SOURCE: “Ideology and Resistance in The Taming of the Shrew,” in Anxious Pleasures: Shakespearean Comedy and the Nation-State, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995, pp. 151-69.

[In the excerpt below, Hall discusses Petruchio's manipulation of Kate's self-identity.]

We have already considered the first of Shakespeare's comedies to make a major use of the traditional comic “wooing debate.” In the discussion of Love's Labour's Lost in Chapter 5, I was concerned to relate the euphoric pleasures of wit in that comedy with the underlying political anxieties of the culture of the court, namely its need to reaffirm a commitment to the patriarchal order against the proliferation of signs that it also depends upon. Wit, as a seductive power operating through language, is the site of deep anxieties over the loss of a center, of the self or of the realm.

In the two chapters of this section, I turn to the other two comedies in which sexual attraction is expressed through the traditional comic wooing debate, but intensified now into a bid for mastery on the terrain of the subjectivity of the other. The anxiety, which operates throughout the Taming of the Shrew (1584), does not enter into the representation of the dominant male character, however. It is analyzed here rather as an Althusserian “absent cause” of audience pleasure. But that pleasure is still troubled by the intensified anxiety which the dominant discourse can no longer control. …

.....

The sexual combat which constitutes the action of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew continues in the critical conflict over the interpretation of the play. In my view this continuing conflict, beyond the frame of the stage, is truly fitting, because in Shakespeare's play interpretation itself is the principal weapon of attack and defense. Petruchio's great wooing dialogue with Katherina arises from his struggle to impose his initially fictional interpretation of her, and to get it recognized by her as the truth of herself. The action of this play concerns the production of a willing (in the contractual sense of consenting) female subject out of a “curs’t” state of rebellion. This is in marked contrast with the immediate source play, The Taming Of A Shrew, in which the heroine's desires are known unproblematically to herself, and are announced equally unproblematically to the audience in a soliloquy:

Kate. Why father, what do
you meane to do with me,
To give me thus unto this brainsick man,
That in his mood cares not to murder me?
          [She turns aside and speakes]
But yet will I consent and marrie him,
For I methinkes have livde too long a maid,
And match him too, or else his manhoods good.(1)

Her address to the audience here confirms immediately the truth of Ferando's statement a few lines earlier: “I tell thee Kate, I know thou lov’st me well.” There is no problem surrounding her desires, intentions and self-awareness. This is all simply given. The threat to “manhood” is also explicit: she wants to marry him, but in order to “match him,” i.e., to put him to a test and master him, unless he is “good” enough to master her. Here it is striking to note what Shakespeare achieves by the introduction of a dramatic silence in place of this explicit self-knowledge. His Katherina in her “curs’t” condition becomes a field of uncontrolled contradiction, and Petruchio's address to her ceases to be a combat upon a clearly defined traditional terrain. Petruchio becomes the audience's only way of “knowing” her. But at the same time, this “knowledge” appears as an interpretation potentially open to rebuttal. The interpretive thrust is an attempt at mastery always open to refutation if she should resist successfully. The audience is thus implicated in a hermeneutic desire for the delayed confession of her truth, which Shakespeare supplies, or appears to supply, at the end.

Since the issue concerns the discursive production of a female subject position and a corresponding fantasy of male dominance, it is worth looking briefly at the strategies of humanist criticism, which celebrate its achievement. Tillyard is still influential. He represents Kate's final speech, where she compares the subordination of a wife to her husband with that of a subject to a prince, as her initiation into the “game” played by Petruchio. Tillyard sees the learning to play as an end to “her stupidity” and the beginning of enlightened freedom:

To all appearances, she has been worn down and submitted her own will to a stronger. And yet, directly after, enlightenment descends and she sees that Petruchio has been playing a game in which she is free to join; and join in she does. Of this there is no doubt. [emphasis added]²

Actually, there is a fissure in Tillyard's own criticism, because elsewhere he insists on the reality of Petruchio's “direct and brutal method by which a man tames a hawk.”³ Similarly, for Theodore Weiss, the ability to “play” means that Kate is educated into a sense of humor, and humor is presumed innocent; therefore, the imposition of the alien will is merely an appearance, assumed temporarily by Petruchio, to enable the emergence of the higher freedom of Kate's selfdom from the bondage of her willful madness:

She has altogether learned the essential lesson that Petruchio is after, that of comedy and of this play itself. Petruchio has helped her to know how to act, that is how to be an ‘actor’, and so herself. She knows now how to play, how, by not taking herself too seriously and so being submerged in herself, to be free of her own fiercely limited rigors and self-concern … (emphasis added)⁴

As Katherina becomes an “actor” (the masculine is not insignificant either), she becomes herself. This is an aporetic moment, when power is both acknowledged and negated by the critic's rhetoric. What is asserted is that the “game” is an initiation into the truth of herself, a revelation rather than a construction by Petruchio. We might remark that when this “education” is complete, Petruchio renounces both constraint and deceit, as does that other great educator, Prospero, at the end of The Tempest.

