstracted abstract typology, are not identical, but in an effort to explain the way that literary conversion functions, it is helpful to review this similar process that has been used for centuries to interpret texts in a way that maintains the significance of the old while simultaneously creating something new out of it. Conversion requires that a durable and dialogical change takes place, and in literary conversion, this change must take place through interpretation. That is what makes it different from the process of adaptation or other forms of rewriting, and that is what makes it uniquely fitted for understanding the relationship between plays such as Taming and Tamer.

The culture in early modern England was significantly affected by this typological way of thinking. The new access that several people had to the Bible, the introduction of Protestantism and its encouragement to interpret the Bible, and the reimagining of classical texts into a

Christian framework created a kind of culture of conversion. This environment had an impact on the way that Shakespeare and Fletcher wrote. Fletcher converted Shakespeare’s play by uncovering ideas that were latent within it, partially because this conversional culture primed him to perform such interpretations and partially because Shakespeare himself was writing in a way that made his plays amenable to conversion. Crosby 85

Chapter 4:

Writing in a Conversional Mode

Benjamin, Arendt, and the study of typology all support in some way the idea of conversion as a literary methodology. That is, the ability for an inanimate object to undergo a conversion if it is an art object. Shakespeare’s plays are not only capable of undergoing conversions, but they are particularly receptive to conversion. This is partly because Shakespeare was living in a culture preoccupied with conversion and endowed with this typological way of thinking and interpreting texts. It is also because of the ambiguity that he allows for in his plays. Both of which create a kind of conversional mode in which he wrote. Many people—scholars and laypeople alike—question why

Shakespeare is still relevant today, why he is still taught in high schools across North

America, why he is still venerated the way he is. Shakespeare’s ambiguity with his characters, themes, and morals are integral to his sustained popularity. The ongoing scholarly debates concerning the meaning of overarching themes, the intentions of certain characters, or even the meaning of particular lines have lasted centuries because there is so much room for interpretation. Shakespeare creates gaps in his stories, and this is part of what makes them so engaging and so amenable to conversion.

Literary scholars have spent a considerable amount of time analyzing

Shakespeare’s Cleopatra,2 and this is due in part to her slipperiness as a character—she is always acting and therefore her ‘true’ character is incredibly difficult to grasp. When

2 See Harold Bloom, Invention of the Human, Francesca T. Royster Becoming Cleopatra: the shifting image of an icon, or Sara Munson Deats Antony and Cleopatra: New Critical Essays Crosby 86

Antony finds Cleopatra apparently colluding with Octavius Caesar, he rails at her for being inconstant, and she responds by asking, “Not know me yet?” (3.13.157). This four- word question could be interpreted to mean that Antony should not be surprised because

Cleopatra is a fickle, self-serving woman who would of course betray him to Caesar if it would benefit her, or it could mean that Antony should trust her by now and know that if she is talking with Caesar it is in an attempt to save both herself and Antony. There is no way to know which meaning Shakespeare intended for us to take from this speech, and the way in which each audience understands Cleopatra is heavily dependent upon the way the actor portraying her delivers this line. The sheer number of discussions surrounding Cleopatra’s elusive character would not have been feasible had Shakespeare told us exactly what Cleopatra intended with this line. Similarly, whether Hamlet actually goes mad or simply pretends to is another question critics have debated since the play’s first productions. Any director taking on Hamlet must decide what the state of his

Hamlet’s sanity will be. Because Shakespeare has left this ambiguity in the character, has created this gap, no portrayal of madness or lack thereof can be considered authoritatively wrong or right; Shakespeare has written potentiality into his characters that begs for interpretation and exploration. This makes his plays lastingly interesting, and it is also what makes them open to conversion.

The reason that Fletcher is able to convert Shakespeare’s play is because of the ambiguity of the relationship between Katherina and Petruchio. It is not clear if Katherina wants to marry Petruchio or whether she is tamed by the end of the play. Katherina at no point says that she wants to marry Petruchio, yet many critics argue that she does.

Katherina explicitly says that she has changed into a submissive wife, but the hyperbolic Crosby 87 language she uses, the rhetorical devices Shakespeare employs in the speech, and the drastic change of her opinions over the course of the two weeks between first meeting

Petruchio and attending her sister’s wedding suggests that this may not be the case.

