Re-creating Katherina: The Taming of the Shrew at Shakespeare’s Globe
Shakespeare’s Globe
During one of Globe Education’s Setting-the-Scene lectures on The Taming of the Shrew in the summer of 2012, Ann Thompson lamented the fact that, editorially speaking, the play had largely been ignored by women. To a rapt audience she remarked that she was the first woman to edit the play in the 1980s and that the next time a woman edited the play was 2010, noting wryly that the latter, Barbara Hodgdon’s Arden edition, was in fact commissioned by her as one of the General Editors of Arden 3. While it may be true that its female editors are few and far between, the performance of the play since 1660 has required female actors to engage directly with the complex social questions about the status of women. Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew is perhaps one of the most problematic plays for a modern reader and playgoer. Holly A. Crocker observes that its stage history ‘speaks to the near impossibility of representing submissive femininity’, that the domination of Katherina’s will and her apparent submission at the end form a disturbing, though unsurprising, resolution to the play.1
I offer no answers here to the questions feminist critics might ask about this play: Was Shakespeare a misogynist? Did Shakespeare believe in the social and domestic subordination of women? Is Katherina’s final speech ironic? To me, such questions are complicated by our lack of knowledge about how Shakespeare’s company might have staged the play. Indeed, as Thompson suggests, there is no textual evidence of the original performances: ‘Neither surviving text,’ she notes, ‘seems wholly to preserve the play as it was performed before the closing of the theatre’.2 I am not sure, in any case, that these are the most productive questions to ask in response to such a socially and culturally complex comedy. Nevertheless, throughout the 400-year history of its performance, Shrew has provoked such questions. Modern performers must negotiate between the play’s radically enforced ‘domestication’ of women and our current expectations of their theatrical representation. What can be problematic is the propensity of modern theatre companies, however, to interpret the relationship between Katherina and Petruchio as equal or mutual. I suggest that this propensity is largely due to the actors’ impulse to make sense of the narrative trajectory and psychological development of character. Character motivation, long outmoded as an analytical model for literary criticism, remains absolutely central to an actor’s process.
In addition to character, genre establishes for theatre companies the ways key relationships and thus the play could work in performance. Shrew’s generic framework is comedy, and it is marketed as an enjoyable experience. But simple enjoyment as a response to this play can be problematic. Too often, Emily Detmer concludes, to ‘enjoy the comedy of the play, readers and viewers must work to see domestic violence, and, at the same time, justify its use’.3 This crux – enjoyment requiring the justification of violence – is precisely what acting companies must overcome. There are, from time to time, productions that counteract the presupposition that a light comedic interpretation of physical abuse as farcical relaxes audiences and thus enables enjoyment, and they might do so by over-punctuating the violence inherent in the play. The controversial all-male Propeller production in 2007 (revived in 2013) is a good example of such theatrical interventions. The male performers could throw each other around a lot more than would be usual had women played the female parts, and they could therefore highlight physically the mental abuse the play espouses. The New York Times review stated that ‘the show refuses to let you root for Petruchio’, that Simon Scardifield’s Katherina won audience’s affections and so:
Clinging wanly to her Petruchio, the Kate of the concluding scenes has become a textbook case of Stockholm syndrome. And the laughter among the audience, so hearty in the show’s first half, fades into guilty silence.4
Brantley’s observation indicates that the audience’s complex and mixed response might be appropriate for the twenty-first century: laughter, then guilt. Equally, it suggests that Propeller’s production, through the use of overt physicality, enabled audiences to interrogate the problems in this comedy.
Significantly, the sensation of enjoyment has come to characterize the experience of attending plays in the reconstructed Globe Theatre; controversially, at times, it is a response induced even during some tragedies and problem comedies that have been performed there since 1997, often provoking dismay from critics towards the Globe groundlings. In a playhouse that is so evocative of the past and that is in frequent danger of replicating, through historically informed productions, long outmoded ideologies, what type of Katherina and what type of Petruchio should we expect to encounter in a production of Shrew there? So for the rest of this essay I will consider the Globe’s 2012 production, looking in particular (through discussion with its lead actor, Samantha Spiro) at the ways in which, practically and ideologically, the construction and development of her character might be used to alleviate anxieties provoked by the play’s seeming investment in female subordination and domestic violence. The Globe’s Shrew reminded audiences that the play is a comedy and that, in many places, it is meant to be funny, whether or not the humour is palatable now. Katherina’s exaggerated violent anger was unleashed with comic vigour but, given the comedic emphasis in her performance, the Globe’s Katherina (Spiro) also had to work to balance the laughs with a sincere portrayal of her experience of cruelty.
