Desire, Courtship, and Marriage
Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,
Thy head, thy sovereign;
– The Taming of the Shrew, 5.2
While there is much in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew that can pose interpretive difficulties for contemporary theatre makers looking to tackle the sixteenth-century comedy—as director Oskar Eustis points out, the central action of the play is “Well, taming a woman”—it is often Katherine’s final speech in Act 5 in which she pledges obedience to her husband that causes the most direct consternation. How to present her transformation from “shrew” to ideal helpmeet without seeming to endorse misogyny?
In her new production, director and adaptor Marti Lyons takes a cue from the play’s Induction—a framing story that is often dropped from the text altogether, but which positions the tale of Kate and Petruchio as a play-within-a-play. In the original version, a nobleman stumbles upon a drunken tinker passed out on the ground and decides to play an elaborate trick on him, fooling him into thinking that he is in fact a Lord. In her adaptation, Lyons embraces the overt theatricality—and class consciousness—of the original by framing this Shrew as a bespoke immersive production designed specifically for a small group of high-end clients. Role play and its attendant trappings—such as donning costumes and performing stage intimacy and combat in front of a watchful audience—is foregrounded, and the story of Kate and Petruchio becomes a vehicle for rehearsing and unpacking the power struggles and contested meanings inherent in desire, courtship, and marriage.
In Marriage and Violence: The Early Modern Legacy, literary scholar Frances Dolan describes a “marital economy of scarcity” that was pervasive in the period when the play was written, and which continues to shape our understanding of marriage today. The scarcity emerges from models of marriage—whether dictated by Christian faith or British common law—that envisioned an ideal marriage as one in which two individuals became “one flesh,” or, perhaps less romantically, one legal agent. Marital discord is then blamed on one spouse asserting their individual will over the other, and a hierarchy is deemed necessary to maintain the peace. Equality between the sexes was portrayed—often comically—“as a source of conflict because it compels husband and wife to war for mastery within their marriage and household.” The “shrew” was a stock female comic figure who engaged zealously in that war for mastery; so named for a mole-like creature with a long snout which, despite its small size, was thought to be a dangerous “beast” with a poisonous bite. Initially, “shrew” was used to refer to both men and women who were dangerous or lacking in self-control. But it gradually gained currency as a metaphorical term for women who were considered wicked or badly behaved.
Dolan notes that the characteristics of the “shrew,” which were codified in the early modern period but remain recognizable today, include “physical violence as well as loquacity and self-assertion.” In early depictions in folktales and ballads, the shrew would “routinely encroach on their husband’s authority by beating them, often with an obviously phallic stick or ‘lusty rod.’” This rod (along with “the pants,” which only one member of the couple could legitimately wear) became one of the principal currencies in the marital economy of scarcity that Dolan describes. “The rod figures violence as a masculine prerogative that shrews usurp. These texts assume that there should only be one stick or rod per couple and depict the mayhem that results when spouses struggle over who will wield it.”
While men were always assumed to be at the top of the hierarchy in both the religious and legal constructions of marriage in the Elizabethan period, texts of the period generally sidestepped the question of whether women are, in fact, inferior to men. The focus instead was on the utility of male dominance and female subordination in maintaining marital harmony. Dolan observes of writing of the period:
“[Even] the most doctrinaire of texts waffle as to whether women actually are inferior or should simply act as if they think they are. In fleeting moments, they concede their own status as fictions…. By locating the problem in the wife’s imagination, these texts suggest that the solution lies there as well. If a wife believes herself to be her husband’s equal then she will contend for mastery rather than submit herself to his authority. The fiction that she is not her husband’s equal (despite evidence to the contrary) is thus the founding myth of marriage.”
Unlike the rod and the pants, which can only properly be yielded by the male member of the couple, this founding myth requires both the man and the woman to commit to the performance of their roles for this “fiction” to endure. For director and adaptor Marti Lyons, the question of how and why a woman might choose to embody the role of subordinate—and in what context that performance might lead a contemporary woman to desire to “place [her] hand below [her] husband’s foot,” as Kate asserts that she does by the end of the play—becomes another animating question for the production. How might Kate’s speech be delivered with sincerity and agency?
Undoubtedly part of the appeal of the shrew-taming narrative, both in its original time and in the present, is that the struggle itself is erotically charged. As noted gender studies scholar Jack Halberstam articulated succinctly: “While people may well invest in values like equality and reciprocity in their political lives, they may not want those same values dominating their sexual lives.” In fantasy, we may try on identities and roles that we would shy away from in our public life. Could Kate be practicing her individual will and agency by consenting to a submissive role in her private life, regardless of her political values in her public one?
Another reading—one that has gained a new pop culture currency with the prevalence of “Trad Wife” content on TikTok, reality television, and in political discourse—is to understand the speech as a commitment to a traditional, scripturally-based vision of marriage. In this version, Kate could be exercising her agency by embracing what adherents to this tradition believe to be a mutually beneficial arrangement, one that balances women’s submission with men’s responsibility. The doctrine of “mutual submission” can be found throughout Evangelical Christian writing on marriage. It posits that while men, as husbands and fathers, must be acknowledged as the “head of the household” and “family leader,” they must “earn” that leadership through service to wife and children. Part of that reciprocity may also be the mutual embrace of fictional roles that hide more complex power dynamics below the surface. As John Bartowski observed in Remaking The Godly Marriage, “Far from being passive doormats, many of these women portray themselves as active strategists who have generously decided to defer to husbands whose fragile egos could not withstand the onslaught of women’s overt assertiveness.” Male headship, then, may provide women with the cover necessary to hide their assertiveness and competence under a mask of submission—what those in the BDSM world might call “topping from the bottom.” For the male head of the household, the performance of dominance may offer them a way to obscure their vulnerability and dependence underneath.
Whatever intentions ultimately drive the words of Kate’s final speech, by embracing the framing of The Taming of the Shrew as a play-within-a-play that renders this performance of fictions visible, this production promises to create a fertile playing ground not only for re-engaging with Shakespeare’s classic story, but for inviting us all to question our own relationship to love and power, submission and domination, agency and consent.
Works cited:
- John P. Bartkowski, Remaking the Godly Marriage: Gender Negotiation in Evangelical Families. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001.
- Frances Dolan, Marriage and Violence: The Early Modern Legacy. Philadelphia, P.A.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.
- Jack Halberstam, “Sex Debates” in Lesbian and Gay Studies: A Critical Introduction, eds. Andy Medhurst and Sally R. Munt. London ; Washington : Cassell, 1997.