Shakespeare in a Divided America

by James Shapiro

  Yet it’s unlikely to have shocked the playgoers who first saw the musical; Hollywood had of late accustomed them to seeing one woman after another put over a man’s knee and spanked. In the decade before Kiss Me, Kate was first staged in 1948, at least twenty-eight films included such scenes, five of them in 1945 alone, including one, Frontier Gal, in which the spanking went on for a full minute. And it wasn’t just the movies: open a magazine and you might come across an ad for Van Heusen shirts in which, in a series of images, a spanking gives way to a kiss, or another by Chase & Sanborn, featuring a spanking, warning wives not to serve their husbands stale coffee. The proliferation of spanking scenes occurs at a postwar moment when domestic violence was on the rise: “That fine old stone-age art of wife-beating,” the Austin Statesman reported in early 1946, “is having a distressing renaissance among returning servicemen . . . it is estimated that there have been 14,000 wives beaten by veterans in the U.S. since the war, with the number increasing. And that doesn’t include the countless minor cuffs, slaps, pokes, smacks and spankings which haven’t been reported to a court.” A psychiatrist, Dr. Andrew Browne Evans, asked to account for “this peculiar phenomenon,” is quoted blaming self-deluding working wives: “Women who don’t want to go back to being housewives are bringing a lot of friction into the home. These women may bear a resentment toward their husbands of which they aren’t really aware. They’ve been self-supporting, free, without shackles, and when their husbands return they have to take a secondary position.”

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  AT A TIME when women were being pressured (or coerced) to return to the way things were before the war, the ending of The Taming of the Shrew—where the two plots of the musical collide for the second time—was always going to be a problem. Should Lilli deliver Katherine’s submission speech earnestly? Ironically? With a wink, as Mary Pickford had famously done in a 1929 film of Shakespeare’s play? On which side of the cultural divide did the show come down? At first, Spewack tried to dodge this choice by eliminating the toxic speech almost entirely. In one early version, she introduced a new character near the very end, a movie producer who wants to film Fred and Lilli performing Shakespeare’s comedy in Padua. When Fred asks Lilli how she feels about this, she replies by recalling a line from Katherine’s submission speech: “My husband is my lord, my life, my keeper, my head, my sovereign.” The producer, who doesn’t get the Shakespeare allusion, is confused, so Fred explains, “My wife is simply saying that she wants what I want, and I want it.” After a surprised Lilli interjects—“You said, ‘My wife’?”—Fred asks her to seal their reconciliation “with a lovely kiss!” This version offered a comedy of remarriage in which everything is smoothly managed, as Lilli gets to have both the man she has always loved and a new and exciting chapter in their career together.

  But this too-easy ending was scrapped. So was another, in which Spewack swung in the other direction, this time having Lilli recite Katherine’s entire forty-five-line submission speech, before Fred’s Petruchio takes her hand and they kiss—though still in character, as actors in Shakespeare’s play. Then, after the curtain comes down, Fred and Lilli return in street clothes, sharing a song (“It Was Great Fun the First Time”), so that, as Spewack’s stage direction indicates, “we know they’re going to try it again.” But this version proved unsatisfying. Porter was asked to help to solve the problem, though he too was initially stymied: “I can’t, for the life of me, figure out how I can make a number of the ‘This is the moon if I say it is the moon’ scene.’” He asked his collaborators for “explicit instructions. . . . Do you want the number to be literally Shakespeare’s words or do you want me to alter them for the sake of rhyme etc.?” Porter’s solution was to frame the submission speech with a new and brilliant number, its music “reminiscent of ‘East Side, West Side,’ i.e., the typical Bowery song of the 1900s.” He added that he was sure that “it will tie up the show into a beautiful knot,” and he was right.

  “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” is sung by the two gunmen during the brief interlude between the time when Lilli walks out on both Howell and Fred, wearing her street clothes, and when she unexpectedly returns, dressed as Katherine, just in time to deliver her long final speech. The song succeeds not only because its lyrics are memorable and its vaudevillian tune catchy, but also because it ties into that “beautiful knot” so many of the show’s competing messages while anticipating Katherine’s submission speech that follows. The song reaffirms that Shakespeare’s work remains common currency in America, a touchstone that unites highbrow and lowbrow—extending even to a couple of thugs who learned their Shakespeare in prison, and who sing:

  Brush up your Shakespeare,

  Start quoting him now.

