Re-making Katherina: Julia Marlowe and The Taming of the Shrew
Royal Holloway, University of London
In Women Reading Shakespeare 1660–1900, Ann Thompson and Sasha Roberts contend that ‘by re-examining our notion of the genres of Shakespeare criticism we can rediscover the work of women reading Shakespeare’.1 This essay responds to the challenge issued by Thompson and Roberts, and focuses on two examples of a much neglected genre – the prompt copy – in order to analyse how Julia Marlowe (1865–1950) read Shakespeare. Marlowe’s prompt copies provide detailed evidence of how this actress researched, interrogated, and then performed in Shakespeare’s plays and her Shrew prompt copies provide vivid evidence of how Marlowe attempted to re-make Katherina.
Marlowe had a remarkable career, lasting several decades, as a leading Shakespearian actress. Despite many opportunities to make money in commercial theatre, Marlowe prioritized playing Shakespeare:2 she performed in comedy – Beatrice, Viola, Imogen, Portia, Rosalind, and Katherina – and tragedy – Juliet, Ophelia, Lady Macbeth, and Cleopatra.3 Marlowe was forty when she started playing Katherina in 1905 and her Petruchio was E. H. Sothern, the man who would become Marlowe’s second husband in 1911. As an actor manager, sometimes working alongside Sothern, and sometimes working independently, Marlowe enjoyed considerable autonomy for much of her career. But what really marks Marlowe out as extraordinary is her work as theatre maker, what would now be called a dramaturg: Marlowe researched her productions; she edited her own texts for performance; she devised stage business. After she retired, Marlowe archived her work, trying to ensure it would be possible for future generations to appreciate the re-making of Shakespeare’s heroines that she accomplished.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, in the United States, the Katherina of Ada Rehan reigned supreme.4 Augustin Daly’s long running and magnificently upholstered 1887 production, starring Rehan, cut vulgarity, minimized farce and dignified Katherina. But in 1905 Marlowe threw down the gauntlet, challenging and explicitly critiquing Rehan’s queenly shrew.5 Marlowe contended, in performance and in print, that The Shrew should be robustly farcical. Marlowe’s Katherina was ‘vehement and pungent’ (Russell, p. 334); she was ‘consistent, human, likeable’ and she had ‘a clever, persisting, indomitable, coil-springed, feminine mind’ (Russell, p. 335). Marlowe’s performance suggested that Katherina ‘was merely biding her time until she could reassert her dominion’, and the end of Shakespeare’s play was the beginning of ‘the taming of the tamer’ (Russell, p. 337). By the standards of her day, Marlowe’s campaign to remake Katherina was feminist.
There is some evidence to suggest that Marlowe might have been interested in the cause of early twentieth-century feminism. In 1893 Marlowe addressed the Woman’s Congress of the Chicago World’s Fair on the subject of ‘Woman’s Work on the Stage’. In this speech she celebrated women’s achievements in the theatre as well as their ‘Courage and perseverance’ and their ‘executive ability’.6 Marlowe was friends with Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906), the suffragist and abolitionist. She was also a very close friend of Charles Edward Russell (1860–1941), a ‘sober, serious and passionate social crusader’, anticapitalist, a determined ‘muckraker’, the son of an abolitionist and, in 1909, one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People.7 Marlowe and Russell met in 1888 (Russell, p. 136); once Marlowe and Sothern were married, they spent most summers in Europe with Russell and his second wife, Theresa Herschel, ‘an ardent feminist’ who was ‘active in the women’s movement’ (Miraldi, p. 204). The friendships between these two couples appear to have been close and although Russell tried and ‘failed’ to ‘convince Marlowe to become involved in social issues’ (Miraldi, p. 301 n.1), it seems likely that Marlowe and Theresa Herschel Russell, the ‘ardent feminist’ would have discussed Katherina.
In 1926 Charles Russell wrote an authorized biography of Marlowe, which constructs her as a never say die heroine of great and talent and tenacity, who succeeds against the odds. Russell only refers obliquely to the fact that from the late 1890s, he advised Marlowe on business matters, particularly investments in war bonds (Russell, p. 264) and the Stock Market (Miraldi, p. 205). However, these investments were critical: they made Marlowe a wealthy woman, one who could afford to take risks in the theatre.8 If reviewers and audiences disliked Marlowe’s Katherina, preferring the status quo of Rehan’s imperious shrew, Marlowe would not go bankrupt.
