The Taming of the Shrew (3 page)

The conclusion to be drawn from such a reading is that the very artfulness of game-playing—of theater—offers a form of release from the pressures of patriarchal, mercantile society:

The danger of reading Petruchio’s actions positively in this way is that one might find oneself glossing over the violence he threatens and performs. There is a long stage tradition of giving him a whip, which—unless one starts becoming very Freudian—is hardly
conducive to the idea that Kate is complicit in everything that happens to her.

The questions of performance and role-playing raised by Kate’s final speech are often read in the light of the induction:

This emphasis on disguise and illusion is equally evident in the Bianca plot:

But it is above all the Sly framework that establishes a self-referential theatricality in which the status of the shrew-play
as
a play is enforced. The female characters in the play are boy-actors assuming a role, parodied and highlighted by the page playing Sly’s “wife.” Thus “in the induction, these relationships of power and gender, which in
Elizabethan treatises, sermons, homilies, and behavioural handbooks were figured as natural and divinely ordained, are subverted by the metatheatrical foregrounding of such roles and relations as culturally constructed.”
²³
“Katherina’s mind is worked on by Petruchio as Sly’s is by the Lord, producing a similar sense of dislocation.… Finally she [too] acquires a new identity.”
²⁴

Every production of every Shakespeare play is different from every other. The very process of adaptation and reinterpretation is what keeps the work alive. Shakespeare’s endurance is dependent on cultural evolution in the light of new circumstances, new beliefs and values. But perhaps of all the plays
The Taming of the Shrew
is the one in which almost everything hangs on a few essential director’s and actor’s decisions: what to do about the induction, how to play the two sisters and the two courtships off against each other, how playful to make the taming, how sincere to make the submission.

Shakespeare endures through history. He illuminates later times as well as his own. He helps us to understand the human condition. But he cannot do this without a good text of the plays. Without editions there would be no Shakespeare. That is why every twenty years or so throughout the last three centuries there has been a major new edition of his complete works. One aspect of editing is the process of keeping the texts up to date—modernizing the spelling, punctuation and typography (though not, of course, the actual words), providing explanatory notes in the light of changing educational practices (a generation ago, most of Shakespeare’s classical and biblical allusions could be assumed to be generally understood, but now they can’t).

Because Shakespeare did not personally oversee the publication of his plays, with some plays there are major editorial difficulties. Decisions have to be made as to the relative authority of the early printed editions, the pocket format “Quartos” published in Shakespeare’s lifetime, and the elaborately produced “First Folio” text of 1623, the original “Complete Works” prepared for the press after his death by Shakespeare’s fellow-actors, the people who knew the plays better than anyone else. In the case of
The Taming of the Shrew,
there is no Quarto text, so all modern editions follow the Folio.

Scholars still debate the nature of the relationship between
A pleasant conceited historie, called The taming of a shrew As it was sundry times acted by the Right honorable the Earle of Pembrook his seruants
(1594) and Shakespeare’s
The Taming of the Shrew
as published in the First Folio. The main action shares a similar plot line with parallel but sometimes differently named characters (Sly and Kate are the only names shared by the two plays; in
A Shrew,
Kate has two sisters not just one, and the setting is Athens rather than Padua). Four possibilities have been advanced:

1. Shakespeare used the previously existing
   A Shrew
   , which he did not write, as a source for
   The Shrew
   .
   
2. A Shrew
   is a reconstructed version of
   The Shrew;
   that is, what has sometimes been called a “Bad Quarto,” an attempt by actors (or conceivably a stenographer in the audience) to reconstruct the original play from memory and sell it.
   
3. Both versions were written legitimately by Shakespeare himself; that is, one of the plays, presumably
   A Shrew,
   is an earlier draft of the other.
   
4. The two plays are unrelated other than by the fact that they are independently derived from another play which is now lost. This is the so-called “
   Ur-Shrew
   ” theory (in reference to the idea of an “
   Ur-Hamlet,
   ” a lost play behind Shakespeare’s
   Hamlet
   ).
   

(1) would be in accordance with his practice elsewhere (as when, for example, he used the anonymous
King Leir
as a source for
King Lear
) and with his early reputation as a patcher of other men’s plays. But if (2) or (3) were correct, there might well be a case for staging the “frame” in the more complete form in which it is found in
A Shrew
. (2), the “Bad Quarto” theory, has found the highest level of support among modern scholars, despite the fact that the differences of plot, language, character, and name are far greater than in the plays usually so classified, such as the First Quarto of
Hamlet
. Explanation (4) has little support, since it adds an unnecessary additional hypothesis about a lost play.

The existence of the anonymous
Taming of a Shrew
Quarto of 1594 raises the question of whether the original performances of Shakespeare’s play would have maintained the Christopher Sly “frame” throughout the action. Some modern editions and productions incorporate the Sly sequences from the latter part of the action, on the grounds that his disappearance from the Folio after the first act is dramatically unsatisfying. In accordance with our editorial policy of respecting the Folio wherever possible, we do not do so. We do, however, print the relevant sequences of the old play (modernized but unannotated) at the end of the play, giving readers the chance to think about them and performers the option to play them. In order to facilitate discussion of the distinctiveness of Kate’s crucial “submission” speech, we also include a text of the equivalent speech from
A Shrew
.

