SOURCE: “The Taming of the Shrew: Women, Acting, and Power,” in Studies in the Literary Imagination, Vol. 26, No. 1, 1993, pp. 67-84.

[In the essay below, Dusinberre reexamines Katherina's role in light of the fact that in the original performances of The Taming of the Shrew Katherina would have been played by a young male actor. Dusinberre explores the ways in which the audience's perceptions of the power relations in the play would have been affected by this knowledge, and notes that the boys, like women in Elizabethan society, were in positions of dependency.]

The opening of The Taming of the Shrew is strikingly different from that of the related play The Taming of a Shrew in offering the audience in the first ten lines a battle between the sexes. The Beggar, who calls himself Christopher Sly, threatens to “pheeze” the Hostess who throws him out of her inn, not just for drunkenness, but for not paying for broken glasses. Threatening Sly with the stocks, the Hostess exits, determining to send for the constable. In A Shrew, the innkeeper is a Tapster, and Slie's offence simply inebriation. Shakespeare's Sly defies the Hostess in a strange little speech: “Ile not budge an inch boy. Let him come, and kindly.” He has in the course of eleven lines quoted Kyd's Spanish Tragedy and challenged her abuse of him as a rogue: “Y'are a baggage, the Slies are no rogues. Look in the Chronicles, we came in with Richard Conqueror: therefore paucas pallabris, let the world slide: Sessa” (First Folio). He sounds momentarily like John Durbeyfield in Hardy's Tess, claiming an ancient and declining stock. The little interchange offers a vignette in which a man and woman engage in a power struggle: she, only a woman, but with a trade and a function which give her access to authority over him: he a beggar with illusions of grandeur, ancestral memories of great men, culture, a power he no longer posesses. But why does he call her “boy”?

I want to argue that he calls her boy because she is a boy. The Hostess must, in Shakespeare's theatre, have been played by a boy actor. But if Sly addresses her as a boy, then a new dimension is added to the interchange. In his drunkenness he seems momentarily to refuse to enter the play: to be, not a drunken beggar, but a drunken actor, who forgets that his dialogue is with a Hostess, and thinks that the boy actor is getting above himself. In other words, the theatrical illusion seems to be tested before it is even under way. Is Sly a beggar, or is he an actor who must play a beggar?

In The Taming of the Shrew, more than in any other play, Shakespeare uses the relationships between actors as a commentary on the social relationships represented in the self-contained world of the play, the drama of The Shrew which is performed before the Beggar (persuaded to believe that he is a lord) at the request of the “real” Lord of the Induction who enters from hunting to refresh himself at the inn and is visited by a company of players. The audience in the theatre is required to react to two competing dramas: a stage representation of a traditional courtship and taming drama; and a more covert drama which constantly interrupts and comments on the taming drama, one generated by the actual structures of relationship present in the company which performs the piece. Sly's use of the term “boy” to the boy actor is only one of many oddities which suggest to the audience the presence in the play itself of actors, not just impersonators of characters. I want to demonstrate how this works in a number of interchanges in the play, and to reinterpret Kate's role in the light of its original theatrical provenance: that Kate would have been played, like the Hostess, Bianca, the Widow, and the young Biondello, by a boy. How would this material condition of Shakespeare's theatre have modified audience perception of the power structures represented in the fiction of The Taming of the Shrew?¹

If Kate is played by a boy in the position of apprentice, then the dynamic between Kate and other players on stage, and between Kate and women in the audience, is altered from what it is in the modern theatre. The boys stood in the position of apprentice towards the adult sharers in the company.² It was not a guild apprenticeship, but more of a personal arrangement, such as that between Pepys and his boy Tom Edwards in the 1660s, a child whom he employed as his attendant from the Chapel Royal: well-educated and a good singer (V [1664], 228, 234 n.1, 255) The boys in Shakespeare's company would each have had a particular master; Burbage was master to Nicholas Tooley, and Augustine Phillips—another boy in the company—spoke in his will of Tooley as his “fellow” in the company (Greg I:47). The master-pupil relationship between the apprentices and the adult actors and sharers in the company is a highly significant one in the dynamics of the company and can be seen to be in operation in The Shrew. The Lord sends instructions to his page on how to play the lady, as any master might have instructed his apprentice on how to play Kate. Furthermore, the apprentice's role in the company creates for him a special relationship with the women in the theatre audience. He must, when the play is done, return to a position of dependency. But great ladies enjoyed a position of social superiority to that of apprentices (Howard 31-40). The apprentice has within the world of the play access not only to that momentary social superiority but also access to the stage power of the female heroine. Women in the theatre audience may return to the subservient lives of women in Elizabethan social structures, but they too have been allowed within the theatre the fantasy of different kinds of power which link them in sympathy with the boy himself as he represents women on stage. Sly, as an actor refusing to play his part—there was, after all, an actor in Shakespeare's company called William Sly—defies his inferior in the company, the boy playing the Hostess. But the play gives the Hostess authority over him: she demands that he pay for the broken glasses and sends for the constable.

