No bones about it--I really effing hate this play. It is the worst. THE WORST, I tell you.
It tells the old folk tale (retold by Chaucer) of a low-born woman named Grissel (or Grissill, or Griselda) who marries a nobleman. This guy loves her . . . ohhhh, he loves her soooo much . . . but he just can't shake the temptation to test her. So he tests her for obedience and loyalty. And boy, does she ever come through. He kicks her family back to their hovel, sends her there to join them, declares that he hates her, takes the children that she has borne him and tells her they're dead, and then 12 YEARS LATER tells her he's marrying again, a younger woman, and that she must be the new wife's bridesmaid. Only after Grissel comes through these tests with flying colors does the douch . . . sorry, the duke, ahem, finally tell her that he's only been testing her for over a decade, that the "new wife" is actually her daughter who is really alive, that he only loves Grissel, and that he's taking her back as his real wife, because she's proven that she's patient and obedient.
Now, up to the end, I can sort of get it. You get thrown out of your house, your all-powerful husband takes everything from you and you can't do anything about it, sure, there are SOME people in the world who would say, "What's the use complaining?", put on a happy/patient/constipated face, and keep gathering rocks or whatever it is you do for fun, when you're not doing your real job gathering dried cow turds for a living. And when he shows up 12 years later and says, "Hey, come do some demeaning work for me and my new wife because I like to humiliate you," you duck your head, say "Yes, gov'nuh" and get to scrubbing that new bidet or whatever, because honestly, he's a duke and will probably kill you and feed you to his prize hogs otherwise.
But THEN, when he says, "Just joking!" and "I really love you; let's be husband and wife again!" and you don't immediately paint your face like a Viking berserker and burn down his castle and then scrape up all the ashes and dump them in a slime-pit that you then use as a privy, you are just going too far. TOO FAR.
What made me doubly mad when reading this play was that somebody had written in it already, and had written stupid stuff like "good speech" and "nice plot" and even "Cinderella story." I started erasing this guy's (gotta be a guy) marginalia, which I never do because everyone deserves to have their experience of the book preserved, but after a while I stopped erasing it and started writing back. Under "Cinderella" I wrote, "Oh yes, she's so lucky," and under "duty" I wrote "dumbness." Whoever that reader was can go sit in the ashy slime-pit privy for a while.
And the detestable duke (actually the Marquis in this play) says that he "tride my Grissils patience when twas greene, like a young osier, and I moulded it like waxe to all impressions: married men that long to tame their wives must curbe them in, before they need a bridle, then they'll proove all Grissils full of patience, full of love." So he's even taking CREDIT for Grissel's patience, claiming that he moulded it.
There might be some counterpoint to the Grissel plot, however slight. The duke's sister, Julia, is very anti-marriage. Some gallants court her and she roundly rejects them all, citing marriage as a prison and Grissel's treatment in particular as loathsome. A comic Welsh character, Sir Owen ap Meredith, is courting a woman named Gwenthyan, who (rightly and Wife-of-Bath-ly) values honesty, virtue, love, and particularly having her own will in marriage. But in the end, Gwenthyan gives into Sir Owen, saying that she has only been testing him as the duke had tested Grissel, and that now "sir Owen shal be her head." Julia, who advises Sir Owen in his conduct with his wife to "weare a velvet hand, leaden eares, and no tongue" is advised by Gwenthyan (and urged by the gallants) to let go of her distaste for love and get married. The only capitulation is that Gwenthyan does end the speech saying "tis not fi[t] that poore womens should be kept alwaies under," though, and some nod is made towards Julia's life choices as well, as the duke says that Gwenthyan speaks for the "froward wives" and Julia for the "maides."
On the whole, though, this play is more rage-inducing than A Winter's Tale and that's saying something.
Showing posts with label Linda Woodbridge. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Linda Woodbridge. Show all posts
Friday, January 13, 2012
The Taming of the Shrew
I'm saving most of my $hakespeare for last, but I read this on Monday to prepare for a class I'll be teaching at the Young Actors' Theatre in Tallahassee. On Jan 30, I'll start teaching a weekly class to sophomores, juniors, and seniors who are studying $hakespeare on Broadway. The juniors and seniors are looking at Kiss Me, Kate so Taming is the natural pairing with that.
