The Taming of the Shrew Read online

  We begin with a brief overview of the play's theatrical and cinematic life, offering historical perspectives on how it has been performed. We then analyze in more detail a series of productions staged over the last half-century by the Royal Shakespeare Company. The sense of dialogue between productions that can only occur when a company is dedicated to the revival and investigation of the Shakespeare canon over a long period, together with the uniquely comprehensive archival resource of promptbooks, program notes, reviews, and interviews held on behalf of the RSC at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon, allows an "RSC stage history" to become a crucible in which the chemistry of the play can be explored.

  Finally, we go to the horse's mouth. Modern theater is dominated by the figure of the director, who must hold together the whole play, whereas the actor must concentrate on his or her part. The director's viewpoint is therefore especially valuable. Shakespeare's plasticity is wonderfully revealed when we hear directors of highly successful productions answering the same questions in very different ways. We also hear from a Kate about the experience of playing "the shrew."

  FOUR CENTURIES OF THE SHREW: AN OVERVIEW

  The early performance and textual history of The Taming of the Shrew, believed to be one of Shakespeare's earliest plays, are clouded with confusion over the precise nature of its relationship with The Taming of a Shrew. It is not clear, for example, whether the 1594 performance of The Taming of a Shrew recorded in Philip Henslowe's diary at Newington Butts in south London by the "Right Honourable the Earl of Pembroke's Men" (Shakespeare's Company) was Shakespeare's play therefore, although scholars believe it probably was. The title page of the 1631 Quarto of The Shrew which claims it was performed by the King's Men at the Globe and Blackfriars theaters and a court performance before Charles I in 1633 indicate that it continued in the company repertoire. The popularity of and interest in Shakespeare's play is also suggested by John Fletcher's sequel The Woman's Prize or The Tamer Tamed (written around 1611) in which widower Petruchio is remarried, to Maria, and subjected in turn to his new wife's taming regime.

  Shakespeare's play was not produced in its entirety from then until the mid-nineteenth century. Instead audiences from the Restoration onward saw partial performances of Shakespeare's text in numerous adaptations. While these testify to the popularity and familiarity of characters and plot, they suggest unease with its complex interweaving of narrative strands. Apart from the anonymous A Shrew which features a complete Sly framework, none of these adaptations treats both the induction and the Katherina/Petruchio plot together. Sometimes they treat the induction material relating to Christopher Sly, in which case the focus is on class, but more commonly the induction has been ignored and the focus is on gender.

  In 1698 John Lacey produced Sauny the Scott or The Taming of the Shrew, a bawdy farce in which the main character is a Scots servant named Sauny (the Grumio role in The Shrew)--from "Sander," the character's name in A Shrew. Written in prose, it has no induction or framework. It's set in London and most of the names are anglicized except Petruchio, Tranio, and Biancha (sic). Katherina becomes Margaret/Peg; Baptista, Lord Beaufoy; Lucentio, Winlove, and so on. The rough outline of Shakespeare's play is adhered to but with an emphasis on physical violence. Petruchio threatens to beat Peg with a stick in the second act, and once in his country house she is not only deprived of food and sleep but is threatened with being undressed by Sauny and forced to sit up, drink beer, and smoke tobacco. Margaret is not tamed by this treatment though, and when she and Petruchio return to her father's, she counsels her sister to rebel against her new husband. When she refuses to speak to Petruchio a barber is brought in to extract a tooth. Petruchio pretends that Peg is dead and is going to have her buried, at which point Margaret capitulates. Her final speech is reduced to "Fy Ladys, for shame, How dare you infringe that Duty which you justly owe your Husbands, they are our Lords and we must pay 'em Service." The writing and characterization are unsophisticated, with the comic emphasis divided between Sauny's bawdy and Margaret's humiliation.

  Charles Johnson's The Cobbler of Preston (1716) is a dramatic response to contemporary political events--the first Jacobite rebellion of the previous year (Battle of Preston, 1715). Johnson was a lawyer turned playwright through his acquaintance with the actor Robert Wilks, joint manager of Drury Lane. He uses the induction from The Shrew, making Kit Sly a drunken cobbler from Preston whom Sir Charles Briton decides to teach a lesson. A rival version written and produced by Christopher Bullock at Lincoln's Inn Fields proved more successful, however, and was regularly revived until 1759.