A recent critic, following very much in the apologetics for the “game” strategy of Tillyard and Weiss, writes of “Katherina's discovery of her inward self through her discovery first of play and then of love.” In this spirit, he explains the benign quality of Petruchio's governance at the end, identifying Shakespeare's play as the representation of a state recommended by the Tudor marriage reformers influenced by Erasmus and Vives:

Subjects who would rebel against a tyrant freely serve a loving king. The concept of loving kingship allows hierarchy without tyranny, for both the subject and the ruler are bound by mutual obligations of love. Thus the model for marriage is ultimately political; the family is a miniature kingdom ruled in benevolence by the husband.⁵

In terms of the history of ideas, he is right in relating this marital politics to an emergent humanism within a centralizing kingdom, but his globalizing idealism (which amounts to that of the by now standard Elizabethan World Picture unified by a “concept”) glosses over the paradox in the formulation “freely serve.” For there is a fissure in the demand for subordination, implying the self as an object that is given, and at the same time the persistence of a subject presumed free not to give. This contradiction is usually resolved by the most famous mythical narrative of modern Western thought, namely the narrative of a founding contract in which the subject is said to freely alienate his/her freedom. Petruchio's plot (his “policy”) is actually a version of this grand narrative.

Legitimation strategies have a history too. The idea that the ruler requires the consent of the ruled was anathema to emergent centralism. It might even be called its paranoiac anxiety. And of course, the hateful idea of the consent of the ruled was not new in itself, but derived from ancient particular rights, which were vigorously defended by Parliament under Elizabeth and James.⁶ Alan Macfarlane, in his Marriage and Love in England 1300-1840, points out that in Shakespeare's time, the tendency towards monarchical centralism was accompanied by the increasing pressure of a resurgent Roman law in matters of marriage, as in other spheres, all over Western Europe. But in England, in particular, it was being more successfully resisted through a tenacious clinging to traditional laws of Germanic origin. This is where family and national politics overlap, because the policy of the Crown was to reinforce the power of the father in the family on the pattern of the same reinforcement in the state. Family policy and state policy were linked aspects of the same processes of “reterritorialization,” in Deleuze's terms, through which the Crown sought to maintain social control. (Naturally, this casts a rather different light on the humanist analogies cited above). The tendency to “Roman” codification was also regarded as an aspect of the Catholic tyranny of Spain threatening traditional English liberties.⁷ As far as marriage and courtship were concerned, traditional law, reinforced by canon law since the twelfth century, insisted on the contractual nature of betrothal between consenting individuals. Thus, in principle, the father did not have exclusive patriarchal property rights, to give or to withhold, over family members, although in practice coercive persuasion often did prevail. In the light of this, one can argue that Katherina's insistence on self-possession is in marked contrast with the “Roman” relationship that pertains in the case of Bianca (to be eluded in the equally Roman comic way, as I will argue later). There is even a certain English nationalism, which would identify with Petruchio's enthusiasm for her in contrast with the docile, tricky, conformist, Petrarchan, continental Bianca. Despite his Italian name, Petruchio is a champion, compelling audience identification, from within the national tradition of English farce, dismissive of timid suitors who “woo like babes” and the feminine ideal which turns them on.

According to Engels in The Origin of the Family, contractual marriage was the foundation of modern “sex-love,” just as it was also the basis of the relationships necessary to capitalism. Macfarlane argues plausibly however, that it was not so much produced by a capitalist revolution in the fifteenth century (the position taken by Marx, Engels, and Weber) as a precondition for its development, which was particularly entrenched in England. But even if one concedes that capitalism did not introduce contractuality ex nihilo, the rapid expansion of the possibilities for “free” contractuality from the fifteenth century, noted by Marx and Engels, is very important for mapping the corresponding shift of affects within the discourse of individualism.

The defense of a traditional “English” discourse against the foreign one, with its connotations of tyranny, should not be understood as a purely reactionary posture. One of the paradoxes of the epoch is that the traditional forms of contractuality had a greater future as the necessary precondition for capitalism than the codifying principles of Roman law would allow. Alan Macfarlane observes that the political space for “free” contracts between “equal” consenting individuals is only possible through the displacement of power outside the family. These conditions corresponded to

the powerful, unified, political system built up by the later Anglo-Saxon kings and consolidated by the Normans and Angevins. This stable order meant that public peace and the control of violence were in the hands of chosen officials, rather than the family's.⁸

The wide-scale use of money after the thirteenth century reinforced these preconditions for a market economy, and already implied the relative unimportance of the family as a unit of production. This is only a question of tendencies and not of absolute distinctions. Nonetheless it enables us to see that the Crown's attempted reinvention of a truly patriarchal family was an instrument of “reterritorialization” in Deleuze's sense. In sum, the rapid expansion of the possibilities for “free” contractuality from the fifteenth century onwards was an intensifying challenge to the nostalgic desire for a social order in which an individual would be defined in terms of family “status.”⁹ My argument, then, is that, in the Katherina-Petruchio plot, Shakespeare explores the inner tensions of the contemporary emergence of “romantic marriage,” which, says Macfarlane, was “a by-product of the rise of capitalistic, contractual, and individualistic societies.”¹⁰ And in the plot of Bianca and her suitors we have the Terentian-Plautine comedy, which deals with the evasion of the absolute quasi-incestuous possession of the girl by the patriarchal senex.

