Emma Smith

The Taming of the Shrew

Lecture available on iTunesU: handout below.

George Bernard Shaw (1888)

No man with any feeling of decency can sit it out in the company of a woman without being extremely ashamed of the lord-of-creation moral implied in the wager and the speech put into the woman’s own mouth.

Germaine Greer (1971)

Kate has the uncommon good fortune to find [a husband] who is man enough to know what he wants and how to get it. The submission of a woman like Kate is genuine and exciting because she has something to lay down, her virgin pride and individuality.

John Fletcher, The Woman’s Prize, or The Tamer Tam’d c 1611

Epilogue: both sexes should be taught ‘due equality;/ And as they stand bound, to love mutually’

[his new wife] must do nothing of her self; not eat,

Drink, say sir how do ye, make her ready, piss,

Unless he bid her

yet the bare remembrance of his first wife […]

Will make him start in’s sleep, and very often

Cry out for Cudgels, Colstaves, anything;

Hiding his Breeches, out of fear her Ghost

Should walk, and wear ’em yet

You have been famous for a woman tamer,

And bear the fear’d name of brave wife-breaker:

A woman now shall take those honours off,

And tame you;

Nay, never look so big, she shall, believe me,

And I am she: what think ye.

Anon, The Taming of A Shrew (1594)

The King of Kings the glorious God of Heaven

Who in six days did frame his heavenly work,

And made all things to stand in perfit course.

Then to his image he did make a man.

Old Adam, and from his side asleep

A rib was taken, of which the Lord did make,

The woe of man so termed by Adam then,

Woman for that, by her came sin to us,

And for her sin was Adam doomed to die.

Then enter two bearing of Slie in his

Owne apparrell againe, and leaues him

Where they found him, and then goes out.

Then enter the Tapster.

Tapster: Now that the darkesome night is ouerpast,

And dawning day apeares in cristall sky,

Now must I hast abroad: but soft whose this?

What Slie oh wondrous hath he laine here allnight,

Ile wake him, I thinke he's starued by this,

But that his belly was so stuft with ale,

What now Slie, Awake for shame.

Slie: Sim gis some more wins: whats all the

Plaiers gon: am not I a Lord?

Tapster: A Lord with a murrin: come art thou dronken still?

Slie: Whose this? Tapster, oh Lord sirra, I haue had

The brauest dreame to night, that euer thou

Hardest in all thy life.

Tapster: I marry but you had best get you home,

For your wife will course you for dreming here to night,

Slie: Will she? I know now how to tame a shrew,

I dreamt vpon it all this night till now,

And thou hast wakt me out of the best dreame

That euer I had in my life, but Ile to my

Wife presently and tame her too

And if she anger me.

Tapster.: Nay tarry Slie for Ile go home with thee,

And heare the rest that thou hast dreamt to night.

Sinead Cusack dir Michael Bogdanox (RSC 1982), in Rutter (ed.)

At the end of the play I was determined that Kate and Petruchio were rebels and would remain rebels for ever, so her speech was not predictable…This so-called ‘submission’ speech isn’t a submission speech at all: it’s a speech about how her spirit has been allowed to soar free. She is not attached to him. He hasn’t laid down the rules for her, she has made her own rules, and what he’s managed to do is to allow her to have her own vision. It happens that her vision coincides with his. There’s a privately shared joke in the speech. And irony. And some blackness…They’re going to go on to have a very interesting marriage. Petruchio was on his knees. I was standing.

Fiona Shaw dir Jonathan Miller (RSC 1987), in Rutter (ed.)

This man who seemed to be her tormentor has given her, or has allowed her to take, the step that will save the rest of her life. That’s why it’s so wrong if the play is about dominance and a broken spirit. It’s about someone on the brink…who found a way of saying ‘yes’ without being compromised. At the end of the play, Kate wins. She can say anything now and she’s still Kate.

Kate makes the men take themselves on. She is saying, ‘I acknowledge the system. I don’t think we can change this’ – which is a terrible indictment of a system of patriarchy’

her positive chance to reform: