"Taming of the Shrew" several different views
(this particular play was mentioned in several books I read over the past weekend, so I decided to check out some of the different interpretations. I would be happy to hear how you view this play. Thanks!)
The Taming of the Shrew: 'This is not a woman being crushed'
An exercise in misogyny – or a love story about a man liberating a woman? As the RSC stages
Stephen Boxer and Michelle Gomez in the RSC’s 2009 version. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian
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A man acquires a rich but headstrong woman as his bride. At the wedding, he punches the priest and later refuses to attend the family party. He drags his bewildered wife through the mud to his country house, where he starves her, deprives her of sleep and contradicts every word she says. By the time they return to her father's home, the woman is meek and submissive. When you strip The Taming of the Shrew of its comic sub-plot, in which a bevy of lovers in disguise woo a beauty, and focus on the bare bones of the story of wildcat Katherine and her "tamer" Petruchio, Shakespeare's early play looks like a nasty piece of work. Indeed, critics and academics have spent much of the past century denouncing it as barbarous, offensive and misogynistic. Yet Shrew is remarkably popular with audiences: the production opening in Stratford-upon-Avon this week is the Royal Shakespeare Company's third (fourth, if you count last year's for young audiences) in less than a decade. Either theatre-goers are secret sadists, who like nothing better than watching a spot of wife-bashing, or there's more to Shrew than meets the eye.
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Over the past two decades, productions have divided into two camps. On one side, performances emphasise the brutality of Kate and Petruchio's relationship. In this interpretation, Shrew can be considered, in director Edward Hall's words, "theatre of cruelty". His all-male production in 2007, he says, "followed the text through to its bitterest conclusion. Look at what Shakespeare has written: Kate is starved of sleep, beaten, refused food." Too often, he argues, this abuse is played for laughs, when what should be being communicated is Kate's suffering.
Hall doesn't think Shakespeare was being misogynistic in portraying female subjugation, but questioning the values of society. "He's challenging an audience's expectations of how a woman is supposed to behave. What if, as a human being, she doesn't want to roll over, as was expected in Shakespeare's day? I actually think he's championing the woman's rights."
The other, less stomach-churning interpretation is that this is a curiously misunderstood love story. Lucy Bailey, who is directing the new RSC show, believes their attraction is instant, and what unfolds is "all foreplay to one event, which is to get these two people into bed". For this to work, Bailey says, Petruchio must never appear to be superior to Kate. "In rehearsals, the play quickly becomes odd if Petruchio starts to lecture, becomes the educator, or takes any moral position. It becomes punitive, and you start to think, 'This is dead and ghastly.' It is a fantastic battle of the sexes: it's because they won't allow each other to win that the game continues."
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https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2012/jan/17/taming-of-the-shrew-rsc
'The Taming of the Shrew': A Feminist Reading
How Should the Modern Feminist Reader Respond to 'The Taming of the Shrew'?
https://www.thoughtco.com/thmb/V11I6IeCIUtTTdYqzUBRmwV05mI=/768x0/filters:no_upscale():max_bytes(150000):strip_icc()/ShrewKatePetrucio-593feff95f9b58d58ace7632.jpg
Taming of the Shew staged
Petruchio (Kevin Black) and Kate (Emily Jordan) from a Carmel Shakespeare Festival production of "The Taming of the Shrew" at the outdoor Forest Theater in Carmel, CA., Oct, 2003.
A feminist reading of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shew throws up some interesting questions for a modern audience.We can appreciate that this play was written over 400 years ago and, as a result, we can understand that values and attitudes towards women and their role in society were very different then than now.
Subordination
This play is a celebration of a woman being subordinated. Not only does Katherine become the passive and obedient partner of Petruchio (due to his starving her of food and sleep) but she also adopts this view of women for herself and evangelizes this mode of being to other women. Her final speech dictates that women must obey their husbands and be grateful. She suggests that if women do contest their husbands, they come across as ‘bereft of beauty.’ They must look pretty and be quiet. She even suggests that the female anatomy is unsuitable for hard work, being soft and weak she is unsuited to toil and that a woman’s demeanour should be reflected by her soft and smooth exterior.
Modern Contrasts
This flies in the face of what we learn about women in today’s ‘equal’ society. However, when you consider one of the most successful books of recent times; Fifty Shades of Grey, about a young woman Anastasia learning to be subordinate to her sexually dominant partner Christian, a book particularly popular with women; one has to wonder whether there is something appealing to women about a man taking charge and ‘taming’ the female in the relationship? Increasingly, women are taking more high powered positions in the workplace and in society in general. Is the idea of a man taking on all the responsibility and burden of work more appealing as a result? Would all women really prefer to be ’kept women’, with the small dispensation of having to obey your men folk in return? Are we willing to pay the price of male brutality over women for a quiet life as Katherine is?
Hopefully the answer is no.
Katherine - A Feminist Icon?
Katherine is a character who initially speaks her mind she is strong and witty and is more intelligent than many of her male counterparts. This can be admired by a female readership. Conversely, what woman would want to emulate Bianca’s character who is essentially just beautiful but unremarkable in other aspects of her character? Unfortunately it appears that Katherine wants to emulate her sister and eventually becomes even less willing than Bianca to challenge the men in her life as a result. Was the need for companionship more important to Katherine than her independence and individuality? One could argue that Women are still celebrated more for their beauty than for any other achievement in today’s society. Many women internalize misogyny and behave accordingly without even knowing it. Women like Rhianna cavort and look sexually available on MTV to buy into a male fantasy in order to sell their music. They shave all over in order to conform to the current male fantasy demonstrated in prolific pornography. Women are not equal in today’s society and one could argue that they are even less so than in Shakespeare’s day...at least Katherine was just made to be subordinate and sexually available to one man, not millions.
