SOURCE: “The Touring of the Shrew,” in New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. 2, No. 7, August, 1986, pp. 275-81.

[In the review below, Cousin examines two productions of The Taming of the Shrew. The critic maintains that although The Medieval Players' production raised interesting questions concerning gender roles, it failed to take the sex-reversal experiment far enough, and describes the Royal Shakespeare Company production as “sombre,” praising the production’s unflinching portrayal of Petruchio's “unpleasant” side.]

During 1985, it was possible to see, as I did, two productions of The Taming of the Shrew performed in non-conventional playing spaces. On one of the few sunny afternoons of the summer, I saw an open-air performance by the Medieval Players in the New College cloisters, Oxford; then in December the RSC Nat West touring version came to the Whitbread Flowers Warehouse, Stratford. I found a good deal to admire and enjoy about both productions, but certain decisions which the Medieval Players took with regard to casting led me to speculate on the problems which the play presents for a contemporary audience. The RSC touring version seemed to me to demonstrate one very effective way of confronting these problems and of finding acceptable solutions to them.

The basic difficulty of the play is of course its attitude to women. Petruchio's treatment of Kate is bad enough (witness his reference to her as ‘my goods, my chattels’). But how is an audience today to approach Kate's final speech? How can a contemporary audience accept the following words?

I am ashamed that women are so simple
To offer war where they should kneel for peace,
Or seek for rule, supremacy and sway
When they are bound to serve, love and obey.
But now I see our lances are but straws,
Our strengths as weak, our weakness past compare,
That seeming to be most which we indeed least are,
Then vail your stomachs, for it is no boot,
And place your hands below your husband's foot:
In token of which duty, if he please,
My hand is ready: may it do him ease.

It is clear from the programme notes to the Medieval Players' production that they were aware of the play's possible difficulties. The following quotation from the programme points to their own solution:

By casting a man as Kate, as Shakespeare himself would, of course, have done, the Medieval Players' production takes the play away from inappropriate modern reaction and lets us see the struggle as a game, not as a solemn treatise.

Not only Kate, but Bianca, too, was played by a man. Furthermore, a number of the male characters—notably Tranio, and two of the suitors to Bianca, Lucentio and Hortensio—were played by women. These sex-reversals worked well. I particularly enjoyed the portrayal of Hortensio, whose absurdities and pretensions were deliciously mocked by Joanna Brookes, the actress playing the role, and also Graham Christopher's Bianca, whose modestly downcast eyes and pouting lips revealed rather than hid the steely determination beneath these surface tricks.

My difficulty with the Medieval Players' production lay in the fact that they didn't take their ideas about the play through to their obvious conclusion—for although Kate and Bianca were played by men, and Lucentio, Tranio and Hortensio by women, there was no sex-reversal in the case of Petruchio. The idea of reversing the sex of the actors playing the lovers seems to me to make sense only if this idea is carried through in the case of the central pair.

If Petruchio had been played by a woman, the relationship between the two would have been funnier because the actors could have used the fact that they were of the opposite sex to comment on their characters' follies. A man playing a woman or a woman playing a man can use this fact to point up the character's absurdities (as a number of the actors did). The games-element of the play, which the company wanted to stress, would then have been more evident.

In addition to making the relationship between the central characters funnier, casting a woman as Petruchio would have enabled the actors to find a way of engaging constructively with the problems the play holds for us today. If both Petruchio and Kate had been played by people of the opposite sex, it would have been better possible for the actor and actress to explore the sexual basis of the relationship and, through this, to suggest a developing affection and mutual respect. These qualities are there in Shakespeare's text. What is needed is a way of presenting them which does not shirk the task of confronting the problems which the play presents for us today.

I cannot see these problems as an ‘inappropriate modern reaction’. A performance of any play takes place in the present. Obviously the text was conceived and written in the past, and it is important that throughout rehearsals due consideration should be given to careful exploration of the playwright's use of language, known conditions of writing and performance, and so on. Finally, however, the actors have only their twentieth-century selves with which to bring the text to life, and the audience must respond with their present-day hearts and minds.

There is a moment at the end of Act V, Scene i, of The Taming of the Shrew which is, I think, a major turning point in the relationship between the central characters. Petruchio asks Kate to kiss him, but she answers that she is ashamed to do so in the street. Petruchio tells her that in that case they must turn back and return home instead of finishing their almost completed journey to her father's house. Poor Kate, exhausted by Petruchio's treatment of her, kisses him, and says, ‘now pray thee, love, stay!’ Clearly it is for actors and director to decide how to play this, but, whatever decision they make, the scene has to make sense in relation to the end of the play.

