Class, Identity, and Comic Choice: Bill Alexander’s The Taming of the Shrew
Hofstra University
Although a critical commonplace in discussions of the play, let us nevertheless begin with what purports to be most obvious about The Taming of the Shrew: its gender politics, which it is alleged must inevitably determine the methodology of dramatic action necessary to bring Shakespeare’s problematic comedy to the stage. Whatever the historical circumstances governing theatrical choice and audience response, whether read with sympathy, grudging acceptance, or bitter hostility, there can be little doubt, so the argument goes, that meaning in the staged or printed text is solely generated by the skirmishes of heterosexual warfare.
What seems less obvious, however, is the extent to which the contentious forces of patriarchy, female assertiveness, and woman’s wonted obedience, whose centrality to The Shrew’s comedic substance is irreducible, drives the play’s representational energies (to a greater or lesser degree) to one of two increasingly conventionalized paradigms. The first theatrical formula to become apparent seems to have been farce in which Kate’s behaviour and Petruchio’s actions are translated into slapstick, swagger, and knockabout two stooges’ physicality. One version of this model is played out by Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1967 film offering the audience a view of the playwright’s characters through the scrim of the couples’ own raucous celebrity, establishing, as Barbara Hodgdon observes, a brash ‘aura of immediacy and authenticity’.1 The other pattern, and perhaps the increasingly dominant performative mode since the 1960s and the emergence of strongly inflected feminist critiques of the play, is that of bleak sardonic irony, nearer tragedy than comedy wherein Katherina is browbeaten (or worse still, brainwashed, as some insist) by a brutish, violent Petruchio into dull, compliant servitude. Tina Packer, in a more recent variant of Katherina as the iconic subjugated female that is part of her continuously evolving production, Women of Will, begins with three disturbing, if by now, narrow, readings of Kate’s final submission, first as ‘a mad, manic prisoner gasping for life’; then as ‘a cooing sexy geisha’; and, at the last, as a ‘broken-backed figure of depressed resignation’.2
But even as disapproving critics would rather exile The Taming of the Shrew to some theatrical Ultima Thule, far away from the vulnerable, too easily influenced spectators, or as disappointed reviewers would prefer another pratfalling adaptation of Shakespeare’s Punch and Judy Show, scholars have been exploring the relative complexity of this early comedy. The disruptive tensions of The Shrew’s tripartite design – the Sly frame, the shrew taming main plot, and the Bianca subplot uncomfortably jostling one another – and the sometimes contradictory claims of comic authority enforced by local, folkloric, and Italianate sources call into equal question issues of identity and class as well as those of gender relations.
Given the insistent, even deliberate simplifications embedded in and the result of its production history, how then can director, company, actors introduce into performance variant and reconsidered Shrews? What theatrical choices can be made to enact a more complicated view of what constitutes the comic action of The Taming of the Shrew? In 1980, Jonathan Miller offered just such an alternative (which received a mixed critical reception, to be sure) for the televised BBC-Time/Life Shakespeare series. This counter-Shrew was shaped by what Miller presumed to be sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Reformation notions of taming/training/education, particularly for women, the corollary, but no less difficult, development of a coherent, stable self, and the problematic construction of a viable social/communal identity. In order to achieve such a comic embourgeoisement, the director’s Petruchio employs actual and symbolic mirrors, including his own exaggerated, even shrewish3 conduct, to permit Katherina to see herself as others do. By the end of Miller’s revisionary exercise, Kate has successfully and publicly humiliated the ‘good’ Bianca (who is the shrew now, the viewer is asked to consider); husband and wife, acting as coequal partners, have acquired in ‘good’ bourgeois fashion, additional financial capital, a reward for self-consciously performing the culture’s definition of normative conjugal roles; and the audience is presented with a demonstration of the new fashioned ‘good’ companionate marriage. Sexual politics is important only insofar as gender provides a context through which character and spectator alike are instructed in the processes by which the civilities of middle class life come into existence.
If the interpolated hymn socializing the self-satisfactions of the bourgeois family freezes the last moments of Miller’s comic reading into holier-than-thou sanctimony, very nearly erasing the production’s transformational energy, then Bill Alexander’s 1992 The Taming of The Shrew for the Royal Shakespeare Company is more unsettling still, especially for the many reviewers anticipating the broad humour of stage tradition,4 because it incorporates into its intricate and volatile mix the disorderly anxieties of class. Indeed, Peter Holland is almost persuaded by Alexander’s interpretation that ‘the play is … about class and that male subjugation of women is only an example of masters’ oppression of servants’.5 Alexander achieves this sense of subversive disquiet in a variety of ways, but primarily by reimagining and restoring the Christopher Sly frame to the performance text, by fully integrating the newly configured and modernized Induction into the play’s action, and finally, by deploying these now elaborate patterns of incident and event across symbolically marked and organized stage space.