  Brush up your Shakespeare

  And the women you will wow . . .

  Brush up your Shakespeare

  And they’ll all kowtow.

  But as their song builds from stanza to stanza, it also affirms, with a little help from Shakespeare, that women will eventually kowtow, submit to men, even if a bit of coercion is necessary. What begins with a woman pushing back against unwanted physical advances—“If she fights when her clothes you are mussing, / What are clothes? Much Ado About Nussing”—provokes a sharp and violent reaction: “If she says your behavior is heinous / Kick her right in the Coriolanus.” Successive stanzas make it increasingly clear that women have no say: “If she says she won’t buy it or like it / Make her tike it, what’s more As You Like It.” The wit and pleasure of the clever punch lines, the humor of these lowbrow figures promoting Shakespeare, the tug of the old Bowery tune, all work to distract us from what is actually being said.

  In its closing stanzas, as the violence and threats escalate, the gunmen make clear that it helps to quote from those of Shakespeare’s plays that are themselves suffused with the threat of violence: “Better mention ‘The Merchant of Venice’ / When her sweet pound o’ flesh you would menace.” And, in the end, if a woman resists an aroused man, a beating may be necessary: “If because of your heat she gets huffy / Simply play on and ‘Lay on, Macduffy!’”—here recalling the bloody strokes at the end of Macbeth. The cheery song normalizes domestic violence, and Shakespeare is there to legitimate if not facilitate this. And those of us enjoying the musical are complicit in this. It’s a perfect prologue to Katherine’s long speech.

  We’re never told why Lilli decides to return and deliver that submission speech, one that brings the show to an end. Because she’s a committed professional? Because she is still in love with Fred? Her speech—now cut to half its length, and sung in a classical style—is taken verbatim from Shakespeare. Lilli plays the scene straight, her Katherine encouraging women to submit to their husbands before doing so to her own. Fred’s Petruchio then takes her hand, saying, “Why! There’s a wench! Come on and kiss me, Kate.” After they kiss, a company finale follows, and as the curtain descends, there is a rousing reprise of “Brush Up Your Shakespeare,” the show ending with the words “Brush up your Shakespeare . . . they’ll all kowtow.”

  There’s a small but revealing change from the late draft of this scene to the one that appears in the published version of the musical five years later in 1953, where the original stage direction—“They kiss,” is replaced with: “They kiss as Fred and Lilli.” It suggests more than a little anxiety that the scene had failed to signal that the action is resolved in a conventionally satisfying way. But since Fred and Lilli are still in character and costume, still acting in a version of The Taming of the Shrew, how could playgoers possibly know that they are kissing as their real-life selves and not as Petruchio and Katherine—especially when in the earlier spanking scene such a shift was telegraphed by Lilli and Fred calling each other by their real names? The best explanation for this difference between the stage script and the published one is that a cultural shift, one registered in this seemingly minor change, had taken place in the intervening five ye
ars.

  What playgoers saw in 1948 had allowed those who want Lilli and Fred to reconcile and remarry to leave the theater thinking that they do; yet it also permitted more skeptical playgoers to believe that Lilli, who is still in character as Katherine, merely performs the role of the dutiful wife, a role that, by divorcing Fred, Lilli has already walked away from, and may do so again as soon as the final curtain descends. Whatever the differences between Arnold Saint Subber, Bella Spewack, and Cole Porter, the one thing they all understood was what it meant to perform a role in midcentury America, to conform to public expectations while at the same time quietly continuing to do what one needed to do. We don’t know—and perhaps neither does Lilli—whether she will return to Fred after the play is over, and if so, on what terms. All we know for sure is that she’ll continue working (while Lois, who marries in the play, will still be single and sexually liberated outside of it, and will continue to work as well). The ending satisfied early audiences because it offered the solution urged upon American women in the aftermath of the war: neither walking out nor capitulating solved the problem; pretending to be a submissive wife did, though many would discover—and rising divorce rates confirm—that the act would prove a difficult one to sustain. But the action of the musical, like the Shakespearean story on which it is based, stops before that breaking point is reached.