Individually the actors playing Kate and Petruchio in the Medieval Players' production performed the scene well. I found the section immediately prior to the kiss moving, but the production had provided no context for the kiss itself. What we were left with was two men on a raised platform, one dressed as a man, one as a woman. The man dressed as a woman crossed to the man dressed as a man as if he were going to kiss him. Then the latter turned his head away so that the former's lips just brushed his cheek. The atmosphere between the two, which a moment before had been electrically charged, was lost.

The two actors had no choice but to play the scene in this way, because a homosexual undercurrent, for which no expectation had been set up, would have been out of place: but no alternative expectation had been established either which would have given the actors a more satisfactory way of playing the scene. The result was that the genuine feeling which can be seen to distinguish Kate and Petruchio from the other lovers was lost, and the audience left finally with the fact of Kate's seemingly unconditional surrender to Petruchio's bullying, without being provided with any acceptable emotional or intellectual way of responding.

Kate's submission to Petruchio is not simply verbal. She offers to place her hand beneath her husband's foot, in token of her obedience. In the Medieval Players' production, Kate placed her (his) hand on the ground, and Petruchio lifted it and raised Kate up. It could have been a very moving moment, in that it could have shown Petruchio's acceptance of a future equality between the two of them, but, like the earlier kiss, it lacked a context. A female Petruchio and a male Kate could have used this moment to reveal the comradeship and sexual love which have come to characterize the relationship, and by freeing this from problems of gender and expectations regarding sexual characteristics and attitudes, have made the production deeply moving and thought-provoking.

The RSC touring production was so different that it took an effort of imagination to recognize it as an interpretation of the same play. Performed in traverse, with a long, thin central playing-area, and with costumes and set design largely in a near-monochromatic range of off-whites, beiges, greys, and browns, this was frequently a sombre, even a hauntingly sad, production.

The narrow, extended playing area did not always lend itself well to the sharply defined clarity of focus needed for farce. I felt at times as though I was watching a tennis match, my head moving from side to side, as I focused first on one piece of action, then on another. Despite this, however, the production, taken as a whole, seemed to me admirable. It was beautiful to look at, but not in a way I found distracting. It was very moving and, though funny only intermittently, the laughter when it came was of a particularly satisfying kind. It didn't evade the question of the play's contemporary relevance, but found instead a way of confronting its difficulties.

Shakespeare, of course, begins the play with an Induction, the gulling of the drunken Christopher Sly, who is fooled into believing that he is a rich lord watching a performance by a group of strolling players. The performance is actually taking place, but Sly's status and wealth is a fabrication. Di Trevis's production for the RSC touring company added a framework which began and ended the play, and served at a number of other moments as a valuable point of reference.

The performance opened in darkness with the sound of a baby crying. Then the music of a violin was heard, and as the lights went up the audience watched the entrance from one end of the playing space of a group of nineteenth-century travelling players. The actors formed themselves into a disturbingly beautiful and moving tableau. A woman carrying a bundle representing a baby was frozen in the attitude of pulling a weird, catlike structure which resembled a huge pram made out of plaited cane with a large, dark-coloured hood. In it sat another woman, also holding a baby.

Two women dressed as gypsies played violins, and the rest of the company of players stood immobile for a few seconds. Behind them was a large, dirty, off-white banner on which were written the words. The Taming of the Shrew—a Kind of History. Slowly, the company began to trudge across the long expanse of the playing space. The floor and the wooden partitions at either end were painted a dull black. Rolled-up white cloths lined the playing area, showing the demarcation of the performance-space. The banner and the cart suggested echoes of Brecht—though the latter was obscurely reminiscent, too, of Lewis Carroll, while the muted colours and the style of the costumes had a Dickensian feel. The players seemed to move helplessly through a cold and inhospitable landscape.

Slowly the players exited, and Christopher Sly and the Hostess erupted noisily into the performance-area through one of the central aisles. This was a distinctly ‘realistic’ Sly. He urinated and vomited on stage, and finally, when the Hostess had left, threw down a small scrap of cloth on to the vomit and fell asleep.

The care with which the company of travelling players and the credibility of the dirty, drunken Sly were established was very important with regard to the overall effect of the production. Sly was present throughout. Beautifully played by Michael Troughton, he served as an on-stage observer of the players' performance, a kind of barometer by which the actual audience could test their responses to the action.