The Taming of the Shrew creates for the audience images of power in the male world in the roles of Petruchio, Baptista, Lucentio, but it also undermines them with a different kind of power, generated by the counterpointing of the actor with the role he plays. This special energy enters the play through the ambiguous medium of Sly, but is sustained throughout the drama by the covert juxtaposing in Kate's role of the heroine and the boy apprentice who must act her. Similarly, the actor who plays Tranio with histrionic virtuosity oscillates between the subservience of his social role and the dominance of his acting role as Lucentio.

Curiously, various snippets of information back up a theory that the Induction of The Shrew deliberately places before the theatre audience not a fiction, but a group of players whom they may identify as actors, rather than as characters, as a modern audience might identify repertory players or particular actors and actresses in a number of different roles. Two actors who appear in the Induction set this line of enquiry in motion. The Taming of the Shrew contains a number of prefixes in the text which refer directly to the names of actors: possibly Sly himself, and certainly Sincklo: named as the Second Player in the Induction. This seems to be more than accident as the play constantly obliges the audience to remember that behind the character in the play is an actor who has his own reality and his own relation to the other figures on the stage, a relation forged in the acting company, not in the Italian society world in which he plays a part.

Shakespeare's Sly may in fact have been played by William Sly, a member of both the Pembroke's men in the early 1590's (McMillin, “Casting”) and subsequently of Shakespeare's company, the Chamberlain's men, later the King's men. His name is on the list of Shakespeare's company at the beginning of the 1623 Folio. In 1604, William Sly appears in the new induction which the playwright John Marston wrote for The Malcontent. He is named in the Dramatis Personae under a special heading: “Actors of the King's Men, at the Globe Theatre, who appear in the Induction: WILLIAM SLY, JOHN SINKLO, RICHARD BURBAGE, HENRY CONDELL, JOHN LOWIN.” In this Induction, Sly pretends to be a member of the audience with social pretensions who has come to sit on the stage as if he were a gallant. The Tire-man, realising that he is not a gentleman, tries to shoo him off: “Sir, the gentlemen will be angry if you sit there.” Sly calls for the other actors, saying that he has seen the play often and “can give them intelligence for their action.” When the actor John Sinklo enters, he greets Sly familiarly: “Save you, coz.” They gossip, and call for the players, Burbage, Condell and Lowin. At a certain point, Sly seems to be rambling and one of the actors begs him to leave the stage, this time successfully. The part is a curiosity in its transparent disguising of two actors for audience members, while on the page they remain simply actors.

Odder still, Sinklo appears in The Shrew, just seventy lines after Sly has fallen into a drunken sleep. The Players enter and the Lord turns to the second player, named in the Folio prefix, probably on Shakespeare's own authority, Sincklo. Sincklo was distinguished in Shakespeare's company by his appearance: he was extremely thin and cadaverous-looking, and he played parts which suited this physiognomy. He is named in 2 Henry IV as the Beadle who arrests Mistress Quickly and Doll. He played the forester in 3 Henry VI who arrests the King. He probably played the emaciated Apothecary who supplies Romeo with poison, and Robert Faulconbridge in King John, mocked by the Bastard for his lack of sex appeal (Gaw 289-303; Wentersdorf, “Names”; McMillin, “Casting” 155, 157). The Lord remembers him in a particular part:

          This fellow I remember
Since once he played a farmer's eldest son—
'Twas where you wooed the gentlewoman so well—
I have forgot your name, but sure that part
Was aptly fitted and naturally performed.(3)

This passage is always taken straight: Shakespeare made a friendly gesture towards an actor for a good performance. But its jests seem to me to huddle in upon each other. The Lord cannot remember his name, although Shakespeare names him in his text: he is John Sincklo. You were a wonderful lover, remarks the Lord to someone who looks like a jailer or a supplier of poison. It is a theatre company's joke, but it becomes much funnier if the audience has seen the actor in other parts and can share the joke. They would have been able to share the joke if they had just seen 2 Henry IV; The Shrew was certainly performed in these years.