Constructing Katherina for a modern Globe audience
In this production, a conflated version of the Quarto and Folio texts was staged in ‘Renaissance Style’ dress.5 Directed by Toby Frow, the production confronted the issues that might bother a modern audience. As Spiro said herself, ‘I wanted to embrace all the problems; I didn’t want to shy away’.6 I asked how she reconciled some of the play’s more disturbing aspects, and in particular the concept of ‘taming’ a woman:
I haven’t played the part before. I feel as though it’s been on my radar and it’s a part that I’ve wanted to play. I’ve always been aware that lots of actors have avoided it and, when they have played it, have really tried to ‘fix’ this play and make it work for a modern audience. So I think the first thing I wanted to do, when I was offered it, was find out when it was set, because, for me, it is incredibly difficult post-feminism. So I was relieved, first of all, that it was set in its own context.7
As Spiro acknowledges, the company and director showed great interest in and came to depend upon the play’s social contexts. During rehearsals they asked the Globe Research team to contextualize the taming theme; thus research and lectures about the position of women in early modern Europe, humoral psychology and medicine, contemporary ‘taming’ methodologies, the relationships within family structures, domestic abuse and the anti-violence reforms in early- modern England informed the process through which both Spiro and Simon Paisley Day (Petruchio) came to grips with their characters and their relationship to each other. Unearthing the historical context and acknowledging the Globe Theatre’s own evocation of pastness helped to circumvent the play’s problems. Embedded in its own moment, the play can be ‘enjoyed’ objectively, the past acting as a kind of fourth wall between the performers, their audience and the text’s difficult themes.
However, while this is what the production seemed to do, it is not actually what was intended and, certainly, both the past and the present contributed to the meaning. In addition to taking on the historical conditions in which Katherina was written, Spiro also developed a psychological back story, infusing Kate’s character with bitterness towards her sister and father and developing for Petruchio feelings of love and devotion as the play progresses. Seeing the play as primarily a love story, both Spiro and Paisley Day found common ground, and thus interpreted the demonstrations of cruelty as mutually affecting, devastating yet reformative:
Simon Paisley Day [Petruchio] and Toby Frow [Director] were both coming from the point of view that this was about two broken people that go on a journey and both end up together having fallen in love; they are playing the society as opposed to Kate playing Petruccio in any way.8
When Paisley Day’s Petruchio saw Katherina for the first time, he could maximize the Globe’s outdoor conditions, in which the actor and audience are equally lit, indicating through facial expression that she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Such a reaction was meant to reveal more vulnerability in Petruchio than his prior remarks that he, ‘will board her, though she chide as loud / As thunder when the clouds in autumn crack’ (1.2.95–5) would seem to indicate.9 Spiro’s Katherina did the same thing upon seeing Petruchio for the first time. Thus, love at first sight, usually associated with Romeo and Juliet, was appropriated for the relationship being constructed as fundamentally loving and equal. It also delighted the Globe audience, who enjoyed their privileged access to a hidden truth: Katherina and Petruchio love each other. Some feminist critics might argue that this approach is problematic. As Detmer concludes, such an interpretation suggests Stockholm syndrome as the only explanation for Katherina’s wholehearted submission not only to Petruchio but to the very idea of being in love with him: ‘alternating coercive threats and kindness [as Petruchio does] sets up a situation where victims actively look for ways to please rather than upset their captors’.10 Seeing Katherina as Petruchio’s captive is plausible: she is taken away from her surroundings, starved and deprived of sleep. However, Spiro suggests that in spite of their emphasis on the comic elements of their relationship, she and Paisley Day were keen not to deny the inherent cruelty in the play:
There is cruelty … she feels the cruelty [but] … he feels the cruelty too and they both learn from it. He [Paisley Day] felt that it was very important that Petruccio also doesn’t sleep, also doesn’t eat, so that he’s exhausted by the time we get to ‘the sun and the moon’; he goes on a similar journey.11
Hodgdon reminds us that this concept characterized Julie Taymor’s interpretation in a production for New York Theatre for a New Audience in 1988: ‘Stressing the other characters’ conventionality, her staging set Katherina and Petruchio off against them, playing the erotic excitement of their intellectual compatibility and their shared delight in games as leading to a mutual equality’.12 The question that arises here is whether or not a sense of mutual equality is really what is at stake in this play. A production of The Shrew requires acknowledgement of the dark cruelty within its comic framework. Spiro discusses possible comic interpretations:
[w]hen we were investigating the play, we didn’t want to limit the depth of what Petruccio does to Katherina. But also it is a comedy; you can do lots of different versions of comedy; there are some versions that try and balance both. Then there are some versions that are very, very dark and you find yourself laughing because you feel uncomfortable. There are not three versions of comedy, but three ways to do this play and I think we have sort of hit it in the middle. Obviously, we were not aiming for mediocrity, and I hope we have been able to make the audience laugh, but really show that there is cruelty.13