Fletcher saw the potential for this latter reading of the play, so he wrote a play in which

Katherina continued to be as shrewish after marrying Petruchio as she had been before their wedding. Fletcher’s reading of Shakespeare influenced the way others understood and adapted Shakespeare—John Lacy’s Sauny the Scot provides us with a scene after the shrew’s comparable submission scene in which she tells her sister that it should be women who dominate in a marriage, not men. That is not to say that this is the right or best way to read the play; however, each time an audience watches Taming, they wonder how the submission speech will be delivered, how the relationship between Katherina and Petruchio will be portrayed. Fletcher brought to light one potential interpretation of

Shakespeare’s ambiguous character, and, as a result, the play was changed dialogically and durably; it was converted.

In a contemporary play with a similar title, we are given the opportunity to see how Taming might have operated if some of the gaps that Shakespeare intentionally created were instead filled in. The Taming of A Shrew is an anonymous play from the late-sixteenth century over which there is much dispute, especially in terms of its relation to Shakespeare’s Taming. In addition to the strikingly similar titles, the three main plot points are shared between the two plays—the main plot concerning the taming of the shrewish Kate, the subplot concerning the courtship of Kate’s more pleasant sister (or sisters, in A Shrew), and the framing story featuring Sly. There are, of course, differences Crosby 88 between the plays, including setting and length, but the basic plots of each are the same, causing scholars to question their relation to one another.

A Shrew was first published in a quarto in 1594 and then reprinted in 1596 and again in 1607. Taming was first published in the 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare’s works, and it was reprinted in quarto form in 1631. Editors and scholars cannot agree upon exactly when A Shrew was written—particularly whether it was written before or after

Taming—or by whom it was written. It might be an early version of Taming written by

Shakespeare or someone else, a rewrite of Taming by Shakespeare or someone else, an adaptation of Taming for touring written by Shakespeare or someone else, or a badly remembered or pirated version of Taming. Regardless, scholars typically agree that

Taming is artistically and linguistically superior to A Shrew; H.J. Oliver, editor of the

1982 Oxford Shakespeare edition of Taming, goes so far as to call A Shrew “clearly inferior” and its author “stupid” (16).

Graham Holderness and Byran Loughry, editors of the Routledge edition of A

Shrew, are distinctive in the field of Shakespeare studies for contending that A Shrew is a better quality play than Taming. They understand A Shrew not as a “‘source’ or

‘analogue’ or ‘memorial reconstruction of a Shakespearean original’, but as a in its own right a brilliantly inventive popular Elizabethan play” (13). One of the main reasons that they prefer A Shrew is because, Taming, in their words, is “authorised but insufficient” due to the aforementioned ambiguity of Katherina and Petruchio’s relationship and the lack of a known ending to the Sly plot (Holderness and Loughry 13). A Shrew gives Kate an aside that allows the audience to be privy to her perspective on her relationship with the Petruchio character and it also includes an ending for Sly in which he returns to his Crosby 89 station as a tinker. By providing answers to these questions, A Shrew may be more

‘sufficient’, but it is thusly less thought-provoking. With the aside from Kate, there is no need to debate how she feels or interpret performances that show her and her relationship with her would-be tamer portrayed in different lights. With the end to the framing plot, there is no need to wonder whether or not it ever was written, whether the induction scenes are a mistake, or how it would have ended if there had been one.

***

Katherina’s feelings toward Petruchio in Taming are impossible to know definitively. She explicitly says that she does not want to marry him, but the reactions of the other characters create confusion regarding her feelings. Her father says he will only marry Katherina to someone she loves, which has led some scholars to believe that

Katherina must love Petruchio. There is no evidence in the play, however, to support this.

On the contrary, Katherina explicitly says that she does not love Petruchio and does not want to marry him. For this reason, it is not entirely clear how Katherina feels about

Petruchio in Shakespeare’s play. In A Shrew, however, Kate is given an aside in which she tells the audience how she feels about her betrothed. The most significant difference between Taming’s Katherina and A Shrew’s Kate, then, is our ability to understand each character, which affects the openness each character and play has to conversion.

In Taming, Baptista clearly views Katherina as a shrew; he tells Petruchio in Act

Five that she is “the veriest shrew of all” (5.2.64). Consequently, when Petruchio expresses interest in marrying her, he tries to turn Petruchio away in an effort to save

Petruchio from the difficulty that is his daughter: “But for my daughter Katherine, this I know: / She is not for your turn, the more my grief” (2.1.61-2). The impetus for both Crosby 90 taming plots in this play is Baptista’s decision that the desirable Bianca cannot marry until Katherina does. Upon receiving an offer of marriage for Katherina, however,

Baptista’s first reaction is to rebuff it. This, in and of itself, does not make sense, but even more curiously, Baptista insists that the suitor who will marry Bianca, his prize, will be the suitor who can offer his family the most financial gain while the suitor who will marry Katherina, his “hilding for a devilish spirit” (2.2.26) is he whom Katherina loves.

