Induction:
Christopher Sly was a poor tinker. One day he got drunk and passed out in front of an alehouse in the countryside. A lord, out for hunting, found Sly sleeping soundly and proposed to play a joke to this drunken beggar to make him forget himself. The lord had his huntsmen taking Sly back to his fairest chamber, making him decent and clean, and lying to him that he is a mighty lord.
So, when Sly woke up in a bedchamber in the Lord's house, he was all confused. Servants surrounded him and were ready to serve him. He was told that he had been insane and had dreamed for fifteen years or more so that he believed himself to be a tinker. Sly was finally convinced by his "wife," whose real identity was the lord's pageboy who followed the lord's command to fool Sly and therefore disguised himself as a lady and played the role of Sly's wife.
The lord's trick continued. A group of actors came to present a comedy in order to please Sly. Then, Sly and his "wife" sat side by side to enjoy the play. This play-within-a-play that Sly watched brought out the main story of the The Taming of the Shrew.
Act I~V:
Now, in Padua...<...more>
Induction:
Christopher Sly: a drunk tinker who was subjected to a prank and was told that he was a lord.
Lord: propsed to play a joke to fool the poor tinker, when discovering sleeping Sly in front of the alehouse.
Page: disguised himself as Sly's wife by the lord's order.
Act I~V:
Katherina: Baptista's elder daugher and Bianca's sister and she was known as the "shrew". Katherina gave her father a headache for she was sharp-tounged, quick-tampered and violent and hostile to her suitors. She seemed to be jealous of her sister, the treasure of her father, and threatened that she would find oaccason of revenge. However, her violence, hostility, and rejection were no use to Petruchio who set his mind in marring her.
Bianca: Baptista's younger daugher and Katerina's sister. Obedient, gentle, and mild, she was the opposite of Katherna. There are many suitors for Bianca and she cannot marry any of them unless Katerina can get a husband first. Later she eloped with Lucentio.
Baptista: a rich man in Padua. He was a father of two daughters, Katherina and Bianca, "one as famous for a scolding tongue" and "the other for beauteous modesty." He was distressed because of his daughters' marriages.
Lucentio: a smart young man from a wealthy family coming to Padua, the nursery of arts, to study. He fell in love with Bianca at the first sight and planned to marry her. Since Baptista and Katherina made the marriage with Bianca complicated, Lucentio and his servants therefore used trickes and disguises to try to circumvent the complex situation.
Petruchio: a young gentleman from Verona. His father died and he came out to see the world. He wanted to marry a woman with rich dowry ("wealth is burthen of [his] wooing dance") and he set his goal to "tame" and marry Katherina. Here are his very words: "For I am he am born to tame you, Kate, [a]nd bring you from a wild Kate to a Kate [c]onformable as other househod Kates."
Others see the Character Profiles in NovelGuide.
 |
This
portrait shows a couple. Take a closer look at the husband and wife and
see the proportion of the two figures.
What do you think? |
(from SparkNotes)
1. Disguise plays a crucial role in The Taming of the Shrew, throughout both the Induction and the main story. While most of the disguises are removed in the end, those who use them to achieve a specified goal generally succeed¡Xparticularly Lucentio and Tranio. What can we infer about Shakespeare's take on the effects of disguise? Can clothes really make the man?
2. The Induction plays a mysterious role in the play. In fact, we never see the conclusion of the trick played on Christopher Sly. What is the purpose of the Induction, structurally, narratively, or thematically? In the end, does the Induction serve merely a cursory role in introducing the play proper, or does it provide commentary on the themes throughout?
3. What techniques does Petruccio employ to "tame" Katherine? Why do they work? Is Petruccio's manipulation of Kate plausible?
4. How do gender roles affect the attitudes of the characters, and how do these roles surface in the play? Most of the men seem to have a particular idea about how a wife should behave, but do their preconceptions extend to all women? How do the women react to these expectations? Are women systematically oppressed, or do they subtly balance the men's power?