But one must perhaps also ask whether Shakespeare's play was written sometime in 1595-7, not in the earlier period. Sincklo's presence in the Induction to The Shrew, together with the possible references to his other roles, particularly in 2 Henry IV, might imply a later date for Shakespeare's play than is usually suggested.⁴The Shrew would then enter the constellation of plays in which Shakespeare probably used Sincklo: Romeo and Juliet, and King John. The interchanges between Sly and the Hostess at the beginning of The Shrew are rich partly because they recall the interchanges in the two parts of Henry IV between Mistress Quickly and Falstaff.

Sincklo's name for the Second Player immediately raises the question of doubling. The Elizabethan custom of theatrical doubling would have made it possible for The Shrew to be acted with only thirteen players (nine adults and four boys), excluding hired men.⁵ It has been suggested that the absence of a return to the Sly plot at the end, and of the interventions in the play made by Slie in A Shrew, result from a theatrical exigency when the Players were touring at the time of theatre closures because of the plague. With his talent for making a virtue out of necessity, Shakespeare seems often to have constructed his plays with doubling written into their artistic conception. Hippolyta may have been doubled with Titania, and often is so on the modern stage. In Pericles, it is almost certain that the incestuous Princess at the beginning doubles with Marina, the virtuous and chaste Princess at the end. Many correspondences in structure and language make doubling part of the play's emotional impact. If Shakespeare used an economical touring cast of only thirteen actors, all the players who appear in the Induction to The Shrew must originally have played parts in the drama presented to Sly. Did Shakespeare, as was his custom, consider the artistic implications of doubling in relation to the fiction he was creating in the main body of the play, and if so, how did that theatrical necessity affect the construction of the action? Sincklo as Second Player must have acted a part in the main action of The Shrew. But which part?

The question can be answered by returning to the peculiar partnership between Sly and Sincklo, in theatrical terms, in both the Induction to The Shrew, and later in Marston's The Malcontent. The doubling process seems in The Shrew to create a special line of communication with the audience particularly evident in the scene in which Lucentio's father Vincentio is brought face to face with the Pedant who pretends to be the father. The scene acquires a special point if Sly doubles with Vincentio. Artistically, Sly makes an ideal Vincentio. The Beggar took little convincing (although much more than in the quarto play) that he was a lord; he is doubled with a wealthy man incapable of entering a world of illusion, whether created by drink or disguise, a man of solid single identity, the antithesis of an actor. Vincentio is a “sober ancient gentleman” who is presented with a tale about his own identity: that he is an imposter.

This is not Vincentio's first encounter with a challenge to his own self-perception. Kate has greeted him on the road to her father's house:

          Young budding virgin, fair and fresh and sweet,
Whither away, or where is thy abode?
Happy the parents of so fair a child!
Happier the man whom favourable stars
Allots thee for his lovely bedfellow.

(4.5.37)

Vincentio is gentleman enough to take it all in good part as a merry joke between gentlefolk. But the habits of sobriety which determine his good-humoured acceptance of a joke at his expense threaten to turn the second comic denial of his identity into a scene more tragic than comic. Turning on Tranio, disguised as Lucentio, he cries: “O, he hath murdered his master! Lay hold on him, I charge you in the Duke's name. O my son, my son!” (5.1.67-9). In The Taming of the Shrew, where everyone tries his or her hand at playing a part, Vincentio's rugged adherence to a God-given role is both a weakness and a strength. It underlines Vincentio's social reality as a man of wealth and position but heralds in the play itself the end of the play-acting, by defining the limits of theatricality for both actors and audience. Vincentio's distress provides a necessary agent between the brilliant carnivalesque of the sun and moon scene on which he enters, and the sobering domestic closures of the obedience speech. Sly may not re-enter Shakespeare's scene, but the world in which he is a beggar is reasserted in Vincentio, the rich man who refuses even for one moment to play another part.

