The Taming of the Shrew (23 page)

7
. Greg Doran production, 2003: Alexandra Gilbreath as Kate, Jasper Britton as Petruchio: “Kate and Petruchio have, we believed, found in each other fellow spirits.”

Kate has a relationship which recognizes her love and respect for her husband, while her sister and the widow have empty relationships with their husbands, which can only end in bitterness.

And the famous submission speech: it’s been played straight, played ironic, played to death, played anew … how did you approach it?

Doran:
As the conclusion to the complex process of their “wooing dance.” Kate recognizes the therapeutic process she has undergone. She had been agitated, or troubled as a person; “moved” like the woman she describes, “like a fountain troubled, / Muddy, ill-seeming,
thick, bereft of beauty.” They have come to recognize in each other spirits who have been compromised by society and forced to play roles. Now they have discovered genuine trust and respect for each other. They won’t play by society’s rules, but they will love and respect each other, so much so that Kate is prepared to subjugate herself to her husband’s will if he should so choose, which of course he does not. We did, however, have a rather nice tense moment when, as she offers to present her hand to place it under her husband’s foot, Jasper Britton’s Petruchio smiled and said, “Come on …,” as if expecting her to fulfill her offer. Only when she moved forward to comply did he complete the line, “ … and kiss me Kate.” And they are clearly going to complement each other sexually as a couple. We guessed they would have a great sex life, unlike their friends’ arid partnerships.

Lloyd:
Our key was not Kate but her onstage audience. By having women playing men we could satirize the men’s need for supremacy. We let Kate play the speech completely straight. You could feel the tension in the audience—dismay almost—“Surely she has not lost her fighting spirit? What is happening?” etc. But the egos of all the men on stage were being bolstered by her obedience. Petruchio was like a big mafia son embracing his father-in-law and both wept sentimental tears that their little lady had finally been brought to heel. The audience understood and went wild with delight and recognition. Then suddenly Kate climbed up on the table. You realized she had been “performing” and now did so more and more extravagantly, displaying her underwear, etc. As Petruchio tried to stop her, the more wild she became. The male cronies, having been made a laughing stock, began to get up and leave the table, and it ended with the couple having an explosive fight—the kind one imagined they were going to continue to have throughout their marriage.

Michelle Gomez
(born 1971 in Glasgow) is a Scottish actor best known for her comedy roles in the television shows
Green Wing
and
The Book Group
. Her performance as Kate in the RSC 2008
Taming of the Shrew
, directed by Conall Morrison, about which she talks here, was her first role for the company.

It must be troubling to be labeled a “shrew”: is Kate a part the modern woman actor should hesitate over accepting?

No. I think Kate is a hugely misunderstood character, and to me that was a huge attraction in accepting the role, not a disincentive. We know from the text she is willful and independent, but the references to her “shrew-like” behavior are all reported speech. The only time we witness anything remotely shrewish is when she is alone with Bianca trying desperately to understand why she has been effectively disowned by her father. But even at the height of her rage and frustration she speaks with impressive eloquence. I found her to be a heartbreaking character.

Did the fact that Shakespeare originally wrote the part for a boy ever come across in your work on it?

We never explored that, but she undeniably has a maleness in the way she expresses herself. She doesn’t sit quietly in the corner waiting to be spoken to.

What did you discover about Kate’s relationship with her sister?

I found it to be the most tragic relationship in the play. Kate receives absolutely no support from her sister. I was astounded at the ease with which Bianca sat back and watched Kate be humiliated. I suppose siblings can often be the harshest critics!

In some productions, Kate and Petruchio form a bond early on, because they are both subversive, aggressive figures. He’s the first interesting man who has come after her. Is that a line you took? It’s certainly striking that something seems to click between them for the first time when they share a joke about oral sex …

We used that as a way to get her out of the prison she was in at home. Here at last was someone that spoke her language. However, she unwittingly, and almost in spite of herself, flees from one form of incarceration to another. In our production, what we found most interesting to explore was the
promise
of love—a promise that was chased and hoped for, but never found. I think that hope is why she never ran away. In some sad respects, I think Kate is a slightly delusional character.

8
. Michelle Gomez as Kate, 2008: Kate and Petruchio form a bond early on because they are both subversive and aggressive figures. But in this production the relationship darkened profoundly in the second half of the play.

The consequence of that reading might be to make the whole process of the taming a kind of game—but in your production the cruelty, mockery, and sense deprivation were in deadly earnest, weren’t they?

We hoped that by taking the game out of it, it would make the final humiliation at the end more effective and more truthful. We were determined that she genuinely try to understand why this man was behaving so monstrously—if only to make sense of her own choice to be with him.

How does Kate relate to the other women at the end of the play?

In our production she had no energy left to relate to anyone. She is a battered wife—terrified to say or do anything for fear of reprisal.

And the famous submission speech: it’s been played straight, played ironic, played to death, played anew … how did you approach it?