5. The play is essentially a comedy, and yet more serious questions about social issues often overshadow its comic features. How does humor function in The Taming of the Shrew? Note especially the two wooing scenes, by Petruccio (Act II, scene i) and Lucentio (Act III, scene i). Why does Shakespeare include so many of the play's best comic devices in these scenes?
6. Examine the characters of Hortensio and Gremio. Why do they fail where Petruccio and Lucentio succeed? Does their failure stem from their reasons for wanting to get married or from other facets of their personalities?
7. In general, the plots of Shakespeare's plays follow a certain pattern, in which Act III contains a major turning point in the action and events that "inevitably" lead to the climax of action and the wrap-up of plot lines in the fifth and final act. How does The Taming of The Shrew conform to, or deviate from, this pattern? How substantially do the events of the third act¡Xthe marriage scene between Petruccio and Kate, and the wooing scene between Lucentio and Bianca¡Xaffect the action of the rest of the play?
Self, Marriage, and Family in The Taming of the Shrew: An Overview
The Taming of the Shrew (1593-4) introduces themes and ideas-including identity formation and the connections between construction(s) of self, marriage, and family relationships-that will recur in the various plays we read this semester. I will focus this class on three topics for discussion: (1) the transformation and refashioning of self identity as seen in the Induction scenes; (2) the views of masculinity, femininity, and gender roles as they are presented in the competing views of marriage in the play; and (3) the constructions of self and marriage present in the family structures and models in the play. This early play, though often performed as a farce, offers a complex view of the interrelations and tensions between identity formation, marriage, and family structures. Today's class will offer an introduction and overview of those relations and conflicts.
As we begin to discuss these issues, we may want to consider an observation by Merideth Skura. In her psychoanalytical reading of Shakespeare's plays she states "¡Kthe simple fact that Shakespeare's plays are about families. It is remarkable how many of the plays develop out of specific moments in what we might call the cycle of generations that makes up a family. Both comedies and tragedies begin in those moments of crisis or transition that open new worlds¡K. Characters grow up in and then out of families; they start their own families and struggle to keep them together; they watch their children leave to set up new families; and, finally, they fall back to become their children's children" (204). Skura also notes "the conflict between family inheritance and personal individuality, between old memories and new perceptions, between being part of the family unit and being the head of a new family" (205). Shakespeare's early comedies, including The Taming of the Shrew, do not offer a resolution to those conflicts but suggest, instead, that resolutions and constructions of self and family are always being negotiated.
I. The Induction: Christopher Sly and Self-Fashioning
Though productions of the play, including filmic versions and recordings of performances-such as Franco Zeffereli's movie version starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton (whose real life marital struggles color our understanding of their performance of Kate and Petruchio) and the recent staging of the play for the DVD in the Kultur series-omit the Induction, the two scenes in the Induction are related to the main plot of the play in several key ways. For our purposes this class, however, I will focus only on one of those aspects: the possibility for transformation of identity.
Two versions of the subplot involving Christopher Sly and the main plot presenting the courtship and marriage of Kate and Petruchio are available:
1. The Taming of The Shrew: Shakespeare's play that begins with the framing device of the lord's pastimes of hunting and tricking the tinker Christopher Sly. Sly watches as traveling players perform the comedy that is the main plot of the play. At the end of this "play," though, the sub-plot involving Sly does not return.
2. The Taming of A Shrew: a play text performed and published in the 1590s. It may (or may not) have been a source for Shakespeare's play, or it may have been an earlier or later version of the Shakespeare's text. In this version, Sly does return at the end of the play and claims that he too, like Petruchio, has learned how to tame a shrew. (If you want to read this version of the play, please let me know.)