The play begins inside a frame story in which Christopher Sly, a drunken beggar, is brought off the streets and tricked to believe that he is a lord. He begins watching a play in bed, and the play he watches is the story of Katharina and Petruchio. The Christopher Sly story interrupts the play once as we discover how Sly is enjoying his entertainment, but it never finishes--we never even see him turn back into a beggar. So, in one sense, the play is an extended interlude to another story, presented (and meant to be taken as?) mere entertainment.
And an interest in acting, in transformation, in playing a part, marks both stories. In the frame story, Sly goes from speaking in prose to verse when he "discovers" that he is a lord. The young boy actor plays at wifeliness, tricking Sly into believing that "she" is his wife. In the play's main plot, Petruchio plays at all kinds of tricks--slovenliness, irrational anger, calling the sun the moon, etc., to trick Katharina into performing her role as good wife. Lucentio plays a tutor, and Tranio plays Lucentio, the servant the master now just as with Sly and his new lordship. And of course the big question about the play is: Is Katharina truly transformed from a shrew into an obedient wife, or is she just playing along, giving Petruchio what he wants in an effort to maintain real control in the marriage? It's all about who's in control, and most often who is in control has to do with "seeming," rather than "being."
In addition to being about role-playing, marriage is about money. Petruchio comes to find a rich wife, and doesn't care at all about her other qualities; and once he marries her, she is his "goods . . . chattels . . . house . . . field. . . barn." And Minola promises Bianca to whomever can provide the largest dowry, even if it is old Gremio, the pantaloon. He cannot really promise, as he does, that whoever "can assure my daughter greatest dower shall have my Bianca's love," though, any more than Petruchio can promise that, if the money is enough, no faults will be so large as to "remove . . . Affection's edge in [him]." What does money actually have to do with love or affection? But on the flip side, who could not feign affection if offered a large enough sum of money? But the men don't seem to learn this lesson, and they gamble on their wives' obedience and affection in the end.
And the play is about learning. "O this learning, what a thing it is!" Gremio says. The daughters are brought tutors; their education is important to their father and their suitors. And Katharina is "schooled," so to speak, in wifely duty; tamed, to use the rampant animal (horse, falcon, shrew) metaphor employed in this and other works. But Bianca spends her time with her tutors (who are disguised lovers) putting up with their romantic advances; we don't actually see her learn any Latin or music. And Katharina's schooling is effective on the surface . . . or maybe, as my students hope to do, she has just learned how to fool her teacher. So is learning good in this play? Or is it another tool of deception, a way to trick, a way to transform surface but not substance?
Blah blah blah, is this play feminist or not? It is definitely about taming, but does the taming "take"? It is certainly misogynist, but that doesn't mean it necessarily takes the part of the patriarchy in the woman debate, as Linda Woodbridge notes. I see it more on a spectrum, leaning towards the anti-woman side but with a few "Sly" winks towards the woman side, winks that Fletcher expands to bawdy and obscene hand gestures in his response, The Tamer Tamed. (I think that metaphor got away from me at the end.)
The play begins inside a frame story in which Christopher Sly, a drunken beggar, is brought off the streets and tricked to believe that he is a lord. He begins watching a play in bed, and the play he watches is the story of Katharina and Petruchio. The Christopher Sly story interrupts the play once as we discover how Sly is enjoying his entertainment, but it never finishes--we never even see him turn back into a beggar. So, in one sense, the play is an extended interlude to another story, presented (and meant to be taken as?) mere entertainment.
And an interest in acting, in transformation, in playing a part, marks both stories. In the frame story, Sly goes from speaking in prose to verse when he "discovers" that he is a lord. The young boy actor plays at wifeliness, tricking Sly into believing that "she" is his wife. In the play's main plot, Petruchio plays at all kinds of tricks--slovenliness, irrational anger, calling the sun the moon, etc., to trick Katharina into performing her role as good wife. Lucentio plays a tutor, and Tranio plays Lucentio, the servant the master now just as with Sly and his new lordship. And of course the big question about the play is: Is Katharina truly transformed from a shrew into an obedient wife, or is she just playing along, giving Petruchio what he wants in an effort to maintain real control in the marriage? It's all about who's in control, and most often who is in control has to do with "seeming," rather than "being."
