A Dallas production of All’s Well That Ends Well is receiving strong reviews, particularly for its leading lady. One of the key points of praise is that it downplays Bertram’s dark side and adopts a tone that the critic likens to Jane Austen. In short, like all productions of this problem play, this version is being judged by how well it deals with the central problem.

And what a problem it is. In what may be the Elizabethan version of He’s Just Not That Into You, plucky Helena spends the entire play trying to get the reluctant Bertram to fall in love with her. Once she tricks him into impregnating her while in disguise, he does. Yay!!! Or should I say, “Yay?” This one could actually be called a Problems Play because its issues are myriad. First, it asks us to invest in a heroine who would degrade herself repeatedly for the love of a man. Feminists, start your engines, please. Next, when she actually succeeds, we’re supposed to be thrilled that this (expletive) finally came around.

As this reviewer noted, the trend lately has been to emphasize the unhealthiness of this relationship, so that the play becomes a story about Helena’s misguided need to win Bertram. While I’m sure that’s all edgy and deep, it gives the actor playing Bertram the most impossible dramatic feat requested of an actor. Part of the reason this production seems to work is that allows Bertram to grow and change throughout the play, not just in the last scene.

Don’t you just love this picture?  One of our cast members drew this amazing picture to be on the back of our cast/crew t-shirts this year!  I went to him and our set designer and I said, “Okay, here’s what I want for our t-shirts this year - I want a shrew (you know, the animal shrew) in a beautiful Elizabethan dress, holding some kind of weaponry, looking like she’s doing the taming!”  Their response - “A mouse in a dress?”  Yup, that’s what I want!  And this is what I got!  I can hardly wait to get our t-shirts made!

Craig asked me a great question after my last post - “Why Shrew?”  He mentioned the fact that it’s about the public submission of a woman (how, exactly, is that entertaining?), and he was wondering why I chose this play, and also how my teenage cast was reacting to the storyline.  I really appreciate his question because it’s always good as a director to question things - interpretations, visions, the text of the play to some extent - This should never be a “set in stone” experience (well, at least until dress rehearsals, maybe!!!)!

So, why Shrew?  I chose this play primarily because it’s a fun play…Anyone who has seen the Burton/Taylor 1967 film would agree, I think!  There is a ton of physical humor involved, and if you consider who’s doing the smacking around, it’s not Petruchio beating Katharina into submission - it’s Katharina breaking a lute over Hortensio’s head; Katharina smacking her sister, Bianca; Katharina hitting Petruchio; Katharina hitting Grumio…Katharina has some serious anger issues to overcome in this story.  Katharina is a young woman who is almost like the ugly step-sister (even though she is quite beautiful).  She is not her father’s favorite - that title goes to Bianca, Katharina’s younger sister.  Any time a parent plays favorites there is going to be resentment, and it is clear that Katharina is very resentful.  Because of this resentment, she is acting out against everyone - Baptista, Bianca, all of her sister’s suitors, and especially Petruchio when he comes a’ callin’!  She has not learned how to deal with her hurt and her anger, and so she has become horribly shrewish.

Petruchio’s methods of “taming” his new wife have been criticized over and over again, particularly in the 20th century with the feminist movement.  He speaks of Katharina like she’s his ”falcon” (4.1), denying her food in order to make her completely dependent upon him.  He plans to keep her up all night, hungry and exhausted, so that she will be more submissive.  I realize that from a modern standpoint this sounds perfectly horrible!  It doesn’t really sound all that funny to talk about causing physical discomfort like this to one’s new bride, or to anyone for that matter.  But it’s important to consider that Shakespeare was not writing this play during the 20th century - he was writing the way a man in the 16th century would write.  I wouldn’t honestly expect anything different.  A recent discussion in the eNotes Book Club concerned this very thing. Should an author write accurately and be true to what his characters would say, or should he candy-coat it and make it nice and palatable for all people to read?  I don’t believe for a minute that Shakespeare was some horrible mysoginist - I think he was writing for his time.  What else could we expect?

So why does Petruchio determine that it is worth his time to “tame” Katharina?  He could have found a much more willing, just as wealthy bride, given a bit more time.  I believe he truly fell in love with her.  The Burton/Taylor film depicts Petruchio as more concerned about his “20,000 crowns” than for the welfare of Katharina, as she runs across a roof to escape from him, almost falling to her death.  But that was something Zeffirelli threw in to make it funnier - that is NOT in Shakespeare’s text.  I was struck by something that Petruchio says in Act 5, scene 2, when my afterschool reading group went through the play this past semester.  At the wedding feast for Lucentio and Bianca, Katharina is demonstrating for Petruchio’s sake that her ways are mended - that she is no longer the unhappy, violent woman she once was.  After witnessing her submissiveness to her husband, Lucentio says, disbelievingly, “Here is a wonder, if you talk of a wonder.”  Hortensio agrees, saying, “And so it is.  I wonder what it bodes.”  Petruchio’s reply touched my heart:

“Marry, peace it bodes, and love, and quiet life,
An awful rule, and right supremacy,
And, to be short, what not that’s sweet and happy.”