The Induction scenes raise questions about what constitutes identity. In his seminal New Historical study of constructions of self identity in the early modern period, Stephen Greenblatt argues that identity in Elizabethan England was not fixed and static, but an ongoing process in which self identity was constantly being "re-fashioned" by forces outside of one's self. The Induction presents the re-fashioning of Sly's identity. The aristocratic lord in the opening scene for his amusement-saying it will be "pastime passing excellent" (Ind 1.63)-wants to stage a dramatic performance that will cause the beggar Sly to lose his identity as a tinker and assume a new identity: "Would not the begger then forget himself" (Ind.1.36). One of his attendants, the first huntsman, replies, "Believe me, lord, I think he cannot choose" (37). As a pastime, similar in violence to the hunt which they have just completed, the lord and his attendants determine that they can and will re-fashion a new Sly, a process in which--they assert--Sly has no choice; he will forget his former self and construct a new self: "My lord, I warrant you we will play our part / As he shall think by our true diligence / He is no less than what we say he is" (65-7).
The Induction scenes suggest that the process of identity formation, including gender roles, is determined by (1) role playing and (2) other people's perception and understanding:
1. By "playing" their assigned roles, the lord and his attendants alter Sly's perceptions of himself. In a similar way, their performance also redefines the nature of their own self/selves.
2. Sly, after some initial confusion, begins to see and understand himself based on his relationships with others, "what we say he is." His identity is determined by the perceptions, understanding, and projection of who they want him to be.The Lord asks a boy, his page, to disguise himself as a woman and play the role of Sly's aristocratic wife. This performance, which Sly finds convincing, suggests that gender roles may also be determined by performance: a boy can convincingly assume the characteristics, appearance, and manner of a girl. (The performance by the page draws attention to the fact that on the Elizabethan stage all female roles were performed by males, and that such well-known women as Juliet, Cleopatra, Desdamona, and Ophelia were all performed by boys.)
The Induction suggests that identity, class, and gender can all be transformed-at least temporarily. And that transformation is the result of performance. When Sly asks his "wife" to remove her clothes and come to bed with him, she declines, saying that sexual activity may mentally and emotionally upset him, and one of Sly's attendants redirects his attention to the comedy that is about to be performed. (The performance, then, is perceived as being less dangerous than sex. Sex, like love, can be socially disruptive.)
Comedy as a genre can be characterized, in part, by the plot in which a community that confronts social threats (that may be either internal, external, or both) is renewed finally by the agency of love. That communal renewal and closure is celebrated with marriage and propagation. The Taming of the Shrew, though, is somewhat different: the play does not end with marriage. Instead, the marriage of Kate and Petruchio happens in Act III. The second half of the play offers a view of married life and the restructuring of identities and relationships within marriage. Like most of Shakespeare's comedies The Taming of the Shrew presents two settings: the household of Baptista and the household of Petruchio. Kate moves between two locations dominated by men.
In Elizabethan England, even more so than now, a marriage was NOT a private affair for the two lovers; instead, marriage was a familial, communal, religious, political, and public act. It is in that conflation of multiple concerns where we can see the gender roles in the play "performed." Coppelia Kahn notes that "Shakespeare rarely portrays masculine selfhood without suggesting a filial context for it¡K Yet, at the same time, an intense ambivalence toward the family runs through Shakespeare's work, taking the familiar shape of conflicts between inheritance and individuality and between autonomy and relatedness" (217).
A. The play presents two competing views of marriage:
1. Hierarchical model in which men dominate
2. Model based on affection and equality between husband and wifeB. Both views are present and competing in the play
1. Petruchio's violent domination of servants and Kate
2. Kate's final speech: subservience, equality, or "play"?C. Gender roles in marriage as performative:
1. Performances of the feminine: the page, Bianca, Kate
2. Performative masculinity: Petruchio
C. L. Barber in one of his influential essay about families in Shakespeare's plays notes, "¡Kthe almost complete absence, in the early work, of confrontations between sons and fathers-the very thing that is to become central in the first major tragedies. In the early work, there is a very strong tendency to submerge or transcend conflict by identification, so that the sensibility is profoundly sociable. Concern for kinship and kindness extends benign family relationships out into larger contexts of society and nature and focuses on unkindness in violations of family and extended family. Figures of adult male authority in the older generation are characteristically weak or vulnerable, and they command loyalty or sympathy¡K. The chief source of menace, however, is in women. For behind the identification with maternal, cherishing attitudes, motivating it at deep levels, is the danger of being abandoned or overpowered. So a central preoccupation of the early work is with overpowering women-either being overpowered by them or overpowering them" (190). Family relationships, including the relationships between sons and fathers and attempts by men to control and "tame" overpowering women, in The Taming of the Shrew can be viewed from several different perspectives:
A. Absent mothers: in this play, like many of Shakespeare's plays, there are no mothers or even mention of mothers.
B. Father-son relationships: the sons are in the process of separating from their fathers, though the fathers are presented positively.