Now, for a social, and familial, order which seeks legitimation in contract, in place of force or deceit (represented, for example, in the pre-Shakespearian Shrew-taming plots), or in place of direct ownership and disposal by the patriarch (the conditions of possibility of the Bianca plot), overt sexual inequality is the scene of a crisis of legitimacy. For a “contractual” civilization, such power may not cease in fact, but it must become invisible. And this is what happens when Petruchio's sexual policy, with its acknowledged trickery, gives way to the internalized “free” consent by Katherina. At the same time, however, from the standpoint of patriarchy, the dependence upon the consent of the subordinate, which may therefore be purely formal or ironic, is a crisis of power, conducive to a paranoiac desire for explicit acknowledgement of its triumph (Petruchio's bet at the end). Here the contractual form of power comes up against its limits.

The often repeated idea of “play” as the basis of socialization in The Taming of the Shrew owes much to Huizinga's influential book, Homo Ludens.¹¹ As a critical strategy for reading Katherina's passage from madness to civilization, it seems incontrovertible. But it should be added that the installation of patriarchal ideology by Petruchio closely resembles the kind of civilizing coercion theorized by Althusser as “interpellation.” Even the process of Katherina's “education” resembles the Pascalian model of recognition arising out of a simulacrum of belief which Althusser cites as the model for ideology arising from “material” practice.¹² That is to say, what Tillyard and Weiss call the playful “education” of Katherina into her “true” nature, is in fact a form of constraining misrecognition imposed upon the female subject. This misrecognition would also be shared by the audience, and academic criticism, in repeating it, is complicit with the dominant ideology of the play.

However, my “Althusserian” demystification leaves something out of account. The discourse of the play does not merely assume the patriarchal myth. It represents the process of its production by a very visible and audible hero. In actual fact, Althusser himself does something similar, when he explains the impersonal and abstract power of ideology by using the metaphor of someone being “interpellated” (or hailed) by another person in the street. The one who interpellates in Althusser's little narrative, is really a metaphor for a power which properly speaking could never have visible or audible presence. As Petruchio plays a similar mythical role in this play, he is really the bearer of a male fantasy of dominance and control. It is as though he demands, and perhaps receives from the audience, recognition as the very embodiment and source of a discourse of power. As for the heroine, she does not simply (mis)recognize herself through the narrative of the play, which is constructed by Petruchio's “policy”; she also recognizes herself as produced through the discourse of another, to use Lacan's terms. This recognition of the other within the self is precisely what the narcissistic discourse of male dominance seeks to repress in its monological drive. It is striking how Kate's new recognition of herself at first appears as a fictive textual construct, in the sense that she herself comments on the origin of her own utterance in Petruchio's discourse:

Katherina. Forward, I pray,
since we have come so far,
And be it moon, or sun, or what you please
And if you please to call it a rush-candle,
Henceforth I vow it shall be so for me.

(The Taming of the Shrew, 4.5.12ff.)

Now, throughout this scene and for the rest of the play, there is a strong possibility of resentment at her subjection, or at the very least reluctant resignation. Alternatively, the actress is free to employ various shades of irony, from self-mockery to barely contained counterattack. These are all textual possibilities, because Katherina's “vow” is not necessarily conscious of its own irony. The main point is the emergence of a new slippery potentiality, because her speech registers itself as a response to another, which it doubles internally. This is quite irrespective of her intentionality, which in any case becomes indeterminate. The confident Horatio does not attend to this indeterminate “inward dialogism,” as Bakhtin calls it, but only to the immediate issue of Petruchio's victory:

Petruchio, go thy ways, the field is won.

(4.5.23)

Some critics (and a fortiori producers, who are often the most efficient readers of textual productivity under altered historical conditions) read Kate's final lecturing to Bianca and the widow ironically. This is then denied by those who affirm that such a content is an anachronism or wishful misreading. But the real issue, I believe, is that such an ironic disruption has become a possible reading, because the drama deals precisely with the foundation of a subject position which surveys, knowingly or not, the process of its constitution through the discourse of another. This opening of a space of indeterminacy (which might allow a freedom for manoeuvre) precisely as a dialogic response to a monologic discourse of power is, I would argue, the new historical content of this comedy. When I refer to this flight from determination through “inward dialogism” as ironic, I certainly do not mean the kind of stabilized irony which supports a definitely satirical kind of feminist reading, like Coppélia Kahn's view that “this play satirizes not woman herself [sic] in the person of the shrew but the male urge to control the woman.”¹³ Though this commands political sympathy, it seems to me as essentialist and monologizing as the more established apologetics for Petruchio as educator. It is an inversion, and merely sets up a rival humanist interpretation of the intentions of Shakespeare as author and unified subject within the text. But it is interesting, nonetheless, because it does illustrate the irony that I am concerned with, namely the capacity of the text to generate rival unfalsifiable interpretive positions. Irony in my sense means the reversibility of the linguistic sign, so that incompatible interpretations of individual characters become possible, but remain marked by uncertainty. For that very reason, however, the characters' utterances become provocations to a desire for a stabilizing interpretation which endlessly withdraws. Far from wishing to satisfy this hermeneutic desire for certainty, I would like to stress precisely how this endless withdrawal from final knowability produces something like an effect of interiority. For the critic/spectator who wishes to know (a desire which reinforces identification with Petruchio), this withdrawal makes the characters' language assume the quality of a veil over an inner mystery. Thus Katherina is constructed as a new kind of feminine character in her evasive response to would-be dominant phallic discourse.

