The Taming of the Shrew (20 page)
Read The Taming of the Shrew Online
Authors: William Shakespeare
The induction device used by Michael Bogdanov (1978) unnerved his audience as they settled into their seats:
Before the house lights dim we become aware of an uproar in the aisle. A roughly dressed man, grasping a bottle, quarrels loudly in a prole accent with the usherette, then proceeds to clamber on to the stage and wreck the set—one of those tacky, pastel-flavoured, Italian Renaissance confections, complete with proscenium arch.… Much tumult accompanies the demolition: stagehands running up and down, bits and pieces of carpentry collapsing.
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Who was the unshaven lout in the third row, shouting and singing and struggling with an usherette? Wasn’t it Jonathan Pryce, the actor billed to play Petruchio? Yes, it was, and presenting so plausible a display of alcoholic rage that I was momentarily convinced he had been given the boot and was taking an ugly revenge on the RSC hierarchy. Then he yelled, “I’m not having any bloody woman tell me what to do.”
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The usherette getting the tirade of abuse and threats of violence was actress Paola Dionisotti, who also played Katherina. This riotous opening and the subsequent destruction of the set gave the audience a clear indication that they were not going to be witnessing a traditional approach to the play:
The elaborate prettiness of the old-fashioned, Italianate set was literally deconstructed before the audience’s eyes to reveal a network of metallic stairs and gantries, resembling the uncompromising interior of a gaol.
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In this one clever move, Bogdanov set up and then demolished the audiences’ preconceptions, left-footing them and preparing them for a very different reading of the play. The dividing line between reality and fantasy was crossed by the leading actors, who took the audience physically into the world of the play. The Italianate set which audiences saw as they entered, set up the expectation of safe theater—the traditional approach. In destroying it to reveal the stark modern setting behind it, Bogdanov instantly installed a darker note—they are going to see beyond the façade, a break from preconceptions about the play from its stage history.
: Anti-Capitalist Shrews
Money, class, and status have a marked effect on the characters in
The Taming of the Shrew
. As soon as human life is evaluated as a financial commodity you devalue a person’s worth, take away their humanity and individuality. Similarly, in a society where people are valued by how much wealth they have, those with less are valued as lesser human beings and open to all sorts of exploitation.
In his 1978 production:
Bogdanov was concerned to stress the continuities between the mercantile ethics of Renaissance Padua and the commercial values of modern-day British capitalism; between the oppression of women in Shakespeare’s time, and the continuing exploitation of sex today; between the class-divisions of the sixteenth century and the economic inequality of the twentieth.
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When interviewed, Bogdanov stated:
Shakespeare shows women totally abused—like animals—bartered to the highest bidder. He shows women used as commodities, not allowed to choose for themselves. In
The Taming of the Shrew
you get that extraordinary scene between Baptista, Grumio and Tranio, where they are vying with each other to see who can offer most for Bianca, who is described as “the prize.” It is a toss of the coin to see which way she will go: to the old man with a certain amount of money, or to the young man, who is boasting that he’s got so many ships. She could end up with the old impotent fool, or the young “eligible” man: what sort of life is that to look forward to? There is no question of it, his sympathy is with the women, and his purpose, to expose the cruelty of a society that allows these things to happen.
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In this production, Baptista
sits hunched over a vast gilt desk, the epitome of the Mafioso-turned-magnate, totting up the value of one suitor’s argosies on an automatic calculator and skimming through the latest digest of farm prices when another boasts of his milch-kine and oxen. And the very last image the production offers is of the servant Grumio clambering across a table to retrieve the wager that Katherine’s compliance has won his master, while Petruchio himself swaggers offstage with his wife hanging off one hand and a 20,000-crown cheque from her father in the other.
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Padua, it seems, is that sort of place, a competitive, grasping, cynical, and really rather horrible city.
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In her 1985 touring production, Di Trevis claimed that the play was “not so much about the position of women as about wealth and class, about people being treated as objects by others in more powerful positions.”
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She believed it was “about power, not gender. Power resides in economic status. The main plot is a play-within-a-play which I see as a rich man’s joke.”
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Set in the early to mid-nineteenth century, the play reflected a time when “women were treated as chattels, when the gulf between the agricultural poor and the city rich was widening, and there was a marked political swing to the right.”
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The play-within-the-play ended with a wedding tableau, rose petals, and music, but the performance was not over. The players took their bows and went off to change, but Sly’s own fiction had not ended. After the confusion of the congratulation of the players, and their subsequent exit, Sly and his “lady” moved toward each other. Sly was gentle and loving. He believed in his role, and he had seen that respect and affection between men and women was possible. Then the page threw off his wig and ran away, laughing mockingly. Sly watched, grief-stricken, and the genuine lord contemptuously threw a few coins at his feet. Sly had fulfilled his part as entertainer. Now he was being paid.
