A Pelican Book: This Is Shakespeare

by Emma Smith

  That seeming to be most which we indeed least are.

  Then vail your stomachs, for it is no boot,

  And place your hands below your husband’s foot,

  In token of which duty, if he please,

  My hand is ready, may it do him ease.

  (5.2.141–84)

  The tone of this is wonderfully ambiguous. Is she cowed, brought low, reduced, broken-spirited? In some ways the language of ‘our weakness past compare’ suggests so, but on the other hand, the very fact of holding forth on stage for an uninterrupted forty-four lines, the longest speech of anyone in the play by far, counteracts this. Is she sarcastically rehearsing a prepared patriarchal conduct piece? Do the increasing rhymes of the speech – sway/obey, hearts/parts, yours/more, boot/foot, please/ease – suggest the harmony of a settled view, or the singsong of a speech learned off pat? Her condemnation of her sex is so long that perhaps it becomes satirical or sarcastic through repetition, undermining its ostensible meaning. And surely calling women ‘worms’ is deliberately excessive? Could this be a plot with Petruchio to win the wager? We have not seen them together in the play for several scenes, so it is impossible to know how, or whether, this set-piece might have been set up in advance. Is Katherine brought to proper wifely conduct and educated away from the anti-social behaviour of her earlier life? She seems to say so in this long account of women’s obligations to their husbands. Or has she had her spirit crushed?

  These large-scale interpretations are made up of the details of particular points in performance. What do the rest of the cast do on stage during this long speech? Are they attentive, amused, uncomfortable? What about Petruchio? When Katherine states that her hand is ready to be placed under her husband’s foot, it’s a quite different declaration with a quite different meaning if, for example, she is kneeling down in front of him with her hand on the floor, or if she is standing up, arms folded, daring him to request it of her. Clearly the questions don’t stop here. Petruchio’s response is a single line: ‘Why, there’s a wench! Come on, and kiss me, Kate’ (5.2.185) (he still hasn’t got her name). As is quite usual in the early texts of Shakespeare (it is printed for the first time in 1623, as part of the posthumous collected dramatic works known as the First Folio), there is no explanatory stage direction at this point. Shakespeare’s plays are very short on stage directions explaining what is happening, and descriptive directions that say how action is conducted – angrily, happily, quickly – are virtually non-existent: the action of the plays is thus up for grabs by actors, directors, and readers too. Sometimes modern editors usurp this freedom, inserting their own stage directions to clarify what they think is happening. Here, at the end of The Taming of the Shrew, the most common interpolated stage direction is the obliging, mutual and perhaps rose-tinted instruction ‘they kiss’. Editors assume, that’s to say, that Katherine accepts Petruchio’s abrupt invitation or that she obeys his brusque command. But there are other staging possibilities here: an unreciprocated or unwelcome kiss, an awkward silence and no kiss at all, a chasm between the couple, or a mistrustful standoff between the sexes.

  Sometimes we assume that what seem to us ambiguities in Shakespeare’s plays – whether Henry V is a good king, or Othello a racist play, for example – are the result of different ethical frameworks then and now. So, this argument goes, scenarios which were quite unproblematic to early modern audiences have gained moral complexity because our attitudes to race, or military expediency, or, in the case of The Taming of the Shrew, the relationship between the sexes, have changed since Shakespeare’s time. But actually it seems that The Taming of the Shrew was always ambiguous, right from the start – and two contemporaneous and related plays help make that visible.

  In around 1610, almost two decades after The Taming of the Shrew, John Fletcher wrote a sequel called The Tamer Tamed. Fletcher was a playwright with the King’s Men who would go on to collaborate with Shakespeare on The Two Noble Kinsmen and Henry VIII, and his riposte to Shakespeare’s early comedy might be seen as a more distant kind of collaboration, or perhaps as a professional calling card. That Fletcher’s play is written as a self-conscious riposte to The Taming of the Shrew is clear. Shakespeare’s Petruchio, now a widower, returns as Fletcher’s major protagonist. The play begins with wedding guests discussing his second marriage and reminding the audience of his first. Tranio reveals that Petruchio is still haunted by Katherine: ‘yet the bare remembrance of his first wife […] Will make him start in ’s sleep, and very often / Cry out for Cudgels, Cowl-staves, any thing; / Hiding his Breeches, out of fear her Ghost / Should walk, and wear ’em yet’. This time around, Petruchio’s friends assert, he will be in sole charge of breeches-wearing, as his new wife, Maria, already knows her place: ‘She must do nothing of herself; not eat, / Drink, say “sir how do ye”, make her ready, unready, / Unless he bid her.’ The opening scene establishes a patriarchal second marriage with a forceful husband and submissive wife.