It is simply undecidable at the end whether Katherina's recitation of the pieties desired by Petruchio is sincere or not. Its formality, its excess, and the fact that it offers a means of mockery of Bianca and the widow, all tend to question single readings. But the major question is: exactly what is it that Katherina has learned from her engagement with Petruchio's discursive will to power? My argument is that she has indeed learned a “game,” but not necessarily in the sense intended by Petruchio and the critics who speak for the desiring fantasy of control which he represents. In the place of overt resistance, Katherina has internalized not only a “lesson” (a law), but also a discursive duplicity which eludes it.

On the other hand, we must also attend to the construction of audience investment in Petruchio's success. The comedy of the unequal wooing dialogue consists in the way that Petruchio addresses praise, loving tenderness, and other deliberate misunderstandings to an entity which may not be there. At its simplest level, this would be a comedy built upon the inappropriateness of language to situation. But, this is not how the audience must understand Petruchio's address to Katherina, because that would make him simply foolish, and undermine audience identification. When Petruchio announces his “policy,” he makes a claim to be master of the plot. The important thing here is the comic prolepsis, for it is a bet upon the power of his discourse. Petruchio is a gambler and adventurer, his weapon is language, and his bet upon his own mastery introduces a risk. The audience's pleasure arises from seeing the danger courted and defeated, however provisionally. At the end Petruchio merely repeats his gambler's throw when he bets upon Katherina's obedience, and her speech on wifely duty doubles his profit. Language engenders money, but if there were no sense of risk, there would be no pleasure.

Katherina voices the risk which Petruchio's discourse runs when she calls him mad, denying him the access to her which his interpretation claims. She calls him “mad,” but the audience sees this in context as a resistance, a denial of the effect of his utterance upon her. The comic strategy is the familiar one of a dialogue at cross-purposes, a dialogue that fails. Here it is developed in such a way as to suggest a second, Bakhtinian “inner dialogue,” but only on the terrain of her subjectivity. This can be seen in the witty exchanges between Katherina and Petruchio. Actually one cannot logically reply to a man whom one also calls mad. But to reply wittily, as Katherina does, assumes an acceptance within the combat. This in turn makes her assertion of madness in Petruchio appear as the denial of her own response even as she makes it. Thus the act of witty reply also confesses what is denied. To this extent, she is not autonomous but captured by language and constrained by Petruchio's verbal “policy.”

The fulfillment of the boastful prolepsis governing Petruchio's “policy” produces pleasure in the audience, that is to say, not firm perceptions of truth, but “truths” which negate anxieties. It is the fictionality of his pronouncements that counts here, because they are shadowed by the possibility that he will fail to prove their truth. Petruchio's early statements about Katherina are clear examples of comic prolepsis:

Petruchio. Father, ’tis
thus: yourself and all the world
That talked of her have talked amiss of her.
If she be curst it is for policy,
For she’s not froward, but modest as the dove.
She is not hot, but temperate as the morn.
For patience she will prove a second Grissel,
And Roman Lucrece for her chastity.

(2.1.283ff.)

Even to call Baptista “Father” before obtaining Katherina is comic prolepsis. And in the rest of the speech, the comic effect depends, not on its insights but on its fictionality. He even projects his own fictional duplicity onto her, and claims that she is secretly double (“curst” for “policy”) in his own image. The boastful proleptic bet is that his language will transform the fiction into the real. The comedy arises from the contrast with the known facts of Katherina's conduct, but not from that alone. There is a desire to see Petruchio demonstrate the power of the discourse, and this is accompanied by the possibility of the failure of language and the triumph of the facts.

With regard to his strategy of “killing her in her own humor,” Petruchio makes statements of “love” in flat contradiction to his conduct. Katherina makes aggressive statements, and to complete the symmetry, these could be construed as concealing love. This is how Petruchio says that he interprets them. But there is an assymetry in the dialogue. His words contradict his acts, presenting her with a gap, which at first she refuses to see as anything but “madness.” On the other hand, her words are at first consistent with her gestures. Though she may behave contradictorily, she has no duplicity. The main achievement in Petruchio's parading of his own duplicity, coupled with the insistent (and always comic) misreading of her language and gestures, is to get her to recognize herself as similarly constituted across a gap between appearance and being, i.e., that she is not what she says she is. What is comically broken is Katherina's fierce insistence on a direct relationship between her utterance and her inner truth:

Katherina. My tongue will
tell the anger of my heart,
Or else my heart concealing it will break,
And rather than it shall, I will be free
Even to the uttermost, as I please, in words.
Petruchio. Why, thou say’st
true. It is a paltry cap,
A custard-coffin, a bauble, a silken pie.

(4.3.77ff.)

