I live in New York, and I go the theatre now and again, so I get ticket offers via email a lot. Most are quickly scanned and then deleted. Some are flagged. And some, like this one:
Kate, the witty, waspish shrew, must be married off before her younger tamer sister. When Petruchio comes in search of a wife, will he live to woo this wildcat Kate? A touching battle-of-the-sexes comedy, in which an unwilling bride has it out in tongue-lashings with her husband while he starves her out of her sulks! This slapstick, misogynistic, controversial tale will leave you laughing all the way home!
prompt massive headdesking. I’m not sure that I have a problem with labelling Shrew misogynist (how else to understand it?), but implying that the misogyny is what will “leave you laughing”?
Well, sure! What’s fresher and funnier than woman-hatin’? What’s your favorite part: when Petruchio enters, insults, an and informs Kate that he will marry her? Or when he keeps her from eating or sleeping, and gaslights her that day is night? Or OMG, the part at the end where Kate publicly humiliates herself ? The Best!
I think you can still do Shrew, but I don’t think you can do it “straight” and expect it to work for modern audiences. Or maybe I do. And that’s the biggest FAIL of all.
Suck it, American Theatre of Actors.
Who the fuck wrote this? She’s unwilling! He starves her! But it’s “touching”! Bring the kids!
I’ve seen two performances of “Taming of the Shrew” and they were both very tongue-in-cheek. Clever stage action can turn the scripted misogyny on its ear, but it takes a lot of effort on the director’s part.
Or reverse the genders. Now there’s a laugh fest!
My first paper for graduate school was called “Taming of the Shrew: Agent Patriarchy or Feminist Subversion?”
And now I’m going to use the play, and some of my arguments from that paper, in my thesis, arguing that only romantic comedies with alternative spacial settings (As You Like It’s Arden, Merchant of Venice’s Belmont, Midsummer’s forest) allow courtship to succeed with happy results. Basically my whole argument is that the comedy of Shrew only highlights the tragedy of Katherine.
So I’ve recently become kind of obsessed (again) with the play. Two of my favorite essays about it are by Lynda Boose and Emily Detmer. Especially the Detmer, I loved that. Some of the stuff that’s been published about it, though, will make your fucking BRAIN EXPLODE. When I was researching my first paper, I was like “Are you serious?! Are you SERIOUS?!” for every other thing I read. They’re all, “No no the relationship is TOTALLY romantic!” and “Kate LIKES that Petruchio tames her. She wants someone to stand up to her and give her a taste of her own medicine!” And then Harold Bloom (…ass) is like, “The nagging feminists just want to take all the fun and romance out of this play. But how could anyone with Kate’s final speech not really be in love with Petruchio? Those stupid feminists.”
@Cimorene: I would like to beat Harold Bloom soundly about the head with my hardcover Arden edition of “Shrew.”
Word on Bloom. The hot air in that man’s head could fuel a major city for years. He lost me when he treated JK Rowling like someone who had committed a crime against humanity because she wrote books that were (1) hugely popular and (2) not “Canon worthy”. Jeez, lighten up, willya?
Dear American Theatre of Actors,
Go shrew yourself.
“Go shrew yourself.”
I actually Laughed Out Loud.
@ BeckySharper
If you like the play, I recommend the Bedford edition, in the Texts and Contexts series. It’s edited by Fran Dolan (love. her.) and has a bunch of historical documents about women’s roles in Elizabethan England. That whole series is really good, but I’m basically a Fran Dolan fangirl so anything she edits or writes is an automatic A+ for me. I’ve never seen any of these editions in a bookstore, though.
My 10th grade English teacher (!!!!!!!!!!) actually taught The Taming of the Shrew to his class and spent a whole class section watching five different versions of Kate’s final monologue, played from tragedy to farce, and getting a bunch of fifteen year olds to seriously discuss the gender politics of the various staging choices.
Personally, I’ve always found it very difficult to read Taming of the Shrew in light of Much Ado about Nothing. You have two strong female characters, known for their sharp tongues, but one gets an unambiguously happy ending, the other gets…tamed?
The BBC did a film of “The Taming of the Shrew” starring John Cleese who, most people know, is classically trained. He said under one condition, only if it was done seriously and not in the comedic tradition. By doing so, you see how awful Petruchio is to Kate. I don’t know if that was his intention, but I my feminist fandom wants to think he did that to show how misogynistic the play really is and is no laughing matter. Or at least to show the serious implications.