One might argue that these alterations do Shakespeare a disservice (although the playwright has been subjected to such ‘betrayals’ with few compunctions for several hundred years), or that the scope of the adaptation is too extreme, the rewriting too extensive, and the additions too intrusive. (This is Peter Holland’s complaint, although he readily admits the general effectiveness of an Induction which must be taken ‘seriously as a response to the inner play’.6 ) But in a directorial programme note, Alexander justifies his refashioned text in which Lord, Huntsmen, Servants, and Page become contemporary aristocrats – Lord Simon Llewellyn, his brother Rupert, the Honourable Hugo Daly-Young and Peter Sinclair, Lady Sarah Ormsby, and Mrs. Ruth Banks-Ellis – as a clarifying return to original intention:
The text spoken by Christopher Sly, Lord Simon and the Warwickshire characters is adapted from the 1594 Quarto text, The Taming of a Shrew … the overall structure, in terms of the relationship of the Sly story to the Shrew story, represent[ing] Shakespeare’s thematic intention. This production follows the structure of the Quarto text while remaining faithful to the 1623 Folio text for the story itself. Although it can never be proved, I believe … that this restores the full scheme of the play.7
While Peter Holland (once again) regards the phrase ‘adapted from’ as disingenuous8, and many of the popular theatre critics dismissed Alexander’s revisions as ‘tiresomely modish’,9 or the newly minted dialogue as ‘rock bottom’,10 how different in sentiment and belief is Simon’s blunt, sneering ‘How beastly. Look at him lying there like a pig. How foul!’11 from the Lord’s resonant ‘O monstrous beast, how like a swine he lies! / Grim death, how foul and loathsome is thine image!’12
There is no doubt that the director’s recreated upper-class characters are presented as an arrogant, complacent, thoroughly unpleasant lot. Lord Simon is drawn as a particularly disagreeable of barely contained male aggression, more brutal and vicious than his lordly sixteenth-century counterpart, especially toward his younger sibling (who is first introduced in the early minutes of the Induction as prey in a mock foxhunt and then feminized as Sly’s wife at Simon’s unbrookable insistence), his women (Lady Sarah is abused if she does not obey), and his drunk ‘who needs teaching a lesson. We’ll mess around with his mind a bit, OK’?13 But all seem to possess the impenetrable certitude of a class used to wielding authority with few restrictions on their impulses and appetites. However, his actors, employed to give a private performance to self-indulgent, rich young men and women, will prove to be their undoing and our education. Notwithstanding their assigned functions as aristocratic possessions, these shape shifters, by the very nature of their profession, carry with them destabilizing energies that will, at least momentarily, dissolve the fixities of class and character.
The choice to tease out, elaborate, and intensify the latent class antagonisms present in both The Shrew’s incomplete frame and A Shrew’s more fully developed Induction allows Alexander to construct out of the problematic encounters among the aristocrats, Sly, the actors, the roles the actors inhabit, and the roles the aristocrats are asked to assume a series of multiplying and reflexive theatrical narratives, a dramatic hall of mirrors in which the ambiguities if social identity and selfhood are reflected for the various audiences on stage and in the playhouse.
It is therefore not unexpected that the language, gestures, and disposition of power that appear among the upper class company are writ large in the performance of the comedy called The Taming of the Shrew. But the complex theatricality of Alexander’s production also suggests that the actor, whose only name is that of the character he plays – Petruchio – might also embody yet another version of mastery, intimidating the aristocrats (no professionals they) impressed into the cast of the inner Shrew play to portray Petruchio’s household servants, just as he, in the character of Petruchio, intimidates and overwhelms his Kate.
Do the members of the on-stage audience, who themselves have created, directed, and participated in the drama of Christopher Sly’s metamorphosis recognize the performance of their own behaviour in the actions of Kate and Petruchio, Lucentio and Bianca, Tranio and Grumio? Does Alexander’s tangled/entangling stagecraft force the members of that other audience – the spectators seated comfortably in a darkened theatre waiting to be entertained – to acknowledge their parts in the dynamics which increasingly blur the distinctions between the role and the reality?
These unsettling questions are enacted on a stage landscape that will reinforce and enhance the productions affective instability. The play begins on a nearly bare stage in front of the pub from which the drunken Sly is unceremoniously exiled. If it is a space momentarily emptied of physical markers which separate, isolate, and organize, an apparently level, albeit a transient, playing field as it were, it soon will contain for a brief time the working class Sly, the company of aristocrats, and a troupe of jobbing actors hired by Lord Simon Llewellyn to entertain his mates and his minions for the evening. Each carries in and on the body easily recognizable signs of his/her position within the hierarchy of class which forms the social context for all subsequent action.
When the scaffolding is raised to show the audience an expensively dressed interior and a bare forestage (the performance area allocated for the actors), the now divided topography of the entire stage with its variety of material indicators clearly incorporates greater complexity of movement and meaning. The upstage living room and the stripped downstage, providing an easy visual equivalent of class division, are separated by a small step, a slight rise which functions as a theatrical threshold, a liminal space where worlds of aristocrat and actor meet.