Petruchio cures her of this directness and freedom “in words.” But this raises the question as to what has really happened to her “curst” contradictoriness when she has undergone Petruchio's education in the nature of the linguistic sign. I would argue that it has not disappeared or been overcome, but has undergone a historic shift, corresponding to the modernity of her discourse. If we say that she has been socialized through a belated acceptance of patriarchy, we must also add that her capacity for irony throws that dominance into perpetual (liberating and/or anxious) doubt.

Insofar as an “inner dialogue” constitutes the dramatic force of the witty exchange, the audience perceives the paradoxical existence of a duet within the combat. Nonetheless, the combat is at least as real as the duet. It is not a question of Petruchio simply perceiving a preexisting split self in Katherina, merely masked by her language, as Ruth Nevo suggests:

What the subtle Dr. Petruchio has done is to drive a wedge into the steel-plating of Katherine's protective armor, so that he speaks at once to the self that she has been and the self she would like to be; the self she has made of herself and the self she has hidden.¹⁴

On the contrary, the split self is produced by Petruchio's address, rather than simply detected by him. His strategy does not reveal another, previously hidden self, but sets up an inner division in her, a space of indeterminacy where subordination may itself be a counterstrategy of resistance. But there is another aspect to this. Katherina's utterances are dialogic responses, penetrated by the discourse which they resist. This is the basis of the effect of interiority, as I have called it. On the other hand, Petruchio's strength in this play, his virtually God-like intelligence and love (for the audience, a gratifying fantasy of male power), depends on the fact that this penetration does not happen to him. Insofar as he is master of the plot, Katherina is his creation out of chaos, and the dialogue is a one-way dialogue. However, a one-way dialogue is an impossibility in fact. Petruchio's claim to power is a narcissistic fantasy, working through a rhetoric of mastery but never unequivocally achieving its goal.

When Ruth Nevo refers to the “subtle Dr. Petruchio,” she mentions Laing as a possible model in the footnotes. There is some truth in this suggestion. Petruchio's address to Katherina has the structure of a “schizophrenic communication,” as theorized by H. F. Searle, following Bateson and Laing.¹⁵ On this view, the schizophrenic communicates in a way in which context, tone of voice, phrasing, gestures, etc., are radically contradictory to the content of the message. Petruchio's words and gestural messages addressed to Katherina are, however, a fictional schizophrenia, in which protestations of concern and love contrast radically with his conduct. Katherina at first interprets the gap as “madness,” which is an attempt at rejection. But then she closes it by recognizing it as intentional, and her interpretation of Petruchio corresponds to a reinterpretation of herself along similar lines. This seems like a successful installation of a strong controlling ego, the goal of Laingian therapy, to overcome the chaotic madness of her own “curs’t” condition. But it raises the problem of the nature of irony.

The Laingian view of irony, rather like Bateson and Searle on humor, assumes an ability of the normal recipient to disambiguate signs, to separate levels of discourse, and to grasp the sender's intention. Without this recentering, irony is indistinguishable from schizophrenia. As one sympathetic commentator on the Laingian view has noted:

In a way, both irony and art are special cases of schizophrenic communication. With regard to their logical structure, and to a great extent their psychological function, each of these three forms of communication follows a pattern which one could call “playing at not playing.” That is, they deal with a type of behavior which is in itself paradoxical, a type of behavior in which level and metalevel are mutually contradictory.¹⁶

Patients diagnosed clinically as schizophrenic are characterized above all by a failure to distinguish levels of discourse, by a consequent lack of humor, and by a tendency to take metaphors literally. That is, by an inability to play. For Laingian thought, the discourse of the schizophrenic patient is not ironic precisely because it is not controlled. It is a chaotic response to an “untenable situation” into which he (or, more usually she) has been placed by the contradictory demands from a beloved authority figure, or even from a whole family group acting in bad faith. (As we will see, this is applicable to Katherina in her “curs’t” state. But the issue is whether it is really overcome by Petruchio's cure, or displaced into the inward split of the modern autonomous, “free,” contracting individual.)

For the Laingian school of thought, clinical schizophrenia is a failure of control, corresponding to an inadequately developed ego. Therapy is aimed at redressing this, by building up self-reliance and independence in various ways. There is a strong commitment to the existential self, implicit in the notion of the bad faith of the family group. Radical therapy is aimed at undoing the individual's subjection to the bad faith of the schizoid family authority, and at building up a strong ego to resist it. It is at this point that Deleuze and Guattari accuse Laing of betraying his best insights and falling back into egopsychology and the familial myth of Oedipalism. They point out that there is generally nothing abnormal in the families of schizophrenics, and that to demonize them is to fail to recognize the normality of “schizophrenic” desire.¹⁷ For them, the villain of the piece is “molar” recontainment in all its forms, i.e., the repressive structures which “reterritorialize” desires through strategies of disfigurement and misrepresentation. That is to say, such recontainment includes the illusory goal of the autonomous self which the ego psychology of the Laing and Bateson school of therapy considers the road to the cure. My purpose is not to settle the thorny clinical dispute, nor to resolve the vast issue haunting this psycho-politics: viz., to what extent should clinical practice integrate the individual into a repressive society or develop the desires that set him/her in conflict with the source of repression?¹⁸ My point is that in the field of ego psychology we encounter the same problem as in literary criticism when it attempts to deal with irony. Irony as a principle of structure and control is set against an irony that would displace all structures (for without this, irony would cease to be ironic). It is this very doubleness of discourse that Petruchio initiates in his play for mastery, and the anxious desire for control continues within critical interpretations seeking to stabilize the meanings of the play. If Petruchio has educated Katherina into an ironic play of signs in lieu of self-expressive language, he has not cured a schizophrenia through a stable ego but installed an ironic subversion of his own project. He has sought from Katherina a willing surrender and subordination of the self in the form of a verbal declaration. But, in order to arrive at this, he has instructed her in an ironic verbal play which makes the nature of the surrendered self forever problematic. Katherina's ability to joke means that the desired closure of the play, which is the goal of Petruchio's plot after all, is put into question. Indeed, as some feminist readings attest, the closure is reversible by the plausible attribution to Katherina of a capacity for ironic utterance and purely fictive self-display.