The fact that the play was clearly being performed by the players, and the presence of Sly—a desperately poor and hopeless man, falsely convinced that he has power and riches—together created a framing-effect which enabled the audience to set the play's events at a distance, yet also gave them a structure within which to formulate their responses.

The connection between the two illusions—that which the players create and Sly's unconscious role-playing—was clearly made when Sly, newly dressed in his rich man's clothes, and both fascinated and bewildered by what is happening, sat on a couch at one end of the playing-space, while in the centre of the performance-area the page was transformed into the semblance of Sly's lady. Slowly, a woman's wig was placed on the page's head, completing the illusion.

The players waited humbly for the real lord, who stood patronisingly behind Sly, to give them permission to begin performing. Their costumes seemed only partially complete. Kate and Bianca wore underskirts and sleeveless bodices, laced at the back. Their parasols were full of holes. The tattiness was deliberately contrived, the subdued colours very beautiful. The incompleteness was a small but constant reminder of the ‘illusion’ of the ‘players performing’.

From the first meeting between the two, the relationship between Kate and Petruchio was explored constructively. Alfred Molina, as Petruchio, stood alone on stage awaiting his first glimpse of the woman he had just stated his intention of marrying. His tall figure was dressed in a dirty white suit and down-at-heel black boots. His head was hunched so that his chin touched his chest. He looked belligerent and bull-like, yet unconfident, as he tried to work out how to approach Kate.

The traverse staging worked effectively in the ensuing scene, when the performance-area triumphantly aided the farcical elements of the play. The furniture consisted simply of stools in the centre of the space. The actor and actress skirmished round these and each other, using Shakespeare's words and the space to score points off each other. The scene was very funny, but it established, too, both an equality of wit and determination and a sexual current of energy between them on which the rest of the production was able to build.

A major reason why the depiction of the relationship between Kate and Petruchio was so successful was that Alfred Molina was not afraid of showing the audience the unpleasant aspects of Petruchio. When he referred to Kate as ‘my goods, my chattels’, he did not attempt to mitigate the force of the words by speaking them lightheartedly. But neither did he show Petruchio as an unpleasant man, with whom it was unnecessary to sympathize: instead, he spoke the words clearly and strongly, and with a certain integrity, challenging the audience to formulate their own response.

Kate was played powerfully and movingly by Sian Thomas. There was a particularly interesting interpretation of Act IV, Scene v, which revealed how well Kate and Petruchio were matched, and also set up expectations which the climax to the production satisfactorily resolved. During the long and tedious journey from Petruchio's home to Kate's father's house, Petruchio constantly contradicts Kate, and insists that she accept his version of events, even if this is patently absurd.

The scene takes place on a public road. It is daylight, but Petruchio insists he will go no further unless Kate agrees that the moon is shining. The dialogue culminates in Kate's ‘agreement’:

Then God be bless'd, it is the blessed sun;
But sun it is not when you say it is not,
And the moon changes even as your mind.
What you will have it nam'd, even that it is;
And so, it shall be so for Katharine.

As Hortensio, who is also present, comments to Petruchio, seemingly Kate has accepted Petruchio's view of the relationship: ‘the field is won’. The travellers then meet an unknown elderly man and Petruchio instructs Kate to embrace this ‘fair lovely maid’. Kate calls the man a ‘young budding virgin’, at which point Petruchio comments that she must be mad to address an old man in this way. Kate's following lines are:

Pardon, old father, my mistaking eyes
That have been so bedazzled with the sun
That everything I look on seemest green.

In this production, Kate emphasized the word ‘sun’ in such a way that Petruchio was fully reminded of the preceding battle of words between them, and he looked away in confusion. A moment before, it had seemed that Petruchio had bullied Kate into submission, but Sian Thomas's intonation and Alfred Molina's look of discomfort established the fact that this was a turning point of their relationship.

Kate appeared to have accepted the subservient position demanded of her, but she had the wit and skill to reveal to Petruchio the tactics he had used to beat her. Now, he looked embarrassed and at a loss as to how to proceed. The possibility of a different kind of relationship was created, and the actor and actress were able to play the kiss in the next scene in a way which revealed the growth of tenderness and desire between them.

As well as relationships between men and women, this production explored, through the character of Christopher Sly and the client status of the travelling players, the relationship between the privileged and the non-privileged. During the second half of the production, Sly became progressively more caught up in the events which were being enacted before him. At one point he watched Lucentio kiss Bianca's bare arm and became clearly interested in doing the same to his ‘lady’.

