the apparent patriarchal assumptions of the taming plot (nor the reductiveness about female charm implied in Bianca’s defection from maidenly modesty), or to suggest that even if he did, the usefulness of the play for the twentieth century is to expose the latent misogyny and brutality that still form the real infrastructure of our bien pensant, politically correct culture.
One way of distancing Shakespeare from the implications of the taming plot has been to repair the broken frame of the play, increasing the significance of the Sly plot by importing material from the anonymous The Taming of a Shrew, printed in 1594 and possibly a ‘memorial reconstruction’ of a Shakespearean original. The taming and submission of Katherine can then be made to appear an unattainable and possibly rather vulgar male fantasy of domination, a dream of empowerment not unlike the violent fantasies of Pirate Jenny in Brecht’s Threepenny Opera. Alternatively, the play can be made to appear more coherent by privileging one or other of its generic modes. On the one hand by ignoring the incipient psychological complexity in the treatment of Katherine in particular (she is after all not the favoured child of her father and Bianca’s butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-her-mouth demeanour might irritate more than a shrew), and taking the whole as a farcical romp with no power to move or upset. On the other side, the farcical nastinesses can be played down in favour of modern notions of relationship where all is fair between the couple because they really love each other, win through to equality within properly constituted hierarchy, and are even, in the most sentimental versions of such a reading, complicit in Kate’s response to the wager.
Certainly H. J. Oliver in his introduction to the New Oxford edition of the play feels that Shakespeare’s not having provided a generically consistent play is a consequence of his youthfulness when he devised it – it is ‘a young dramatist’s attempt to mingle two genres that cannot be combined’. But if generic miscegenation is an effect of youth, then it is surprising to find it again in All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure. Since in these plays it does much to earn the description ‘problem plays’, it might be well to consider if this is not also the effect in The Shrew. The clash of farcical folk-tale in the taming plot with the legitimate desires of both Petruchio and Katherine for lives that they can live, betrays the inconsistences and half-truths that are daily tolerated and evaded. There seems to me no possible way of doubting that Shakespeare presents Katherine’s speech of submission to an idealised hierarchy of gender relationships without irony, but he surely does not do so without thought or without demonstrating the worst that can be said about its potential for physical and psychological tyranny.
The rewards for Katherine’s submission in life, as it were, are presumably those ‘good days and long’ that Petruchio has already stated as his goal. Since it comes as a definitive culmination to the action, the audience is left with no sense of need for its endless repetition, it frames a way of life, while shrewishness is on the contrary a lifetime career, the future of Bianca and the widow. This is not modern but it is not too bad in the circumstances. And the reward in the theatre is the complete stage dominance of Kate. It is possible, of course, to pluck weary disaster out of Katherine’s eloquent dignity but it seems not worth the trouble.
LIST OF CHARACTERS
INDUCTION
Scene I
Before an alehouse on a heath.
[Enter Hostess and SLY.]
Sly
I’ll pheeze you, in faith.
Hostess
A pair of stocks, you rogue!
Sly
| Y’are a baggage; the Slys are no rogues. Look in the chronicles: we came in with Richard Conqueror. Therefore, paucas pallabris; let the world slide. Sessa! | 5 |
Hostess
You will not pay for the glasses you have burst?
Sly
No, not a denier. Go by, Saint Jeronimy, go to thy cold bed and warm thee.
Hostess
I know my remedy; I must go fetch the thirdborough.
[Exit.]
Sly
| Third, or fourth, or fifth borough, I’ll answer him by law. I’ll not budge an inch, boy; let him come, and kindly. [Falls asleep.] | 10 |
[Wind horns. Enter a Lord from hunting, with his Train.]
Lord
Huntsman, I charge thee, tender well my hounds;
Brach Merriman, the poor cur, is emboss’d;
| And couple Clowder with the deep-mouth’d brach. | 15 |
Saw’st thou not, boy, how Silver made it good
At the hedge corner, in the coldest fault?
I would not lose the dog for twenty pound.
1 Huntsman
Why, Belman is as good as he, my lord;
| He cried upon it at the merest loss, | 20 |
And twice to-day pick’d out the dullest scent;
Trust me, I take him for the better dog.
Lord
Thou art a fool; if Echo were as fleet,
I would esteem him worth a dozen such.
| But sup them well, and look unto them all; | 25 |
To-morrow I intend to hunt again.
1 Huntsman
I will, my lord.
Lord
What’s here? One dead, or drunk?
See, doth he breathe?
2 Huntsman
| He breathes, my lord. Were he not warm’d with ale, | 30 |
This were a bed but cold to sleep so soundly.
Lord
O monstrous beast, how like a swine he lies!
Grim death, how foul and loathsome is thine image!
Sirs, I will practise on this drunken man.
| What think you, if he were convey’d to bed, | 35 |
Wrapp’d in sweet clothes, rings put upon his fingers,
A most delicious banquet by his bed,
And brave attendants near him when he wakes,
Would not the beggar then forget himself?
1 Huntsman
| Believe me, lord, I think he cannot choose. | 40 |
2 Huntsman
It would seem strange unto him when he wak’d.
Lord