Baptista explains, “he … That can assure my daughter greatest dower / Shall have my

Bianca’s love” (2/1/331-3), but Baptista will not marry Katherina to anyone until “the special thing is well obtained, / That is, her love” (2.1.124-5). Baptista promises Traino

(pretending to be Lucentio) and Gremio that whoever offers him the most money will have Bianca’s love, not just her hand. He does not give any concern to which of the two men Bianca prefers despite the fact that they are both wealthy men with good status and either would make a suitable husband for her. In the case of his other daughter,

Katherina, whom he repeatedly insults and does not appear to care for in the way he does

Bianca, Baptista does not ask for anything in return and requires that Katherina love her betrothed. This commendable yet inconsistent gesture is made stranger still by the fact that at no time before her wedding does Katherina give her love to Petruchio.

Katherina makes it abundantly clear that she does not want to marry Petruchio when her father asks why she appears to be ill-tempered after her first encounter with him:

Call you me ‘daughter’? Now I promise you

You have showed a tender fatherly regard

To wish me wed to one half lunatic, Crosby 91

A mad-cap ruffian and a swearing Jack

That thinks with oaths to face the matter out. (2.1.274)

Furthermore, after Petruchio lies to Baptista, telling him that they have “’greed so well together / That upon Sunday is the wedding day” (2.1.286-7), Katherina does not show that she consents in any way and instead exclaims “I’ll see thee hanged on Sunday first!”

(2.1.288). Despite what Katherina has just said and everyone’s purported disbelief that such a match could be made so swiftly, especially with such a shrew, they do believe

Petruchio. Some scholars argue that Katherina’s silence at this point implies her acquiescence; however, Ann Thompson, editor of the Cambridge edition of Taming, has a different position: “Petruchio deprives Katherina of her principal weapon, leaving her, in most productions, speechless with rage” (100). Thompson’s assessment is supported by the description we are given of Katherina during her wedding ceremony. Petruchio, according to Gremio, swore, stamped, and even hit the priest, and Katherina “Trembled and shook” as a result (3.2.157). Katherina seems to typically rely on her verbal sparring abilities, but when Petruchio infuriates or intimidates her, she loses her voice.

As further proof of the fact that Katherina has not shown her father that she loves

Petruchio, when Katherina, Baptista, and Tranio are waiting for Petruchio to arrive at the church for the wedding, Katherina still maintains that Petruchio does not have “that special thing” that Baptista said must be obtained before they marry—her love. In response to her father complaining of Petruchio’s tardiness, she describes her situation thusly: “I must, forsooth, be forced / To give my hand, opposed against my heart” (3.2.8-

9). Why would Baptista force his daughter to marry this man if she does not love him when he implied that that was the only condition he required to give his daughter’s hand Crosby 92 away? There is no reason for him to say such a thing if he did not mean it. If it was something that he had promised to Katherina, he need not say it to Petruchio when she is not present, especially if he plans to marry her to him regardless. Some scholars argue that Katherina has fallen for Petruchio, but, as Petruchio claims, wants to continue to act like a shrew in public. They say that her comment in the church is a reaction to her fear of being rejected by Petruchio, whom she actually loves. If this is the case, though, it is still curious that her father would marry her to someone who she has explicitly told him she would rather see hanged than marry, given his insistence that she must love her betrothed.

Of course, there is no way to know for sure what Shakespeare intended—whether

Katherina really is being forced into marriage with someone whom she abhors or whether she is secretly excited about the match—but in A Shrew, we are given an explanation.

In A Shrew, Kate’s father is equally deaf to Kate’s protestations of being wedded to her suitor; however, in this play, we learn that Kate is not as against the match as she leads others to believe (whether or not they listen). After railing at her father and the

Petruchio figure, Ferando, Kate considers her situation in an aside: “But yet I will content and marrie him, / For I methinkes have livde too long a maid, / And match him to, or else his manhoods good” (53). Holderness and Loughry claim that this aside demonstrates that Kate has a “complex subjectivity separable from her public persona and indicates her voluntary entry into a contest with Ferando” (94). Shakespeare’s play features several asides between characters, but none include Katherina. We never get this kind of insight into her personality; she does not have confidantes in whom she can confide or soliloquies in which the audience can discern her true feelings. If she has a complex subjectivity separable from her public persona, we are not afforded the opportunity of Crosby 93 seeing it. There are several reasons why A Shrew has not been studied and esteemed in the way that Taming has been over the past four hundred years, and I assert that one of them is because it fills in gaps, thereby inhibiting further conversation and dialogue.