At the height of Vincentio's alarm about his son, in the anonymous The Taming of a Shrew, Slie intervenes: “I say wele have no sending to prison” (80). In Shakespeare's play, the intervention is made by Gremio, the unsuccessful suitor to Bianca, billed in the stage direction as a “pantaloon” (the shrunken old man from the Italian commedia del' arte): “Take heed, Signor Baptista, lest you be cony-catched in this business. I dare swear this is the right Vincentio” (5.1.76). Gremio has a curious part in The Shrew not paralleled by anything in the quarto. He is old and rich and unsuccessful. His suit is the source of an interchange between Katherina and Bianca in II.i. Kate tries to find out which of the suitors Bianca affects. Bianca denies Hortensio, and the following exchange ensues:

KATHERINA.
O then, belike, you fancy riches more:
You will have Gremio to keep you fair.
BIANCA.
Is it for him you do envy me so?
Nay then, you jest.

(2.1.16-19)

You must be joking, remarks Bianca, in the confident tone of a woman who can choose, which infuriates her suitorless sister more than anything. Gremio at the end does not get a wife either to obey him or not. But he has one important moment in the play. He protests against sending Vincentio to prison and declares that he is sure this is the right Vincentio.

That Slie intervenes in A Shrew but Gremio intervenes in Shakespeare's version is odd. Shakespeare's Hostess threatened Sly with the constable; in his drunken apprehension of the play this episode could plausibly have reminded him that he might go to prison for not paying for the broken glasses. A possible ending for the play would indeed be the return of the Hostess with the officer, perhaps played by John Sincklo, who played the Beadle who arrested Mistress Quickly in 2 Henry IV, an inversion of roles which would have its own theatrical irony for audiences who had seen both plays. But the Slie who intervenes and prevents Vincentio's arrest is the other Slie, the one in A Shrew where there is no Hostess, and no threat of prison (although, confusingly, there may have been the same John Sincklo acting in the play). Why did Shakespeare give the intervention to Gremio when it would have been much more appropriate in the drama he had himself written, to give it—as in the anonymous text—to Sly?

The easy answer is of course that Sly was needed for the part of Vincentio. But another answer based on theatrical realities suggests itself. Gremio, old shrunken and unsuccessful suitor to Bianca, must have been doubled with the Second Player of the Induction, the man called Sincklo, whom the Lord praised for acting the lover so well. Skinny, cadaverous, with a stage history of arresting people, Sincklo, having failed yet again to be a good ladies' man, steps forward to protest against sending people to prison. It is a joke based on the acting company and aimed at a repertory audience. Beneath the role of Gremio is the reality of Sincklo, the actor who looked like a jailor. Beneath Vincentio, a man who resists the denial of his identity, is Sly, willing to apprehend being a Lord. Almost, the two parts coalesce: Sly as Vincentio is momentarily in danger of going to prison after all, and possibly Vincentio's acting should register, however fleetingly, his own double role as rich man and Beggar, until he is returned to singular identity by Sincklo, protesting that in this play he is not a jailor but a man who plays the (albeit unsuccessful) lover. The Taming of the Shrew never completely conceals the presence of the actor behind the mask, showing the audience two competing power structures, one social, the other theatrical.

One of the peculiarities of the anonymous The Taming of a Shrew is that instead of Slie's rising in status under the influence of the trick, he stays the same, and the Lord descends to his level, the level of good fellows. Slie in this play only recognises his new state through his clothes: “Jesus, what fine apparell I have got” (46). He is easily persuaded, where Shakespeare's beggar resists: he would much rather drink beer than sherry; he doesn't want to wear a doublet, and he accuses his attendants, as Vincentio accuses the Pedant and his accolade, of trying to make him mad. He is ultimately convinced not by clothes but by poetry, and responds—as Sebastian responds to the equally unexpected raptures of Olivia in Twelfth Night—by adopting the poetic idiom:

Am I a lord, and have I such a lady?
Or do I dream? Or have I dreamed till now?