  But this Petruchio is in for a shock. Fletcher reveals that his seemingly compliant bride has her own hidden agenda on behalf of all downtrodden wives, vowing to bend her new husband to her own will. To this end, she locks Petruchio out of her chamber on their wedding night and fortifies it against his invasion. She thus literalizes a common metaphor in male poetry of the period by turning her own virginity into a martial siege, in which she holds the position of strength. Parleying with her husband from her ‘barricaded’ bedroom, Maria reminds him of his patriarchal reputation: ‘You have been famous for a woman tamer, / And bear the feared name of a brave wife-breaker: / A woman now shall take those honours off, / And tame you.’ As Bianca (a woke reboot of Shakespeare’s ditsy kid sister) admiringly puts it: ‘All the several wrongs / Done by imperious husbands to their wives / These thousand years and upwards, strengthen thee: / Thou hast a brave cause.’

  Fletcher’s witty, girls-on-top comeback to The Taming of the Shrew speaks to Shakespeare’s intrinsic ambiguities. Fletcher’s Petruchio and his friends recall, with horror, Katherine’s untamed wildness, suggesting that she was never really submissive to him at the celebration scene which ends Shakespeare’s play. But Maria and her friends also know Petruchio as an exemplary chauvinist who needs to be taught a lesson. Maybe it’s significant that the men in the second play experience Katherine’s unrepentant fury, whereas the women see her as a victim of a tyrannical husband. Fletcher’s interpretation of the gender politics of Shakespeare’s conclusion seems equivocal, and this contemporary response suggests that the questions the play has prompted for later audiences were always present. Fletcher hedges the issue about whether Katherine really is tamed into submission to her husband by the end of the play, thus identifying this uncertainty as a thoroughly contemporary view. His interpretation of that final speech shows both that Petruchio has, and hasn’t, tamed his shrew, and the existence of his sequel suggests that The Taming of the Shrew is itself not quite complete, not quite stitched up: from the start it prompts and participates in arguments about gender relations, rather than adjudicating or settling them. As we’ll see repeatedly in this book, Shakespeare’s plays are questions rather than answers.

  To add to the ambiguities, let’s throw in another version of the play. Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew was first printed in 1623. But there is another text, with the title The Taming of a Shrew, published, without authorial attribution, in 1594. A Shrew is a text whose relation to The Shrew is very difficult to ascertain. It has a similar plot, and a central character called Kate, who is a scold, and who is to be married to Ferando in order to help the suitors of her two, more popular, sisters. The play proceeds pretty much as the Shakespeare version we are more familiar with, with scenes of taming involving food and sleep deprivation, but two points of comparison help us sharpen our appreciation of the more familiar Shakespearean text. The first is that problematic final speech. The Kate of A Shrew (in this play there doesn’t seem to be any tension over abbreviating her name) gives quite different reasons why wo
men should submit to their husbands’ authority. In Kate’s oration, women’s intrinsic inferiority is biblically sanctioned from the get-go. In the Book of Genesis, she reports, from Adam ‘A rib was taken, of which the Lord did make, / The woe of man so termed by Adam then, / Woman for that, by her came sin to us, / And for her sin was Adam doomed to die.’ It’s a hoary old story amplified by a false etymology beloved of early modern misogynists. The prefix ‘wo’ in ‘woman’ actually comes from ‘wife’, a word that came into Old English from Germanic, but it was a popular ‘joke’ to link it with ‘woe’, an expression of pity or grief. So Eve was ‘woeman’ – the notion of woman and of bringing sorrow to man were handily combined.