Similarly, Lacy’s Sauny the Scot and Garrick’s Catharine and Petruchio, which strongly suggest that the shrew will return to her rebellious behaviours, do not generate the same kind of discussions regarding the sincerity of the submission speech because it is heavy- handedly indicated that the shrews in each are not being genuine. The ambiguity surrounding Katherina in Taming is what makes Shakespeare’s play so frustratingly enticing, and it is also what makes it such a conversional piece of art.

***

While watching Taming, it is easy to forget about Sly after the second induction scene, but originally, Sly would have stayed visible on an upper stage through the rest of the play and possibly had a final scene. Watching the play this way or reading it with this knowledge can change the way that we view the taming plot. Sly is duped for the entertainment of both the Lord and the audience, but many adaptations of the play omit the induction scenes entirely. Tori Harding-Smith asserts that drawing attention to Sly

“diminishes the verisimilitude of the characters and so reduces our empathy with them”

(4). The ridiculous character of Sly and the enigma as to the lack of his reappearance throughout the rest of the play make the changes that happen in the taming plot more farcical and so alter the way in which we understand the play. Furthermore, because A

Shrew completes this framing plot, less discussion regarding it is required; it is not as open to interpretation or conversion as Shakespeare’s framing story that has no known ending. Crosby 94

Most scholars believe that Shakespeare did write an ending to the Sly plot, but it was lost at some point. Charlotte Artese, however, believes that Shakespeare purposefully left this framing story without an end: “it is interesting to consider a possible resistance to determining the end of ‘Lord for a Day’ and the attendant attitude toward class structure”

(323). Artese’s article “‘Tell thou the tale’: Shakespeare’s Taming of Folktales in The

Taming of the Shrew” analyzes the relationship of the folktale origins of Taming and the play itself. In it, she notes that in early modern England, there were three basic endings to the ‘Lord for a Day’ folktale. One is that found in A Shrew—the lower class man is returned to his station, oftentimes believing that his foray into aristocracy never truly happened. The other two are quite different: in one, the lower-class man is given a position at the court of the upper-class man and an advantageous marriage; in the other, the lower-class man is returned to his station, but he reunites with the upper-class man later, and he is given some money, though not enough to change his status significantly

(Artese 322). Artese succinctly summarizes the implications of these three different endings respectively: “a peasant can never be a lord, a peasant can be a lord, and a peasant cannot be a lord but should be compensated for his oppression” (322). As such, if

Shakespeare did write an ending to the Sly plot, there is no way of knowing which of these three endings he might have used. It seems unlikely that the Lord would give Sly a place in court and a marriage that would help him to move up in class, but at this point, we can only conjecture. Perhaps, though, as Artese asserts, Shakespeare never intended to write an ending and instead always planned to leave this gaping hole in his play.

Artese cites a manuscript of Count Lucanor, a collection of stories owned by a fourteenth-century Spanish prince, in which there is a ‘Lord for a Day’ folktale and two Crosby 95 taming folktales that closely resemble Shakespeare’s taming and courting plots.

Significantly, in this manuscript, the ‘Lord for a Day’ story is cut off mid-sentence while the lower class man is still under the impression that he is a lord (Artese 323). Although, like the lack of an ending in Shakespeare’s play, this was most likely the result of a problem with printing or a case of certain pages being lost over the years, it could have inspired others to consider what the ‘Lord for a Day’ story could mean without an ending.

Artese suggests that Shakespeare was forcing his audience to choose an ending for themselves: “While he insists that the audience accept the way that he is telling the

‘Shrew’ tale, for the ‘Lord’ tale he leaves them to their own devices” (323). As thought- provoking as Artese’s ideas are, I must disagree with her assertion that Shakespeare

“insists that the audience accept the way that he is telling the ‘Shrew’ tale” because the many gaps he constructs, including the uncertainty of Katherina’s feelings toward

Petruchio, suggest that he “leaves them to their own devices” to interpret the taming plot as well. Moreover, the lack of an ending to the framing plot does not only influence the

Sly plot, it also heavily influences how we understand the play within the play.