  James Worsdale's A Cure for a Scold (1735) is an anglicized version of Sauny the Scott, which takes place in polite society and is brought into line with the dramatic unities. The text is stripped right down and filled out with twenty-three songs plus dancing. There is no induction or Sly frame. Baptista has become Sir William Worthy; Petruchio Mr. Manly, now an old friend of Sir William's, and Grumio Archer (Manly's friend rather than a servant); Lucentio is called Gainlove and there is no disguising subplot, although he does run off and marry Flora (Bianca); Katherina is Margaret/Peg as in Sauny. The Tranio role is omitted but some of his functions are taken over by Flora's maid, Lucy. The language in this version has been cleaned up--there is none of the bawdy of the original or vulgarity of Sauny, and there are picturesque archaisms, but despite this and the expression of egalitarian sentiments, the violent potential of the original is exploited and Margaret's physical humiliation relished.

  The most famous and popular adaptation was David Garrick's Catherine and Petruchio (1756), frequently played in a double bill with his similarly abridged version of The Winter's Tale, Florizel and Perdita. Garrick cut the Sly frame and returned the play to Padua. Petruchio is a wealthy man come to Padua to woo Kate. There is no suggestion of any hostility toward her sister or indelicate suggestion that Bianca cannot marry because of Kate. In fact, Bianca is already newly married to Hortensio. Much of Petruchio and Katherina's dialogue from The Shrew is retained but the bawdy innuendo is removed. Garrick's Catherine keeps the line from A Shrew/Sauny/Cure for a Scold in which she decides to accept Petruchio as a husband. They are to be married the next day and Petruchio turns up unsuitably dressed, as in Shakespeare's play. Petruchio comes out of the church singing before taking his bride away. Grumio has gone on ahead and describes events to the female Curtis, who strikes him. The scene in Petruchio's house is much as in Shakespeare's--the line " 'Twas a fault unwilling" is one of very few to survive in all versions. With no disguised suitors or pretended fathers, it is her own father that Kate addresses as "Young budding virgin, fair and fresh and sweet" when he, Bianca, and Hortensio come to visit. Kate's speech is broken up with interjections from her father, sister, and husband. Petruchio turns down the second dowry, claims that he will "doff the lordly husband; / An honest mask, which I throw off with pleasure" and concludes the final speech himself. This is a polite, genteel, and radically simplified version with rather tame shrews, but it nevertheless evoked sufficient anxiety for Garrick to write an Epilogue for Kate in which the actor proclaims, "Thank Heav'n! I'm not the Thing I represented."

  Hannah Pritchard's Catherine was celebrated for her "humour, wit and ... sprightliness"25 as was Henry Woodward's Petruchio. It was revived in 1756 with Kitty Clive as Catherine and enjoyed considerable success despite the notoriously ill-tempered relationship between the leads. Thomas Davies, Garrick's biographer, records how, on one occasion, "In one of his mad fits, when he and his bride are at supper, Woodward stuck a fork, it is said, in Mrs. Clive's finger; and in pushing her off the stage he was so much in earnest that he threw her down: as it is well known that they did not greatly respect one another, it was believed that something more than chance contributed to these excesses."26

  So popular was Garrick's adaptation that The Taming of the Shrew was the last of Shakespeare's plays to be restored to the repertory, in 1844, when Samuel Webster and J. R. Planche produced it at the Haym
arket Theatre in London. It was Garrick's rather than Shakespeare's version which was played by many of the greatest Shakespearean actors of the day including John Philip Kemble and Sarah Siddons, William Charles Macready and Helen Faucit, Henry Irving and Ellen Terry. It was Garrick's version also that crossed the Atlantic and was first performed by David Douglass and the American Company at the Southwark Theatre in Philadelphia in 1766, making it the most popular of Shakespeare's plays of the late eighteenth century there after Romeo and Juliet and Richard III.27

