Shakespeare in a Divided America

by James Shapiro

  Adams began his inaugural lecture by declaring that with the opening of the Folger Shakespeare Library, the nation’s capital now had three great monuments to those who had “molded the political, the spiritual, and the intellectual life of our nation”: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and William Shakespeare. Shakespeare had earned that status by helping to preserve the great “Anglo-Saxon” racial legacy of America’s founders, serving as a bulwark against a sea of immigrants that had recently threatened it. Adams recalled for his audience how in the “middle of the nineteenth-century” the “first great wave of immigration” brought thousands upon thousands to our land, “mainly from Germany, Norway, Sweden, and other north-European countries.” Though “honest, thrifty, and altogether admirable as citizens,” they nonetheless began “to alter the solid Anglo-Saxon character of the people.” That danger paled in comparison with the dilution posed by those who came after: “Italians, Poles, Slavs, Hungarians, Czechs, Greeks, Lithuanians, Rumanians, Armenians,” who “swarmed into the land like the locust in Egypt.” These newcomers were “foreign in their background and alien in their outlook upon life” and “exhibited varied racial characteristics, varied ideals, and varied types of civilization.” Things looked grim, as America “seemed destined to become a babel of tongues and cultures.”

  “Fortunately,” Adams explained, “about the time that the forces of immigration became a menace to the preservation of our long-established English civilization,” compulsory education for the young was instituted, and the study of Shakespeare’s plays required. The dissemination of his plays in new editions, in amateur and professional performances, in women’s reading groups, in university courses, and by book collectors like the Folgers further stemmed the effects of the wrong sort of immigration. With immigration quotas now imposed and Shakespeare deemed essential to the nation’s cultural life, the tide had been turned. By 1932, the racist fantasies that forty years earlier had first enlisted Shakespeare in opposition to a culturally diverse America were now enshrined: “If out of America,” Adams concluded, “commonly called the melting-pot of races, there has been evolved a homogenous nation, with a culture that is still essentially English, we must acknowledge that in the process Shakespeare has played a major part.”

  Alfred Drake spanking Patricia Morison in Kiss Me, Kate, 1948.

  CHAPTER 6

  1948: Marriage

  Even in its own day, The Taming of the Shrew—a play that delivers on the promise of its title, regaling us with how Petruchio breaks the will of his headstrong wife, Katherine, declaring, “She is my goods, my chattels . . . my ox, my ass, my anything” (3.2.230–32)—seems to have troubled theatergoers. Shakespeare’s fellow dramatist John Fletcher, tapping into this unease, responded with The Tamer Tamed; in this sequel, Petruchio, now a widower, gets his comeuppance when he marries a woman who tames him. What’s notable about Shakespeare’s handling of the story is how Katherine is broken: though she may strike him, Petruchio never hits back. Long before our modern-day black sites and their enhanced interrogation techniques, Shakespeare understood that the surest way to break people was first to disorient them, then to deprive them of food and sleep (“She ate no meat today, nor none shall eat,” Petruchio brags. “Last night she slept not, nor tonight she shall not” [4.2.185–86]). What happens in the play differs from what some unruly women actually endured in Elizabethan England, where punishments included wearing a “scold’s bridle,” or, in a precursor to waterboarding, being dunked in a pond while strapped into “a cucking stool.” It’s no surprise that The Taming of the Shrew fell out of favor, replaced by less disturbing adaptations; more than two centuries passed before the original version finally rejoined the repertory in 1844 in Britain—the very last of Shakespeare’s plays to do so.

