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!

Julius Caesar has always been a politically loaded play. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, directors and actors have used it as a parable about various turning points in world history, such as the rise of the Nazis or the dawn of the Cold War. A current production of the play at the Boston-area American Repertory Theatre envisions the play in Camelot-era America. Whatever the milieu, the political machinations are front and center.

One question that every director of every production of a Shakespearean play must answer is, “How many ideas can I tackle with one play?” If the plays are to be used to create a dialogue with other ideas, other periods, or other social issues, how many can one production address? A recent review of a production of Julius Caesar criticized the artistic team on those very grounds. This version seeks to use the play as a commentary on the treatment of native/aboriginal peoples. Compounding this, however, is some nontraditional casting that left the reviewer puzzled. The approach was gender-blind, which means that some roles traditionally played by men were cast with female actors and vice versa. The problem presented is that this approach was not applied uniformly. For the reviewer, this muddied the play’s sociopolitical waters, making the intent less clear than intended. Can you take on more than one issue in the same play? Could a Julius Caesar about both gender and native peoples work? Ultimately, when concept productions fail, is it because the plays are complicated enough on their own terms?

Shakespeare’s women are nothing if not succinct. While their husbands, fathers, brothers and male friends blather endlessly about every stupid thought in their heads, the girls choose their words carefully; so carefully, in fact, that many of them simply do not speak for lengthy stretches. Given the tradition of boy actors in Shakespeare’s time, perhaps this reduced “female” presence made sense. Still, Will’s heroines are at times maddeningly taciturn. At the end of Measure for Measure, does Isabella accept the marriage propose to her or renounce it and continue with her religious avocation? No one can be sure because she never utters another word, and as a result Measure for Measure has become the Edwin Drood of Shakespeare’s canon because each production must decide how to end it.

Somewhere out in internetland, some folks explored this problem from the opposite perspective. Instead of focusing on the negative, they counted the number of lines of every female character in Shakespeare’s plays to discover who was the most talkative. The results are surprising in that they do not include The Bard’s most famous femmes like Juliet or Lady Macbeth. Coming in at number three is Imogen, the plucky heroine of the complex (and often confusing) Cymbeline. First runner-up goes to the Queen of the Nile herself in Antony and Cleopatra. Finally, the gabbiest gal in Bard-dom is none other that Rosalind from As You Like It. The winner is easily the most recognizable of the three as the other two are featured in less frequently staged works. What does that say about contemporary appreciation of Shakespeare’s women? Do we simply exalt the plays based on the male characters and the women become famous by default (sort of like Kelly Preston)? Or, more insidiously, do we prefer these characters when they suffer in silence?

If Shakespeare had written the 1980’s play and film, Steel Magnolias, the result might have been something like the new Nantucket production, The Wit and Wisdom of Will’s Women (dig the alliteration!). The show is a mélange of scenes and monologues highlighting The Bard’s complicated ladies. Think of it as Now That’s What I Call Shakespeare! To give it a modern spin, the show is also set in a beauty salon a la Magnolias, with the actresses doing each other’s hair in between iambic banter.

While feminists might blanche at the mise en scene (what’s next? A slumber party?), this Shakespearean revue puts a well-deserved focus on female Shakespearean performers. Often consigned to being “the girl” in the plays proper (see Ophelia and Desdemona as examples), these characters are given life in this new format that is free of all that overbearing male angst. Shakespeare may be esteemed the greatest writer of the English language, but his heroines often lean more towards David Mamet opacity than Paula Vogel complexity. While the men rant and rave for hours at a clip, the women have only a few scenes and monologues to fight for their needs and wants. People love to yammer on about Hamlet’s madness, but what about that of Ophelia? Perhaps in a production like The Wit and Wisdom of Will’s Women, we might catch a glimpse of a three-dimensional woman instead of an ignored sister, a screwed-over daughter, or a jilted girlfriend.