Taming the Shrew

*** Spoiler warning if you intend to see the RSC Taming of the Shrew ***

Yesterday I went to see the RSC production of The Taming of the Shrew with a group of students. I had been told it was a controvertial Shrew (you can read reviews here and here) but didn't know much else about it.

It is a particularly brutal production. There is a lot of physical violence throughout, and Petruchio's 'taming' of Katherina is shown deliberately and overtly as acts of mental and physical cruelty.

The production was not without comedy, particularly in the scenes with Bianca and her suitors, with Tranio and Biondello, but the comedy was rarely with Petruchio and Katherina. I think this is what has caused such controversy. Petruchio's scenes of 'taming' have, in other productions, been played comically. And, I think, some audiences do not want their Shakespeare - particularly their Shakespearean comedy - to be so harsh / brutal / condemnatory of patriarchal values. But the RSC did not show anything in their Petruchio / Kate scenes that Shakespeare did not write. It was only their interpretation in performance that seemed to be shocking.

Despite his brutality on stage, Petruchio's speech in Act IV still provoked some laughter:

Thus have I politicly begun my reign,
And 'tis my hope to end successfully.
...
She ate no meat today, nor none shall eat;
Last night she slept not, nor tonight she shall not.
As with the meat, some undeserved fault
I'll find about the making of the bed,
And here I'll fling the pillow, there the bolster,
This way the coverlet, another way the sheets.
Ay, and amid this hurly, I intend
That all is done in reverend care of her.
And in conclusion she shall watch all night,
And if she chance to nod I'll rail and brawl,
And with the clamour keep her still awake.
This is a way to kill a wife with kindness,
And thus I'll curb her mad and headstrong humour.
He that knows better how to tame a shrew,
Now let him speak: 'tis charity to show. (4.1.175-198)


I wonder whether it is an audience's need to find comedy here that provoked the laughter, or whether it is related to a modern, western understanding that the idea of an husbandly 'reign' or 'shrew taming' should be absurd. But there was nothing comic in the delivery of this speech, or in the scene that preceded it. And the emphasis put on killing his wife with kindness, even metaphorically, was deeply disturbing. The most painful scene, for me, was one in which Katherina was shown to offer sexual favours to Petruchio's downtrodden servant Grumio - who himself had been shown, up to this point, to be the very lowest of the characters in the play - if he would give her food. He both humiliates her and denies her the food he has shown to her. Although Katherina delivers her final speech of wifely obedience with dignity, her subsequent on stage almost lifeless submission to Petruchio's sexual appetite leaves no doubt in this production that Kate is a defeated woman, however much scope for ambiguity the play itself might allow. It is a very dark production.

But that said, I thought it was an extremely good and thought provoking production. And I wish my class of Shakespeare students from last year had seen it. It might have made one or two of them think more critically about their uncritical, 'un-scare-quoted' use of the word 'taming' in their essays. Their unquestioning acceptance of it as a term was slightly concerning to me, and my suggestions in seminars that this was not necessarily presented as a good thing in the play went unheard in several cases.

They would not have been able to dismiss this production's interpretation quite so readily.

The Winter's Tale

Well, it should have been a summer's tale. A group of early modernists from the English Department went to watch the play outdoors in the middle of June at the Large Public Park here, the name of which is curiously appropriate, although not exactly right, for watching Shakespeare. The weather had been fine all day - not hot and sunny, but dry and not not too overcast. Colleague who Worries Too Much was convinced it would be a glorious evening, and we wouldn't need to go home for our raincoats. I was much more doubtful. I did go home for mine, and was very glad I did. It waited until the performance was about to start and then the rain came. The theatre company carried on regardless, and I passed my picnic-carrying plastic bag to colleague who Worries Too Much so that she could at least cover part of herself with something waterproof.

