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wrote

author Barnabe Rich with brutal bluntness just before The Taming of the Shrew was penned. It is as if Shakespeare took this pronouncement as a personal challenge in his creation of the character of Katherine, whose father, Baptista, endures the kind of pressure that even a hefty dowry might not alleviate. Baptista has a daughter who, though young and good-looking, has an unenviable fl aw: She is a shrew, and hence unvendable.

The quality of “shrewishness”—defi ned in the 14th century as pertaining to a “peevish, malignant, clamorous, spiteful, turbulent woman”—was thought to derive from the attack of a shrew-mouse, a small animal with a gnawing, venomous bite. 1510 saw the fi rst recorded use of “shrewd,” which came from “shrew” and meant “cunning.” Shrews in Shakespeare’s time threatened the primacy of men, and the cucking stool and the bridle were infamously used to “tame” them—the former a chair to which the accused shrew was strapped at the site of her transgression; the latter a cage that encased the head, with a metal tab that prevented speech by resting on the tongue. Husbands of shrews were humiliated by being forced to ride around the town on a horse backward. Who would willingly take Katherine, then, so young and yet so volubly bad-tempered? And, to make matters

worse, if Baptista can’t get his shrewish older girl married, he is likely to be saddled with two unmarried daughters, since it was customary at the time for an older daughter to marry fi rst.

When Shakespeare wrote this play, he was 27 years old, had been married for nine years to 35-year-old Anne Hathaway, and had two daughters and a son. Just before The Taming of the Shrew was written, he left his family with his parents in Stratford and struck out for the London stage: He knew his own talent and was eager to make income and a reputation. It was natural for a young, ambitious playwright to alight on the themes of sex, money, bad character, and power—four ingredients that have always been intriguing to the popular imagination.

But even with these qualities on board, how do you

make an attractive drama

out of an unmarketable, unpleasant woman? Shakespeare would go on to make evil lead characters—like Richard III, Iago, and Titus Andronicus’ Aaron—who were also irresistibly engaging. But as a playwright who sought to engage his public, he was unlikely to design a lead character as simply unpleasant. Would this really be a prescription for audience engagement—a woman who screams and yells and hits unsuspecting tutors over the head with musical instruments? The answer to the question of why Shakespeare created Katherine lies in the play’s fascinating and adventurous take on the conventions of its own times. Scholars and audiences often wish to dismiss The Taming of the

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Shrew as an unfortunate museum piece dug up from a time when Shakespeare wasn’t old enough to know better; but such opinions grossly underestimate what he was doing with the character of Katherine.

This particular unmarketable woman stood at a social crossroads. Her intrigue lay not simply in the thrill factor—would we see her eventually tamed as a horse might be broken, and how much pressure and danger would it take? Shakespeare also created Katherine as a fi gure of controversy as well as of personal appeal. Beautiful and motherless, like a young, free-ranging weed, Katherine has grown up unchecked by maternal constraints and undaunted by social convention. Though most women (Shakespeare’s wife included) could not write at this time, a good number knew how to read, and were doing so voraciously. The printing press had made available to the public pamphlets and controversial texts—like Arden of Faversham, and the Querelles des Femmes—that debated women’s social roles.

These had the effect of opening women’s eyes and broadening their perspectives. Kate spoke to the heart of this new generation of women, and she spoke back to the old guard who decreed that a desirable woman was a silent, obedient one.

As the play moves past the Induction scene, we see Petruchio arrive in Padua—the seat of learning in Italy—with mercenary intentions: “I come to wive it wealthily in Padua; / If wealthily then happily in Padua.” He wants to use Katherine’s wealth to offset his own considerable inheritance, and her reputation as a shrew doesn’t seem to worry him at all:

Think you a little din can daunt mine ears?

Have I not in my time heard lions roar?

Have I not heard the sea puff’d up with winds

Rage like an angry boar chafed with sweat?