  It took even longer in the United States. It wasn’t until 1887, at a time when American women were organizing in their struggle against discrimination and fighting for the right to vote that would not be won for another thirty-three years, that American playgoers had a chance to see something approaching Shakespeare’s original, in the socially conservative production directed by Augustin Daly, starring Ada Rehan. The nation’s leading critic, William Winter, considered Daly’s interpretation “one of the few really great and perfect dramatic creations of its time” and heaped praise on Rehan’s transformation as Katherine from “shrewishness to loveliness.” As her resistance to Petruchio wilts and she submits to him as her “master,” Rehan’s Katherine was, for Winter, “unmistakably the same woman, only now her actual self.” When, after the turn of the century, Margaret Anglin, the first woman director to tackle (and star in) the play, brought her production to New York, a deeply offended Winter savaged it for treating Katherine’s final speech (in which she urges wives to abase themselves and “place your hands below your husband’s foot,” then does so herself) “as if it were mere mockery . . . a jest, secretly understood between Petruchio and his wife.” The world was changing and men like Winter weren’t happy about it.

  A half century would pass between Daly’s production and the next groundbreaking American one, by Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne in 1935. Lunt and Fontanne were at this time the leading stars of the American theater, and since 1924, not long after they married, had insisted on performing together. Plays with strong roles for both of them were not easy to find, and The Taming of the Shrew, which proved to be one of them, was a hit, opening on Broadway to rave reviews, then touring across the country. They went all in on the farcical, bringing onstage acrobats, “dwarfs,” and horses, distracting audiences from the ugliness of the plot. The celebrity of the leads also meant, as another reviewer put it, that “at least half the fun comes in watching them enact Mr. and Mrs. Alfred Lunt.” Shakespeare didn’t often write about married life, focusing instead on courtship. Having a power couple play the leads in The Taming of the Shrew gave audiences the rare pleasure of responding to the comedy as one that was also about the push and pull of a real (or at least an imagined) marriage.

  Lunt and Fontanne restored the usually cut Induction of The Taming of the Shrew, in which a lord commands a troupe of traveling players to perform at his behest in order to fool a drunkard who has fallen asleep. Their performance creates for spectators a sense that they are watching a play within a play. In Lunt and Fontanne’s production, these players were an irritable troupe worn down by endless touring. They fake-coughed loudly when anyone in the house failed to suppress a cough, repeated cues, and shouted out lines from offstage. It got violent. Fontanne’s Katherine broke a lute over Lunt’s head, ground her heel into his foot, and bit him; Lunt’s Petruchio retaliated by smacking her on her bottom, kicking her, and dragging her around. For one reviewer, Fontanne accepted “defeat not sweetly and softly as many Katherines do, but with a mental reservation that she still may have something to say about this business of being tamed.” And when at the end she declares that she is ready to place her hand beneath her husband’s foot in token of her submission, the promptbook indicates that “as she swings her hand to punctuate her meaning,” she (accidentally?) smacks him in the face. “You were left to wonder at the finish,” the reviewer for the Boston Globe wrote, “whether her humility was not more mock than real.” In a final gesture meant to puncture (in the very act of staging) the fantasy of eternal marital bliss, the production ended with the lovers departing in a chariot drawn by a unicorn. Esquire’s critic was convinced that once “the curtain fell,” Fontanne’s Katherine “would get revenge for hardships and humiliations by beating the hell out of her spouse.” Katherine, having lost the battle, may well win the war; but if so, that victory is deferred, Petruchio the victor, and patriarchal norms left battered but still standing.

  In February 1940, Lunt and Fontanne returned to Broadway for a one-week, standing-room-only revival of their production, a benefit for the Finnish War Relief Fund, staged as the world slid toward war. One of those involved in mounting it was Arnold Saint Subber, who
would go on to a long career as a Broadway producer. At the time, though, he was just an ambitious 21-year-old trying to make his way in the theater. Thirty years later Saint Subber told an interviewer for the BBC that “one of the jobs I had had was as a play reader in the Alvin Theatre where Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne were performing Taming of the Shrew. I was constantly backstage and would listen to Mr. Lunt and Miss Fontanne screaming at each other, in rage, ‘If you ever do that again I will never go on stage with you ever again in my life.’ And then, both appearing onstage cuddly, sweetly, and I thought to myself—that’s quite a sketch.” Saint Subber, convinced that this frontstage/backstage drama would make for a great show, “went about peddling the idea of turning Taming of the Shrew into a musical.”