***

The Sly plots of both plays start very similarly—Sly falls asleep drunk, a Lord finds him and decides to dress him up in his own clothes and move him to his own room to be entertained by the reaction this lowly man will have at waking to be told he is a lord. Then the Lord asks the players to put on a play for Sly, and that play is about taming a shrew. In both Taming and A Shrew, Sly and the Lord interrupt the taming plot after the first scene. The stage directions tell us that after commenting on Act One, Scene One, the

Lord, Sly, and Bartholomew “sit and mark” (1.2.243). Thompson notes, “These words Crosby 96 indicate that the ‘Presenters’ remain on stage (sit) and even prepare for later involvement in the action (mark) but F makes no further mention of them” (77). As such, we do not get to learn how or when Sly discovers that he has been duped. In A Shrew, we do have such an ending. Throughout A Shrew, Sly interrupts the play within the play to ask questions, make comments, or request more drink. At one point nearing the end of the play but before Kate’s submission speech, the Lord realizes that Sly has fallen asleep, and he asks his servants to put him back in his own clothes and return him to the tavern where they had found him. When Sly awakes, he believes that his foray into nobility and the play he watched was only a dream but claims that he now knows how to tame a shrew.

Some performances of Taming affix A Shrew’s ending of the Sly story to

Shakespeare’s play to create a whole frame rather than have the induction scenes without an ending. Others ensure that Sly stays onstage watching the taming plots throughout the play, and draw attention to him by having “actors enter with a cart and property baskets, request additional props from the lord, turn occasionally to their prompter, and bow to

Sly on their entrances and exits” (Haring-Smith 4). More commonly, however, the induction is dropped. Rather than adding an ending that is generally believed to not be

Shakespearean, they cut out scenes that they do believe to have been written by

Shakespeare. This is almost universal in film versions of the play and relatively common in stage productions. What is the value of the induction? Are directors right to cut it entirely? Is that more Shakespearean than adding an ending that is probably not

Shakespeare’s?

The presence of the characters from the Sly plot throughout the play and especially at its ending makes A Shrew very different from Taming. Many scholars who Crosby 97 believe in A Shrew’s merit assert that the presence of Sly and the Lord undercuts the actions of the characters in the play within the play, especially when the Lord in A Shrew assures Sly that the taming play is all folly. When a character is to be sent to prison in the taming plot of A Shrew, Sly interrupts the action to protest. The Lord significantly reminds him, “this is but the play, theyre but in jest” (81). Sly, using his newfound, fabricated authority, ignores the Lord and commands that none will go to prison.

Thankfully, the actors on stage who were to be imprisoned get away, and Sly is appeased.

This particular moment of metatheatricality, however, reminds us that everything we are seeing in the taming plots is merely a jest, and audience members should not take it seriously. In Taming, most productions that include the induction have Sly, the Lord, and

Bartholomew quietly exit the stage sometime after Act One, Scene Two. When this happens, it is easy for the audience to forget that they are watching a play within a play.

When audiences are reminded, however, Sly’s existence problematizes the messages produced by the taming plots because those messages were intended for a character as silly as Sly rather than for the audience directly.

At the end of A Shrew, Sly proclaims that he will tame his wife; consequently, the practice of shrew-taming becomes less believable and reputable. Sly is presented as a lowly drunkard who is easily duped. Sly constantly makes mistakes—he mistakenly believes that he is a lord, he mistakenly believes that Bartholomew is a woman and his wife, he mistakenly calls a male and female character two girls, he mistakenly fears for the freedom of the actors whose characters are threatened with prison, and he mistakenly believes that he dreamt the whole thing. Despite thinking it was all a dream, Sly proclaims: “I know now how to tame a shrew ... Ile to my / Wife presently and tame her Crosby 98 too (89). The audience can assume that he will be mistaken about this as well and infer that taming a wife may not be as easy as the play suggests. In Taming, Baptista, Lucentio,

Tranio, and Hortensio are all amazed by the clear transformation Katherina has undergone by the fifth act, and the audience is unsure as to whether or not to believe in its sincerity. In A Shrew, the audience is less likely to believe in Kate’s transformation because to believe that it is realistic is to agree with Sly. We do not know whether or not

Shakespeare wrote an ending to the Sly plot, but it is worth considering that he may have intentionally left this story unfinished, creating another gaping hole as to the play’s stance on class and gender as perceived through the several instances of cross-dressing in the play.