  Despite the favorable reception by critics of Webster and Planche's restoration of Shakespeare's play in 1844 and the excellent performances of Louisa Nisbett as Katherina and Robert Strickland as Sly, Garrick's adaptation continued to hold the stage. Samuel Phelps produced Shakespeare's Shrew at Sadler's Wells in 1856, playing the part of Sly himself to great critical acclaim:

  Mr Phelps has a special aptitude for the impersonation of low-comedy characters.... Sly, under the influence of drink, is little better than a machine, and wholly moved by his instincts. His head turns mechanically from one to another when spoken to.... Gradually his impulses are awakened, and he then shows somewhat of his native humour; the various traits of which were so excellently delineated that the house was convulsed with laughter. We may add that the most uproarious merriment also rewarded the efforts of Mr Marston and Miss Atkinson, as Petruchio and Katherine. The effect was incomparably greater than any ever produced by the performance of the same play in its usual abridged form.28

  But it was Augustin Daly's 1887 production at Daly's Theater, New York, in 1887 which finally "assured that Shakespeare's play would replace Garrick's afterpiece on both the English and American stages."29 As the New York Times records, "It was a performance of poetic comedy, so beautiful, so graceful, and so merry that the eye was dazzled, the ear captivated, and the senses charmed."30 The greatest praise was reserved for Ada Rehan whose Katherine "was of greater merit than any other individual performance."31 The production and Rehan's performance met with equal success when they transferred to London's Gaiety Theatre the following year: "Miss Ada Rehan has entered into the very soul of Katherine, and furnishes a representation of the character not to be surpassed in loveliness and in originality."32 Theater historians have been less kind to Daly's production, Stark Young called his acting version of The Shrew "only a patch-up of the Garrick version."33 Nevertheless, the French comedian Constant Coquelin was so impressed when the production went to Paris that he ordered a French translation. Paul Delair's La Megere Apprivoisee was produced in 1892 at Abbey's Theatre. An Italian version starring Ermete Novelli was also produced at New York's Lyric theater in 1907. Margaret Anglin's production, which opened in Melbourne in 1908, originally included Shakespeare's induction, making this its first presentation in America when the show transferred to San Francisco in 1913, but the scene was inexplicably cut before going on to New York.

  In the same year John Martin Harvey produced Shakespeare's play at the Prince of Wales Theatre in collaboration with William Poel, actor-manager and founder of the Elizabethan Stage Society, with himself as Petruchio and his wife, Nina DeSilva, as Kate. The Times reviewer reported:

  We found not only the Induction (which was given in full) but the presence of Christopher Sly in the audience a great help. We had seen the troupe of players arrive in their gaudy clothes of red and yellow. We knew they were only players. It left us free to enjoy this "pleasant conceited historie" as a piece of hearty fun, without bothering about its ethics or calculating its probability or its likeness to life.34

  The restored text of Shakespeare's play was regarded as problematic even before feminism and critical theory turned The Taming of the Shrew into a problem play. Among the earliest critics to voice his objections, particularly in relation to the last scene, was George Bernard Shaw:

  No man with any decency of feeling can sit it out in the company of a woman without being extremely ashamed of the lord-of-creation moral implied in the wager and the speech put into the woman's mouth.35

  In her account of the play in performance, From Farce to Metadrama: A Stage History of the Taming of the Shrew 1594-1983, Tori Haring-Smith describes the various strategies directors have adopted over the years in order to make the play palatable to modern audiences.36 As her title suggests, directors attempted to distance productions from those elements deemed problematic through emphasizing its comedy in slapstick routines and commedia dell'arte caricature featuring madcap shrews and ruffianly Petruchios. While these were often popular with audiences, critics were judgmental to the point of asking whether the play should in fact be performed at all. It has continued to be performed but the ideas which had brought about a cultural revolution and the revision of critical judgments were naturally to have an effect on performance. In the light of such new thinking, it was difficult to produce the old-fashioned farces or romantic wish-fulfillments. One way in which the play could be made acceptable was by emphasizing the induction which had so frequently been cut in earlier productions. This lent the play distance from the taming plot and also illuminated the relationship between class and gender oppression--if Kate was a victim of patriarchy brainwashed by Petruchio and the social structure, so was Christopher Sly. Many modern productions have focused on the play's examination of class structures in relation to Sly and the actors, most notoriously Bill Alexander's RSC productions of the early 1990s (discussed in detail below) in which the induction is used as a springboard for a more philosophical exploration of the discrepancy between appearance and reality.

