So The Taming of the Shrew is a comedy from the early part of Shakespeare's career. It probably dates from fifteen ninety two to three and it's just published in the Folio in sixteen twenty three. Sorting out the order of Shakespeare's earliest plays is really critically still quite a moot point.
But if you look at in addition, like the Oxford Edition Complete Oxford, which puts the players in chronological order, you'll see that the time of the shrew comes second, second in all of Shakespeare's works. After two gentlemen of Verona. And just before the play, we now call the second part of Henry the Sixth. So that suggests that the most recent scholarship is putting it right at the beginning of of Shakespeare's work.
I talked a bit when I thought about comedy of errors, about what earliness tends to allow us to think about Shakespeare's plays, how it allows us to excuse certain things or to to see things as as immature and lechon comedy that as I suggested that that might be slightly unhelpful. OK. So it's an early comedy. And there's the question I want to try and use to vocalise our discussion of the play is probably the most obvious one.
Is the show tamed? Is Katharina Tamed? And so, you know what happens next? If you've been and if you have the lecture. So what happens now is I give a short synopsis of the play in order that even if you haven't read it, you can get a sense of what I'm talking about through the rest of the lecture.
I think uniquely in this lecture series and possibly uniquely in Shakespeare with the Shrew, it isn't really possible to give an account of what happens in the play that precedes the kind of interpretation we might want to perform on it. So there isn't any such thing as a neutral plot summary of the play. But that's the crux of what I'm talking about. That plot summary is already a contested part of critical interpretation. And it's just going to try and outline how that is.
So The Taming of the Shrew is about to courtships, the daughters of the Paduan merchant, Baptista, Katharyn and Bianca. Katherine is the shrew. So a shrew is a source goldish woman who's teaching an American summer school where they had been Googling pictures of shrews. And we're in a terrible anxiety about how big they were thinking that they might be like bears or something.
Of course, shrews are tiny, tiny things and quite why that the association is more likely to be with kind of shrewd and those kinds of things rather than that mouse with a long nose. So Katherine, is the shrew, a woman who, depending how you look at it, is feisty and independent, lonely and misunderstood, strident and anti-social.
Her father, who, depending on how you look at it, is either a worried, a widower or a patriarchal tyrant, has decreed that Bianca, who has numerous suitors because depending on how you look at it, she is beautiful, gentle and agreeable, or she is exactly the kind of annoying, insipid, simpering arm candy who would have a lot of suitors in Elizabethan comedy. And to you, too, would want to tie up and beat her. Bianca cannot marry until her older sister is also married.
The stage is set at the entrance of Petruchio, who, depending on how you look at it, is a quirky and an unorthodox guy who knows his own mind and wants a woman who knows hers or a psychopathic bounty hunter with sadistic and misogynistic tendencies. So Catherine and Petruchio are paid off in a relationship which, depending on how you look at it, it's crackling with sexual tension, along with a touch of domination, fantasy or a cynical, loveless and enforced by patriarchal society.
He treats her in a way which, depending on how you look at it, uses distinctly unfunny tap techniques from torture, including sleep deprivation, brainwashing and starvation to bend her to his will or performs a zany, unorthodox courtship which shows their mutual determination not to yield as the underlying equivalence and equality beneath their union. So at the end of the play, Catherine is depending on how you look at it.
Broken, spirited, parroting, patriarchal ideology and utterly submissive, offering to put her hand under her husband's foot or ironically and unabashedly vocal, preaching the interdependence of husband and wife to earn herself half of a of a fact wager placed by her husband. And did I mention that the whole story is set up as a play within a play? The play's induction sets up the Pachuco and Katherine plot as a play performed for the drunken Tinka.
Christopher Sligh, who is being made to believe he is a Lord and that a page dressed up as a woman is his wife by some Bullingdon Club types who so having a bit of fun, meaning the whole story is framed as to be obviously implausible and fictional. Even the names are contentious. We used to call the female lead in this play Kate. But feminist editors have pointed out that this is not neutral either. When Petruchio meets her for the first time, he greets her.