Initially, the territory cum class partition is rigidly maintained: the golden girls and boys remain in their well-appointed luxury, the actors restricted to their forestage working space. But over the course of the performance of The Taming of the Shrew, this strict spatial segregation disintegrates as actor and aristocrat move with increasing ease back and forth over the threshold/boundary: actors enter through the rear door of the living room approaching their stage through the aristocratic company, share space on the sofas with their patrons, stand comfortably next to Ruth or Peter or Hugo while the aristocrats step downstage to join the actors as participating extras in the comedy.
The most powerful moment for this viewer (and I saw the production twice, once in Stratford, once in London) during which the tangled threads at last coalesce to form a visible design (even if that design resembles a set of Chinese boxes) occurs precisely at that point in 4.1.80ff. when Ruth, Simon, and Sarah, recruited to play servants, enter another country. Suddenly they are émigrés, displaced persons in a society they do not know, and more important, that they do not control, whose scripts they have not mastered, and where authority resides elsewhere.
Inadequate to their tasks, neither competent actors nor competent servants (even with text in hand), they become objects to the players just as the players had been objects to the aristocrats. When Emily Watson playing Ruth playing Nathaniel is unable to function, Anton Lesser as the actor playing Petruchio slaps her, the sound echoing across the stage and into the audience. The slap stuns and silences – the world quite suddenly has turned upside down.
But to whom is the punishment addressed and by whom is power expressed? Is the explosion of temper ‘real’ or ‘feigned’? Is Petruchio angry at Nathaniel? Is the player teaching Mrs Ruth Banks-Ellis a lesson about a community in which she is powerless? Exactly what lesson is being taught? In a single theatrical gesture, the unfixed relational nature of personal and social identity is exposed, the barriers (or should one say the barricades) of class seem to topple and all – actors, aristocrats, and we who watch – are thrust into that liminal borderland where boundaries are rendered permeable and the certainties which supposedly govern the self and the world dissolve.
However the instant passes, and a presumed revolution does not seem to have happened. The performance goes on to its conclusion as Katherina’s final speech recalls into being the old hierarchies. But if conventions are restored, things are not quite the same. Rupert gently returns Christopher Sly to his place under the pub sign; Ruth Banks-Ellis has been liberated by her experience with shape-shifting, role-playing, and performance; and Lady Sarah Ormsby leaves Lord Simon standing alone in a darkening room. Perhaps the revolutions have occurred, after all.
But the play is not yet over. As Sly awakens, enchanted and baffled ‘by the best dream that ever I had in all my life’,14 ready now to tame his wife, the players renter, their power hidden beneath street clothes, merely ordinary, and a flicker of recognition passes between them. Or does it?
One final observation in this production, those who are in some way abused by any system’s need for hierarchy, order and acquiescence (and there are always victims in the administration of power) – the worker (Christopher Sly), the women (Lady Sarah Ormsby, Ruth Banks-Ellis, Katherina Minola), the vulnerable young (Rupert Llewellyn) – are allowed to retain bits of their humanity and our sympathy the longest. Make of that what you will.
1‘Spectacular Bodies: Acting + Cinema + Shakespeare’, A Concise Companion to Shakespeare on Screen, ed. Diana E. Henderson (Oxford, 2006), p. 106. I would also like to suggest that the directorial exploitation of his stars’ notoriety and the filmgoers’ inescapable awareness of the autobiographical complementarity may unwittingly create a cinematic frame, analogous to the Induction of the Shakespearean original.
2Ben Brantley, ‘Shakespeare’s Mighty Sorority,’ The New York Times, 3 February 2013.
3It is worth noting here that according to the Oxford English Dictionary the earliest definition of shrew still extent in the sixteenth century refers to male misbehaviour: ‘A wicked, evil-disposed, or malignant man; a mischievous or vexatious person; a rascal, villain.’
4The majority of reviewers from Benedict Nightingale in The Times to Charles Spencer, Irving Wardle, and Kenneth Hurren, among others, miss Alexander’s point and purpose, preferring traditional Shrews wherever possible.
5English Shakespeares: Shakespeare on the English Stage in the 1990s (Cambridge, 1997), p. 129.
6Ibid.
7Programme for the RSC production of The Taming of the Shrew, 1992, unpaginated.
8Holland, op. cit., p. 129
9Charles Spencer, Daily Telegraph, 3 April 1992, quoted in Theatre Record, 24 March–7 April 1992 vol. XII (1992), p. 419.
10Irving Wardle, Independent on Sunday, 5 April 1994, quoted in Theatre Record, op. cit., p. 420
11‘Induction’, typescript, RSC production, The Taming of the Shrew, p. 4. I would like to thank Professor Michael Warren for his copy of ‘The Induction’.
12William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, ‘Induction’, ll. 30–1, The New Cambridge Shakespeare, ed. Ann Thompson (Cambridge, 1984; reprinted 1985, 1988, 1995), p. 48.
13‘Induction’, typescript, op. cit., p. 4.
14‘Induction’, unpaginated.