Gradually, however, as he watched the slow growth of tenderness between Kate and Petruchio, his own feelings changed and he timidly and gently held his ‘lady's’ hand. For Sly, the fictitious events he was watching were real, and he was persuaded by what he saw to respond more caringly.

The final part of the performance skilfully interwove the various strands which had been established—the developing relationship between Kate and Petruchio, the link between Sly's situation and the play-within-the-play, and the framing device of the travelling players who present the show. Act V, Scene i, ended with the kiss between Kate and Petruchio, but before this the second and third of these strands were linked in a particularly interesting way.

The elderly gentleman whom Kate addresses at Petruchio's command as ‘young budding virgin’ is in actuality Vincentio, father of Bianca's lover, Lucentio. In order to win his bride, Lucentio has changed places with his servant Tranio, and now Tranio pretends not to know his master's father and calls for an officer to take Vincentio to gaol.

In Di Trevis's production, Sly heard the call for an officer to be summoned, and intervened decisively. ‘No,’ he said, ‘no prison.’ The players tried to remonstrate with him, reminding him that it was a play he was watching, not reality, but he was adamant. Clearly he had had experience of prison, and refused to countenance its introduction into the play. The actors looked helplessly at each other, wondering how to continue. Then the comic policeman who had entered was persuaded to leave. Biondello, Lucentio, and Bianca entered, and the action continued.

This moment worked in a variety of ways. It was, first of all, very funny. Secondly, it focused the audience's attention on the various illusions which had been established. The central action concerns the progress in the relationship of the lovers, chiefly Petruchio and Kate. This is presented as a play performed by a group of actors and is watched by Sly who wrongly believes himself to be a rich lord. At the same time, the audience knows that all the characters, including Sly and the players, are played by actors.

The interruption of the play-within-the-play and the focus on the other illusions which had been established had the effect of reminding the audience that they were watching a play. It reminded them, too, of Sly's state of poverty at the beginning of the performance. Now his involvement in the fiction of his role makes him believe in his ability to affect the fictitious events being enacted before him; but his power is as illusory as the play he watches, and as his privileged status.

After Sly's interruption, the play resumed its course towards the imminent conclusion. Sian Thomas's rendering of Kate's final speech was characterized by a certain ambiguity. She appeared to suggest that she was carrying Petruchio's previously stated view of her role as wife through to its logical conclusion, in order to show its absurdity.

The speech was partly tongue-in-cheek, but it also clearly showed Kate's new-found love for her husband. Petruchio listened with growing emotion to Kate's words, and at the end wiped away a tear. His words, ‘Why, there's a wench!’ were spoken quietly, and he was obviously moved. He picked up the cap which he had ordered Kate to throw down, put it gently on her head, and then jokingly placed it on his own. The two of them ran off with their arms round each other, laughing at the folly of the other characters.

The play-within-the-play ended with a wedding tableau, rose petals, and music, but the performance was not over. The players took their bows and went off to change, but Sly's own fiction had not ended. After the confusion of the congratulation of the players, and their subsequent exit, Sly and his ‘lady’ moved towards each other. Sly was gentle and loving. He believed in his role, and he had seen that respect and affection between men and women was possible. Then the page threw off his wig and ran away, laughing mockingly. Sly watched, grief-stricken, and the genuine lord contemptuously threw a few coins at his feet. Sly had fulfilled his part as entertainer. Now he was being paid.

Some of the players then returned to collect props and costumes. An actress got down on her hands and knees to clean the floor. The actress who had played Kate entered. She looked humble and downtrodden now. There was no trace of her courage and vivacity as Kate. In her arms she held the baby she had carried at the beginning of the performance as she pulled the cart. As the lights faded for the final time, Sly stretched out his hand to this actress, offering her as a gift one of the coins that had been tossed at him.

A poor man had learned something through the experience of watching the play, but he was without power. He was a man, but he was not rich, and within the society the production depicted both qualities were necessary before a human being was considered of real worth. In the play-within-the-play which constituted the main action of the performance the real audience had seen a man and woman discover from a seemingly hopeless starting point a relationship that was moving and valid. The framing of this stage action with other illusions provided a structure within which audiences could explore their response to the play. Like the frame of a picture, these illusions could serve to focus the attention on events depicted within the frame or, finally, on the external world.