He is still asking for beer, but he tries to translate it into an aristocratic idiom: “And once again a pot o'th' smallest ale” (Induction 2.62-71). Shakespeare's Sly unwillingly becomes an actor in an aristocratic show. The Slie of A Shrew remains himself, but brings the actors into his orbit. The Lord remains with him all the time, and has become “Sim,” a good fellow. But oddly, this name also seems, like Sincklo's name, to link the Lord with a particular player, because at the very beginning of the play-within-a-play the direction reads: “Enter Simon, Alphonsus, and his three daughters” (48). Simon, the Lord who gulls Slie, is already on stage, however. Possibly the actor who played Alphonsus was one Simon Jewell, a player in the Queen's or Pembroke's Men, who died of the plague in August 1592.⁶ But it is also possible that, as in the 1960 John Barton production (Holderness, Performance 31), an actor playing in the play stepped out of it to address Sly, when he intervened, about the prison, and also during the negotiating with Alfonso. Simon, the Lord, never seems, even when he comes from hunting, remotely like a lord. He is much more like an actor, one of the boys.

In Shakespeare's play, the Lord is emphatically never one of the boys: he is an instructor of boys, both those he would call boy because they are his social inferiors, Sly, the player who must not spoil the show by laughing—and those who really are boys—Bartholomew the page who must play Sly's lady; he calls to one of his men:

Sirrah, go you to Barthol'mew my page
And see him dressed in all suits like a lady
That done, conduct him to the drunkard's chamber,
And call him “madam”, do him obeisance.
Tell him from me—as he will win my love—
He bear himself with honourable action
Such as he hath observed in noble ladies
Unto their lords, by them accomplished.

He not only advises on the idiom, how the boy is to behave and speak, but on practical matters, how he is to produce tears:

And if the boy have not a woman's gift
To rain a shower of commanded tears,
An onion will do well for such a shift,
Which in a napkin being close conveyed
Shall in despite enforce a watery eye.

He is confident that all will be satisfactorily performed:

I know the boy will well usurp the grace,
Voice, gait and action of a gentlewoman.

(Induction 2.101-128)

In the next scene he instructs Sly: to be a lord requires a mind stocked with poetry and luxury, hawking and hunting, the arts and music, and the ideal. Sly is beguiled by the language of birth, the imaginative world which opens before him: “I smell sweet savours and I feel soft things” (Induction 2.66). When the Lady enters, she plays her part to perfection:

My husband and my lord, my lord and husband,
I am your wife in all obedience.

Does she, one might ask, overplay it a little? Sly announces that he seems to have slept fifteen years, and the Lady responds:

Ay, and the time seems thirty unto me,
Being all this time abandoned from your bed.

The effect is instantaneous:

Sly: 'Tis much. Servants, leave me and her alone.
Madam, undress you and come now to bed.

(Induction 2. 102-12).

If this is a page acting, one suspects that he willfully overplayed his part to make the onlookers laugh. The moment has the zest of purest amateurism: a naughty boy let loose in a woman's clothes, pushing his luck as far as it will go.

Ben Jonson's play Cynthia's Revels, which was acted by a children's company at court, opens with an Induction in which three children in the company quarrel about who is to speak the prologue:

2 CHILD.
… I thinke I have most right to it:
I am sure I studied it first.
3 CHILD.
That's all one, if the Author thinke
I can speake it better.
1 CHILD.
I pleade possession of the cloake.

This child appeals, brandishing his costume, to the audience: “Gentles, your suffrages I pray you.” A voice [within] calls out angrily: “Why, Children, are you not asham'd? Come in there” (IV.35). Admittedly this is a company of children (of the Chapel Royal); but the apprentices could be as young as ten and most people would feel it is not only children who are capable of such speeches. Bottom is more genial, but he still wants the best part: indeed he wants every part.

The sense of the power invested in the actual part which is played is not confined to the apprentice boy actor in The Taming of the Shrew. A parallel can be drawn with the role of Tranio, servant to Lucentio, who gets to play the master. One presumes that the less proficient actor was given what seems on the face of it to be a side-lined part, until one realises that he is in fact required to take over from Lucentio, who thus becomes an onlooker, and a subordinate: the schoolmaster of Bianca, not the acknowledged wealthy lover. Presumably the more skilled actor actually took the part of Tranio. But the servant, Tranio, is almost too convincing in his role of master, Lucentio. It seems to me false to play Tranio as a man who transports into the role of master the commonness of a servant.⁷ He plays Lucentio, as the Page is to play Sly's lady, as one who knows how, if necessary, to imitate a good actor and thus become one; this is an Elizabethan view of education even if not ours. The reason for Tranio's success in the part of Lucentio is his command of a noble language, the language of Petrarch in Petrarch's city, Padua. When Lucentio devises the disguise, Tranio accepts in these terms:

In a brief, sir, sith it your pleasure is,
And I am tied to be obedient—
.....I am content to be Lucentio.