  Eight years and a world war would pass before Saint Subber assembled a creative team that transformed the seed of his idea into one of the most enduring and successful American musicals, Kiss Me, Kate. Typically, popular attitudes toward marriage, divorce, and women in the workplace evolve at a glacial pace. But the war changed that. The draft had left industries desperate for workers, and the number of women who for patriotic or economic reasons joined the workforce exploded during the war, going from 11.9 million in 1940 to 18.6 million by the war’s end. In 1940 a little over a third of white-collar workers were women; by 1945 they accounted for half. Even in blue-collar jobs—typically associated with the kind of labor it was assumed that only men could really handle—the percentage of women rose, from roughly a quarter to a third of all workers. Those gains were almost entirely wiped out at war’s end, when women came under enormous pressure to step aside and let returning veterans take over. After 1945, the percentage of white-collar jobs held by women returned to near prewar level, and blue-collar ones plummeted to below that. Most of the women who continued to work saw their paychecks shrink. “We Can Do It” posters that had exhorted women in the workplace were discarded, replaced by a drumbeat message from the federal government that “a mother’s primary duty is to her home and children.” Making sense of these conflicting directives wasn’t easy, and it was to imaginative works like Kiss Me, Kate that whipsawed Americans flocked to make sense of the marital state of the nation.

  The government’s patronizing guidance was reinforced by academic experts, such as Barnard College professor Willard Waller, who warned in his book The Veteran Comes Back that after “a war, women do not easily give up their newfound freedom, and since men are scarce and morality in general relaxed, the post-war period tends to be a time of experimentation and new family customs and forms.” As the military campaigns in the European and Pacific theaters were ending in victory, Waller warned that a new war was imminent for America’s men—and it wasn’t against the Russians. He wrote about it in an op-ed that ran in the New York Herald Tribune in February 1945 (and appeared in many other leading newspapers as well) titled “The Coming War on Women.” Waller takes as a given that “the two halves of the human race have struggled for supremacy,” and that in the immediate aftermath of a major war “men and women [are] at loggerheads,” and “one might say the women get out of hand.” He has little doubt that when the troops come home, “women will probably put up a stronger fight for supremacy because this war’s changes have merely climaxed generations of feministic progress.” He anticipates conflict on three fronts: “the battle for jobs, the battle of the birth rate, and the battle of personal ascendancy.” Victory will only be achieved when the “patriarchal family” is “restored and strengthened” and “millions of women” surrender “their jobs.” The “young men who have fought a war,” he warns, “are not likely to accept petticoat domination.” A deeper problem for Waller is that “the woman of today is so constituted that she cannot help trying to dominate her husband, and if she fails she will resent that, but if she succeeds she will be forever embittered.”

  Waller’s conclusion reads like a gloss on the increasingly anachronistic take on The Taming of the Shrew, with men sounding tough and women playacting furious resistance but secretly enjoying male dominance: “It is better just to tell her plainly that he is going to be the boss, and then she will be very angry and will threaten to leave him and will love him to distraction.” Newspapers across the country were flooded with responses when his op-ed ran, and even Eleanor Roosevelt was moved to respond to it, urging women not to leave their jobs.

  Yet Waller’s view was moderate when compared with that espoused in the controversial bestseller Modern Woman: The Lost Sex. Its authors, the psychiatrist Marynia F. Farnham and the historian Ferdinand Lundberg, had first tried out their pseudoscientific attack on feminism in November 1944 in the pages of Ladies’ Home Journal, to which millions of American women subscribed. Farnham and Lundberg’s argument boiled down to this: women were unhappy because they wanted to act like men. But biological determinism (including the “fact” that only men achieve sexual satisfaction in casual relationships) confirmed that such a pursuit was doomed to failure. Modern women, they concluded, were “sick, unhappy, neurotic, [and] wholly or partly incapable of dealing with life,” because the workingwoman is “in the dangerous position of having to live one part of her life on the masculine level, another on the feminine.” This self-destructive resistance to patriarchal authority must end: “Women’s rivalry with men today, and the need to ‘equal’ their accomplishments, engenders all too often anger and resentfulness toward men. Men, challenged, frequently respond in kind.” The moral of their story was much the same as the one that William Winter had taken away from The Taming of the Shrew in the previous century: a “woman who is to find true gratification must love and accept her own womanhood as she loves and accepts her husband’s manhood.”