***

The two most prevalent kinds of changes that take place in Taming are the changing of a personality—namely Katherina’s taming—and cross-dressing of both gender and class. A Shrew explains the change in Kate’s personality and it supplements the cross-dressing scenes by providing an end to the Sly plot. We are given an unusual example of class cross-dressing in the induction when Sly is convinced that he is in fact a lord. Sly is unconscious when the Lord dresses him up as a lord, and when he wakes, the

Lord and his servants trick Sly into thinking that he is, in fact, a lord. Shakespeare often plays with cross-dressing in his comedies, but this is the only instance in which someone is dressed up and tricked into thinking he is someone different from himself rather than dressing up in order to mislead others.3 Unlike Tranio, who does indeed pass when he

Bottom is in a similar position, but he is not merely dressed up, he is given the head of an ass, and the Queen of the fairies does not treat him as she does in order to trick him, Crosby 99 rises in class upon adopting his disguise, Sly does not pass for a nobleman. Upon first waking, Sly speaks in prose and asks his serving men for conserves of salt beef and ale whereas his serving men and the Lord speak in verse and offer him candied fruit and sack, which typically referred to “imported sherry or white wine; a more aristocratic drink” (Thompson 60). Even if these people had not been the ones to dress up Sly, they would be able to recognize immediately that he was not of the social status that his clothes suggest. Once Sly starts to believe that he is in fact a lord, he starts speaking in verse; however, he still fumbles with language, mistakenly calling a comedy a “comonty” and continuing to prefer ale to sack (i.2.95, i.2.132).

In productions that keep Sly visible throughout the play, his presence problematizes the messages produced by the taming plots: as previously discussed, when an actor playing a tinker dressed as a lord is watching a play in which several characters are pretending to be of a higher class than they are, the play within a play becomes more farcical. The Sly plot also further complicates gender roles—watching Katherina give the submission speech can produce quite a different effect when you are watching Sly sit next to an actor playing a boy whose character was instructed on how to play a woman and is successfully passing as a woman as they watch another boy actor playing a woman instruct other boy actors playing women on how to behave as women.

In Shakespeare’s induction, the Lord asks that his page, Bartholomew, play Sly’s wife. He instructs Bartholomew in the art of playing a woman:

And say, ‘What is’t your honour will command

Wherein your lady and your humble wife

but because she believes she is in love with him neither does Oberon transform Bottom in order to trick him but in order to humiliate Titania Crosby 100

May show her duty and make known her love?’

And then with kind embracements, tempting kisses,

And with declining head into his bosom,

Bid him shed tears. (I.110-16)

The Lord is confident that his page will be able to play this part well. In A Shrew, the boy pretending to be Sly’s wife is actually one of the actors from the troupe that will put on the taming play, but in Taming, he is merely a page. There is no reference made to the page’s acting abilities or experience, and yet the Lord is confident that he will “well usurp the grace, / Voice, gait and action of a gentlewoman” (I.127-8). Is that because the

Lord thinks that it is easy to perform the part of a devoted, doting wife? In this moment, the Lord could very well be speaking to one of the boys in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men who would be playing the part of Katherina or Bianca. The Lord instructs Bartholomew how to act like a wife in this opening scene of the play, and in the closing scene,

Katherina instructs Bianca and the Widow how to be good wives. Rather than the play opening and closing with the framing story featuring Sly, the play begins and ends with instructions on how to play the part of a woman. If Katherina has changed and is genuine in her final speech, then she is teaching other women how to be better wives. Even if she has not changed and is being facetious throughout this speech, she, like the Lord, is still explaining how the ideal wife is supposed to act..

Even if Katherina is sincere and is actually trying to teach these women how to be better wives, her attempts are undercut by the fact that Bartholomew’s presence reminds us of the sex of the boy actors playing the female characters. Moreover, Katherina draws Crosby 101 our attention to the female characters’ bodies in this speech, which would serve to remind the audience once again that these female characters are being played by boys:

Why are our bodies soft, and weak, and smooth,

Unapt to toil and trouble in the world,

But that our soft conditions and our hearts

Should well agree with our external parts. (5.2.165-8)

Barbara Hodgdon accuses this speech of “insistently rehears[ing] women's attributes”, but argues that its excessiveness “betrays an intense anxiety to mark the speaker's body as feminine, and to do so, it pulls out all the culture's-and the theater's-available capital.

Toward the end of the speech, however, the illusion of femininity teeters on its head, threatening to tip ‘woman’ into the androgynous identity of the boy actor” (540). One of the kinds of capital about which Hodgdon speaks is the use and knowledge of verse. In several instances in Katherina’s speech, lines are eleven syllables long, which was called in early modern England and is still known today as, “feminine rhymes” (Hodgdon 541).

This speech preaching the proper way to be feminine is reinforced by Katherina’s use of feminine rhymes. Hodgdon calls this excessive; I call it metatheatrical. In emphasizing

Katherina’s femininity through this rhetorical device and by drawing the audience’s attention to the “soft” and “smooth” bodies of the boy actors, the audience cannot help but be reminded that these actors specifically lack the ‘parts’ of women.