1. Lucentio, when he arrives in Padua with his servant Tranio comments at length about his father and his father's "love and leave" (1.1.5) and "his good will" (1.1.6). Later, Lucentio must reinvent and re-fashion the image of his father (literally) to accommodate his changed views of home and the world. His father, when he arrives in Padua, must adjust himself to meet that re-fashioned image.
2. Petruchio, similarly, comments three times upon entering Padua of the death of his father and the beginning of his new life away from home. He says, for example:Such wind as scatters young men through the world
To seek their fortunes further than at home,
Where small experience grows. But in a few,
Signor Hortensio, thus it stands with me:
Antonio, my father is deceased,
And I have thrust myself into this maze,
Happily to wive and thrive as best I may. (1.2.45-53)C. Father-daughter relationships:
Baptista's relationship with his daughters is more complex that that of the sons with their fathers. Baptista is supportive of his youngest daughter Bianca. But he is presented as weak and overpowered by Kate. Susan Bassnett, while discussing the "wayward sons and daughters" in Shakespeare's early plays, notes that "Absolute obedience to a parent, like obedience to a monarch, is a concept that Shakespeare questions in these plays¡K.. Rebellion against parental authority is primarily against the father¡K. That the father must be obeyed is clear; the forces of law are on his side. But in every case the father is proved wrong by the events that take place" (63-4). Bassnett also argues (and we may debate) that in his early plays Shakespeare presents "personifications of authority in decay and the younger generation, in rebelling against their parents, does not seek anarchy, but rather seeks to assert a new system of values, firmly rooted in a wider, more humanitarian vision of the world" (71). Does Kate and her rebellion against her father-and husband-suggest a "wider, more humanitarian" world view? Does Bianca's performance as daughter and later as wife suggest a broader perspective than her father's?D. Sister-sister relationship:
The relationship between Kate and Bianca is marked initially by overt physical and verbal violence and competition. By the end of the play, though, Kate has learned to express that violence and competiviness in more subtle ways. The final scene in the play marks that competition in a family that is bound together but also marked with division. Skura states that in Shakespeare's plays, "The family is so important that characters cannot even imagine themselves without one, yet every family must bring on its own destruction."
Taming of the Shrew: Works Cited and Consulted
- Bassnett, Susan. Shakespeare: The Elizabethan Plays. New York: St. Martin's P, 1993.
- Bermel, Albert. Shakespeare at the Moment: Playing the Comedies. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2000.
- Bryant, J.A., Jr. Shakespeare and the Uses of Comedy. Lexington: U of Kentucky, 1986.
- Burke, William Kenneth. A New Approach to Shakespeare's Early Comedies: Theoretical Foundations. New York: Vantage P, 1998.
- Hall, Jonathan. Anxious Pleasures: Shakespearean Comedy and the Nation-State. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1995.
- Lewis, Anthony J. The Love Story in Shakespearean Comedy. Lexington: U of Kentucky, 1992.
- Mangan, Michael. A Preface to Shakespeare's Comedies 1594-1603. London: Longman, 1996.
- Skura, Meredith. "Interpreting Posthumus's Dream from Above and Below: Families, Psychoanalysts, and Literary Critics." In Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays. Eds Murray M. Schwartz and Coppelia Kahn. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980.
- Shakespeare, William. The Taming of the Shrew: Texts and Contexts. Ed. Frances E. Dolan. New York: Bedford, 1996.
- Waller, Gary, ed. Shakespeare's Comedies. London: Longman, 1991.
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