One unexpected feature of Russell’s biography is his emphasis on Marlowe’s careful preparation of her prompt copies. Russell states that
[h]er way was to take a page of text and paste it upon a page of a blank book much larger. Then, with insatiable care, she marked every emphasis and covered all the marginal space with minute annotations as to meaning, purpose, business, intonation, gesture. On each role, she spent months and sometimes years of diligent study and patient review before she was willing to essay it; reading the commentators, weighing the meanings, testing emphases, fitting the character into its times and background, putting Rolfe by the side of Theobald and White by Steevens, until, at last, the competent mistress of the full significance of the role as a definite creation in arts, she walked upon the stage to delineate it.9
While such predetermined direction would be anathema to many theatre practitioners today, Marlowe’s acknowledgement of scholarship, and how it can feed into theatre, is noteworthy.10 Russell also pinpoints the summer of 1905 as the moment when Marlowe worked on the prompt copy for Shrew, along with The Merchant of Venice (Russell, p. 333).
Although Marlowe’s Shrew was not popular with some critics, particularly those who were devotees of Daly, the show ran for two weeks in New York to ‘crowded houses’ (Russell, 346). It then
continued in the Sothern-Marlowe repertoire for twenty years, was repeated and repeated in New York and every other important city in (the US), drew to each performance a capacity house, and so far as Shakespeare is concerned, established new bounds of popular favour (Russell, p. 352).11
Marlowe’s Shrew changed a great deal over the decades: sometimes it used a full pictorial set; after the First World War it tended to be more bare-boards. Some changes – such as delaying Katherina’s first entry until 2.1 – may have had more to do with Marlowe’s decreasing stamina and ill health over the years than with critical interpretation. But the prompt copies clearly indicate that Marlowe cut the text, rearranged lines and interpolated business in order to remake Katherina’s relationship with Petruchio and, in particular, to qualify Katherina’s final submission.
It is important to note, from a bibliographic point of view, that the term ‘prompt copy’ in relation to the Sothern and Marlowe productions is an inclusive term that covers a wide range of kinds of text.12 These include: souvenir copies such as the records made by Lark Taylor, an actor with Sothern and Marlowe’s company;13 preparation copies; part books; lighting plots; typescripts; touring prompt copies; instructions to carpenters; the working prompt copy used by stage managers, such as Frederick Kaufman, to run a show. Some prompt copies appear to take the reader very close to Marlowe’s performance; for example, Twelfth Night 58 has ‘Lines marked for stresses by Miss Marlowe’ (Shattuck, p. 481).14 Collating all the extant prompt copies of the Sothern/Marlowe Shrew would create an information overload, so I will focus here on two contrasting Shrew prompt copies, labelled by Shattuck as 47 and 48. Shrew 47 is a souvenir prompt copy donated to the Folger in 1934 by Francis S. T. Powell. It has Powell’s handwritten notes on a published text of The Shrew; Powell stage managed the Sothern/Marlowe production, was intimately familiar with it, and was helped in reconstructing the prompt copy by another Sothern/Marlowe stage manager, Frederick S. Kaufman.15 Shrew 47 documents the five-act, fuller version of the Sothern/Marlowe production whereas Shrew 48 records details of the four act version, which opened at Baptista’s first speech. Shrew 48 is a typescript and has very full information on lighting, prop lists, music, etc. Shattuck (p. 442) identifies it as a Kaufman prompt copy.
The Shrew 47 and 48 prompt copies testify that Sothern’s Petruchio seized every opportunity to signal that he was completely smitten by the fiery charms of Katherina, something which gave her a significant power base; thus, in 5.2, when Petruchio demands in a ‘Commanding tone’ that Katherina should fetch Bianca and the Widow, there is a moment of renegotiation: ‘when he continues’ with this ‘Commanding tone’, Katherina ‘looks at him and they exchange an understanding glance and he adopts a softer tone’ (Shrew 48, p. l8). After Katherina throws her cap underfoot, ‘Petruchio picks up cap and gives it to Katherina’ (Shrew 48, p. 19). Nevertheless, on hearing Petruchio’s demand that she lecture on ‘duty’, Marlowe’s Katherina ‘protestingly falls on stool’’ (Shrew 48, p. 19) even though Sothern’s Petruchio ‘pats his money pouch’ when Lucentio complains he has lost ‘a hundred crowns since supper-time’, presumably, to signal to Katherina that money is at stake (Shrew 48, p. 19). After Katherina places her hand on the floor, Petruchio ‘seizes her hand, and places his own on floor. She places her foot on his hand’ (Shrew 47, n.p.). Finally Katherina ‘holds up her dress and he takes gold he has won and pours all of it into her lap as …..CURTAINS CLOSE’ (Shrew 48, p. 21). Marlowe thus qualifies the submission speech radically as firstly Katherina is invited to join forces with her husband to make money and appears to accept, and secondly Petruchio abjects himself by placing his hand upon the floor, allowing Katherina to tread on his foot before he hands over the proceeds of the wager to her.