Still the company’s desire to balance comedy with cruelty seems unachievable without acknowledging the progressive deterioration of Katherina’s will and the assertion of Petruchio’s. If Katherina is to be given dignity, Crocker suggests, ‘Petruchio’s challenge … is to animate a legitimate subject whose identity is comprehensive in relation to his own character but whose virtue is believable outside the context in which he presents her’.14 The loving glance the ‘lovers’ shoot each other in the Globe’s production might underscore the ‘mutual equality’ between them (if everyone in the audience notices it), but what happens when the final gesture is performed? How can this most famous – and most contentious – moment demonstrate ‘mutual equality’? Spiro says:
I certainly felt very strongly that in the moment she’s realizing these thoughts; it’s not preconceived. I think everything is fresh and new for her and she is a woman that has newly fallen desperately in love. The size of that emotion is overwhelming for her and she would lay down her life for him. The gesture came out very instinctively in rehearsal and I still feel it every night so strongly … it’s total devotion, total giving of herself to him, and I think she feels it back in bucket loads from him as well.15
The play’s final moments have also been interpreted as an act of defiance, at least within an early modern context. Sixteenth-century ideal wives were indeed obedient, but they were silent too, something Katherina refuses to be. By all accounts, speech is the one consistent feature of her character from beginning to end. Using language that polarizes the two sisters, Tranio says, ‘Mark’d you not how her sister / Began to scold and raise up such a storm / That mortal ears might hardly endure the din’ (1.1.170–2). Melinda Spencer argues that given the bridal ritual the gesture connotes and her lengthy, rhetorically apt speech, ‘her compliance is presented as a role she must play in order to get what she wants, as well as a role necessary for social stability’.16 This is not a sign of submission, according to Spencer, it is performance. Spiro would disagree: a reconciliation with female subordination can be achieved by playing the scene lovingly. But she does see Shakespeare interrogating early-modern courtship rituals that construct false hierarchies between men and women that are immediately reversed upon marriage.
Thus, for Spiro, Shakespeare’s social scrutiny occurs throughout the play. All the suitors are questionable, and Bianca’s performance as ‘mistress’ is highly suspect. In the wedding scene, Spiro says that Katherina is,
a woman hoping she’s going to be swept off her feet. And that’s not what we want to necessarily say as feminists; but I wasn’t afraid of that either, of a deep longing that she dared not think that he might just come along and save her from this world and take her off on his horse. And then he turns up on Grumio! You know?! That’s the humour. And so for me, it’s those contrasts that Shakespeare has written so brilliantly, a woman desperate to be taken off by a knight in shining armour and then this is what really happens. This is reality.17
Shakespeare is no doubt scrutinizing cultural rituals around courtship, marriage, and love. Perhaps there is scope for imagining the Kate-Petruchio relationship as a great love story. Regardless of whether a theatre company emphasizes love, comedy, or cruelty, the play’s cultivation of mental abuse and occasional torture will never quite be acceptable to a modern sensibility. Spiro, perhaps one of the most energized, clever yet vulnerable Katherinas I have seen, plays an idealistic scenario with her Petruchio. But I admire her faith in love and in Shakespeare: she discovered a deep and mutual love between the couple and still managed to find the feminist in Shakespeare, something we are all trying to do.
Notes
1Holly A. Crocker, ‘Affective Resistance: Performing Passivity and Playing A-Part in The Taming of the Shrew’, Shakespeare Quarterly 54, 2 (Summer, 2003), pp. 142–59, (142).
2Ann Thompson ed., introduction, The Taming of the Shrew, The New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge, 1984), p. 3.
3Emily Detmer, ‘Civilizing Subordination: Domestic Violence and The Taming of the Shrew’, Shakespeare Quarterly 48, 3 (Autumn 1997): 273–94, 274.
4Ben Brantley, ‘Be it Padua or Illyria, Boys will be Boistrous’, New York Times Theater Review, 20 March 2007 theater2.nytimes.com/2007/03/20/theater/reviews/20brantley.html (accessed 20 January 2013).
5‘Renaissance style’ is indicated in publicity material denoting that a production will be set in the early modern period, but without deploying ‘original practices’. See Carson and Karim-Cooper, Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment (Cambridge, 2008) for a discussion of ‘original practices’ as a specific Globe performance practice.
6Farah Karim-Cooper interview with Samantha Spiro, August 2012.
7Spiro interview, August 2012.
8Spiro interview, August 2012.
9William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, ed. Barbara Hodgdon, The Arden Shakespeare, 3rd edn. (London, 2010).
10Detmer, p. 286.
11Spiro interview, August 2012.
12Hodgdon, p. 128.
13Spiro Interview, August 2012.
14Crocker, p. 142.
15Spiro interview, August 2012.
16Melinda Spencer, ‘Kate’s Forward Humor: Historicizing Affect in The Taming of the Shrew’, South Atlantic Review 69,1 (Winter, 2004), 61–84, 78.
17Spiro interview, August 2012.