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Tag Archives: The Taming of the Shrew

The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film #39: The Taming of the Shrew (1967)

18 Sunday Sep 2016

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in The Rogue's Guide to Shakespeare on Film

≈ 1 Comment

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Elizabeth Taylor, Franco Zeffirelli, Richard Burton, The Taming of the Shrew

Rogues Guide to Shakes on Film 239. Franco Zeffirelli’s The Taming of the Shrew (1967)

All right, readers, let’s get to it. The Taming of the Shrew is one of those infernal puzzles Shakespeare has bequeathed to us.

We don’t use the word shrew these days to describe women, so if you want to imagine a current translation, the play might be called The Taming of the Raging Bitch. It’s the most amazing romantic comedy ever. I mean that sincerely.

shrew-poster

In this film, Elizabeth Taylor plays the raging—um—shrew.

The chief plot is that Katherina is the oldest daughter of Signior Baptista. She cannot help railing violently against her younger sister who has acquired two suitors, and railing against her hapless father as well.

shrew-13

Signior Baptista is adamant, bless him, that Bianca will not be wed before her older sister is married, since that would disgrace Katherina. And why is Katherina a shrew? Perhaps she resents being little more to her family than an impediment to her sister’s happiness. Perhaps Katherina views the prospect of getting married herself just to make her sister happy as utterly dehumanizing. Perhaps she regards the very role of being a woman—a wife, mother, daughter, gaze object for men, an accessory to her dowry—inherently belittling.

Soliloquies are for tragedies, not comedies.

Katherine is too often lashing out to reveal her own emotions so directly.

shrew-6What is interesting about this film’s casting is that Katherina is played by Elizabeth Taylor who is stunning, even when she is snarling, whereas Natasha Pyne’s Bianca is a blandly beautiful blonde.

shrew-12

The implication is that Katherina’s temper makes the men of The Taming of the Shrew unable to see her physical beauty. Her rage defines her as other than female to them.

What makes this film perfect is that the male lead, Katherina’s suitor, is a bold alcoholic named Petruchio, played by Richard Burton. Can I get a Hell, yes?

shrew-1
In the first half of the film, this performance is giddy, silly slapstick, and Petruchio’s courtship of Katherina comes off like the deranged efforts of a cartoony character, like Pepe LePew who seems oblivious to the horror he is causing.

shrew-11

Katherina is unaccustomed to a man courting her like she is actually desirable, and is equally unaccustomed to a man who will accept and match her aggressions. The way the courtship plays out so physically in this medieval Italian set is both quaint, earthy, and delightful, like collapsing onto piles of cotton.

And yet the drama of this comedy modulates, as these two people, lawfully married, learn to acknowledge accept one another as human beings, even as the psychological terms of their marriage are being negotiated. Tenderness creeps in at moments, despite the fraught nature of their relationship.

Petruchio may be a drunkard capable of violence and gross egotism, but he is also unwilling to advance upon her sexually without her consent.

For all of Shrew’s  outrageousness of plot and gender politics, those conflicts are the point. The ironies of the play, that Katherina accepts and simultaneously ironically transforms her new role as wife, need to be there in the acting, for the ironies on the page are subtle, so much so that many people today find the play too patriarchal for current audiences.

What’s interesting about this Zeffirelli film is that the subplots don’t seem to drag or do much more than credibly make us feel the chief plot more intensely. Gremio, an eldery suitor of Bianca’s, and Hortensio, an ineffectually foppish suitor to Bianca as well, come off as comic villains.

shrew-16

Lucentio’s courtship of Bianca, done under the guise of being her tutor, seems to happen in the background, visible without slowing down the primary plot, and Michael York (who played Tybalt in Zeffirelli’s Rome and Juliet) makes Lucentio seem suitably romantic and somehow not creepy.

shrew-9The costumes and the sets are charming, making the middle ages seem colorful and fun, somehow even making codpieces look good. But if you look closely, there are also less happy details, too, that point out the stakes at play in this dangerous comedy.

shrew-10You might quite easily try to dismiss the sketchy politics of this comedy, born of a more restrictive, thoroughly patriarchal time, but if you watch with an open mind, you’ll see that the world of The Taming of the Shrew is still recognizable today, and that we still must strive to treat each other with dignity, even if that requires approaching the world with a profound degree of irony, to know the difference between who we are, and who we are told we are.

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John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.

