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The Taming of the Shrew
Helpful
weblinks:
SparkNotes Guide to Shrew
-- synopsis, character analyses, and interpretations by Harvard grad students
Michael Cummings'
"Shakes Sphere" website offers a nice, brief outline of important
highlights.
Movies:
There's the famous Richard Burton/Elizabeth Taylor version, still rentable, and
two popular adaptations --
"Kiss Me, Kate" -- the 1959 musical that had a successful revival in 2000, and
"10 Things I Hate About You," a 1999 high-school update starring Julia Stiles
and Heath Ledger
Comedy in Shakespeare’s time tended to fall into several categories, requiring varied levels of sophistication on the part of the listener for fullest enjoyment:
Burlesque — purely physical comedy: potty and sexual jokes, pratfalls, food fights, drinking/drug jokes, drag costumes. This level of comedy requires almost no prior knowledge — references are to the most basic kinds of human experience.
Farce — plot-oriented comedy (similar to situation comedy today): disguise/mistaken identity, eavesdropping (intentional or unintentional), coincidences and accidents, get-rich-quick schemes that backfire, etc. Familiarity with the formulas and conventions of plot increase enjoyment.
Romantic comedy — boy-get-girl/boy-loses-girl/boy-gets-girl-back: humor is based on the delusions and pretensions of young people in love, misunderstandings, etc. Familiarity with the conventions of love poetry often required for appreciation of satire about lovers.
Comedy of manners — humor requires a knowledge of the social mores and fashions referred to in the plays; jokes center around social hypocrisies and pretensions. This type of comedy would probably only be funny to people who were familiar with the values and behaviors of the elite characters being satirized.
Witty comedy — humor based on wordplay (puns and literary allusions) and on comic heroes who use intelligence and language to outwit their adversaries and get what they want. This type of comedy requires the highest level of previous knowledge on the part of the audience, since much of the humor assumes a sophisticated command of the nuances of language and the uses of formal logic and rhetoric.
No one play ever featured only one type of humor exclusively — most comic plays feature a mixture of all these types. You will note, though, a decided hierarchy of humor in this list, from “low-class” to “high-class.” Shakespeare’s theater was not overly concerned with observing decorum, or a separation of comic styles — that would come later, in the 18th century.
The Taming of the Shrew is not an original story for Shakespeare, but is based on:
1) The folk tradition of the shrewish (argumentative, harsh) woman, which plays on the common comic tradition of inversion, or turning the natural order of things upside down. This implies, of course, that the Renaissance believed that the natural order of things was for women to be quiet, meek and subservient to men.
2) A number of plots common to the commedia dell’arte tradition — a theatrical style popular in Renaissance Italy, France and Spain. This form of comic theater (based on the Roman plays of Plautus and Terence) relied on exaggerated stock characters (the foolish elderly husband, the miser, the braggart soldier, the clever servant, the pedantic but ignorant doctor), topical plots, disguises/mistaken identities, and broad use of farce. It was performed by traveling troupes of actors all over Europe (including England), and Shakespeare would have been familiar with these conventions.
The opening scene (with Christopher Sly and the Lord) is an example of metadrama: a framing-device, or a play-within-a play. Critics disagree as to why this prologue is here or what it has to do with the play overall. We’ll disregard it for our purposes, but keep in mind its references to the relationship between reality and dreaming, and think about what plays and dreams have in common.
Notice the dual plots: the first is the wooing of Bianca by various lovers of varying appropriateness. This leads to the disguise plot in which Lucentio pretends to be a teacher and allows his servant, Tranio, to pretend to be him (the motive for such complications is nearly always money). This allows for lots of class-inversion comedy, as well as the comedy surrounding the foolish romantic fantasies of the old men Hortensio and Gremio. Notice to what extent Bianca’s romantic happiness becomes a financial issue.
The romantic plot would have been predictable to Shakespeare’s audiences. More interesting would have been the interplay between the Shrew and the Shrew-Tamer (Katharina and Petruchio) — not because of any suspense as to the outcome, but because of the possibility for lots of burlesque humor and sexual titillation at the thought of an aggressive woman facing off with an aggressive man. What Shakespeare adds to this folk tradition is a fair amount of sympathy for the Shrew.