The acting company worked very hard. Each of them took more than one part - something I suppose is essential if a travelling company wants to keep costs down - and they acted well enough that it was easy to forget they were really the same person. For the most part, the doubling up of parts seemed purely practical, but I thought one of the choices of pairing was particularly interesting. The man who played the shepherd's son, adoptive brother of Perdita, also played Paulina, wife of Antigonus, who speaks plainly and abruptly to King Leontes, pointing out his faults to him. Again, this was probably in part due to practical considerations - none of the actresses could play her because they would have to be on stage playing two parts at once at the end of the play. Of course in Shakespeare's day all female parts would have been played by boys, but if only one in this production is not played by a woman, it is, I think, critically interesting that it should have been the outspoken Paulina. She does not behave like an early modern woman should - she is not quiet, she does not keep herself and her thoughts private, she is not obedient to her husband (or to her king). She is, in fact, a "manly" political character - indeed, she is more outspoken than the courtiers. So, does having a man play her serve to emphasise her difference from courtly ladies? Does it attempt to trouble ideas of what being a courtly lady actually is? Or does it serve to emphasise the lack of action, the lack of questioning of the king, by the male courtiers? And, can all of these questions be asked of the play anyway, if Paulina was originally played by a boy actor?

I don't want to answer these questions here. I merely want to pose them as questions interesting to me, and I hope to you, raised by this production. I am very fond of the The Winter's Tale as a play. It raises issues of power and authority, truth and fiction, religion, gender, genre and representation. As I think all good productions should, this one just added one further facet to a complex and fascinating play.

Much Ado about Something

On Friday my Aspiring Author friend and I went to an outdoor performance of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. It had been rainy weather all week (although nowhere near as bad as it's raining Down South) but it didn't rain on Friday and we made it through the performance without getting wet. The actors were pleased about that too - they'd been on tour for a number of weeks and this was only their seventh 'dry show'. Aspiring Author and I laid out my burst airbed (useless for sleeping on, but brilliant as a large waterproof outdoor rug) on the mud - despite it being a dry day, the grass was still boggy from the week's rain - and settled down in front of the loch, amongst the fold away chairs and picnic tables of other audience members to watch the performance. (A moment of panic coming back from a trip to the ladies before the performance started when I had lost Aspiring Author in the forest of such chairs and tables that had grown up in the brief time I was away.)

Illyria (the acting company) are very good. We've seen them before and were expecting great things. We weren't let down - although I think I preferred their performance of Comedy of Errors two years ago, maybe because I know Much Ado better and had a clearer idea of what I thought it should be. Occasionally the actor playing Benedick was a little too much Branagh-esque for me, but those moments were few and far between. There was an arresting moment when Don Pedro proposed to Beatrice and she turned him down. I've never thought about this as anything other than comic; Branagh's film version laughs it off immediately. Illyria chose to present it with all the awkwardness turning down a proposal from such an important man would have carried way back when... Leonato's anger when he heard Hero was unchaste was also extremely well done - the actor was very controlled, but gave out all the venom of Renaissance misogyny in the mouth of a let down and publicly embarrassed father.

All of the actors work very hard - there were only five of them playing all the parts, and playing different characters convincingly too. They even worked out ways to have two characters played by the same actor on stage at the same time. Very impressive. With only one woman in the cast taking the role of Beatrice (amongst others - the rest were male parts) the other female roles had to be taken by men, which is authentic for Shakespeare's time, but not often seen these days. They had a very clever matching up of characters whereby the actress playing Beatrice also played Claudio, and the actor playing Benedick also played Hero. I think that brought a new dimension to the play that I hadn't considered before. No one in the cast played fewer than three parts, and some took more than that. The cast also sell their own performance programmes and souvenirs, and mix with the audience at the end of the interval (they're quite fond of sharing your picnic - if you go to one of their performances, and I would recommend them, do take some spare strawberries!).

It was a thoroughly enjoyable evening, despite it getting a little chilly and the midges coming out to see what was going on.

I hope Illyria get more dry shows for the rest of the tour. They shouldn't have to work that hard and fight the weather.