Good morrow, Kate, for that's your name, I hear. The reply is clear. Well, have you heard? But something hard of hearing. They call me Catherine. They do talk of me. The folio text begins by calling her Catarina in stage directions, although it does move to call her Kate. It's quite an interesting way in which you might want to think of the text itself. The apparatus of the text trying to tame her, changing her name in stage directions and speech prefixes from Catherine or Catarina,
which she herself says she prefers towards Kate. The name Petruchio gives her. George Bernard Shaw, who was not a fan of the play, felt it was all just about bearable until Catherine's final speech at which he at which he baulked, Shaw wrote a letter to the Palomar Gazette in 1888 in the guise of a woman urging both men and women to boycott the play.
This is sure no man with any feeling of decency can sit it out in the company of a woman without being extremely ashamed of the Lord of Creation, moral implied in the wager and the speech put into the woman's own mouth. But perhaps unexpectedly, Germaine Greer writing in the feminist classic The Female Eunuch, first published in 1971, writes that Kate has the uncommon good fortune to find a husband who is man enough to know what he wants and how to get it.
The submission of a woman like Kate is genuine and exciting because she has something to lay down her virgin pride and individuality. That's certainly the view of the play we get at the end of Zeffirelli's film version of 1967, which by casting offstage on our lovers tempestuous lovers Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton as Catherine and Petrochem consolidates the sense that this is a passionate relationship in which both pots and pans but also underway I would fly.
The 2005 BBC Shakespeare retold film of the play also helps this kind of interpretation by casting Rufus Sewell as a Petruchio, already constructed by Sewall's own acting persona as a highly desirable batboy. So it's worth thinking about Howcast. Casting makes a difference here. The play tries to set up Petruchio as a kind of embarrassment to Catherine, doesn't it, in the description of how he behaves at the wedding? It that has a different connotation.
If if the if the casting choice makes Petruchio look a suitable or even a desirable husband, as in that BBC version. So the question then of whether Catherine is tamed or not is one that the play itself produces. And it's a question that the play itself does not answer. Therefore, it's been the work of criticism and especially of performance to try to produce an answer. Is Kate tamed or not?
But I think what I want to stress in this lecture is the importance of the question, the ongoing importance of the question rather than an answer. This is a deeply ambiguous play on its own terms. And in terms of the history and its intersection with things we still feel strongly about jete.
Gender relations is still highly topical. Subject is a play which has had a very, very active life in 20th and 21st century performance, almost always in some kind of dialogue with modern or topical views about women and their roles. So in some ways, the answer to the question about whether Catherine is tamed is a sharper version version of something which I think is true of everything we say about Shakespeare. We tend to make this play mean what we want it to mean.
Let me try and put some detail on that. And like George Bernard Shaw and like many other readers and performers of this play, I'm going to put the main locus of the question about Katherine's timing on her final speech. I'm going to read that speech out. It's a it's a really long speech and it's partly its length that's important. Anyway, we can get sensitised to read the whole thing. This is much the longest speech in the whole play. Phi Phi, a nit that threatening unkind brow.
She's talking there to the other women and not scornful glances from those eyes to wound thy Lord King by governor. It blotz thy beauty as frost to bite the Medes, confound thy fame as whirlwinds, shake fair buds and in no sense is meat or amiable. A woman moved is like a fountain, troubled, muddy, ill seeming thick, bereft of beauty. And while it is so none so dry or thirsty will deign to sip or touch one drop of it.
Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper. I had by sovereign one that cares for the and for thy maintenance, commits his body to painful labour both by sea and land to watch the night in storms, the day in cold. While thou lightest warm at home, secure and safe, and craves no other tributed by hand. But love fail looks and true obedience to little payment for so great debt. Such duty is the subject owes the prince even such a woman oath to her husband.
And when she is froward peevish, sullen, sour and not obedient to his honest will, what is she. But a foul contending rebel and the graceless traitor to her loving Lord. I am ashamed that women are so simple to offer war where they should kneel for peace or seek for rules to primacy and sway when they are bound to serve,
love and obey. Why are our bodies soft and we can smooth, unmap to toil and trouble in the world, but that our soft conditions and our heart should well agree with our external parts. Come, come your froward and unable worms. My mind has been as big as one of yours. My heart is great. My reason haply more to bandy word for word and frown for frown. But now I see our land, says Arbat straws. Our strength is weak.
Our weakness past. Compare that seeming to be most which we indeed least are then value of stomachs. It is no boot and place your hands below your husband's foot. In token of which duty, if you please. My hand is ready. May do him ease. Now, the interpretation of this final speech of Catherines is crucial to the overall interpretation of the play. Are we to read this as an expression of her being cowed, brought low reduced or broken spirited?