In addition to being about role-playing, marriage is about money. Petruchio comes to find a rich wife, and doesn't care at all about her other qualities; and once he marries her, she is his "goods . . . chattels . . . house . . . field. . . barn." And Minola promises Bianca to whomever can provide the largest dowry, even if it is old Gremio, the pantaloon. He cannot really promise, as he does, that whoever "can assure my daughter greatest dower shall have my Bianca's love," though, any more than Petruchio can promise that, if the money is enough, no faults will be so large as to "remove . . . Affection's edge in [him]." What does money actually have to do with love or affection? But on the flip side, who could not feign affection if offered a large enough sum of money? But the men don't seem to learn this lesson, and they gamble on their wives' obedience and affection in the end.
And the play is about learning. "O this learning, what a thing it is!" Gremio says. The daughters are brought tutors; their education is important to their father and their suitors. And Katharina is "schooled," so to speak, in wifely duty; tamed, to use the rampant animal (horse, falcon, shrew) metaphor employed in this and other works. But Bianca spends her time with her tutors (who are disguised lovers) putting up with their romantic advances; we don't actually see her learn any Latin or music. And Katharina's schooling is effective on the surface . . . or maybe, as my students hope to do, she has just learned how to fool her teacher. So is learning good in this play? Or is it another tool of deception, a way to trick, a way to transform surface but not substance?
Blah blah blah, is this play feminist or not? It is definitely about taming, but does the taming "take"? It is certainly misogynist, but that doesn't mean it necessarily takes the part of the patriarchy in the woman debate, as Linda Woodbridge notes. I see it more on a spectrum, leaning towards the anti-woman side but with a few "Sly" winks towards the woman side, winks that Fletcher expands to bawdy and obscene hand gestures in his response, The Tamer Tamed. (I think that metaphor got away from me at the end.)
Thursday, December 08, 2011
The Woman Question
If I could travel 27 years back in time, I would tell Linda Woodbridge, "You go, girl." Because that's when her book Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540-1620 was published. I was three years old. Weird.
This book provides context on the woman question, the age-old real-life and literary debate on the nature of womankind. Woodbridge works on several well-established assumptions. First, the formal debate about womankind is an actual genre with identifiable generic conventions, a genre strongly influenced by Agrippa and Castiglione. The essays foster a sense of genuine debate, drawing on oration and dialogue as forms; they argue a thesis with the help of logic and rhetoric; they address Woman in general, not specific women; they do, however, use exempla from classical and Biblical sources. Woodbridge argues that the works that fall into this category, however, do not necessarily mirror their authors' actual views on womankind. They were merely rhetorical exercises on a topic of sustained interest (like abortion and weed to our Freshman English students today). Just because a student decides to write a persuasive essay on abortion, does not mean that that particular student has actually had any contact with abortion in his or her real life (the same cannot always be said of weed, however). "There is not a scrap of evidence to suggest any connection with real life at all" (17). Finally, she believes that attacks on the nature of womankind were responses to defenses of womankind, and that the attacks are actually more in line with modern feminism than the defenses (which often followed a Patient Grissel line of reasoning).
There are, however, many works of literature that deal with the "woman question" that are not part of the formal genre, many of which do bear "a considerably clearer relationship to contemporary reality" (6). Many of these arose from the Hic Mulier/Haec Vir controversy over transvestitism in women beginning in the 1570's. This controversy was also linked with foppishness in men; both trends brought to mind the androgyne or the hermaphrodite, a fraught image in Renaissance society. For some, the hermaphrodite represented perfect unity, the "essential oneness of the sexes" (140). For others, the hermaphrodite became a symbol of effeminacy, impotence, and a lowering of human nature. Many times the hermaphrodite was linked to the monstrous. Woodbridge establishes these published arguments in relation to real-life events and people, and establishes later canonical Renaissance literature as having a similar relation. In these works, laudatory and satiric, women have power over men; "the quality of Renaissance misogyny was itself a tribute to the sturdiness of Renaissance women" (268).