The taming of one small woman will not daunt this adventurer. Kate hits back at him, giving as good as she gets—but, while she fears and resists the curbing of her spirit, she also wants to be married, asking why her sister Bianca should get to the altar ahead of her and she remain alone.

And this is the source of Kate’s taming in the play—it comes, I feel, not just from Petruchio, but from her own wish to have what has been denied her. In creating this character Shakespeare has made an inquiry—youthful and crude, but nonetheless fascinating—into the nature of womanhood itself (and into the nature of manhood as refl ected against it). He portrays a girl whom no one expects to be other than shrewish, unmanageable, and unsaleable: a girl whom everyone laughs about, someone as potentially dangerous as a bear in a cage.

Perhaps Petruchio alone sees Kate’s potential to be different; and Kate, along with everyone else, refuses at fi rst to believe him. But could Petruchio “tame” this young woman if she didn’t want to change? On one hand, we might object to the seeming conventionality of Katherine’s rebellious spirit being ultimately quieted. But the “taming” may be more than a humorous affi rmation of a woman’s return to her rightful role: It may indeed be a form of homage to Elizabeth, England’s powerful, eloquent, and female regent. Who might a

woman be? Need womanhood curtail her range of motion? Whatever his dramatic intention and effect, Shakespeare, in this play, stretches the social girdle traditionally encasing a young woman. In the process of this stretching is Katherine’s rebuke to society; Shakespeare has us watch as she and Petruchio engage in an adventure that eventually snaps the girdle back into place. But maybe this journey itself allows Kate more fl exibility, not less—The Taming of the Shrew permits her to try on various possibilities for womanhood, and, eventually, to change herself quite radically, fi nding a new place in a world that has pointed and laughed at her as she has struggled, motherless and unmarketable, to fi nd her own way.

In Kate’s famous fi nal speech, she advocates obedience and duty to “foul contending rebel” women like the “Katherine” she used to be. Has she fi nally capitulated, or is she actually mocking those who choose to think she’s been tamed? One thing is for sure—Kate has the last laugh: She’s never been more central nor more talkative than when arguing for women’s subordination. She’s vacated the bad girl’s chair (leaving it ready for Bianca!). n

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THE MAKING OF A PROPER SHREW.

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The Taming of the Shrew has been dismissed as chauvinistic comedy about the battle between the sexes in which a mouthy, strong-willed woman dares try to enforce her will, and is starved and humiliated into submission by her husband and eventual “tamer.” The uppity Kate is put in her place and debases herself at the end of the play with a monologue about submitting to one’s husband as lord and master. When uttered with a straight face, this speech allegedly has Elizabeth I, Cleopatra, Catherine the Great, Hypatia, Susan B. Anthony, Emmaline, Christabel and Sylvia Pankhurst, and Betty Friedan spinning in their graves with indignation on behalf of mouthy broads everywhere.

Aunt Mary and Aunt Ella-Jean pulled me aside to give me hugs and laud me with praise. They told me how proud they were of me. Nobody in our family had ever embarked on a Ph.D. Just before they disappeared back into the crowds, Aunt Ella-Jean warned me in a hushed tone, “Just be careful, honey. You know how women in our family can be kinda high-strung, and too much learning can make you crazy.” Aunt Mary nodded in agreement, and off my aunts disappeared into the sea of extended family.

I found this hilarious. Where on earth did they get such a nutty idea? “Too much education makes you crazy.” My family, I thought, is crazy.

A few years later, I realized they my aunts were not dispensing a rural-South bias against uppity gals who pursued higher education. They were espousing a deeply held cultural value that dates back through the millennia. For it’s true: When you start eating from the tree of knowledge, your eyes are often opened to the naked horrors and inequities the world has to offer, and you are no longer satisfied with the status quo. Globally, whenever women begin to have greater access to education, they begin to demand things: to have the vote, to have careers, to be paid a fair wage, to have inheritance rights, to have legal rights to their children, and to have autonomy over their own bodies. Intellectual awakening among the oppressed is a grave danger to the status quo. It always has been. Shakespeare knew this only too well.