Some of the players returned to collect props and costumes. An actress got down on her hands and knees to clean the floor. The actress who had played Kate entered. She looked humble and downtrodden now. There was no trace of her courage and vivacity as Kate. In her arms she held the baby she had carried at the beginning of the performance as she pulled the cart. As the lights faded for the final time, Sly stretched out his hand to this actress, offering her as a gift one of the coins that had been tossed to him.
A poor man had learned something through the experience of watching the play, but he was without power. He was a man, but he was not rich, and within the society the production depicted both qualities were necessary before a human being was considered of real worth.
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. Di Trevis production, 1985: a humble and downtrodden Kate “held the baby she had carried at the beginning of the performance as she pulled the cart,” very much in the manner of Brecht’s Mother Courage.
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Playing games is something Petruchio does throughout the play, whether the games are funny or dark, and he sets the tone as soon as he arrives.
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Petruchio’s motivation for his actions toward Katherina radically alters what the audience feels about the more brutal scenes in the play. Likewise, Katherina’s response to his behavior, her awareness and understanding, or lack of it, will determine just how funny the play remains. Because of the ambiguity inherent in the text the relationship between these two misfits can be interpreted in many ways. It offers a precarious balance in characterization which can determine whether or not the audience sees a love story or disturbing account of spousal abuse.
In 1987 Jonathan Miller turned his psychologist’s eye to the play, finding the crux of the problem in the fact that Katherina was an unwanted and neglected child:
Dr Miller … is interested as always in the clinical psychology underlying the text. He has been talking of the behaviour patterns of unloved children. Katherina has every reason to resent being her father’s unfavourite daughter. By being as “froward” as she knows how, she is showing just how unlovable she can be if she chooses. “It’s not that she needs taming, she needs releasing,” reflects Fiona Shaw [who played Katherina]. “She behaves badly because of being imprisoned by her society—being offered round by a father who says, in effect, “Which of you chaps will have Kate?—otherwise nobody gets Bianca.”
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Fiona Shaw’s Katherina was a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown, unable to be a complete person in a repressive society: “After a while, when people are calling you a shrew, you start living the name. If you’re told you’re ugly, you start acting ugly.”
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Her psychological state was even reflected in the stage design of Stefanos Lazaridis:
The Shrew is also about upstarts and outsiders, an unruly woman and a subversive suitor who affront decorum and knock Padua off its level footing. Miller’s set demonstrated this too. It put Padua on a steep slope, its street a vertiginous rake.… [Kate] finally appeared, behind the rest, self-absorbed, teetering down the steep edge of the steep verge, arms outstretched like a tightrope walker. On one side was High Street Padua, on the other, a sheer drop. This woman was on the brink. While the suitors bickered, Fiona [Shaw’s] Kate ranged behind them, flashing her embroidery scissors, gouging initials into the walls and hacking off handfuls of hair.
Shaw described how she “wanted to give the effect of a woman mutilating herself like some women in prison do. I wanted to use the scissors
to cut my arm—I thought about women in crisis who, far from being aggressive towards other people, are very often aggressive towards themselves.”
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When this Katherina meets Petruchio, she finds, for the first time in her life, somebody who genuinely wants her:
It may only be for her money and services … but at least she will be valued for something.… The scene then develops between standard hostilities and moments of astonishment and delighted intoxication, which she then chokes down to renew the combat. Miss Shaw plays this beautifully; but most of her acting has to be between the lines, with many a pause for conflicting emotions to pass over her face before the action resumes.
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She comes in—and is talked to by a man for the first time; that’s what disorientates her. Not his violence but his gentleness.
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Brian Cox’s Petruchio uses violence to instruct, to throw a reflection of Katherina’s behavior back at herself so that she can learn that violence against others is only really violence against herself. With this damaged Kate, extreme methods were needed to break her anger and own self-destructive behavior:
He means to be taken seriously—when Kate slaps him, there is a deadly purr in his voice which tells us she would be very unwise to do it again—but cruelty disgusts him.… Petruchio is usually played as an engaging sadist. Cox makes him a shrewd eccentric, a man who brawls and shouts to parody behaviour he detests.
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She comes in wrecked from the journey, still in her wedding dress, and what happens next is that her expectations of normal life are totally undermined. She who has been characterized by violence now has to observe what violence really is.… He shouts at the servants.… He beats them up and says, “Nay, Kate, be merry!” … It’s a nightmare. Because the tamer is a man who says, “You want violence? Look at this, what d’you think of this? Bang!” So much so that the only lines Kate speaks in that scene are defending the servant! “Patience, I pray you, ’twas a fault unwilling.” For the first time she is the one who’s tempering. For the first time Petruchio makes contact with her civilizedness.
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. Jonathan Miller production, 1987: Fiona Shaw as Katherina and Brian Cox as Petruchio. “With this damaged Kate, extreme methods were needed to break her anger and own self-destructive behaviour.”