Even though these actors most likely were smooth of face and smaller and weaker than grown men, their bodies would still have been quite different from those of a woman. The softness of a woman typically refers to her breasts and lack of musculature, but these actors lack these female parts while playing the part of a female. The actor Crosby 102 playing Katherina reminds us of his breastlessness, of his anatomical sex, in this speech, and, if Bartholomew, Sly, and the Lord are still on stage, Bartholomew’s presence is a constant reminder of the ease with which one can cross-dress. The instability of gender here calls into question one’s ability to make a transformation from male to female so simple and thus calls into question the possibility that people can make a lasting, meaningful change, such as a conversion.

***

Theatre was thought to have powerful influences on people to the extent that many critics did not believe that boy actors should dress as women for fear that they would somehow become women or entice men to have sex with boys.4 All of this goes to show that there was great significance placed on the audience, and so I believe that we should place an equal amount of significance on the fact that Sly was the intended audience of the taming plots. When we watch the taming plots through the filter of Sly watching them, it does change our perspective on one’s ability to change—whether that is a change in personality, class, or gender. Watching Sly’s utter failure at passing as a nobleman and then watching him watch all of the characters within the taming plots who pass so easily in their disguises influences the way in which we view these changes.

Watching the Lord instruct Bartholomew on how to act like a lady and watching

This was true in early modern England and it is still the case in the contemporary world of scholarship. Phillip Stubbes, a Protestant antitheatricalist of the sixteenth century, argued that having boy actors play the parts of women harmed the masculinity of the actor and of the spectator (Stubbes 144-145). Over four hundred years later, some contemporary gender and queer theorists argue that the feminized bodies of cross- dressing boys led the audience to consider engaging in sodomitical activities (Orgel 15- 16). In addition, they assert that casting boys in women’s roles had the power to destabilize gender identity and denaturalize sexual desire in the sense that heterosexuality was deemed natural and homosexuality deviant (Howard 112). Crosby 103

Bartholomew successfully convince Sly that he is a lady influences the way in which we understand the boy actor playing Katherina deliver the submission speech. Thus, in order to better understand how Shakespeare worked the false conversions that he perceived in

England into Taming, it is significant to note the filter through which he has us watch this play on changing. Haring-Smith asserts, “Distancing the play by emphasizing the framing story can unify the three plots—the deception of Sly, the wooing of Bianca, and the taming of Kate—which, although they come from three different traditions with diverse conventions and expectations, all involve illusion” (5). Of course, the theme of illusion is evident in adaptations that cut the induction scenes as well, but it is foregrounded when the framing device is utilized.

With the multitudinous changes that take place in Taming and the ambiguity

Shakespeare designs around Katherina’s feelings and the Sly plot, this play is both concerned with the idea of conversion—what constitutes a real conversion and what are the consequences of not converting when under pressure to do so—and open to conversion from outside sources. Taming’s openness to conversion is even more evident when it is compared to A Shrew, a play that fills in some of the gaps that Shakespeare purposely creates. A play such as Tamer would not be able to convert A Shrew as easily and smoothly as it does Taming because there is less room for interpretation in A Shrew.

Anxieties surrounding conversion permeated early modern English culture, and this preoccupation manifests itself both in Shakespeare’s subject matter and in the way he writes, and this conversional mode of writing perfectly illustrates the way in which a text can be converted and conversion can be understood as a literary methodology. Crosby 104

Conclusion

The field of adaptation studies has had difficulties with designating and categorizing different kinds of rewritings for decades. Authors such as Hutcheon, Cohn, and Coursen propose arguments as to why particular names are preferable and delineate how and when they should be used. Fortier and Fischlin yield to using the term ‘adaptation’ despite acknowledging that it is not the right word for many of the texts they study, claiming there is no ‘right word’. Drouin proposes a kind of compromise in which we use existing terms—specifically ‘adaptation’ and

‘appropriation’—but qualify them using an adjectival-based system in order to make these terms at once more specific and more flexible. In this project, I have demonstrated how ‘conversion’ is another term that can be used to describe particular kinds of rewritings. I do not suggest, however, that ‘conversion’ should supplant the more commonly used ‘adaptation’ but that it should be recognized as a distinct methodology. I contend that where an adaptation alters its source in order to tell us about the cultural moment from which the adaptation comes, a conversion does this while also returning to its source and lastingly changing the way that we view it.