The meager historical evidence we have about Shakespeare’s family suggests that his parents were illiterate. He, however, benefited from Renaissance philosophies about education, which were trickling down the strictly policed class hierarchy in England, so that even a middle-class schoolboy from the boonies of a rural town such as Stratford could receive a pretty intense education. Boys like Shakespeare went to school six days a week from dusk ’til dawn and were drilled in Latin, literature, church teachings, and history. By the time he left school, Shakespeare arguably had a better education in language and rhetoric than most college undergraduates today.

Shakespeare was certainly aware of the transformative power of education. Many of his plays and most intriguing characters, such as Prospero and Hamlet, are eternal students; and he often plays with notions of education as a source of transformation and social mobility. Girls, however, were yet another matter. Educating girls beyond the domestic arts was still seen as frivolous, unnecessary, and potentially dangerous. Anyone doubting this maxim needed look no further than the overeducated, troublesome shrews sired by Henry VIII.

I love the aforementioned uppity women. What a pack of fabulous, well-educated shrews. Along with other uppity over-educated types, I like to argue that Shrew is a comedy about using education and learning to transform oneself, alter one’s social status, and eventually (hopefully) change society. A little education makes a shrew. A lot of education makes an effective shrew…one dangerous enough to promote change, even though she is generally perceived and treated as a social pariah.

Some years ago, at my grandfather’s wake, I was accosted by a contingent of my great aunts—my grandmother’s half-sisters. Grandma, a fabulous, mouthy shrew in her own right, was unbelievably proud of the fact I was about to embark on my Ph.D. I don’t think anyone in northwest Alabama was uninformed of what she viewed as my educational accomplishments.

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Henry’s daughters Mary and Elizabeth were never intended to rule. Yet their father had them highly educated. He put in his will that—even though they had both been declared illegitimate bastards when Henry divorced Mary’s mother and beheaded the shrew who birthed Elizabeth—they were still in the line of succession should something happen to his only surviving son, Edward IV. Edward died at 16; enter the shrews.

Women certainly could not competently rule themselves, much less an entire kingdom—so said conventional English wisdom. Mary and Elizabeth were the first women ever to rule England in their own rights. One of Mary’s first acts as Queen was to formally decree herself a man for legal purposes. When Elizabeth ascended the throne after Mary’s death, she never legally declared herself a man, but she certainly had no qualms about playing her public image as the Virgin Queen (which gave her access to comparisons to Christ’s mother, the Virgin Queen of Heaven) against a more masculine persona, as when she told English troupes on the eve of their defeat of the Spanish in 1588, “I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but the heart and spirit of a king, and a king of England, too.” Conjuring the image of her father and portraying herself as his manly heir was among her favorite tactics. She also steadfastly refused to marry. Ever.

Under English law, everything a woman had, including her person, became the property of her husband once she married. Elizabeth saw where a woman’s status in marriage got her mother: Henry VIII’s second queen is still buried, sans her head, under the floor of the chapel in the Tower of London. There were exceptions to the marital property laws for a female sovereign, but it was a murky area, and Elizabeth certainly witnessed how her sister, “Bloody” Mary (she certainly earned that name), never quite successfully juggled her roles as wife and queen. Elizabeth had learned something: from her formal education, her father’s dubious example, and her sister’s woes. She possessed a verbal prowess and sly intelligence infamous in her day. She was also an eternal student; she learned from others and taught herself how to be England’s first successful female monarch, supposedly saying, upon learning the throne was hers,

“This is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes.” Yet the achievements she won for herself did not trickle down to the rest of English society.

In Shrew, a great deal of the plot revolves around Baptista’s desires to have educated daughters. He hires them private tutors, claiming to want them to have good educations and social and economic respect in their marriages. Bianca uses her education to choose a husband on her own, without her father’s permission. If her behavior by the end of the play is any indication of how that marriage will go, she, not Lucentio, will be wearing the pants, so to speak. What she has learned from her education is how to fly under the radar as a covert shrew. It’s passive-aggressive, sure, but it works.