Is she sarcastically rehearsing a preprepared patriarchal conduct piece? Is this a plot between her and Petruchio to win the bet? How she'd been brought to proper wifely conduct and educated away from the antisocial behaviour of her earlier life. These large scale interpretations of the whole speech are made up of the details of particular points in performance. What are the rest of the cast doing while this goes on? This is this is the source lowest point in the play.
Comedies tend to be about back and forth and dialogue doesn't. They seem to move quite quickly. They don't have big set piece speeches. That's something we associate with genres like tragedy and that stuff that gives us a different pace to these plays. This is a this is a play which slows down into this long speech right at the end. So what are the rest of the cast doing? Are they attentive? Are they amused? Are they uncomfortable? What about Petru Kiyo?
When Catherine states that her hand is ready to be placed under her husband's foot, it's a quite different declaration with quite different meaning. If, for example, she kneels down in front of him and puts her foot her, puts her hand down under his foot, or if she's standing up, daring him to ask her to do it. Clearly, the questions don't stop here. Petru Kirs response is a single line following on from Katharine's 43.
Why there's a Wenche. Come on and kiss me, Kate. Is that a kind of adequate response? It is. Is that just delighted? Is that anything you could say? Is it meant to register a kind of inadequacy or incommensurate ability, as is quite usual in the folio? There is no following stage direction. Have to come and kiss me, Kate. We might think that kiss me. Kate is an internal stage direction which doesn't need the editor to write.
They kiss or he kisses her to say your actions, which actually is slightly different in connotation. But most editors do insert the obliging mutual and even romantic they kiss. But it's possible, quite possible that they don't. Or, you know, there are any number of things could happen at that moment. There are other possibilities, an unwritten unreciprocated or an unwelcome kiss or no kiss at all.
Elizabeth Shafe has excellent stage history of the play in the Cambridge University Press Shakespearean production series is the place, I think, to look up some of these possibilities. We'll talk more about them in some specific cases a bit later in the lecture. Now, certainly some of these possibilities are more available to particular cultural moments than others.
And one of the things we tend to assume about the timing of the shoe is that the problem it presents to modern audiences is a new one. It is. It is in some sense about a gap between what we think the Elizabethans accepted and thought was fine and what we now accept and think is fine. So that this is a play, therefore we construct as unproblematic in its own time. But which games kind of problems through historical circumstance?
I think lots of things that isn't true about The Taming of the Shrew. I think he always was an ambiguous and problematic play. Interestingly and unusually, in the case of The Taming of the Shrew, we can see some way, some of the ways in which the play impacted on its earliest audiences because of the evidence of a sequel written by John Fletcher in around sixteen eleven. Fletcher was a playwright with the men, probably the house playwright after Shakespeare.
He collaborated with Shakespeare on Two Noble Kinsmen and on all his true or hand with Ace in the early 60s, 16 teams. His mock sequel to Shakespeare's earlier play can be seen as a further or more distant kind of collaboration. This is another way in which these two writers are working together. By Fletcher writing a kind of response to The Taming of the Shrew. The play is called The Woman's Prise or the Tamer Tamed.
And what it does is to reintroduce the taming of the Shrew into the context of well-established literary context of the war between the sexes. Typically in serial stories like those by Chaucer maybe or Boccaccio, a story in which a husband outwits or triumphs over his wife is balanced out or capped by a story in which the wife is off challenges or overcomes the husband. So these these shrew stories, these gender inequality stories tend to go in pairs that kind of egen each other out.
And what the Fletcher play does to Shakespeare, perhaps, is to provide that answering Paire structuralists who have wanted to change it. Sorry, structuralist, who've wanted to trace the origins of the circulation of particular story types, have identified that the shrewd timing plot exists across many cultures. There is no agreed literary source for Shakespeare's treatment of it here. But as an oral folktale, it has a very wide reach.
At the end of Fletcher's play The Woman's Prise, the epilogue proposes that the result of the two plays should be a truce. Both to both sexes should be taught to, quote, do equality. And as they stand bound to love mutually between them and deflectors plan suggests we ought to get to some kind of a mean of some kind of balance between the sexes.
Now that Fletcher's play is written as a self-conscious riposte to The Taming of the Shrew, it's clear Shakespeare's Petruchio is now a widower and returns as Fletcher's major protagonist. Fletcher's play begins with the wedding guests discussing pachucos, second marriage and reminding the audience of his first, Tanya reveals that yet the bear remembrance of his first wife will make him start in sleep and very often cry out for cudgels, cold staves, anything hiding his breaches out of fear.
