The Taming Of The Shrew – William Shakespeare, 1590-1592 ★★½

What's Askew About the Shrew?

Not every “classic” work of literature makes great reading. Sometimes a work is overrated, a little or a lot. Sometimes the text fails to connect to a particular reader. And sometimes, every once in a while, the classic label is not a function of the text itself, but rather the work’s place in our larger culture. You respect it, see its imprint, and sort of shrug.

That is my subjective take on The Taming Of The Shrew, a pleasant comedy that in my view, promises more than it delivers.

If anyone really reads Shakespeare for laughs, Taming Of The Shrew is fine stuff, engagingly written. Consider the back and forth between the title character Katherine and her suitor Petruchio, whip-smart byplay and surprisingly raunchy:

PETRUCHIO 
Who knows not where a wasp does wear his sting?
In his tail.
KATHERINE

In his tongue.
PETRUCHIO

Whose tongue?
KATHERINE 
Yours, if you talk of tales, and so farewell.
PETRUCHIO

What, with my tongue in your tail?
Nay, come again, good Kate. I am a gentleman—
KATHERINE

That I’ll try. She strikes him. [Act II, scene i, lines 239-248]

Where there's a whip, there's a way. Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford vie as Petruchio and Kate in a 1929 movie that became the first-ever Shakespeare adaptation in the sound era. Pickford's Kate is more of a hellcat than in the play. Image from https://www.folger.edu/taming-of-the-shrew.

Yet in construction, in handling subplots, and in other ways, the play also reads like a rush job which has traveled the centuries losing more than the odd line or two. Much Shrew scholarship centers on just how contorted by time it has become, whether sourced from an earlier play or repurposed by Shakespeare from folk tales of the time. With all Shakespeare plays, there are questions about whether we are reading the play as written. With Shrew, this get raised more often.

After a brief two-scene “Induction” that establishes the play as being performed for a boozy vagrant, the action opens with Bianca, a “young modest girl” pursued by two suitors, Gremio and Hortensio. Before the opening scene is over, Bianca picks up a third suitor, Lucentio, just arrived in town. Bianca’s father Baptista lays down the rules: No one marries Bianca unless someone marries my eldest daughter Katherine first.

Easier said than done. “That wench is stark mad or wonderful forward,” [I, i, 71] a servant notes. Katherine arrives as an unmitigated fury, angry at the world and her place in it. While she rages at everyone, the suitors put aside their differences to get Kate hitched.

GREMIO

I am agreed, and would I had given him the
best horse in Padua to begin his wooing that would
thoroughly woo her, wed her, and bed her, and rid
the house of her. [I, i, 145-148]

Enter Petruchio, a rough gentleman of means strangely attracted to Katherine, or maybe just her dowry. Dad’s blessing comes easy enough; Kate herself is a tougher sell.

Petruchio puts the moves on Katherine, in an 1846 engraving by Kenny Meadows which was published in a British volume of collected Shakespeare. Image from https://nepascene.com/2018/06/gaslight-theatre-updates-shakespeare-taming-shrew-wilkes-barre-june-22-30/.

“We have ‘greed so well together/That upon Sunday is the wedding day,” he says.

“I’ll see thee hanged on Sunday first,” she says. [II, i, 332-334]

The action is fast and furious, full of pratfalls and putdowns. The language is more straightforward than in many of Shakespeare’s comedies, less dependent on puns that need archaic pronunciations to come off. Each of the three sections – induction, plot, and subplot – are set up well enough. But the induction is dropped after just one brief return in the middle of Act 1, rendering it a pointless blind alley, while the two main subplots each suffer from shaggy-dog storylines.

The Bianca subplot is more pointless than anything else. The richest suitor, Lucentio, wins the father’s approval, but only under the cover of a faithful servant acting in his place while he pretends to teach her Latin as another suitor’s hired tutor. So little takes place between the young lovers it makes sense this whole storyline gets trimmed in adaptations and ignored by the critics.

LUCENTIO

Hic ibat, as I told you before, Simois, I am

Lucentio, hic est, son unto Vincentio of Pisa,
Sigeia tellus, disguised thus to get your love, Hic
steterat, and that “Lucentio” that comes a-wooing,
Priami, is my man Tranio, regia, bearing my port,
celsa senis, that we might beguile the old pantaloon. [III, i, 35-40]

Lucentio is not the only one wooing Bianca with the "fake-tutor" ploy. Here Hortensio pretends to instruct Bianca about music while playing on her heartstrings. Why Bianca doesn't recognize the guy who has been chasing her since the beginning of the play is never explained. Image from a 2016 Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival production at http://www.pashakespeare.org/show2016_shrew.php.