That’s all he wanted with Katharina - peace, love and a quiet life, and all that is sweet and happy.  (”Awful” in the third line, by the way, means “profoundly respectful or reverential,” according to Schmidt’s on-line lexicon - http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.03.0068%3Aentry%3D%23424.  Petruchio wanted respect, as we all do, I believe. And yes, he wanted “right supremacy” - to be the head of his house - as any 16th-century man would have wanted.)  I think this touched me because of what I was like during the first few years of marriage to my saint of a husband.  Because some of my students read this blog, I won’t go into specifics, but trust me, I had Katharina matched in the “shrew” department.  It was my husband’s peace and love and desire for a kind, quiet life, that finally helped me see that there is a better way of dealing with frustrations.  Petruchio just went about it as a 16th-century man would.

By the way, my teenagers seem to really be drawn to the sibling rivalry between Bianca and Katharina.  What kid hasn’t, at one time or another, felt honestly like their parents loved, admired, liked, whatever, their sibling(s) better than themselves?  Many adults still believe that!  The cast seems to really enjoy the fact that Bianca ends up possibly not as submissive and obedient as her father always believed her to be, and they love it when Baptista gives Petruchio “Another dowry, to another daughter,/For she is changed, as she had never been.” (5.2)  They see that Katharina did need to change her attitude and her actions, but then once she does, her parent is thrilled to death with her and sees the good in Katharina that before wasn’t evident.

I hope this helps everyone see a different side of this wonderful play. It helps to stick solely to the text, rather than worry about what other people say about it. I have found, too, that reading one of his plays multiple times (I think I’ve read Shrew now about seven times, plus seen three different stage and film versions) really helps a 21st-century person wrap their heads around the language and all of the nuances of what Shakespeare was saying. Give it a try - It’s worth the ride!

A new production of All’s Well That Ends Well received a middling-to-low review. The review notes that the play is one of Shakespeare’s “problem plays” and cites the play’s varying tones and characters. Furthermore, the reviewer finds fault with the tone of the production itself, calling the serious parts too bland and humorous parts occasionally too garish. What struck me most about this review is the almost seamless way it mixed criticism of the production with criticism of the play itself. Essentially, for this writer, the play is full of traps and the actors and director fell into many of them.

Since he is near-deified to many, isn’t this reviewer’s complaints about the play kind of, well, blasphemous? Conversely, does Shakespeare have a few clunkers in his repertoire? If so, why perform them? Are we seeing productions of plays like All’s Well That Ends Well simply because of concern over audience fatigue? If Shakespeare aficionados have had more than their fill of indecisive Danish princes or kings who disinherit their daughters, it makes sense that other plays might be explored to show a different side to his writing. Still, are we attempting to make all thirty-something plays into classics?

These questions probably cannot be answered, but they bear asking. Also, what if we look at it from a different perspective? Would a reviewer be quite so hard on a play like All’s Well That Ends Well if he didn’t know who wrote it? In other words, are Shakespeare’s “great” plays and his reputation being used to punish his more idiosyncratic works?

Who knew that Shakespeare and Dolly Levi had so much in common? One of the few well-documented moments in Shakespeare’s life is the subject of a new book, The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street, by Charles Nicholl. In it, Shakespeare is involved in some matchmaking that unfortunately does not go as planned. Around 1604, Shakespeare was residing in a home owned by a French family whose daughter was engaged to be married to a young man who did not meet the father’s approval. The daughter sought Shakespeare’s assistance, a dowry was negotiated, and The Bard himself helped cement their legal union.

It sounds like a plot for one of Shakespeare’s comedies, yet this real-life story did not play out that way. Apparently, the father denied a dowry had ever been agreed upon and eight years later, his son-in-law belatedly sued him for reneging on the contract. Naturally, Shakespeare was their star witness, but the playwright, in true Alberto Gonzales fashion, could not remember exactly what happened when deposed. Perhaps one of the most striking things about Nicholl’s book is how he parallels this fractured love story, along with Shakespeare’s further immersion into the seamier side of London life, with the writer’s increasingly darker look at romance. After all, it was during this period that he wrote one of his most problematic romances or comedies (or whatever other category you wish to use): Measure for Measure. As Nicholl suggests, perhaps Shakespeare found that love was not all it appeared to be.

A new Idaho production of Measure for Measure is taking a modern-dress approach to the text to bring out the sociopolitical issues raised by this “problem play.” As with any high-concept interpretation, the purpose is to underscore the play’s contemporary relevance, yet the approach takes on added meaning when dealing with one of Shakespeare’s “problematic” scripts.

“Problem play” is one of those terms that’s acquired a wide variety of meanings through popular usage (and misusage). Today, it is usually invoked to describe one of Shakespeare’s plays that doesn’t easily fit into the comedy-tragedy-history triumvirate. In essence, the problem is ours, not Shakespeare’s, as mixed-genre plays are harder to categorize. Originally coined at the turn of the twentieth century, “problem play” did not mean the tonal shifts in the script were difficult to navigate in production. Instead, it referred to plays that deal with a specific social or political issue (much like the early realistic and naturalistic plays of that period). The three original problem plays were Measure, Troilus and Cressida, and All’s Well That Ends Well. Today, it might include plays like Cymbeline (whose oft-questioned authorship may account for its tonal and structural shifts), The Tempest, or even Hamlet. Given that mixed-genre forms are so prevalent nowadays (see television shows like Desperate Housewives or Six Feet Under), maybe we should reconsider what is so problematic about any of these plays.