Her ghost should walk. And where I am yet. This time, the two close friends have said he will be in sole charge of breaches wearing his new wife, Maria is going to be completely controlled by him. She must say it said the friends do nothing of herself, not eat, drink, say, sir. How do you make her ready? Unless he paid her. So Petruchio plans in his second marriage to enforce himself and his husbandly authority over his new wife ismy wife, Maria.
But Petruchio is in for a shock. His seemingly compliant, compliant bride has her own agenda. She swears till I have made him easy as a child. And tamers fear he shall not win a smile or a pleased look. To this end, she locks Petruchio out of her bedchamber on their wedding night. In supplies for a siege and fortifies it against his his invasion.
But Fletcher's interpretation of the gender politics of Shakespeare's play seems already ambiguous, and this gives us a kind of licence to develop this ambiguity as something intrinsic to the play from its first performances. In his recollection of The Taming of the Shrew, we can see from what I've just described that Fletcher Hedges the issue about whether Catherine really is tamed into submission by the end of the play.
This is this uncertainty becomes thoroughly contemporary. Petruchio as friends remember Catherine as a rebel and a tempest. The threat of her return haunts Petru CEO sleep, suggesting therefore that her independence was not quelled by her husband and that the speech of apparent submission at the end of Shakespeare's play that we've just heard was only provisional. On the other hand, Maria Parleying with her new husband from Habari Kadota Chamber, salute him.
You have been famous for a woman Tamer and bear, the feared name of Brave Wife Braker, a woman. Now she'll take those honours off and tame you. Nay never looked so big. She showered, believe me. And I am she. What? Think ye. So Patrique is renowned here as a wife break suggests that he is remembered for taming Katherine, even though the comments about his ongoing nightmares suggest his hold over her was not as complete as Maria supposes.
Fletcher's interpretation of that final speech then implicitly allows for Petraglia both to have to have tamed and to have not tamed his first bride. That ambivalence, then the question mark over what kind of resolution we reach at the end of Shakespeare's play is, we could argue, present in its reception from the earliest point. Fletcher's play asks the same question we are asking. And like us, can't settle to a single answer.
So this early ambivalence about the play is amplified by evidence from an apparent earlier version of this play. I've already said that The Taming of the Shrew was first printed in the Folio of sixteen twenty three, but there is an early play text published under the beguilingly similar titled The Taming of a Shrew, which is published anonymously in Quarto in fifteen ninety four, said The Taming of a Shrew, published anonymously in fifteen ninety four.
A shrew is a text which is which of which the relation to the Shrew is quite difficult to work out. The play has a similar plot. The two plays have a similar plot. Both have the central character called Kate, who is a shrew or a scold in a shrew. She is to be married to Ferrando, the Petruchio character that is called Ferrando, to aid the suitors of her sisters in the earlier version. There are two other sisters as well as Kate.
The play precedes pretty much as the Shakespeare version we are more familiar with, with scenes of taming, involving deprivation of food and sleep. But there are two points of comparison between the Shrew and a shrew that I'd like to bring up as particular focuses for discussion. And the first is to take us back to that final speech that I spoke about. In The Taming of a Shrew. Kate and Emma call her Kate, because that is what she's called all the way through and the taming of Asia.
Kate, speech about the reason women should be subservient to their husbands is actually distinctly different from those given by Shakespeare's Catherine. Kate tells us in a shrew that women's inferiority is part of the biblical order of creation. The king of kings, the glorious God of heaven, who in six days did frame his heavenly work and made all things to stand in perfect cause, then to his image.
He did make a man, old Adam, and from his side asleep, a rape was taken of, which the Lord did make the woe of man, of which 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 vision of a kind of divinely ordained misogyny straight from the Garden of Eden, which Shakespeare's Kate Shakespeare Catherine doesn't give us any glimpse of Shakespeare's speech.
Comparison speech is largely secular and certainly has no touch of this idea that, of course, women are inferior. They were made out of the rape and then they brought sin into the world. In Shakespeare's play, by contrast, the rhetoric, as we've seen, is something more approaching post reformation ideas of so-called companionate marriage, companionate marriage, a marriage which was not between equals, but which proposed mutual responsibilities for husband and wife.