The following notes highlight various aspects of the editorial process and indicate conventions used in the text of this edition:

Lists of Parts
are supplied in the First Folio for only six plays, not including
The Taming of the Shrew,
so the list here is editorially supplied. Capitals indicate that part of the name used for speech headings in the script (thus “Christopher
SLY
, a drunken beggar/tinker”).

Locations
are provided by the Folio for only two plays, of which
The Taming of the Shrew
is not one. Eighteenth-century editors, working in an age of elaborately realistic stage sets, were the first to provide detailed locations (“another part of the city”). Given that Shakespeare wrote for a bare stage and often an imprecise sense of place, we have relegated locations to the explanatory notes at the foot of the page, where they are given at the beginning of each scene where the imaginary location is different from the one before. In the case of
The Taming of the Shrew,
the induction takes place in the hall of a lord’s house that is assumed to be in England but that is then theatrically transformed into Padua and related Italian locations.

Act and Scene Divisions
were provided in the Folio in a much more thoroughgoing way than in the Quartos. Sometimes, however, they were erroneous or omitted; corrections and additions supplied by editorial tradition are indicated by square brackets. Five-act division is based on a classical model, and act breaks provided the opportunity to replace the candles in the indoor Blackfriars playhouse which the King’s Men used after 1608, but Shakespeare did not necessarily think in terms of a five-part structure of dramatic composition. The Folio convention is that a scene ends when the stage is empty. Nowadays, partly under the influence of film, we tend to consider a scene to be a dramatic unit that ends with either a change of imaginary location or a significant passage of time within the narrative. Shakespeare’s fluidity of composition accords well with this convention, so in addition to act and scene numbers we provide a
running scene
count in the right margin at the beginning of each new scene, in the typeface used for editorial directions. Where there is a scene break caused by a momentary bare stage, but the location
does not change and extra time does not pass, we use the convention
running scene continues
. There is inevitably a degree of editorial judgment in making such calls, but the system is very valuable in suggesting the pace of the plays.

Speakers’ Names
are often inconsistent in Folio. We have regularized speech headings, but retained an element of deliberate inconsistency in entry directions, in order to give the flavor of Folio. Thus Sly is always so-called in his speech headings, but “Beggar” or “drunkard” in entry directions.

Verse
is indicated by lines that do not run to the right margin and by capitalization of each line. The Folio printers sometimes set verse as prose, and vice versa (either out of misunderstanding or for reasons of space). We have silently corrected in such cases, although in some instances there is ambiguity, in which case we have leaned toward the preservation of Folio layout. Folio sometimes uses contraction (“turnd” rather than “turned”) to indicate whether or not the final “-ed” of a past participle is sounded, an area where there is variation for the sake of the five-beat iambic pentameter rhythm. We use the convention of a grave accent to indicate sounding (thus “turnèd” would be two syllables), but would urge actors not to overstress. In cases where one speaker ends with a verse half-line and the next begins with the other half of the pentameter, editors since the late eighteenth century have indented the second line. We have abandoned this convention, since the Folio does not use it, nor did actors’ cues in the Shakespearean theater. An exception is made when the second speaker actively interrupts or completes the first speaker’s sentence.

Spelling
is modernized, but older forms are very occasionally maintained where necessary for rhythm or aural effect.

Punctuation
in Shakespeare’s time was as much rhetorical as grammatical. “Colon” was originally a term for a unit of thought in an argument. The semicolon was a new unit of punctuation (some of the Quartos lack them altogether). We have modernized punctuation
throughout, but have given more weight to Folio punctuation than many editors, since, though not Shakespearean, it reflects the usage of his period. In particular, we have used the colon far more than many editors: it is exceptionally useful as a way of indicating how many Shakespearean speeches unfold clause by clause in a developing argument that gives the illusion of enacting the process of thinking in the moment. We have also kept in mind the origin of punctuation in classical times as a way of assisting the actor and orator: the comma suggests the briefest of pauses for breath, the colon a middling one and a full stop or period a longer pause. Semicolons, by contrast, belong to an era of punctuation that was only just coming in during Shakespeare’s time and that is coming to an end now: we have accordingly only used them where they occur in our copy-texts (and not always then). Dashes are sometimes used for parenthetical interjections where the Folio has brackets. They are also used for interruptions and changes in train of thought. Where a change of addressee occurs within a speech, we have used a dash preceded by a full stop (or occasionally another form of punctuation). Often the identity of the respective addressees is obvious from the context. When it is not, this has been indicated in a marginal stage direction.

Entrances and Exits
are fairly thorough in Folio, which has accordingly been followed as faithfully as possible. Where characters are omitted or corrections are necessary, this is indicated by square brackets (e.g. “[
and Attendants
]”).
Exit
is sometimes silently normalized to
Exeunt
and
Manet
anglicized to “remains.” We trust Folio positioning of entrances and exits to a greater degree than most editors.