(1.1.202-7)

The servant must obey the master, but the actor is jumping for joy that he is to play the bigger part, the part of the master, not the servant. His first speech is to his rival suitors to Bianca, defending his right to enter the competition:

And were his daughter fairer than she is,
She may more suitors have, and me for one.
Fair Leda's daughter had a thousand wooers;
Then well one more may fair Bianca have.
And so she shall: Lucentio shall make one,
Though Paris came in hope to speed alone.

Gremio is as startled as we are: “What, this gentleman will out-talk us all!” Lucentio, newly demoted, is sour: “Sir, give him head. I know he'll prove a jade” (1.2.235-42). Access to the language of class which Tranio as actor can command as easily as he can play his previous role of obedient servant, gives him stage power.

By the end of the play, Tranio has also acquired some social power within its structures. When he sits at the wedding feast and sees the brides already squalling, he is locked into a fellowship with Petruchio, Baptista, Lucentio and Hortensio which seems to offer no cognizance of his renewed status as servant. It is as if, from playing the master, he has acquired the manners of a master and now sits in easy fellowship with the real masters. But equally one could say that fellowship is resolved into actors playing a new kind of role, that of audience. As they share the comradeship of actors watching their fellows play a scene, social distinctions in the world of the play are momentarily forgotten in the theatrical climax. Actors, amateur and professional, will recognise the special comradeship between performers in a particular production and how relationships off-stage intertwine with relationships on stage. This is the stuff of The Taming of the Shrew, and more so than in the anonymous A Shrew, which is a play dominated by class conflict: them and us, or the workers and the toffs, as Holderness puts it in his edition of the play (18-19). In Shakespeare's play, class is a necessary element of the drama.⁸ But its centre of vitality is acting and theatre: the relation of the players beneath the masks to the parts they play, and the special power generated from a sense of interweaving relationships within the theatrical world which comment on the relationships impersonated in the social world of the play.

The Shrew may have been written with particular actors in mind for other parts besides those of Sincklo and Sly. This early comedy, oddly enough, though apparently dating from the early 1590s, reminds one of Hamlet. The arrival of the company of professional players, their sophistication: no one is going to laugh at the antics of the mad lord watching the play; the respect with which the hunting Lord of the Induction treats them and above all, that Lord himself, all invoke the world of Hamlet. The Lord, like Hamlet, fancies himself as a playwright and has already constructed his own little drama of deceiving Sly before the Players arrive, which then becomes more complex when he has more actors, and more professional actors ready to hand. Hamlet instructs the Player to insert a speech of his own writing into The Murder of Gonzago and holds forth about acting. The Lord in The Shrew, spurred on by the arrival of the Players, still plans his own amateur show in which his page will play the lady. His speech of instruction is not, to my mind, an instruction on marriage but an instruction on how to act an obedient well-born lady, and the incentive given is that the page will win the Lord's love, or one could say, that the apprentice will win the master's love. Hamlet was played by Burbage. Did that remarkable actor, who joined the newly-formed Chamberlain's men at the same time as Shakespeare in 1594-5, perhaps also play Petruchio? Did Shakespeare rewrite the early play in order that it would provide a fit vehicle for this actor? If so, the memorial construction theory must go out of the window, and so must the attendant—and far from convincing—very early date for The Shrew. Be that as it may, the possibility that Petruchio and the Lord were played by Burbage seems worth entertaining from the evidence of the play itself.

Burbage was no doubt a fascinating actor to be apprenticed to, and probably very demanding. Shakespeare seems to have written scenes for Burbage which allowed both actor and dramatist to incorporate into the play the rehearsing of how it should be acted. An elegiac tribute to Burbage in Thomas May's The Heir, written in 1620, the year after his death (Gurr 44), recalls that when he acted:

… Ladies in the boxes
Kept time with sighs, and teares to his sad accents
As he had truely been the man he seem'd.