For modern feminists such stage business might appear to be band-aiding. However, Marlowe’s fighting defence of her production in the face of criticism, especially by Daly’s apologists, a defence first published in the Evening Telegram, has to be read as feminist. Marlowe claims that she has gone back to Shakespeare, which, for her, means the Folio text, ‘the real text of Shakespeare devoid of the conventionalities and traditions with which it has been encumbered for years’ (Russell, p. 343). The Folio is also the source of Marlowe’s commitment to farce; the text demands characters strike each other and productions which omit such business are ‘misconceptions, perversions, and un-Shakespearean “Shrews”’ (Russell, p. 344).16 Marlowe cites contemporary critics – Fleay, Ward, Furnival, and Furness (Russell, p. 343) – to bolster her argument and denounces the use of ‘incongruous austerity’ in ‘recent productions’ which approached The Shrew ‘as if it were of a classically comic fiber comparable in dignity and grace to “As You Like It” or to “Twelfth Night”’ (Russell, p. 342). Marlowe claims The Shrew is an ‘Elizabethan farce comedy’ (Russell, p. 342), and ‘the subdued, dignified, restrained interpretation of the play’, that Daly had popularized, is wrong. Marlowe states her Katherina ‘was tamed not so much by physical overbearance’ as by her amusement at the ‘practical joker’ Petruchio (Russell, p. 344). Marlowe concedes that Shakespeare’s roles are open to many different interpretations but ‘I must play according to my own conviction, not by another’s’ (Russell, p. 345). Twenty years after Marlowe’s direct, possibly shrewish, defence of her artistic choices, Russell decided – presumably with Marlowe’s blessing – to reprint Marlowe’s article in his 1926 biography. Both Marlowe and Sothern were then retired, looking back over their careers and actively seeking to ensure their achievements were not forgotten. Sothern had published an autobiography in 1917, My Remembrances: The Melancholy Tale of “Me”, and he was planning to write Julia Marlowe’s Story.17 Sothern and Marlowe had also, in 1922, cut a series of 78 rpm records featuring famous Shakespearian speeches; these records include two sequences from The Shrew.18 One Shrew recording is easily accessible via an elegant, online installation, which marries the sound track of the first meeting between Marlowe’s Katherina and Sothern’s Petruchio with stills of Marlowe.19 Marlowe’s famous contralto voice occasionally ‘sing[s]’ by modern standards of performance, but Katherina’s resistance to Petruchio can be heard in a series of incoherent noises of astonishment and protest. The second recording – Katherina’s advice to women – departs radically from the business indicated by Marlowe’s prompt copies;20 however, Marlowe’s interpretation – that Petruchio arouses Katherina’s sense of humour (Russell, p. 334) – is still very clear. The sequence cuts 5.2 from line 99 onwards, sometimes rather awkwardly, in order to fashion a duet that includes the throwing down of Katherina’s cap. When Petruchio issues his cap throwing order, Katherina reacts by laughing as if she is very amused. She delivers the advice to women speech uncut, rendering Marlowe the star and Sothern the support act in this recording, and Petruchio’s response, ‘Why, there’s a wench. Come on, and kiss me, Kate’ is followed by a series of exaggerated kissing sounds, and much laughter: Petruchio laughs in a slightly pirate-king style and Katherina in a much higher key. Marlowe’s Katherina and Sothern’s Petruchio are playing an amusing game and are having great fun. Thus while the Victor recordings present an adaptation of what is documented in the prompt copies as Marlowe’s stage performance, the audio performances still complement the overall interpretation of The Shrew that the prompt copies offer; for Marlowe, The Shrew should be full of laughs and, at the end, Katherina is unbowed, amused and actually in control.