In the western world, the word ‘conversion’ has connotations with the religious, which is often associated with the past, so it follows that works that return to their source texts are described with a word that has this historical embeddedness. Adaptations, by contrast, point toward the future, which suits the pseudo-scientific connotation that the word ‘adaptation’ conveys. These terms rightfully reflect the processes that they carry out. Conversions and adaptations operate in different ways; thus, they should have different designations. Crosby 105

The relationship between Shakespeare’s Taming and Fletcher’s Tamer is a perfect example of how a text that rewrites its source can convert it. This relationship is compared to that between Taming and a modern adaptation of it, 10 Things. 10 Things adapts early modern

England’s concept of shrewishness to its equivalent in 1999 America in a thought-provoking manner while also providing a commentary on modern bardolatry. These insights, however, do not alter the way we understand Shakespeare’s play as much as it demonstrates that Taming was a well-suited source to use as a foundational text to tell the story of Kat and Patrick and

American high school students in 1999. Tamer, however, does change the way in which we understand Taming, both in the context of the play and in people’s reception of it over the centuries.

The production history of both Taming and Tamer, including the production history of

Taming’s Restoration adaptations, demonstrates how Tamer affected audiences’ understanding of Katherina and Petruchio’s relationship. John Lacy’s and David Garrick’s adaptations of

Taming both operate in a way that is tailored to fit Taming’s sequel. Despite technically being a sequel, Tamer was often viewed as the main event throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and Taming and its adaptations the precursors to it. After the Restoration, Tamer was not recorded as having been produced again until the end of the twentieth century, but despite its absence from the stage, its impact had already been made—Taming was already converted.

The way in which a text rather than solely a human being is able to undergo conversion is further explained by understanding the significance of art objects. An art object is different from an object of utility in that it has something within it that creates meaning outside of its usefulness. Hannah Arendt argues that this is because art objects are reified thoughts. Because conversion is the dialogical and enduring change of thoughts and art objects contain this kind of Crosby 106 interiority, it follows that art objects are capable of undergoing conversions in a similar manner as humans.

It is made even more evident that understanding ‘conversion’ as a literary methodology is possible when it is compared to a very similar procedure already in operation: typology.

Typology is the study of the relationship between the New Testament and Old Testament as well as the study of reading other texts in a way that illuminates their connections to the Bible.

Despite the fact that the stories of the Old Testament were written long before Christ’s birth,

Christians believe that these stories are related to those of the New Testament. They believe that there are instances of foreshadowing in the Old Testament that point to the coming of Christ, and to read these instances as such is to have a typological view of the Bible. Early modern English people were particularly primed to think typologically because of the ways in which the

Protestant Reformation and the Renaissance encouraged them to interpret old stories in new ways. This helped to shape the way that both Shakespeare and Fletcher wrote.

Based on the folktales that Shakespeare would have been familiar with when writing

Taming, it is clear that by portraying the relationship between Katherina and Petruchio in the way he did, he was intentionally creating gaps in his play. Not only was he interpreting these stories in a new way to create his own plot out of them, but he also designed ambiguities that then left his play open to interpretation. A Shrew, which cannot be accurately categorized as either an adaptation or a source of Taming because of its anonymous author and unknown date of creation, demonstrates how Taming might have functioned if Shakespeare had given answers rather than created questions in his play. Furthermore, the lack of an ending to the Sly plot in

Taming—whether intentional or not—creates more uncertainty around this play. A Shrew provides insight into Katherina and Petruchio’s relationship and an ending for Sly, and by doing Crosby 107 so, contains fewer intricacies for scholars and audiences to debate. A Shrew acts as a foil to

Taming, and their similarities and especially their differences display the way in which the obscurities Shakespeare devises in his plays make them more amenable to conversion than other art objects.

Shakespeare creates ambiguities in this play, and by doing so, he allows for the possibility of different interpretations of it. Fletcher seized on this opportunity and wrote a play that brought to light the possibility that Katherina was not tamed in Shakespeare’s play. He portrayed the marriage between Petruchio and Katherina as tempestuous and thusly brings to light the possibility that Katherina is not sincere in her last speech, which causes us to consider

Shakespeare’s play in a new way. Once Fletcher cast doubt upon Katherina’s taming, audiences would always attend Shakespeare’s play wondering how Katherina, her taming, and her relationship with Petruchio would be portrayed. Whether Katherina’s submission speech was delivered genuinely or facetiously, audiences have known since Fletcher’s play that both were possibilities, and this is how Fletcher dialogically and durably changed Shakespeare’s play. This is how and why Tamer converted Taming. Through this example, we can see that conversion can be understood as a methodology, and through the debates concerning the issue of naming in the field of adaptation studies, we can see why conversion should be accepted as a new methodology for understanding specific kinds of rewritings of texts. Crosby 108

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