Katherina's acquisition of irony, then, is a product of socialization in response to Petruchio's address. But it is a response marked above all by a new use of language. Katherina ceases to express herself in her old “curs’t” manner, and now uses language strategically, as a series of manipulable signs. The vulnerability of a transparent and manipulable self disappears, and is replaced by a play of language signs, whose precise degree of falsity or truth is unknowable. Irony takes the form of a nonessentialist acceptance of the power of signs, and “play” becomes a form of resistance to all definition. In this sense, Katherina emerges as an early practitioner of linguistic “jouissance,” in response to the patriarchal claim to know her. Thus her utterance is irreducible either to the expression of her nature or to the version of irony as the binary opposite of that truth, by which she could also be pinned down.

This means that if Petruchio or the audience were to reflect upon his achievement, they could never know if the verbal dominance were real. As an undivided and controlling figure (a male fantasy, in fact), Petruchio expresses euphoric mastery. Anxiety is not part of his representation as a character, but it certainly is part of the discourse which produces him as gratification. In this sense he is akin to Othello and Claudio of Much Ado About Nothing. He is even closer to Benedick in the latter play, for Benedick, in his wooing combat/dialogue with Beatrice, is like a Petruchio who has lost his impervious fantasy status, and is penetrated with anxiety. … [B]ut first I want to deal with the other combat in this play, namely the conflict between Katherina and her sister, Bianca. This antagonism involves two contrasting versions of womanhood, and each young woman is at the center of a different kind of comic discourse. The “double plot” is in reality more than that; it is the articulation of a conflict of discourses.

.....

The formal contrast of the Katherina-Petruchio plot and the Bianca plot is well-known to criticism. I would like to situate the discursive differences in a historical narrative. We can begin to historicize the contrast of the two discourses in the play by pointing to the failure of patriarchal control in the Bianca plot as a failure of tyranny. Roman comedy, after all, must be understood theoretically as a way of lifting temporarily the oppressiveness of Roman law, which gave absolute ownership to the paterfamilias. The comic discourse of the Plautine-Terentian tradition was fixed in the conventionalities of the very law which it subverted. The place of the father is also discursively fixed; he is the figure of a power which is exercized through direct possession. The comedy concerns the suitor's elusion of this virtually incestuous possession, so as to legitimately take his place. Rivalry and transgression are recontained, and this evasion of Oedipal conflict gratifies the audience even as it restores patriarchy on the basis of normality.

An audience which merely consumes the narratives of such comedies “knows” that the young woman is always guarded by the watchful father or senex figures, because she is extremely desirable. This structure, (which is that of the Bianca plot) is endlessly repeated and is still quite familiar. It seems perfectly normal even as it casts a suspicion of incest upon the father figure. According to this assumption of “normality,” a beautiful woman is, after all, naturally desirable. However, if we ask why this narrative arises again and again, the beauty of the fictive woman cannot serve as a causal explanation of the structure. It appears as an expression of something else: the suitor's desire is focused upon the woman, who is therefore beautiful because she is forbidden and owned/protected by the father. And if such a reading of Oedipal rivalry appears too strained or too universalist, I would make the point that in the context of the clannish Roman “familia,” all women deemed worthy of attention were directly owned in this way.

The happy conclusions of comedies on the Roman pattern do not normally draw attention to the collective and clannish sexual politics which underwrite them. The fact that nothing has changed at the end, that the suitor as husband now stands where the father figure did, is not noted because there is no critical position from which such an observation could be made. The comedy assures the transfer of the young woman, evading the bond of paternal incest by trickery instead of a fearful lapse into Oedipal conflict. Unchangeability of conventions is no problem for a discourse where historical change has little purchase. But here in Shakespeare's comedy, the failure of Roman comedy is explicitly registered through Petruchio and Katherina's mockery of the husbands of Bianca and the widow. What is mocked by Petruchio is the failure of a certain kind of patriarchy. In effect, Petruchio affirms through Katherina's own pronouncements the superiority of his new form of patriarchy, because it is a rule by consent. The claim is that the contractual marriage precludes rebellion, like that of Bianca and the widow, whose formal acquiescence to marriage has involved no surrender of their inner selves at all. The basis of Petruchio's claim is the declared assumption of patriarchal values by Katherina herself (cf., Portia in The Merchant of Venice). Furthermore Petruchio reinstalls an order where Baptista's abandonment of certain protective/possessive functions of the father has led to a chaos which he is powerless to control. In sum, the often noted formal contrast of the style of the Bianca plot with the Petruchio-Katherina plot mediates an important historical fault line and shift in modes of patriarchal dominance.