  There was one more turn to their argument: all this unhappiness is a modern phenomenon. Things had only changed for the worse in the seventeenth century; back in Shakespeare’s day things had been different, and better. All this would be grist for the mill for those fashioning Kiss Me, Kate at the very time that Farnham and Lundberg’s book was making such a splash. Modern Woman spoke to a nostalgia for a lost (and imaginary) world, where things were simpler, and where all—especially women and minorities—knew their place. But the war had punctured that fantasy. African American and Japanese American soldiers had served heroically in combat. Women had held down blue-collar jobs and didn’t have to rely on men to put food on the table.

  Because working women were less dependent on men for support, the loss of jobs, especially well-paying ones, for women after the war ought to have led to a lower divorce rate, as more wives now had to depend upon their husbands for financial support. Yet the opposite occurred, with the divorce rate in America skyrocketing in the aftermath of the war. The unraveling of many hasty wartime marriages had something to do with it, but the epidemic of divorces at the time went far beyond that, reflecting a deeper crisis about cultural expectations for married life. The figures were sobering: in 1940, one marriage in six had ended in divorce; by 1946, the figure was one in four. And with the return of millions of American husbands from the front, that rate continued to soar. A headline in the New York Times in April 1944 warned that ‘‘7 of 10 War Marriages Held Headed for Trouble.’’ Two years later U.S. News & World Report announced that the country’s divorce rate had reached an all-time high in 1945, with more than a half million divorces projected for the following year. A battle between the sexes was now replacing the one between the Axis and Allied powers; the time was ripe for a Broadway show that enacted it.

  * * *

  • • •

  IN 1947, Arnold Saint Subber persuaded Lemuel Ayers, a talented young designer, to coproduce his as yet unnamed musical. They tried to get the playwright Thornton Wilder to write the book, but he turned them down. They then approached Bella Spewack, one of only a few women at the time writing for Broadway. Spewack told the young producers that she had read The Taming of the Shrew in school and thought it “a lousy play,” one “of the worst Shakespeare wrote.�
� She also told them that if they were “thinking—you know—of just musicalizing Shakespeare, that’s for high school.” She left them with the promise that she would “think about it and if I get a notion how to make it a Broadway show I’ll call you and tell you.” By the autumn of 1947 she had found a way, and committed to writing the book.

  A lyricist was now needed, and despite his reputation, Cole Porter was not the first to whom the producers turned. Porter, who had produced a string of hits in the 1930s, had been eclipsed by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, whose wartime musicals—Oklahoma! and Carousel—had deftly integrated songs and story line in a way that other lyricists, including Porter, had failed to do. Because of that, many considered Porter past his prime. Yet Spewack, who along with her husband, Sam, had worked with Porter a decade earlier, urged her producers to approach him. When they did, though offers were scarce, Porter was ambivalent. He thought a Shakespeare musical “was too esoteric, too high-brow for the commercial stage” and wondered “how he could expect audiences to understand something that he didn’t.” That might have been the case with a more complicated Shakespearean plot, but Spewack was able to pare down Shakespeare’s contribution to the accessible story line of its title: Petruchio meets then tames Katherine, who in the end submits; Porter’s lyrics would work like soliloquies, providing insight into the characters’ inner experience. A breakthrough for him came shortly before Christmas 1947, and by May 1948 an inspired Porter had written twenty-five songs for the show, a third of which were never used.