Hamlet's advice to the players to hold the mirror up to nature is tailor-made for such an actor. It is not only the Lord's interest in acting in The Taming of the Shrew which seems to link him with the roles which Shakespeare created for Burbage in the mid-1590s. Another inhabitant of Shakespeare's stage in the mid-1590s is conjured up by Petruchio's dedication to the wooing of Kate:

Think you a little din can daunt mine ears?
.....Have I not in a pitched battle heard
Loud ‘larums, neighing steeds and trumpets’ clang?
And do you tell me of a woman's tongue,
That gives not half so great a blow to hear
As will a chestnut in a farmer's fire?
Tush, tush, fear boys with bugs!

(1.2.193-204)

Petruchio here sounds like Hotspur in I Henry IV, whose troubled dreams of battle alarm another Kate. Both men, Petruchio and Hotspur, share a rhetoric of sport: Hotspur is as much a huntsman on the battlefield as the hawking Petruchio is a warrior in wooing. But they share their love with someone else: the Lord in the Induction, who enters praising his hounds as enthusiastically as Theseus in A Midsummer Night's Dream. I want to suggest that the Lord in the Induction was played by the same actor as Petruchio (Burns 51) and that that actor was Richard Burbage, who joined the Chamberlain's men in 1595, along with Shakespeare himself. Burbage's theatrical career begins, in our records, with a sensational stage brawl (Greg I:44) not too dissimilar to the first scene between Petruchio and Kate. Hotspur himself, of course, is in Shakespeare's play boisterously matched with Kate (in defiance of history).

Many of Kate's lines carry a Dionysiac charge for most women, of things thought but never said, as when she bursts out to Petruchio, over the business of the cap:

Why, sir, I trust I may have leave to speak,
And speak I will. I am no child, no babe.
Your betters have endured me say my mind,
And if you cannot, best you stop your ears.

(4.3.72-6)

Oddly, these lines have found their way into the first Quarto of Hamlet (1603), which precedes the more usually authenticated 1604 Quarto 2. Hamlet says of the Players, about to enter:

The clowne shall make them laugh
That are tickled in the lungs, or the blanke verse shall halt for't,
And the Lady shall have leave to speake her minde freely.

(my italics)

In both the 1604 text and the Folio, the link with The Shrew passage has been obscured by a slight re-wording: “The Clown shall make those laugh whose lungs are tickled o'th' sear, and the Lady shall say her mind freely, or the blank verse shall halt for't” (Complete Works 2.2.324-6). The implications are obvious. The line stuck in the theatre audience's mind, and perhaps was the key moment of Burbage's stage performance with his apprentice. Natalie Zemon Davis has written of the unruly woman on top in European culture: Kate is anarchic. She seems to obey not only no social conventions but no theatrical ones either, speaking when she is supposed to be silent, according to everyone else's rules. This includes the ending of the play too, where she is supposed finally, after a play of speaking her mind, not to speak her obedience. Her final rejection of the heroine's giving way gracefully is marked by her wonderful long outburst. If it is about obedience, its provenance is marked by an apprentice's joyful sense not of the social, but of the theatrical arena, in which, like Tranio, he is a free citizen chosen on merit. The play creates within the comic context a charge of anarchic delight comparable in intensity and verve to the tragic energy of Hamlet himself. It is as though the reality of the boy beneath the role speaks to the reality of the women in the audience, allowing them stage power even as he proclaims social submission.⁹

The incentive offered to the apprentice who plays Kate is not just the winning of his master's love—and the satisfaction of an actor like Burbage must have been worth winning—but his own pride of place in the play. Stage power appears here, even if the price of it is a speech on social submission. Furthermore, behind the text of Kate's obedience speech is the powerful evocation of manhood: dangerous, challenging, adventurous, painful (Burns 46-7). As the apprentice enters the woman's discourse, the dramatist has seen to it that he conjures up a vision of his own entry into the position of master: the one who takes the risks.¹⁰ But this is also mirrored in his stage situation, because the play stands or falls on the apprentice's performance in the last scene, just as Petruchio's wager stands or falls, and as the husbands gather round to witness their wives' performance, so the masters gather round to see whose apprentice will play the big part: the one with the cloak, the one who studied it first, or the one that the author thought would speak it best. One of the reasons why The Shrew, with its apparently time-bound folk-origin conservative dogmas about women, has not simply died a quiet death like all the other Elizabethan plays in the taming genre, is that it releases into the auditorium an energy created through a dialectic of opposed wills, command versus obedience, and power versus powerlessness, which is polarised in the utterance of the boy actor playing the woman.