She also discusses the stage misogynist, a stock character who is comic in nature and who hates women. This character has links to Vice characters from secular morality plays and the soldier who returns in peacetime to find that his warlike nature is inappropriate for civil society. He may hate women because he has been spurned by one particular woman. And he is generally unreliable as a narrative voice; we don't believe him because we know he's partial, and because we often see him proven wrong. Benedick falls in love. Bosola learns to admire the Duchess of Malfi. Hamlet's treatment of Ophelia was uncalled-for. This character may represent a distrust of civilian society in general, whose values are "hermaphroditic"; it may represent the adolescent fears of sex and becoming an adult. As Woodbridge says, out of the three dozen she examines, not one exists "whose misogynistic pronouncements are not undercut by context or deflated by humor" (297).
She ends her book by discussing the paradoxical nature of the woman question (Madonna/whore), of Renaissance views of women ("grafting female-dominated courtly love upon male-dominated marriage"), and of the Renaissance itself, a hermaphroditic age. This last bit gave me the most to think about, although the whole was delightful. Perhaps if I have to teach an "intro to the Renaissance" course, I will focus it around the idea of paradox and the image of the hermaphrodite.
This book provides context on the woman question, the age-old real-life and literary debate on the nature of womankind. Woodbridge works on several well-established assumptions. First, the formal debate about womankind is an actual genre with identifiable generic conventions, a genre strongly influenced by Agrippa and Castiglione. The essays foster a sense of genuine debate, drawing on oration and dialogue as forms; they argue a thesis with the help of logic and rhetoric; they address Woman in general, not specific women; they do, however, use exempla from classical and Biblical sources. Woodbridge argues that the works that fall into this category, however, do not necessarily mirror their authors' actual views on womankind. They were merely rhetorical exercises on a topic of sustained interest (like abortion and weed to our Freshman English students today). Just because a student decides to write a persuasive essay on abortion, does not mean that that particular student has actually had any contact with abortion in his or her real life (the same cannot always be said of weed, however). "There is not a scrap of evidence to suggest any connection with real life at all" (17). Finally, she believes that attacks on the nature of womankind were responses to defenses of womankind, and that the attacks are actually more in line with modern feminism than the defenses (which often followed a Patient Grissel line of reasoning).
There are, however, many works of literature that deal with the "woman question" that are not part of the formal genre, many of which do bear "a considerably clearer relationship to contemporary reality" (6). Many of these arose from the Hic Mulier/Haec Vir controversy over transvestitism in women beginning in the 1570's. This controversy was also linked with foppishness in men; both trends brought to mind the androgyne or the hermaphrodite, a fraught image in Renaissance society. For some, the hermaphrodite represented perfect unity, the "essential oneness of the sexes" (140). For others, the hermaphrodite became a symbol of effeminacy, impotence, and a lowering of human nature. Many times the hermaphrodite was linked to the monstrous. Woodbridge establishes these published arguments in relation to real-life events and people, and establishes later canonical Renaissance literature as having a similar relation. In these works, laudatory and satiric, women have power over men; "the quality of Renaissance misogyny was itself a tribute to the sturdiness of Renaissance women" (268).
She also discusses the stage misogynist, a stock character who is comic in nature and who hates women. This character has links to Vice characters from secular morality plays and the soldier who returns in peacetime to find that his warlike nature is inappropriate for civil society. He may hate women because he has been spurned by one particular woman. And he is generally unreliable as a narrative voice; we don't believe him because we know he's partial, and because we often see him proven wrong. Benedick falls in love. Bosola learns to admire the Duchess of Malfi. Hamlet's treatment of Ophelia was uncalled-for. This character may represent a distrust of civilian society in general, whose values are "hermaphroditic"; it may represent the adolescent fears of sex and becoming an adult. As Woodbridge says, out of the three dozen she examines, not one exists "whose misogynistic pronouncements are not undercut by context or deflated by humor" (297).
She ends her book by discussing the paradoxical nature of the woman question (Madonna/whore), of Renaissance views of women ("grafting female-dominated courtly love upon male-dominated marriage"), and of the Renaissance itself, a hermaphroditic age. This last bit gave me the most to think about, although the whole was delightful. Perhaps if I have to teach an "intro to the Renaissance" course, I will focus it around the idea of paradox and the image of the hermaphrodite.
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