And we can see this in the large number of Protestant conduct books about the household, a marriage which are produced in the second half of the 16th century and beyond. This kind of conduct literature tries to set out that just as the wife had responsibilities to the husband, so too he had responsibilities to her. There's an attempt to establish sort of interlocking, interdependent bonds of obligation between husband and wife and also between children and parents and masters and servants.
Catherine's speech draws on this understanding of marital reciprocity, arguing that the husband is, quote, one that cares for the and for time maintenance, commits his body to painful labour both by sea and land to watch the night in storms. The day in cold, while our lives warm at home, secure and safe and craved no other tribute by hand. But love, fetlocks and true obedience to little payment for so great a debt.
So payment and debt suggests these are that this is a kind of transactions is a relationship of transactions where the husband's dangerous work or uncomfortable work bringing home the money deserves from the wife. Kindness and and slippers and pipe by the fire, that kind of thing. Now, if we set aside the obvious fallacy in this speech that Petruchio is never likely to commit his body to painful labour for anything since he has got Catherines diary,
which was the most attractive thing about her to start with, remember? I come to wive it Wellesley in Padua. Setting that aside, it might not be right to set it aside, but let's do that. We can we can see that Katherine's speech implies a different relationship from that always wretched Garden of Eden scenario, which is evoked by Kate in the timing of a shrew. The speech in Asia also ends with a stage direction. She lays her hand under her husband's feet.
So it does provide the accompanying gesture of subordination that I was pointing out isn't actually signposted in Shakespeare's version. Therefore, giving a space for different kinds of interpretation, offstage business, whether Catherine does or doesn't put her hand on the particular foot.
So all this might suggest that, by contrast with Kate in the timing of a shrew, Catherine's taming, if it is really happened, is her ANCOP cooperation into a more reciprocal version of gender relations than the mediaeval antecedents of the taming plot might suggest. So it's something more like Protestant ideas of companionate marriage than mediaeval, misogynistic, biblical ideas about how women or the word woman should always be spelt.
W o. E m. A n. Catherine, speech suggests the interconnectedness of husband and wife, although obviously we shouldn't overstate this mutuality, thy husband is thy lord, thy lifestyle, keep her thy head of a sovereign. This is not an equity. This is not an equality of any kind. It's the analogy, the analogical model, by which wifely obedience to the husband is in Aso's social and ethical continuum with the subject's loyalty to the monarch.
Such duty as the subject owes the prince even such a woman oath eats, or even such a woman oath to her husband. So the woman owes to the husband what the subject does to the prince. It's important, therefore, that these hierarchies are maintained. This is the basis of the statue which is on the Elizabethan lawbooks called petty treason. Petty treason is the murder of a husband by a wife. It's not just murder.
It's a kind of treason because these hierarchical relationships are in a kind of continuum with treason against against the sovereign. So it's a really good idea, I think, to compare these two two versions of the speech to see what another female character in a very similar situation might choose to say as part of her rhetoric of subordination compared with what Shakespeare's Catherine does,
the text of a shrew is very widely available. Online archive dot org has a has as a copy of a 19th century edition. There's also a modern edited version in the quarter series from Cambridge University Press. One further part of that earlier play is relevant here. Just after Kate and her new husband, Ferrando, leave the stage for bed, the framing plot with which the play began comes back into focus. Christopher Sligh and the play in The Taming of a Shrewd.
The stage direction reads, then enter to pairing of Sligh in his own apparel again and leaves him where they found him. And then goes out. So Sly returns to the stage to be woken by the tap star. The taps, the this is the tap to speak was going read it to. Now the dark, some night is over passed and Dorning day appears in Crystal Sky. Now, Mr. Heyst abroad soft. Who's this? What sly. A wondrous Horthy lain here all night. I'll wake him.
I think he's starved by this. But that his belly was so stuffed with ale. What now? Slye awake for shame. Simu gives some more wins or wine. What's all the players gone? Am I not a Lord? Lord with a murrain come out that drunken still. Who's this sly trapster. Oh Lord Sarah. I've had the bravest dream tonight that ever thou hast in all of my life I marry, says the top star. You best get you home for your wife, or curse you for dreaming here tonight.
Will she? So sly. I know now how to tame a shrew. I dreamt upon it all this night till now. And thou hast wake me out of the best dream that ever I had in my life. But out to my wife presently and tame her to if she anger me nay taris life or I'll go home with thee and hear the rest that thou hast trend tonight. Christopher Slye suggests here at the end of The Taming of a Shrew, that the take home message from this play is the direct information about how to tame a shrewish wife.
