Shrew(s)

About a week ago, Joyce and I drove down to the Hanna Theater in Cleveland to see the Great Lakes Theater Festival's production of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew.

I've got a fairly long history with Shrew. I think I first got "hooked" on the play when I saw that Zeffirelli film (with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor) back in 1967, a year after I graduated from college.

Then a pause.

In the late 70s I taught for a couple of years at Western Reserve Academy, and I used the play there at least one of the years.

Then a pause.

In the 1980s, back at (beloved) Harmon Middle School in Aurora, I decided I would introduce my 8th graders to Shakespeare via Shrew, and so I did for a half-dozen years or so (culminating with the Zeffirelli film)--until Kenneth Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing came out in 1993. And for my final three or four years of middle-school teaching I taught that play--and had a ball doing so.

Shrew, of course, is a troubling play. Briefly, it's the story of a wild and crazy guy named Petruchio who marries a wild and crazy woman named Katherine, whose failure to find a husband has delayed her younger sister's hopes, for their father (Baptista) has declared that the younger (Bianca) may not marry until Katherine does.

A lot of weird stuff happens (people pretending to be other people, etc.--a favorite device of the Bard).

But Petruchio marries Katherine (in a wild ceremony we only hear about); Bianca marries Lucentio (a young student who recently arrived in Padua to study--changes his mind when he sees Bianca). And ... happily ever after ...?

Not quite. Bianca turns out to be more ... difficult ... than we'd been led to believe.

And Katherine?

Well, it's her final (long) speech near the end of the play that has given directors fits over the years. In it, she says to the other women present that a woman's husband is "thy lord, thy life, thy keeper, thy head, thy sovereign ...." (Here's a link to her whole speech.) At the end she tells women to prostrate themselves before their husbands ...

A lot of this doesn't exactly sit well these days, does it?

But I've had a different "take" on all of this for quite a while. I've long thought the play should be called The Taming of the Shrews--for both Petruchio and Katherine (as I suggested above) are, as Maurice Sendak would say, "Wild Things." Out of (self-)control.

But they fall in love. They learn how to behave around the other. They learn how to love. You cannot take Katherine's speech literally: She is saying what her lover wants her to; he knows that she is doing so--just for him. He also knows she is feigning. She is still the bright, strong woman she has been throughout the play--the woman whom he now loves.

I've seen stage productions of Shrew many times--and I've seen various Katherines play that final speech in various ways, from true earnestness to patent playful irony.

But what we saw in Cleveland was the best of all.

Katherine and Petruchio shared the speech (with some pronoun changes, obviously!). And at the end, Petruchio dropped to his knee and offered his hand to her.

Perfect.

Love is not a monologue; marriage is not a kingdom. It is two people, offering their hands to the other, hands each will clasp until it is no longer possible to do so.

So, I really liked the Cleveland production. It was somewhat "Elizabethan" in design--few props, no scenery (upstage were some levels, a la the Globe, where sat audience members, people whom the cast engaged and employed from time to time). No high-tech sound/lighting effects.

Just actors--fine ones--finding--showing--the truth in a difficult play.