Bianca occupies the position of a girl defending herself within clannish patterns based on status, where the collective interests are in the hands of an actual father. Katherina, by contrast, inhabits a different universe of discourse, but not by choice. In an important sense, she has had her independence thrust upon her in the form of an abandonment by her mercantile father. He dissolves the old law of clannish possession in her case, while preserving it in Bianca's. But this is still a patriarchy. Katherina is “his,” and in freeing her, he is declaring her to be of no value. The point is that Baptista may be only one character, but he is two different father figures in his relationship to Bianca and to Katherina. In him a certain contradiction between being a merchant and being a father is played out. He is usually represented, quite rightly, as a comically weak figure, not too different from the doddering but rich Gremio.

Baptista's law, ostensibly made in favor of the older daughter, actually casts her out and declares her undesirability, in marked contrast to his possessiveness where Bianca is concerned. The insulting aspect of this law concerning Katherina is fairly clear, and gives an immediately understandable reason for her anger with her father for putting her on the market at so cheap a price:

Katherina. I pray you, sir,
is it your will
To make a stale of me amongst these mates?

(1.1.57ff.)

The anger addressed to her father is a reproach that he has totally abandoned a father's possessive love in her case, but not in Bianca's. This does not preclude possible love rivalry with Bianca, when she questions her violently to get her to reveal her preferred suitor. The conventionally minded Bianca slyly suggests this, and Ruth Nevo repeats it as the truth: “we surely do not require inordinate discernment to understand what ails Katherina Minola.”¹⁹ The basis of such commonsense criticism is to read the outcome, where Petruchio gets this “truth” recognized, back into the preceding discourse as its only truth. But Katherina's jealousy of the younger daughter has a much more direct connection with their father's preference than with Bianca's totally undesirable suitors. Even when Katherina expresses jealous anger at the prospect of Bianca's marriage, she expresses it in terms of a loss of the higher status that she has hitherto had:

Katherina. What, will you
not suffer me? Nay, now I see
She is your treasure, she must have a husband,
I must dance barefoot on her wedding-day
And for your love to her lead apes in hell.

(2.1.31ff.)

The dancing barefoot at a sister's wedding and the supposed leading of apes in hell were the humiliations reserved for women who remained spinsters. This jealous outburst is less concerned with a desirable sexual partner than with the father's preference for the younger daughter and the humiliating loss of status that she confronts here. (Incidentally, Macfarlane notes that even in England, marriage might give a woman a higher status than her spinster sisters, marked by a right to wear certain clothes, so the humiliation would be very public.²⁰) Katherina's jealous rage, then, is not the simple expression of a secret desire for a husband bursting through a willful self-repression. It is a jealousy over the father's preference for Bianca, whether this is expressed in the form of witholding her from suitors or preparing to give her away for a large dowry. This means that Katherina's angry refusal to get married is not a clearcut rejection of her father. On the contrary, her jealous anger is a way of staying with him. If she is rebelling, it is against a father who has cast her out, publicly declaring her to be of no value; it is not, as in the case of Bianca's Roman comedy, a rebellion against a father who would keep her in.

Katherina's anger arises from her loss of status. It is an anger of betrayed clannish loyalty and love. Baptista's only response is to deny his responsibility: “Was ever gentleman thus griev’d as I?” (2.1.37). He has made a law, ostensibly in her favor, and is reproached for favoring Bianca. The key to the contradiction escapes him, but it arises from what his proclamation reveals. Katherina's revolt is not against her father; on the contrary it is against the law through which he has abandoned the possessive role of the patriarch. Her freedom is nothing but a mercantile dissolution of older structures. It is even possible that her fierce domination of her sister is an attempt to stand in for her father's weakened vigilance. Hortensio's explanation of Baptista's law to Petruchio, suggests an unvoiced complicity between Baptista and Katherina:

Hortensio. He hath the jewel
of my life in hold,
His youngest daughter, beautiful Bianca,
And her witholds from me and other more,
Suitors to her and rivals in my love,
Supposing it a thing impossible,
For those defects I have before rehears’d
That ever Katherina will be wooed.
Therefore this order hath Baptista ta’en,
That none shall have access unto Bianca
Till Katherina the curst have got a husband. [emphasis added]

(1.2.118ff.)

Hortensio may be merely projecting these motives, but an audience could never know whether he is right or not. The speech indicates a possible reading of the situation. Thus Katherina would not be merely following her own inclinations in remaining unmarried. Her “curs’t” rebelliousness would be a posture of loyalty and love, through which she maintains the law of patriarchal possession against Baptista's abandonment. Seen from Katherina's position, there could scarcely be a more striking example of the “double bind” injunction. It could be rendered in this way: “1. I want to get rid of you. You are undesirable, so I will give you freedom to marry absolutely anyone. 2. Rebel against this insulting abandonment, as I know you must, because by so doing you will serve my desire to keep Bianca, and we will all stay together as a clan.” However this schizoid injunction has no conscious agent. It seems to arise from Baptista's inadequacy, i.e., from the failure of traditional paternity, rather than from conscious intention.