  Seeing blatant anti-women sentiments in the final speech of A Shrew helps us to look again at the particular arguments Shakespeare gives his Katherine. She argues that men have particular obligations to women, and so women have reciprocal responsibilities in turn. This is the rhetoric of mutual obligation, something that has a distinct role in sixteenth-century debates about Protestant ‘companionate marriage’. Marriage, while not a union of equals, nevertheless carried mutual responsibilities, in which each partner endured limits on their individual freedom within a bond of reciprocity. As the wife had responsibilities to the husband, so too he had responsibilities to her; the wife’s subservient conduct is secured by the husband’s generous protection of her. Katherine’s speech draws on this understanding of marital reciprocity, arguing that the husband is ‘one that cares for thee, / And for thy maintenance commits his body / To painful labour both by sea and land’ (5.2.152–4). If we set aside the obvious objection – is Petruchio ever likely to commit his body to painful labour by anything, given that his whole aim was to ‘wive it wealthily’ (1.2.74)? – we can see that Katherine’s speech implies a different marital relationship from the Garden of Eden scenario invoked by Kate, where the woman is an afterthought made of spare male matter, who then brings sin and death into the world. And that speech in A Shrew ends with the stage direction ‘she lays her hand under her husband’s feet’, thus providing the accompanying gesture of subordination that is not stated in Shakespeare’s text, where the gestural gap allows for an alternative choreography.

  So maybe A Shrew is clearer about its Kate’s taming, as it incorporates her into outdated ideas of marriage that have been replaced by a more mutual ideology promulgated by Protestant advice books on companionate marriage, and by Katherine at the end of The Shrew. Perhaps. But here too there are questions. The second point of comparison between these sister plays is their treatment of the wider framing narrative. Shakespeare’s play begins with a tavern landlady kicking out the drunken Christopher Sly, whereon he falls asleep. A hunting party of lords with dogs finds him and decides to enjoy ‘a pastime passing excellent’ (Induction 1.65): to take up Sly, wash him and dress him in fine clothes and pretend that he is a nobleman who has been ‘lunatic’ (Induction 1.61). Sly is persuaded by, or goes along with, this jest, accepting Bartholomew the page as his wife, and proclaiming ‘I am a lord indeed’ (Induction 2.71). The trick segues into a play, performed ostensibly as part of the ‘lord’s’ recuperation: a ‘pleasant comedy’ will ‘frame your mind to mirth and merriment’ (Induction 2.131). That inset play, set in Padua, is our story of the suitors to the daughters of Baptista. The suggestion is that Sly and Bartholomew watch the entire play from the sidelines, although if that’s the case, Shakespeare doesn’t make much use of them: they have a moment of dialogue after the first scene, with Sly proclaiming this ‘a very excellent piece of work’ (1.1.251), and then no more. In reading the play, perhaps we don’t notice this too much, but the structure is awkward on the stage.

  Many modern productions have taken advantage of A Shrew because it supplies a more extensive, mock-chorus role for Sly as a commentator on the unfolding plot, and in particular because it has a final sequence that closes the parenthesis that the opening scenes established. A Shrew ends with Sly returning to the stage in his own clothes; he is woken by the tavern-keeper. Befuddled with drink and sleep, Sly grumbles: ‘gi’s some more wine. What, ’s all the players gone? Am not I a lord?’, and then announces ‘I have had / The bravest dream tonight that ever thou / Heardest in all thy life.’ ‘You had best get you home,’ is the unimpressed reply, ‘For your wife will curse you for dreaming here tonight.’ Sly is unabashed: ‘Will she? I know now how to tame a shrew … I’ll to my / Wife presently and tame her too, / An if she anger me.’ So, A Shrew closes with Sly suggesting the play he has seen is a handbook to wife-taming that he will implement in his own household. Not only is the play about taming a shrew, but it is a manifesto and instruction guide for others to do the same. There’s a similar moment in Shakespeare’s play when Petruchio, alone on stage after he has sent the travel-wearied Katherine hungry to bed, declares: ‘Thus have I politicly begun my reign’ and tells the audience, ‘He that knows better how to tame a shrew, / Now let him speak.’ Tis charity to show’ (4.1.174, 196–7).

  Should we take Sly’s promise seriously as an assessment of the play? Or does a plot summary from a drunken tinker immediately mark itself as preposterous and deluded? Is Sly a figure for the audience, or a pitiful patsy who doesn’t understand the first thing about theatre, or wives for that matter? Does bringing back the frame device re-establish the Kate/Ferando plot as a self-conscious fiction, something that could only happen within these quotation marks that signal make-believe? And in any case, can this tell us anything about The Shrew, which only introduces but does not bring back Christopher Sly and in which this ending of the frame doesn’t exist? Does the Katherine and Petruchio plot in Shakespeare’s version retain those introductory elements of self-conscious fiction or does that fade away? Are we supposed to take this comedy seriously at all?