Now, does that mean we should take this seriously as an assessment of the play? Does Christophers lie, as is sometimes suggested, standing as the kind of on-Stage audience, a kind of proxy or a figure for our own reactions? Or does it play summary from a drunken tinker? Immediately mark itself as preposterous and deluded. Should we be thinking? That's what Christopher Sly would think. And therefore, that is not what I myself think.
Does bringing back the frame device at the end of a shrew re-establish the Kate Ferrando plot, a self-conscious fiction, a play within a play which could only exist in this never, never land of theatricality or dream? Thinking back to what I was talking about last week from Midsummer Night's Dream.
And in any case, does any of this tell us anything about the shrew in which the ending of the play, this ending of the play with the frame coming back does not exist after the second scene of the play proper? The slight plot in The Taming of the Shrew disappears entirely. And it seems very unlikely. It seems very unlikely to me that the players would waste a kind of chorus figure or a chorus presence on stage if it weren't actually saying anything.
I think the slide, it must just disappear in performance. So so far, I've been suggesting then that the ambiguity over whether Katherine is tamed at the end of The Taming of the Shrew is intrinsic to the play. It isn't, as some critics have suggested, a problem that arises because we do not now believe the kind of gender ideology that the Elizabethan audiences would have supported.
It's not, I think, the problem of history. In fact, gender relations have always been problematic, uncontested in different ways. And literary versions of those, perhaps even more so. I think it's a fallacy to look back and think that the past was believed in more homogenously or more straightforwardly than our own society does now.
The modern the early modern evidence of the taming of Asia, that quarto version of something like this play from 1894 and of the time, attained the Fletcher play in the Jacobean period, as well as the play's own structure. And its ambiguities mean that this is a question present in the text itself. It's not something which we bring from some modern perspective which destabilises the text, which was perfectly straightforward.
For the last section of the lecture, then I want to turn to some late 20th century performance to suggest how some of these ambiguities have informed and shaped the play's direction on the contemporary stage. And here I am using material from female actors in the book edited by Carol Rutter called Clamorous Voices.
Shakespeare's Women Today. It's a great account of different, very, very articulate actors talking about playing Catherine, which is what we're going to use in the ledger today, but also measure for measures. Isabella, for instance, Lady Macbeth, Rosalind and other other characters are really interesting understandings of
the characters and of the play of productions in which they were performed. So the chapter on the Term With The Shrew brings together Schneid Kuzak, who played Catherine for the RISC in 1982 under the direction of Michael Bogdanoff and Fiona Shaw, who was directed by Jonathan Miller in another RLC production in 1987. So this is what these two actors talk, how they talk about the question of whether Katherine is tamed or was tamed in their productions.
Fiona Shaw argued that Katherine's last speech is a kind of step forward into a new life. This man, who seemed to be her tormentor, has given her or has allowed her to take the step that will save the rest of her life. That's why it's wrong. It's the play's about dominance and the broken spirit. It's about someone on the brink who found a way of saying yes without being compromised.
So the man who seemed to be her tormentor has given her or allowed her to take the step that will save the rest of her life. Shaw's was a a kind of a kind of interpretation of Katherine, which suggested that Katherine Suresnes was the sign of being out of control, out of the kind of social norms, unable to enjoy OAP or proceed with personal relationships on any level. So she brings out the what Katherine the evidence of Katherine shrewish behaviour is actually just bad behaviour.
It's not really anything that you would particularly want to support her in doing. Katherine is never trying to challenge gender norms in the way that, say, Portia does when she dresses as an extremely efficient lawyer in Merchant of Venice, for example. You know, she's not saying I don't want to be married because I'm going to be a doctor or I'm going to do something else. Is she she's just saying I hate my sister and a bag, a looter over her head and going to beat her.
These are these are low level anti-social pieces of behaviour. Fiona Shaw felt this is not a Kate whose independence or whose feistiness should be endorsed by the play because it's not worthwhile. It's not doing anything productive. It's anti-social. It's a sign of a kind of pain or or misalliance mis mis kind of mis fitting into the society. At the end of the play show, says Kate, when she can say anything now and she's still Kate, she's saying, I acknowledged the system.