Like her life depended on it. One false move in front of the court and she would receive the most horrific beating later at home. Although I felt there was a subtle defiance in this approach, because what kind of victory is this for Petruchio? She is showing the world that the very qualities that attracted Petruchio in the first place have disappeared. He can only cope with her spirit by breaking it, and what sort of a misogynist bully does that make him?

William Shakespeare was an extraordinarily intelligent man who was born and died in an ordinary market town in the English Midlands. He lived an uneventful life in an eventful age. Born in April 1564, he was the eldest son of John Shakespeare, a glove maker who was prominent on the town council until he fell into financial difficulties. Young William was educated at the local grammar in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, where he gained a thorough grounding in the Latin language, the art of rhetoric, and classical poetry. He married Ann Hathaway and had three children (Susanna, then the twins Hamnet and Judith) before his twenty-first birthday: an exceptionally young age for the period. We do not know how he supported his family in the mid-1580s.

Like many clever country boys, he moved to the city in order to make his way in the world. Like many creative people, he found a career in the entertainment business. Public playhouses and professional full-time acting companies reliant on the market for their income were born in Shakespeare’s childhood. When he arrived in London as a man, sometime in the late 1580s, a new phenomenon was in the making: the actor who is so successful that he becomes a “star.” The word did not exist in its modern sense, but the pattern is recognizable: audiences went to the theater not so much to see a particular show as to witness the comedian Richard Tarlton or the dramatic actor Edward Alleyn.

Shakespeare was an actor before he was a writer. It appears not to have been long before he realized that he was never going to grow into a great comedian like Tarlton or a great tragedian like Alleyn. Instead, he found a role within his company as the man who patched up old plays, breathing new life, new dramatic twists, into tired repertory pieces.
He paid close attention to the work of the university-educated dramatists who were writing history plays and tragedies for the public stage in a style more ambitious, sweeping, and poetically grand than anything which had been seen before. But he may also have noted that what his friend and rival Ben Jonson would call “Marlowe’s mighty line” sometimes faltered in the mode of comedy. Going to university, as Christopher Marlowe did, was all well and good for honing the arts of rhetorical elaboration and classical allusion, but it could lead to a loss of the common touch. To stay close to a large segment of the potential audience for public theater, it was necessary to write for clowns as well as kings and to intersperse the flights of poetry with the humor of the tavern, the privy, and the brothel: Shakespeare was the first to establish himself early in his career as an equal master of tragedy, comedy, and history. He realized that theater could be the medium to make the national past available to a wider audience than the elite who could afford to read large history books: his signature early works include not only the classical tragedy
Titus Andronicus
but also the sequence of English historical plays on the Wars of the Roses.

He also invented a new role for himself, that of in-house company dramatist. Where his peers and predecessors had to sell their plays to the theater managers on a poorly paid piecework basis, Shakespeare took a percentage of the box-office income. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men constituted themselves in 1594 as a joint stock company, with the profits being distributed among the core actors who had invested as sharers. Shakespeare acted himself—he appears in the cast lists of some of Ben Jonson’s plays as well as the list of actors’ names at the beginning of his own collected works—but his principal duty was to write two or three plays a year for the company. By holding shares, he was effectively earning himself a royalty on his work, something no author had ever done before in England. When the Lord Chamberlain’s Men collected their fee for performance at court in the Christmas season of 1594, three of them went along to the Treasurer of the Chamber: not just Richard Burbage the tragedian and Will Kempe the clown, but also Shakespeare the scriptwriter. That was something new.

The next four years were the golden period in Shakespeare’s
career, though overshadowed by the death of his only son, Hamnet, age eleven, in 1596. In his early thirties and in full command of both his poetic and his theatrical medium, he perfected his art of comedy, while also developing his tragic and historical writing in new ways. In 1598, Francis Meres, a Cambridge University graduate with his finger on the pulse of the London literary world, praised Shakespeare for his excellence across the genres:

For Meres, as for the many writers who praised the “honey-flowing vein” of
Venus and Adonis
and
Lucrece,
narrative poems written when the theaters were closed due to plague in 1593–94, Shakespeare was marked above all by his linguistic skill, by the gift of turning elegant poetic phrases.

Elizabethan playhouses were “thrust” or “one-room” theaters. To understand Shakespeare’s original theatrical life, we have to forget about the indoor theater of later times, with its proscenium arch and curtain that would be opened at the beginning and closed at the end of each act. In the proscenium arch theater, stage and auditorium are effectively two separate rooms: the audience looks from one world into another as if through the imaginary “fourth wall” framed by the proscenium. The picture-frame stage, together with the elaborate scenic effects and backdrops beyond it, created the illusion of a self-contained world—especially once nineteenth-century developments in the control of artificial lighting meant that the auditorium could be darkened and the spectators made to focus on the lighted
stage. Shakespeare, by contrast, wrote for a bare platform stage with a standing audience gathered around it in a courtyard in full daylight. The audience were always conscious of themselves and their fellow spectators, and they shared the same “room” as the actors. A sense of immediate presence and the creation of rapport with the audience were all-important. The actor could not afford to imagine he was in a closed world, with silent witnesses dutifully observing him from the darkness.