Shakespearing #8: The Taming of the Shrew

10 Sunday Aug 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Shakespeare, Shakespearing

≈ 1 Comment

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David Foley, Shakespeare, Shakespearing, The Taming of the Shrew

Shakespearing #8 by David Foley

The Taming of the Shrew

07 Taming of the Shrew

In my memory, The Taming of the Shrew was a rambunctious farce with two larger-than-life roles and a Stepford Wives ending. On reacquaintance, it’s a joyous work of art. But about that ending: the reasons Kate gives for submitting to Petruchio are not comfortable, but they express an ideal of marriage still to be found in many parts of the country today. What rankles is the taming of Kate’s glorious refusal to submit. But there’s plenty to suggest that Kate has not so much been tamed as she’s learned to manage the relationship between self and society more astutely, and in the service of love.

The play is actually quite subversive about the relationship between love and the social forms. Shakespeare worked in pairings, and it’s no accident that Petruchio’s absurdist wooing of Kate is echoed immediately by Tranio and Gremio wooing Baptista for Bianca’s hand. “’Tis deeds must win the prize,” he tells them, only to clarify that by “deeds” he means “dower,” the money, land, and luxuries they then fall over each other to promise him. It’s Petruchio, despite having “come to wive it wealthily in Padua,” who has to remind everyone that you marry a person, not an estate, nor yet a social form:

To me she’s married, not unto my clothes.
Could I repair what she will wear in me,
As I can change these poor accouterments,
’Twere well for Kate and better for myself.
 

But the play is more subversive still. I don’t know how common it is these days for productions to leave out the Christopher Sly “Induction” (the first productions I saw didn’t have it), but to do so cheats both audience and play—the audience because the Sly scenes are charming and funny, and the play because the Induction provides a key to all that follows. It not only frames the main action of the play as a performance, but, like the play itself, it’s a series of performances by people pretending to be people they’re not. Most significantly, the Lord’s page pretends to be Sly’s wife: “I am your wife in all obedience.” To put this neat foreshadowing in the mouth of a boy who’s pretending to be a woman and a wife suggests that Kate’s final speech is just another performance, that marriage itself is a performance as artificial as all the other performances in the play.

Kate and Petruchio come to terms not in the last scene, nor even on the road back to Padua, when Kate is clearly humoring Petruchio (she’s learning to perform), but in Act V, Scene 1, when they “stand aside” like spectators at a play to watch the unraveling of all the performances in the Lucentio/Bianca story. At the end of the scene Petruchio asks Kate to kiss him, and she at first resists. She’s not ashamed of him, she says, “but asham’d to kiss.” “Why then let’s home again,” he says, but she replies, “Nay, I will give thee a kiss.” It’s a public performance of the privacy of marriage, whose public face, we now understand, is a necessary absurdity, a performance within which love is shielded.

None of this fully accounts for the joyousness of the play, which I put down to something else. According to the Riverside notes, the Sly scenes are full of references to people and places around Stratford. It may be that in Shrew Shakespeare went nearer to home than he ever had before. There’s a sense of fondness in the Induction and the play itself: a fondness for the frantically performing folk of everyday life.


David Foley

David Foley is a playwright and fiction writer living in Brooklyn. His plays include Cressida Among the Greeks, Paradise, Nance O’Neil, The Murders at Argos, A Hole in the Fence, and Sad Hotel, among others. His novel The Traveler’s Companion is available on Amazon. He teaches at New York University.

Episode 65: Orlando Shakespeare Theater!

06 Friday Sep 2013

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Blog Post, Episode

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Jim Helsinger, Orlando Shakespeare Theater, Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew

Episode 65 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

Lowndes Center Red Carpet

On this week’s show, I talk to three of the stars of Orlando Shakespeare Theatre’s production of The Taming of the Shrew.

Geoffrey Kent (Petruchio)

Kent_Geoffrey

And Deanna Gibson (Kate)

Gibson_Deanna

John Ahlin (Baptista)

John Ahlin

And J. Bradley talks about being haunted by The Cure.

Jesse Bradley

TEXTS DISCUSSED

William Shakespeare Complete WorksYou can read J. Bradley’s essay Reflections yourself at Monkey Bicycle.

NOTES

play-tops-taming

The Taming of the Shrew runs September 11th through October 6th. Get tickets here.

If in New York City, check out

New York Classical Theatre

Episode 65 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

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