How Do You Solve a Problem Like Katherine
Feisty, outspoken, opinionated Katherine was a problem to be solved in this play. Perhaps Shakespeare was demonstrating the way in which women are beaten down, criticised and derided for being themselves and in an ironic way was challenging this? Petruchio is not a likable character; he agrees to marry Katherine for the money and treats her badly throughout, an audience’s sympathy is not with him. An audience may admire Petruchio’s arrogance and tenacity but we are also very aware of his brutality. Perhaps this makes him slightly attractive in that he is so manful, perhaps this is even more attractive to a modern audience who is tired of the metrosexual male and would like a resurgence of the cave man? Whatever the answer to these questions, we have somewhat established that women are only slightly more emancipated now than in Shakespeare’s Britain (even this contention is debateable). The Taming of The Shrew raises issues about female desire:
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https://www.thoughtco.com/taming-of-the-shrew-feminist-reading-2984901
Power and gender in The Taming of the Shrew
Article by: Rachel De Wachter
Does The Taming of the Shrew advocate sexual inequality or does it show and critique men’s attempts to subordinate women? Rachel De Wachter discusses how we should think about relations between the sexes in the play, and examines how writers, directors and actors have explored this question over the past four centuries. How should we interpret the dynamics between men and women in The Taming of the Shrew? This question has echoed around the play since it was first performed. We need only look at its incredibly varied production history to see that directors have convincingly interpreted the play in many different, even contradictory, ways. The play’s nebulous quality makes it difficult to pin down, and just a few examples of produtions reveal the interesting scope it offers to directors. Gregory Doran’s 2003 production showed ‘Kate trying to rescue a madman she genuinely loves’.[1] Phyllida Lloyd has has cast only women in her 2016 production to caricature the brutality of men enabling the actors ‘to throw the behavior of the men into a particular relief, and be playful [with that aspect of the play in a] larger than life way’.[2] Caroline Byrne’s 2016 Globe Theatre production presents a darkly violent relationship between the protagonists set against a desperate and brutal political backdrop, with references to the 1916 Easter rising suggesting a common cause between feminism and Irish nationalism. While these different ways of presenting the play offer different insights into its meaning, one fundamental question haunts every interpretation: is this a play that advocates sexual inequality or does it show and critique men’s attempts to subordinate women?
Many responses to the play are critical of the apparent inequalities it presents. This includes the earliest substantial response – John Fletcher’s The Woman’s Prize, or the Tamer Tamed (c. 1611) – which concludes with the lesson that men ‘should not reign as Tyrants o’er their wives’ (Epilogue, l. 4). Indeed Fletcher’s play aims ‘to teach both Sexes due equality / And as they stand bound, to love mutually (Epilogue, ll. 7-8).’ Interpreting the power dynamics between men and women, in The Taming of the Shrew, an in particular the central couple Katherina and Petruchio, is a problem from the outset. Whether you see the relationships in the play as harmlessly boisterous and knockabout or tragically violent and oppressive, Shakespeare is clearly offering us his take on that perennial trope in both comedy and tragedy: the battle of the sexes. Before readers even consider critical or directorial interpretations, they face a perplexing text whose meaning, perhaps more than many of Shakespeare’s plays, seems to shift depending on the approach taken. These ambiguities can usefully be scrutinised by focusing on the language and structure.
The language of the play: hunting
The language of hunting is a recurring motif in the play and warrants consideration as a larger metaphor beyond its role as a mere social backdrop to the action. In the framing Induction, the Lord arrives at the alehouse with his huntsmen. Their conversation about the hunt seamlessly becomes a conversation about Christopher Sly lying drunk and dead to the world in front of them. The Lord describes him in a dehumanising way, calling him a ‘monstrous beast’ and comparing him to a ‘swine’. Thus Sly seems to become ‘fair game’ for a different kind of trap than those the Lord might use in hunting, though it is no less cruel. The Lord tricks Sly into believing he is also a nobleman, a fiction which the audience recognise as unsustainable.
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characteristics of things which might be desirable to him: voicelessness, obedience, usefulness.
In one of the central soliloquies of the play, Petruchio sets out how he intends to tame Katherina. His language is rich with imagery related to falconry. Hunting with falcons is thought to have been a pursuit of the upper classes. Petruchio’s close knowledge of it is a mark of his social standing, as well as the source of his confidence that he can tame nature. Both his social status and his knowledge seem to underpin the patriarchal dominance which he intends to assert over Katherina. Petruchio makes an explicit analogy between his method of domesticating his wife and the methods used by falconers. He will ‘man [his] haggard’ (4.1.193) or tame his wild female hawk. As a model for marriage, this seems a disturbing metaphor based on the falconer curtailing the natural freedom of a powerful bird. Shakespeare seems to be highlighting the inequality of the relationship in which the rational, free man subjugates the woman who, like a wild animal, has her access to food and sleep controlled. Petruchio intends ‘to make her come and know her keeper’s call’ suggesting that Katherina will be obedient and understand her position of subservience to her ‘keeper’. Both Sly and Katherina are on the receiving end of patriarchal dominance in relation to class and gender respectively.
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https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/power-and-gender-in-the-taming-of-the-shrew
https://study.com/academy/lesson/feminism-gender-roles-in-the-taming-of-the-shrew.html
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