The point about Baptista's law is that it does assert ownership over Katherina but only in order to reject her at the same time. It drives her out of the clan structure of possession where Bianca has a clear tenable position. But the command which drives her out still claims her allegiance, as any command must. The transfer of this untenable position to the one offered by Petruchio is not a move into a pure freedom of self-possession, where in ironic “play” she would be “herself.” But nor is it a return to a timeless patriarchal structure. It is a move from a clearly defined “status” in the clan-based order into a “self-possession” which amounts only to the contractual freedom to alienate the self. Irony, which means here the ability to avoid the definition of that self (by “retaining for oneself the final word,” as Bakhtin puts it) offers a space for maneuver within the new discursive constraints.²¹ But the irony, which has been brought into being as both acquiescence and resistance to Petruchio's “game” strategy, continues to operate around the traces of the structure which has been left behind, namely the clannish structure of patriarchal possession where the father, tyrannical or benevolent, has not yet abandoned his direct controlling possession. He persists as the demand for control within the interiorized play of signs in the individual, modern subject.

Through this process of interiorization (entirely unknown to Bianca and the widow), the father seems to have become for Katherina the Lacanian phallus, that is, a felt need to anchor the self within and against the very play of signifiers which give her a measure of freedom. In her fierce loyalty to Baptista, transferred to Petruchio (her psychotherapist), she retreats from a greater freedom, possibly fearing it as the madness within, the “curs’t” condition which lies, according to Lacan, beyond the Symbolic Order held in place by the phallus.

Notes

1. The Taming Of A Shrew [1594] in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, volume 1, ed. Geoffrey Bullough (London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, and Columbia University Press, 1957), 69-108.

2. E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's Early Comedies (London: Chatto and Windus, 1965), 82-83.

3. Tillyard, Shakespeare's Early Comedies, 85.

4. Theodore Weiss, The Breath of Clowns and Kings: Shakespeare's Early Comedies and History Plays (London: Chatto and Windus, 1971), 68.

5. John C. Bean, “Comic Structure and the Humanizing of Kate: The Taming of the Shrew” in The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz et al. (Urbana, Chicago, and London: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 69-70.

6. This conflict was painted over, to employ a happy metaphor, by the notion of the contract. It is important to recall that the idea of the social contract was not an invention of the radical bourgeois thinkers of the late-17th and 18th century. Their specific contribution was to produce a critique of the inequality of a contract when power is vested on one side only. Under those circumstances, the formality of the contract, namely an agreement between two freely consenting parties, serves to mask the real inequality of the subordination. This rationalist critique brings to light what the discourse attempts to hide about itself.

7. For a full discussion, see Alan Macfarlane, Marriage and Love in England 1300-1840 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 120-147, and 321-344 in particular.

8. Alan Macfarlane, Marriage and Love in England 1300-1840, 335.

9. “Status” and “contract” as indices of contrasting social forms are taken from Sir Henry Sumner Maine, Ancient Law [1861]. Alan Macfarlane observes: “With the arrival of capitalism the society is no longer held together by status but by contract—that is, by the market, by an impersonal law, a centralized state. This provides a framework which permits a certain disengagement from the family, enabling free-floating individuals to enter the labour market early.” Marriage and Love in England, 328. He points to the paradox that this is also the enabling condition for romantic love, the antithesis of capitalistic rationality. See also Tony Tanner's use of these terms in Adultery and the Novel: Contract and Transgression (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins, 1979), chapter 1.

10. Alan Macfarlane, Marriage and Love in England, 325.

11. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955).

12. Louis Althusser, “Lenin and Philosophy” and Other Essays trans. Ben Brewster (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1971, 168ff.

13. Coppélia Kahn, Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 104.

14. Ruth Nevo, Comic Transformations in Shakespeare (London and New York: Methuen, 1980, 48-49.

15. H. F. Searle, Collected Papers on Schizophrenia and Other Related Topics (New York: International Universities Press, 1965), 381-428.

16. Rolf Breuer, “Irony, Literature, and Schizophrenia,” New Literary History 12, no. 1 (Autumn 1980): 105.

17. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, L'Anti-Oedipe: Capitalisme et Schizophrénie (Paris: Minuit, 1972), 430-433.

18. For an interesting discussion see Peter Sedgwick, Psycho Politics (London: Pluto Press, 1982).

19. Ruth Nevo, Comic Transformations in Shakespeare, 40.

20. Alan Macfarlane, Marriage and Love in England 1300-1840, 149.

21. M. M. Bakhtin in Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics [1929, revised 1963] explains that the relationship to the other and self-definition are intimately related, and both are held in suspense by the self's retention of a “loophole”: “A loophole is the retention for oneself of the possibility for altering the ultimate, final meaning of one's own words. If a word retains such a loophole this must inevitably be reflected in its structure. This potential other meaning, that is, the loophole left open, accompanies the word like a shadow. Judged by its meaning alone, the word with a loophole should be an ultimate word and does present itself as such, but in fact it is only the penultimate word and places after itself only a conditional, not a final, period.” M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryn Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 233.