The Taming of the Shrew

Where I teach sixth grade English my kids are now learning about Shakespeare. I didn't read Shakespeare until the tenth grade. The kids I teach, as wonderful as they are, have a pretty tough time reading and writing, and to throw them into Shakespeare seems pretty ambitious to me. But I'm a Shakespeare buff, and I've done my best with the challenge.

The play they are focusing on is The Taming of the Shrew, which is not my idea of the best introduction to the Bard. It is, after The Merchant of Venice I would guess, the most controversial of his plays, in that it could be openly expressing mysogynism and sexism. But others, including many female scholars, see a kind of prescient feminism in it that I'm not sure I see. When you get right down to it, the play celebrates the total obedience of a wife to a husband. Or is it just a romantic comedy?

For the uninitiated, this is an early play, from 1590-92. It tells the tale of two sisters, one fair and virtuous (Bianca), and one fair but not so virtuous (Katharina). To be fair, Katharina is not a slut or anything, but she is the "shrew" of the title, basically a word used for a woman of bad temper. She's just extremely unpleasant to be around.

Their father, Baptista, refuses to let Bianca, the younger sister, marry before Katharina does:

"Gentlemen, importune me no further,
For how firmly am resolv'd you know
That is, not to bestow my youngest daughter
Before I have a husband for the elder."

Problem: no one wants to marry Katharina. One suitor says, "I say, a devil. Thinkest thou, Hortensio, though her father be very rich, any man is so very a fool to married to hell?"

But into town rides Petruchio, from Verona:

"I come to wive it wealthily in Padua;
If wealthily, then happily in Padua."

He is eagerly recruited by Hortensio, an old friend and one of Bianca's suitors, but he feels a duty to warn him about her. He is not dissuaded, saying he has faced roaring lions and gone to war, how could a woman scare him off. He's after the money--20,000 crowns.

The next part of the play has Petruchio wooing Katharina, which in most versions involves lots of crockery being thrown, as Katharina does not take an instant liking to this man. But he does marry her, and takes her off to his house even before the wedding banquet, declaring:

"I will be master of what is mine own.
She is my goods, my chattels; she is my house
My household stuff, my field, my barn,
My horse, my ox, my ass, my anything."

I would say that is a speech not aged well.

He packs her off to his home, where he proceeds to further "tame" her by denying her food and destroying her clothes. She does come around to love him, though, or at least learn how to tolerate him, as when he declares than sun is the moon and gets her to agree with him, and then saying it is the sun after all.

At the end, at Bianca's wedding to Lucentio (a drab subplot that I won't bother discussing), three married men make a bet to see whose wife is more obedient. Petruchio wins the bet, as Katharina makes a speech that is either horrifying or romantic, depending on your point of view:

"Thy husband is thy lord, thy keeper,
Thy head, thy sovereign, one that cares for thee,
And for thy maintenance commits his body
To painful labour both by sea and land...
And craves no other tribute at thy hands
But love, fair looks, and true obedience;
Too little payment for so great a debt.
Such duty as the subject owes the prince,
Even such a woman oweth to her husband;
And when she's forward, peevish, sullen, sour,
And not obedient to his honest will,
What is she but a foul contending rebel,
And graceless traitor to her loving lord?"

So, is this the first instance of Stockholm Syndrome, or a woman who realizes, despite herself, that she's found her perfect match. Some scholars, even women, think so. They look to a line earlier, when Petruchio says, "And where to raging fires meet together, They do consume the thing that feeds their fury." Is this just an example of what every similar play or film since then--two people who hate each before they realize that they love each other?

I don't think so. Petruchio never does not love Katharina, or at least covet her. He never really shows her much respect. Oh, he says the right things--"Kiss me, Kate," the most famous line, is uttered three times, each one with a more rapturous reply. I think this play is a symptom of Shakespeare's time, when men did lord over their wives. I don't think Shakespeare necessarily believed this was a good thing--Katharina is a fully formed character with her own internal life, at least until that last speech, but he was speaking to the masses.

To help the kids along, I showed them the Franco Zefferelli version of the play from 1967, starring then the greatest movie stars in the world, Elizabeth Taylor as Katharina and Richard Burton as Petruchio. Of course, my kids have no idea who they were. Zeffirelli sticks firmly to the rompish comedy aspect of the play, with plenty of slapstick. Burton plays Petruchio as pretty much a drunken buffoon--in a scene that is not in the play, but is only described, the wedding, he drinks from the sacramental wine jug. In one amusing scene Petruchio announces, "I will not sleep, Hortensio, till I see her," before promptly falling asleep.

It's most a Liz and Dick show, with them rolling in a pile of wool,her decolletage on spectacular display, falling through a roof, her hitting him over the head with a pan. But it's pretty fun. The costumes are terrific (it's set in the proper time and place) and I enjoyed Victor Spinetti, so well known from A Hard Day's Night, as the foppish Hortensio.

A much later film, 1999's 10 Things I Hate About You, was a modern take on the film that I'd like to see again. Unfortunately it's rated PG-13, which I'm not allowed to show to sixth graders.