Kate manages to marry a man who is, in many ways, her spitting image. The formal education she receives makes her adroit at verbal barbs and aware of what she does and does not like. However, her society views her behavior as entirely mad. Too much learning has made her crazy in the eyes of those around her. Likewise, Petruchio’s servant describes him over and over as a madman much like Kate is a woman: highly educated and fond of soaring rhetoric sliding into verbal abuse, physical abuse, and getting one’s way at all costs. Of the two, however, it is Kate, not Petruchio, who first employs verbal abuse. She even insults and strikes Petruchio before he has much of a chance to display his unconventional “wooing” skills.

Kate is still a mouthy, troublesome broad at the end of the play; she has simply redirected her aggression towards socially acceptable targets: other women. The men in charge quite approve of how Kate makes Bianca and the Widow the recipients of her “schooling.” Petruchio remarks proudly to the other men as Kate drags Bianca and the Widow onstage at the end of the play: “See where she comes and brings your forward wives/ As prisoners to her womanly persuasion.” It is to these women that Kate directs her final tongue-lashing speech on how to “behave”—proving she has graduated from Petruchio’s School for Shrews. n

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SAVE THE DATES!We have special events nearly every night—Educator Night, free Tastings, reduced ticket prices, dramaturg talkbacks, and more.

EVENTS

For complete descriptions of these and other events, click calshakes.org/events.

Lower-Priced PreviewsBe a part of the process by seeing the show before the show opening, at a discounted price.

9/21–23

Educator Nightan in-depth look at how teachers can bring The Taming of the Shrew and William shakespeare to life in their classrooms

9/22

Cal Shakersnetwork with a diverse group of emerging leaders and philanthropists at this pre-show event.

9/23

Opening Night!Mingle with the cast at a post-show reception.

9/24

meet the Artists matinees Post-show chat with cast & creative team

9/25 & 10/9

Complimentary Tastingsenjoy pre-show samples from local purveyors.

9/27 & 28 10/4 & 5

10/11 & 12

Teen NightPre-show event for ages 13-18, including pizza and an interactive, fun, pre-show engagement with a cal shakes teaching artist

9/29

Shindig Pre-show ladies’ night cocktail party

9/30

InSight matinee Post-show talk with the dramaturg 10/2

Guests at the inaugural cal shakers event; photo by Jamie Buschbaum.

SHREW

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Bring it on… a London alehouseHere we present a new induction,Our version of the pre-instruction.

Padua, Italian seat of learningBaptista has a lovely girlAnd one who’d make your straight hair curl.Until the elder harpy’s matedThe sweet and younger must be gated.

Three men before Bianca standCompeting for the maiden’s hand.Her brutish sister’s in the waySince she must have first bridal day.

Gremio brings old age and moneyTo woo Baptista’s sweet young honey.Lucentio comes with youth and learning,But not a proven way of earning.

Hortensio stands in suit as wellAnother dazzled by love’s spell—But how will any get the prizeDangling there before their eyes?

Katherine the curst has much to say (Hence the title of our play)And since a shrew won’t make a brideBianca must remain inside.

An idea…Lucentio pretends to be a tutor.(In secret he’s Bianca’s suitor)He says he comes with learning laden—At least this gets him near the maiden.

And then Petruchio hits the scene,His will is strong, his temper keen,His pockets full, his chamber bare,He seeks a wife upon a dare.

Katherine, source of all the strifeWill be subdued and be his wife!They marry soon with scant ado,And then we watch him tame the shrew…

Meanwhile Lucentio’s rather brashIn dealing with his lack of cash.He finds an elder with the guileTo play his father mercantile.

With seeming cash Bianca’s wooedAnd won, and wed—and then her moodBecomes more waspish and more wildAs Katherine grows more meek and mild…

A battle-ax is now young BWhile Kate obeys on bended knee,And all are left to contemplateWho’s the shrew, and who’s our Kate….?