  Four million American playgoers saw Kiss Me, Kate during its initial two-and-a-half-year Broadway run and subsequent two-year national tour. The show won the Tony Award for best musical, best composer and lyricist, and best author of a musical. Kiss Me, Kate was Cole Porter’s last great hit. A decade after the show opened, and after thirty-four operations, he finally had his leg amputated. After that, he was free of pain but apparently never wrote another song. As for Bella Spewack, life mirrored art, for the success of the musical led to her reconciliation with Sam, and they remained married and resumed their collaboration, though never again wrote anything approaching the success of Kiss Me, Kate. Less than a month after its opening, the New York Times reported that Kiss Me, Kate “may very well have set a fashion for future Broadway stage offerings,” notably “a modern musical drama, as yet untitled, based on Romeo and Juliet,” that “will arrive in New York next season.” Originally intended as a story about Jewish and Christian intermarriage, by the time the next Shakespeare musical opened on Broadway—eight years later—it had turned into another fundamentally American story, one about race, immigration, and gang violence: West Side Story.

  Kiss Me, Kate was made into a film in 1953 that nearly another four million Americans would see. But in the five years since it had opened on Broadway, America had quietly changed, changes reflected in the film. Its cast was now all white. The reconciliation of Lilli and Fred is never in doubt. Gender roles are fixed and any allusion to same-sex desire scrubbed. The spanking figured prominently in posters advertising the film. Lyrics are cut, the score censored, and to the relief of the reviewer for the Christian Science Monitor, the film “has dispensed with the excessive suggestiveness of the original.” As far as loose morals and women’s independence went, the backstage world was now more or less indistinguishable from the frontstage one, leading one reviewer to complain that “the cast seems to have no grasp of the temperamental, backstage comedy” of the Broadway hit. Frontstage conventionality—embodied in Shakespeare’s taming plot—had won out over what an anxious Willard Waller had in 1945 called “a time of experimentation and new family customs.” Playact submission long enough and it is easy to forget that it is just a performance. A door that had briefly opened was firmly shut and mostly stayed that way until the 1960s ushered in civil rights, second-generation feminism, Stonewall, and with those social movements freshly transgressive ways of staging and interpreting Shakespeare. In our own day, the recent clamor to “Make America Great Again” harkens back to a fantasy version of this period in the nation’s history—though one that more closely resembles the sanitized world of the 1953 film version of Kiss Me, Kate rather than the grittier and more honest one of the 1948 musical, which had allowed a fleeting glimpse of the struggle in postwar America for greater sexual freedom, racial integration, and women’s choice.

  David Parfitt, Donna Gigliotti, Harvey Weinstein, Gwyneth Paltrow, Edward Zwick, and Marc Norman at the 71st Academy Awards, March 21, 1999.

  CHAPTER 7

  1998: Adultery and Same-Sex Love

  A month before it was scheduled to open in movie theaters on December 11, 1998, Shakespeare in Love still lacked an ending satisfying enough to please American test audiences. Some viewers felt that it was missing an “emotional punch.” Others couldn’t understand why the heroine “didn’t just run off with Shakespeare.” That cut of the film had scored a solid 85 out of 100 in test screenings; but if this score had any chance of being nudged past 90, the ending would have to be changed. Director John Madden and screenwriter Tom Stoppard were under intense pressure from Harvey Weinstein and other Miramax executives to find a solution—which, to the producers, meant giving audiences a happier ending. Weinstein, who flew to London and reportedly badgered Stoppard, was nervous enough to consider a limited release that would allow interest in the film to build rather than risk a more ambitious opening. Miramax executives also worried that putting Shakespeare’s name in the title would be box-office poison, and had pressed, unsuccessfully, for Shakespeare in Love to be replaced by Thou Art My Girl or How Should I Love.

