Shakespeare � Taming of the Shrew

"I am ashamed that women are so simple / To offer war where they should kneel for peace, / Or seek for rule, supremacy, and sway / When they are bound to serve, love, and obey." (V.ii.165-168)

These lines Katherine speaks at the end of the play, and they sum up the theme that the farce deals with. The play, of course, is very controversial in our modern world. Sometimes people forget that this play is a farce, a mysoginist fantasy set in an absurd world. Perhaps we should not be so anxious to shun this play as merely sexist, for the play exists soley for entertainment. At the same time, we cannot forget about the atrocities committed against woment in the past. This play is a "friendly" (if there can be such a thing) reminder of the way of days thankfully gone by. I have conflicting views about the play. On the one hand, it is a play that treats women as pets. Good pets don�t bite and bad pets must be trained. On the other, it makes us laugh at the very "taming" of the bad dog (the "bitch," if you will).

The excerpt I chose to dwell has a female character telling us that women are shameful when they are overbearing. We are told that women should not even seek to "sway" their husbands in one way or another. It is horrifying to think of a time when women were meant to be mindless drones and yet that is what the play harkens back to. The protagonist of the play, Petruccio, has one goal: to teach Kate to be subservient to a man (namely him). When explaining why he starves Kate and deprives her of sleep, Petruccio tells us, "This is a way to kill a wife with kindness, / And thus I�ll curb her mad and headstrong humour." (IV.i.189-190) What can we say about this premeditated abuse? In the same soliloque, Petruccio carefully plots out how he will continually blame her for things that are not her fault. He will keep her hungry and tired until she breaks. This isn�t a Vietnamese prison camp, but a situation of domestic torture. At the same time, it is hilariously bizzare. I have seen Shrew performed on stage by a professional repetory group and scenes that would be grisly in real life are wonderfully humorous on stage. That is the magic of Shrew, even for modern audiences. It is a wonderful slice of nastiness, a comedy that no one but Shakespeare could get away with. Imagine a film to come out today about a crafty guy who forces a woman to marry him. He then tortures her. He physically and mentally abuses her. After starving and sleep-deprevation, she suddenly becomes cheerful and completely loyal to her husband. If something like this came out in this day and age, it would be an outrage, regardless of how excellent the writing or dialouge was. Shakespeare gets away with it because the play is a relic from an old time.

There is no completely correct way of seeing Shrew. I hold that there must be a balance. The play is sexist, but should that turn us off from the fact that it is marvelously witty? Balance must be a factor in reading Shrew. We must focus on the good and accept the bad as part of the playwrite�s time.