The Taming of the Shrew 1990

The Taming of the Shrew is a play-within-a-play. The story of Kathering and Petruchio, and Bianca and Lucentio, is told by a group of strolling players. It is a practical joke played on a drunken bum by a powerful Lord.

There is no consistent tone to the play as a whole. We lunge giddily from farce to comedy of manners, to slapstick -at times even to trgady; and from one level of "reality" to another. Some characters are complex and rich, and others no more than stock figures from commedia dell'arte.

What is more, many of them are pretending to be someone else. The drunken bum, Christopher Sly, watches the show with his "wife" who is in fact the Lord's Page, Bartholomew; the Lord is disguised as a servant. In the play-within-a-play, the servant, Tranio, is disguised as his master, Lucentio; Lucentio is disguised as a Classics teacher, Cambio; Hortensio is disguised as a music teacher, Litio; the Pedant is disguised as Lucentio's father, Vincentio; and Petruchio himself puts on many different "acts" for Katherina's benefit. In Shakespeare's day there would have been one final most crucial disguising: the three female parts would have been played by boys.

All of this means that it is impossible for any audience to view the story of how a woman is tamed into submission through starvation, sleep deprivation, and other abuse, as transparent, or "natural". As always, Shakespeare has a reason for his use of "complex seeing." Most obviously, it places Katherine's long, final speech of submission, in quotation marks. There is no pat, happy ending to this play, but a series of dots followed by a question mark...?

Recent Shakespeare scholarship has been fascinated by the figure of carnival as a controlling agent of meaning in his theatre. Carnival is chutzpa, or cheek. Carnival is the enemy of consistency and "order". Traditional roles are reversed, costumes mixed, good taste transgressed, genders bended, forbidden topics discussed, bodily functions acknowledged, and most of all, dominant powers undermined. However briefly, in Shakespeare's "time out", we learn that all things made by humans, even the human subjects themselves, and their relationships with each other, are not unchanging, eternal, and "the way things are", but contingent, temporary, subject to time and change.

When the male actor playing Katherine echoes St. Paul by saying that women "are bound to serve, love, and obey," to her husband, who is played by a woman, the spirit of Carnival turns male chauvinist propaganda into its exact opposite.