  In America Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontane enjoyed great success with their "thumping picnic"37 of a production in the 1930s. George Devine at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford, in 1953 was the first director to incorporate the epilogue from A Shrew in which the Sly framework is completed. Its commedia dell'arte treatment was much admired, as were Marius Goring's Petruchio and Yvonne Mitchell's Katherina.

  1. Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, 1953: a commedia dell'arte treatment.

  John Barton's subsequent production at Stratford in 1960 with Peter O'Toole and Peggy Ashcroft took over and heightened many of Devine's effects.

  Michael Langham, for the Stratford Festival, Ontario, in 1962, took the framing device beyond the conclusion of the play:

  2. John Barton production, 1960: Peter O'Toole as Petruchio and Peggy Ashcroft as Katherina, a production which "heightened many of Devine's effects."

  In that moment--with just a faint suspension of breath to show that something is passing--a world closes down like the last light of day. Petruchio, so triumphant over Kate only a moment ago, is now leaning against a pillar as though his energies could never be restored, his shoulders limp with an actor's weariness. Kate, the virago who has not for a moment stood still, stands alone, looking at no one as the stage properties are hustled past her, waiting for her composure to return. The supporting company, instantly characterless and briskly indifferent, cares only about packing the cart for the journey into the night. And when Petruchio has breathed out his tensions and become a mere player again, he moves past Kate without so much as a nod to her. Starting down the road that will end somewhere in another performance, he throws his arm about Bianca, who is obviously his real love. A play is a play, and even when it is well done, 'tis done.38

  Productions in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century have continued to experiment with strategies and ideas to update The Shrew and render its problematic politics acceptable: "Directors have been drawn to the Shrew because it can withstand extensive adaptation and modification, enabling them to put their personal signatures upon their productions."39 One of the most disturbing is Charles Marowitz's "Gothic tragedy"40 The Shrew (1974) which opens with Kate tormenting Bianca "tied to a pole, bound hand and foot." There is no Christopher Sly framework but the theme of playacting becomes part of Katherina's taming as Grumio and Hortensio take all the supporting roles wearing masks of "gnarled brutish servants."41 Petruchio is an adventurer seeking
a wealthy wife, but the undercurrent of menace and violence is horrifyingly exploited. The theme of class is reinforced through a parallel modern couple--the Boy/Girl who play Bianca and Hortensio. Katherina is finally brainwashed and becomes a mindless cipher parroting the words she has been taught to speak.

  Directors have set the play "in such unlikely places as Cleveland's Little Italy, the American Southwest, Nigeria, New South Wales and the American West"42--Tyrone Guthrie at Stratford, Ontario, in 1954 and James Dunn at the Edinburgh Festival in 1979, among others. They have played with gender roles; for example, the Medieval Players in Oxford's New College cloisters in 1986 cast men in the roles of Kate and Bianca and women as Lucentio, Tranio, and Hortensio, but the problem according to one critic was that Petruchio was not also cross-cast,

  If Petruchio had been played by a woman, the relationship between the two would have been funnier because the actors could have used the fact that they were of the opposite sex to comment on their characters' follies.... In addition to making the relationship between the central characters funnier, casting a woman as Petruchio would have enabled the actors to find a way of engaging constructively with the problems the play holds for us today.43

  There have been a number of all-male productions since then in which the cross-dressed performances have successfully challenged essentialist theories of gender and highlighted its role-playing aspects. At Shakespeare's Globe in 2003 it was performed by the Women's Company directed by Phyllida Lloyd:

  Rather than struggle with this troublesome piece, however, the girls' strategy is to have fun with it. Striding about the stage in doublet and hose, the cast adopts its male personas with relish, slapping each other on the back, drumming the table and lounging with their legs apart--in short enjoying all the laddish behaviour that would still be thought unladylike today.44