Marlowe valued her prompt copies and tried to ensure they survived by donating them to archives.21 While prompt copies need to be theorized, and questions asked about their provenance, use, and their status as evidence in constructing performance histories, Marlowe’s indubitably offer theatrically pragmatic insights into her readings of Shakespeare’s plays, both the plays that she and Sothern produced and the plays, such as Measure for Measure and The Tempest, that they planned to produce but didn’t. Her prompt copies also offer a useful corrective to reviews, which with the increasing availability of newspapers online, risk becoming dominant sources in performance histories simply because they are so accessible. What the Shrew prompt copies indicate, for me, is that Marlowe was not only a star actress but also a remarkable dramaturg; she was tenacious in her resistance to the dignified Katherina, popularized by Daly’s production; determined in her qualification of what Katherina’s submission meant; and energetic in promoting her reading – in performance, in print and via a sound recording – of Katherina. Marlowe found playfulness, fun and laughter in the Shrew; it may be hard now to laugh at the jokes she enjoyed, but Marlowe’s resilience in promulgating her remaking of Katherina deserves respect.
1Ann Thompson and Sasha Roberts (eds), Women Reading Shakespeare 1660–1900: An Anthology of Criticism (Manchester, 1997), p. 7.
2John D. Barry, in Julia Marlowe, Sock and Buskin Biographies (Boston, 1899?), records Marlowe’s ‘determination to become a Shaksperian (sic) actress’ (19).
3Marlowe also played Hal to the Hotspur of her then husband, Robert Taber, in 1 Henry IV but it was not a success. Photograph in Barry (opposite p. 56).
4For more on The Shrew’s performance history in this period, see Elizabeth Schafer, The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare in Production (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 15–22.
5Daly waged a vendetta against Marlowe for years. See Charles Edward Russell, Julia Marlowe: Her Life and Art (New York and London, 1926), Chapter XIV, ‘The Fight with Augustin Daly’.
6Marlowe, Julia, ‘Woman’s Work on the Stage’, read before the Woman’s Congress of the Chicago world’s Fair, Wednesday 17 May 1893, reproduced in Russell, pp. 551–6 (554).
7Miraldi, Robert, The Pen is Mightier: The Muckraking Life of Charles Edward Russell (Basingstoke, 2003), p. 204.
8For the last thirty years of her life, Marlowe lived at the New York Plaza Hotel (Chicago Daily Tribune, 13 November 1950). For risk taking see Patty S. Derrick, ‘Julia Marlowe’s Imogen: Modern Identity, Victorian Style’ Theatre History Studies 31 (2011), pp. 90–117, on the costly failure of the lavishly mounted 1923 Sothern/Marlowe Cymbeline.
9Russell xxi. More information on Marlowe’s methods appears on p. 151.
10Barry, writing in 1899, states that Marlowe and her then husband, Robert Taber, ‘prepared a stage version of their own, after studying those made by Mr Hackett and Mrs Inchbold’ (sic) (Barry, p. 61).
11Marlowe finally retired from the stage in 1924 although ill health had been an increasing challenge from 1914 on. See Forrest Izard, Heroines of the Modern Stage (New York, 1915), p. 316.
12Charles Shattuck, in The Shakespeare Promptbooks: A Descriptive Catalogue (Urbana, IL, 1965), lists 13 prompt copies for the Sothern/Marlowe Shrew. His ‘Introduction’ acknowledges the wide range of ‘marked copies’ he lists under the heading ‘promptbook’ (5).
13Lark Taylor also appeared in Daly’s production and some of the business he records seems to be Daly’s rather than Sothern and Marlowe’s.
14All references to individual prompt copies use the numbers employed by Shattuck.
15Prefatory comments to Shrew 47 state that ‘The manuscript was made by Francis T. S. Powell, Stage Manager, with assistance of Frederick Kaufman, Assistant Stage Manager.’
16Somewhat inconsistently, Marlowe rejects the ‘spurious’ (Russell, p. 343) Induction, which Daly’s production played.
17See E. H. Sothern, My Remembrances: The Melancholy Tale of ‘Me’ (London, 1917), and Julia Marlowe’s Story, ed. Fairfax Downey (New York, 1954). Marlowe delayed publication of Julia Marlowe’s Story until after her death. The book is dedicated to Russell, and Sothern writes in the first person as if he is Marlowe. The text was edited after Marlowe’s death by Fairfax Downey. There is very little on The Shrew in either of Sothern’s memoirs.
18The Victor Records catalogue lists the wooing scene as 74704 and Katherina’s advice to women as 74705.
19See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaxdIHU6V3k and http://shakespeare.berkeley.edu/Shakespeare/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=148&Itemid=100008
20I would like to thank Stephen Dryden of the British Library’s Sound Archives for help in accessing this recording.
21Most Sothern/Marlowe prompt copies were deposited in the New York Public Library, the Museum of the City of New York, and the Folger Library.