  There wasn’t much time left to change the ending, which had long bedeviled Stoppard, nor was it financially feasible to reshoot the final scenes in the replica Elizabethan playhouse that had been built for the film, or reassemble the eight hundred extras who had filled it. If Shakespeare in Love was to compete for the upcoming Academy Awards, to be held in March—which it had to do if Miramax hoped to turn a decent profit—its opening couldn’t be delayed. Those involved in making the film now found themselves in the same predicament in which they had placed the film’s hero, Will Shakespeare, who was struggling to bring the play he was writing to a satisfying conclusion.

  The ending of Shakespeare in Love continued to be tinkered with until shortly before its December opening. By mid-February 1999, Valentine’s Day weekend, the film was playing at close to two thousand movie theaters across America, and the following month would win seven of the thirteen Academy Awards for which it had been nominated, including Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay. It would go on to gross more than $100 million by the end of July in the United States alone, a phenomenal success for a film that lacked car chases, animation, or intergalactic battles, and that had been given an “R” rating, which meant that those under 17, a significant percentage of the moviegoing public who wanted to see it, had to be accompanied by a parent or guardian. A movie ticket cost on the average five dollars in the US in 1999, so roughly 20 million Americans saw the film during its thirty-three-week run in movie theaters. That’s roughly 10 percent of the adult population in America. No other film about Shakespeare or of his works has ever come close to that figure. And the film’s reach extended further when it became available on DVD. How America imagined Shakespeare at the end of the twentieth century both influenced and was powerfully shaped by Shakespeare in Love—and how this Hollywood success story happened, and what was altered or suppressed in the making of the film, would in turn reveal a great deal about the fault lines in American culture at that pre-9/11 moment.

  Hollywood had long been in love with Shakespeare, but as far back as Warner Bros.’ A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935)—directed by Max Reinhardt, and starring Mickey Rooney and James Cagney—American moviegoers had failed to requite that love; that film barely made back the million dollars it cost to make. With few exceptions, movie versions of Shakespeare’s plays, even critically acclaimed ones, were box-office disappointments. The decade leading up to the release of Shakespeare in Love was typical. Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V (1989) had cost $9 million to make and earned back in the United Stat
es little more than that. A year later, Franco Zeffirelli’s Hamlet (1990), starring Mel Gibson, grossed only a little more than $20 million domestically, as did Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing (1993), despite a glittering cast. A brilliant Richard III (1995), starring Ian McKellen, failed to clear even $3 million in America. Hollywood learned the hard way that it didn’t matter how talented the director was or how many stars were in the cast; the only truly popular Shakespeare play for American moviegoers in the late twentieth century was the one they knew and loved best from high school: Romeo and Juliet. Back in 1968, Zeffirelli’s European-produced version of that play (distributed in the US by Paramount) earned close to $40 million domestically, and Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 version, William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, set in Miami and starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes, earned $46 million in America. Part of the genius of Shakespeare in Love was embedding familiar highlights from Romeo and Juliet (leaving out the unromantic bits) within a suspenseful biopic about the creative and emotional travails of the man who wrote it.

  The premise of Shakespeare in Love is that something had to account for what catapulted Shakespeare from the dodgy author of Two Gentlemen of Verona to the brilliant creator of Romeo and Juliet. The film’s fictional answer is to be found in an inspiring extramarital affair Shakespeare has with Viola de Lesseps, a wealthy merchant’s daughter who is about to be married off by her parents to a money-hungry and crass aristocrat, the Earl of Wessex. Will can’t seem to finish his next play, Romeo and Ethel the Pirate’s Daughter, though he has already sold it to competing theater managers, Philip Henslowe and Richard Burbage. The year is 1593. Biographers don’t know much about the real Shakespeare’s life at this time, leaving the filmmakers an unusual degree of freedom. Will Shakespeare, who begins the film in despair about love and art, ends up finding in Viola his muse. For her part, Viola, who loves theater, falls for Shakespeare’s words before falling in love with the playwright himself, after disguising herself as a young man and auditioning for one of Will’s plays (at a time when women were forbidden to perform in the public theaters).