  Answers to these questions can only be partial or contingent. What’s more important is to acknowledge, from the first chapter of this book, how Shakespeare’s works prompt questions rather than answering them. The ambiguity over whether Katherine is tamed at the end of The Taming of the Shrew is intrinsic to the play – it isn’t a problem that arises because we do not now accept the kind of gender ideology that the Elizabethan audience would have supported, so it’s not the problem of history. Rather, the early modern evidence of the Taming of a Shrew, that quarto version of the play from 1594, and of The Tamer Tamed, the Fletcher play in the Jacobean period – as well as the play’s own structure and ambiguities – mean that the question was always present. Shakespeare’s plays hold our attention because they offer narratives through which we can shape our own contemporary concerns. A flick through the modern production history of The Taming of the Shrew is exemplary: the suffragettes, the post-war reiteration of gender conservatism, and second-wave feminism have all found the play hospitable and relevant to their concerns. If the twenty-first century iteration of the problems between the sexes looks different from its late sixteenth-century counterpart, the questions still remain.

  CHAPTER 2

  Richard III

  Richard III’s opening lines are also their most familiar: ‘Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this son of York’ (1.1.1–2). Their recognizability may obscure just how unusual they are. Richard is the only one of Shakespeare’s major characters to begin his own play. You may recall – perhaps you’ve experienced this in the theatre – the bewilderingly oblique way Shakespeare tends to begin his plays, via marginal characters whom we struggle to place as they recount or anticipate some major narrative event in a conversation that begins in the middle, leaving us flailing (beginning Shakespeare’s plays at their beginning is not always the easiest place to start). Not so in Richard III. The opening stage direction in the first printed edition is ‘Enter Richard, Duke of Gloucester, solus’ – meaning alone – making it absolutely clear that not only does he open the play, he does so, uniquely, in soliloquy. He begins, that’s to say, by addressing the audience. From the outset, we are his creatures.

  Richard III
is described as a ‘tragedy’ in its first publication, but the story of Richard’s path to the throne, and of his eventual defeat in battle reads more like a modern criminal biopic. The details of the plot are less important than its overall shape of rise and fall. In large part Richard’s success is due to his capacity for ruthless violence. The synopsis of the play that serves as a lurid blurb to potential buyers of the first print edition stresses this aspect: ‘Containing his treacherous plots against his brother Clarence, the pitiful murder of his most innocent nephews, his tyrannical usurpation, with the whole course of his detested life and most deserved death’. It’s a compelling prospectus, but actually rather misleading: Richard’s primary tactic in the play is seduction rather than elimination. And among Richard’s many conquests during the play, from Lady Anne to Buckingham, from the Lord Mayor to his deluded brother King Edward, we – the audience – are the first, reeled in hook, line and sinker by this confiding, charismatic, funny opening speech. Richard strategically lays bare his own vulnerabilities, describing himself as ‘not shaped for sportive tricks’ (14), ‘rudely stamped’ (16) and unable to ‘prove a lover’ (28). He confesses, with some pride, that he is ‘subtle false and treacherous’ (37) and that he plans to set his brothers Clarence and Edward in ‘deadly hate’ (35). At that moment Clarence enters, and we are sworn to silence: ‘Dive, thoughts, down to my soul’ (41).

  This apparent candour is utterly beguiling. Even though – perhaps because – we are in no doubt about his ruthless self-interest, Richard establishes an immediate alliance from the outset. This intimacy with the audience will be carefully managed through a stream of asides and sardonic remarks, where only we know his true meaning, keeping us from forming any real attachment to any other character. The very title of the play seems to have succumbed to his charms and to endorse his ambitions. Richard, Duke of Gloucester, doesn’t actually become King Richard III until Act 4, but his play has no doubt he will get there: from the opening he is the king-in-waiting. And the very rhythm of that first soliloquy enacts the dominance he is going to exert over his play. I’m not a huge fan of that classroom staple of Shakespeare studies we identify triumphantly as iambic pentameter. It’s not always clear to me what we actually know when we say that somehow Shakespeare’s lines go ‘de-dum de-dum de-dum de-dum de-dum’, other than that they don’t therefore sound very interesting. But what is interesting about Shakespeare’s use of rhythm is when it changes or surprises us, as here. ‘Now is the winter of our discontent’ begins decisively with an inverted rhythm – the stress is on ‘Now’, the first syllable, not, as regular iambic pentameter would have it, on the second. It calls us to order; it tells us who is boss.