The Katherine subplot is meatier, providing the play’s title and its lasting reputation, yet suffers from lack of development. Petruchio rags on Katherine, doing everything from calling her “Kate” to refusing to feed her because (he says) nothing is good enough for his love. She acts the part of someone who deserves all of this, spitting venom and kicking shins, until... suddenly... she’s docilely following his lead, and even, in a groaner ending, lecturing the other ladies on the merits of wifely service:

KATHERINE 
Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,
Thy head, thy sovereign, one that cares for thee,
And for thy maintenance commits his body
To painful labor both by sea and land,
To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,
Whilst thou liest warm at home, secure and safe,
And craves no other tribute at thy hands
But love, fair looks, and true obedience—
Too little payment for so great a debt. [V, ii, 168-176]

I don’t object to this because it offends modern sensibilities. Rather, it doesn’t work. It’s a laughless conclusion to a merry play that comes out of left field. People who claim ironies and subtext in that moment and others are kidding themselves.

Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor continued a Hollywood tradition of famous off-screen couples playing Petruchio and Katherine. A big box-office hit, the 1967 film comes off today as tired and grating. Image from http://margaretperry.org/how-is-the-taming-of-the-shrew-1967-a-comedy/.

That’s not even the most tiresome speech. Another features a long description of a painfully sick horse. Call me a pig, but I can handle comedy scenes involving women getting dragged through the mud easier than ones involving a sickly, mistreated animal.

My favorite part of The Taming Of The Shrew is its Induction. A two-scene mini-play, it involves a drunken beggar, Christopher Sly, who is found sleeping one off by a lord who decides to prank Sly by setting him up in his place for a night, instructing his servants to pretend Sly is their master. He enlists some travelling actors to perform a play for Sly, which becomes The Taming Of The Shrew.

Sly initially objects, but soon settles into his role, aroused by the sight of a page boy playing his wife. For a tiny mini-play, the Induction offers some very amusing moments, as well as some flights of poetry only the Bard could pull off so well:

SECOND SERVINGMAN 

Dost thou love pictures? We will fetch thee straight
Adonis painted by a running brook,
And Cytherea all in sedges hid,
Which seem to move and wanton with her breath,
Even as the waving sedges play with wind. [Induction, ii, 49-53]

Christopher Sly gets the royal treatment, while the players prepare. An 1867 illustration by William Quiller Orchardson from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Christopher_Sly_(Orchardson).jpg. 

But after the evening’s main card is underway, the Induction gets only one brief reprise, and referenced no more. Did Sly ever discover he had been tricked? What was his opinion of the relationship between Kate and Petruchio? How close did he get to scoring with the page boy? Like much else here, I am more entertained pondering possibilities.

There’s also a Gremio and a Grumio, emblematic of how confusing the play can get. Others play multiple characters, sometimes addressing the same person they are imposturing. Such confusion does enhance the comedy. But if you want something deeper, it is a bit of a letdown.

Maybe it’s because he wrote it around 1591, i. e. quite early in his career, but by then he was already producing much finer fare like A Comedy Of Errors and Richard III. Maybe he really did write a fuller play, from which only this has reached us. Why else does one of the rival Bianca suitors vanish from the competition without explanation? Why are characters both so obtuse and (occasionally) hyperaware?

In Act IV, scene iii, Petruchio gets into a dispute with a tailor over a dress Katherine quite likes but he deems unworthy. Much of the play's second half revolves around Petruchio, with the former spitfire Katherine reduced to sighing tagalong. Image by C. R. Leslie for the 1886 Illustrated London News, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Taming_of_the_Shrew.

Most critically, why does Katherine go from raving she-devil to docile so quickly? Just in Act II, scene i, we begin with her having tied up her sister, see her first meeting with Petruchio where she tells him marriage with him will never happen, then leave quietly with him as he announces their pending betrothal.

Perhaps there is a lost scene or section of scene where Petruchio actually says or does something that brings Kate over. What we see in the play is her telling him off one moment, then going off quietly then next. She still barks, but her resistance is nothing like shrewish after that first scene. She gets soft instead.

Which leads me back to my starting point, that The Taming Of The Shrew endures less on its own merits than for its larger place in our culture. As the archetypical “Battle of the Sexes,” it has established a template that keeps recurring across the generations, much like Shakespeare’s Romeo And Juliet, the flip side of the same boy-loves-girl story. People argue over it, laugh with it, and relate to it in some basic way without engaging it enough to see where it falls short or feels thin.