I don't think we can change this, but she is able to operate within it. So sure argues that the speech at the end of the production that she was in was not really an articulation of the gender status quo, but a kind of challenge to it and suggesting that Kate, who is within the system in some ways, is more able to operate according to its rules or that kind of push its rules a bit and to be herself, to be a person, to be it to be to be a comic person.
So I think that's a production which gives the play a comic ending. That's not to say a funny ending, but the ending that comedy is looking for, which is the sense that individuality is a rather dangerous quality and comedy is what people need, is the ability to meld their individuality to someone else.
That's how comedies work. That does that bringing people together and suggesting that a kind of radical autonomy is a dangerous, anti-social thing to have the people who are on their own in comedies are dangerous. A. Comic figures, people like Don Jones, who is talking about when we were thinking about much ado about nothing.
Let's look at then at Schneid Cusack's interpretation of Kate's final speech, which is less, less, less guarded than shows, is I think she sees the speech as a positive coming together, the intellectual consummation of a marriage of equals, which is just about to have its physical consummation after the end of the play. This is Kuzak at the end of the play. I was determined that Kate and PetroChina were rebels and would remain rebels forever.
Her speech was not predictable. This so-called submission speech isn't a submission speech at all. It's a speech about how her spirit has been allowed to soar free. She is not attached to him. He hasn't laid down the rules for her. She has made her own rules. And what he's managed to do is to allow her to have her own vision. It happens that her vision coincides with his. There is a privately shared joke in the speech and irony and some blackness.
They're going to go on to have a very interesting marriage. Petruchio was on his knees. I was standing there. So she goes on to talk about how this stage business goes, went towards shaping the interpretation of the scene. So the question of whether Katherine is tamed becomes in these two accounts a point of contention. The play text raises but cannot answer while performance tries to find contingent answers.
No matter how hard we look at the text of the shrew, we won't be able to stabilise its meaning. But we can look to performance to give us some of the possibilities. What's interesting about these possibilities in performance is that it's extremely rare to see a production of the play, which argues that Katherine is trained. So that's for us to see that. Now, that's obviously a kind of too uncomfortable. It's not a thing that we we particularly want to see.
So let's finish with a slightly wider question then. What's at stake for us in this question of whether Katherine is tamed? Why does this question matter? The examples from modern performance, both of these two stage productions with Schneid Kuzak and with Fiona Shaw and the films by Zeffirelli and for the BBC that I cited earlier. All of these productions want a Catherine who, if she is tamed, is better for it.
Case has been brought into a more contented social role, has kept enough of her firing us to be interesting, has met her match in Petruchio and is going to have a more interesting marriage than Bianca is with whoever it is she ended up marrying. None of these versions from the later 20th century wants the play to endorse Katharine's taming as the comic triumph of Petruchio or of male authority. I think this tells us something about what we want or need Shakespeare to mean.
It probably wouldn't really matter whether Fletcher or Middleton or Johnson wrote a play about gender relations in which male superiority seemed to be utterly championed because it would be easy for us to identify that as a kind of antique attitude, the equivalent of doublets and hose a kind of museum piece, which is the way we tend to think about other writers from the past. It wouldn't really matter to us if we were to say Fletcher was sexist, you know, hold the hold the front page.
Shakespeare's role in modern culture, of course, makes that stance impossible. We don't value Shakespeare primarily because of the insight he gives us into 16th century culture. Rather, we burden his works with the requirement that they can somehow anticipate our later concerns and ways of thinking. Put more simply, a misogynistic Shakespeare would be a very uncomfortable man of the millennium or a compulsory author here or in school.
The school system or a beneficiary of taxpayer subsidy as at the Royal Shakespeare Company. Criticism has worked extremely hard to make this play acceptable, and it's worth assessing the lengths to which scholars and directors have gone to reassure us that Katherine is not, after all, tamed. So I'm arguing that the play itself is ambiguous.
But out of that ambiguity, we have created something like a performance consensus, which suggests, at least for the modern period, that Katherine is able to retain some kind of independence, some kind of autonomy, even as she speaks at the speech that we've been discussing. Now, some of these ideas about how later history shapes our expectations and makes certain kinds of readings possible or impossible will recur next week,
which is my last lecture in this series. The plane going to be talking about is The Merchant of Venice. And I think the question I'm going to talk about that is, why does Pisania pick the lead casket? Why just beside you pick the LED casket to help us see your Merchant of Venice next week. Thank you.