In The Taming of the Shrew, the apprentice has virtually the last word. As the stage heroine mouths obedience, the apprentice eyes his female audience, both the querulous wives on the stage and the women in the audience. Did the women in the audience register the exhilaration of the apprentice actor seizing his chance to be master, to realise stage power even if the price of it was a recognition of the submission to which he and they would have to return once the play was over? The triumph of The Shrew is the triumph of art over life, of making a beggar believe that he is part of the play, or of making a drunken actor enter an illusory world and use its language. Men and women in the theatre audience in Shakespeare's play become the watcher, Sly, and take his place as witnesses of the play, but also become seduced, as the Beggar is, into entering the play world, believing it to be real, as the ladies believed Burbage's acting to be real. In this play, Shakespeare has allowed the apprentice to upstage the master, perhaps originally Burbage himself. No one bothers much about Petruchio's reality because they are so busy talking about Kate's. Her speech steals the show. Beneath an ostensible message of humility it generates the suppressed exhilaration of its stage power: the seizing of mastery by the apprentice even as he proclaims a master's doctrine of subjection.

What did Shakespeare's contemporaries make of it? I maintain that they were not all out ducking their wives in the pond.¹¹ Sir John Harington, who owned a copy of The Taming of a Shrew (given that Shakespeare's contemporaries made no distinction between their title, which Shrew?) wrote in 1596 in The Metamorphosis of Ajax: “For the shrewd wife, reade the booke of taming of a shrew, which hath made a number of us so perfect, that now every one can rule a shrew in our countrey, save he that hath her. But indeed there are but two good rules. One is, let them never have their willes; the other differs but a letter, let them ever have their willes, the first is the wiser, but the second is more in request, and therefore I make choice of it” (153-5). A year later, in 1597, Harington wrote his wife a poem on their fourteenth wedding anniversary, entitled “To his wife after they had been married 14 yeares”:

Two prentiships with thee I now have been
Mad times, sad times, glad times, our life hath seen.
Souls we have wrought four payr, since our first meeting
Of which two souls, sweet souls were to to fleeting.
My workmanship so well doth please thee still
thou wouldst not graunt me freedom by thy will,
And Ile confess such usage I have found
Mine hart yet nere desir'd to bee unbound.
But though my self am thus thy Prentice vowd,
My dearest Mall, yet thereof bee not proud,
Nor claym no rewl thereby, there's no such cause,
For Plowden who was father of the laws,
which yet are read and ruld by his indytings,
doth name himself apprentice in his Writings.
And I, if you should challenge undew place,
could learn of him to alter so the case.
I playn would prove I still kept dew priority,
and that good wives are still in their minority,
But far from thee my Deare bee such audacity,
I doubt more thou dost blame my dull capacity,
That though I travaile true in my vocation,
I grow yet worse and worse at th'occupation.

(14-15)

In this remarkable poem the husband is the apprentice to his wife and has served two seven-year terms, which have given him such content that he prefers bondage to freedom. In Harington's Epigrams, printed after his death, the compositor has either made an error, or failed to understand the significance of the fourteen years: that the apprentice's bonds were up. In this poem Harington, who always claimed that his poems were not fiction, but truth, warns his wife that if she should prove proud, he could prove in law that the situation might be reversed, and she would find that she was the one who was still in her minority, in the apprentice position. However, he is not afraid that that boldness will be taken by her, but rather that he will fail her in his vocation.

The sexual intimacy of this poem within a domestic context makes it most extraordinary, yet the sustained image of the apprentice suggests that it was not only in the theatre that apprentices and women shared a common minority status, but also that the equality which the apprentice boy might gain as heroine, might have its counterpart in the true interchange between apprentice and master which is created in the delight of Petruchio at the end of the play in the boy's performance. Harington, who was fond enough of Shakespeare's plays to possess fifteen of them in quarto, and three duplicates (Furnivall 283-3), may have felt that for his own wife and for himself, the witty jesting godson of the queen, the play had much to say. But that that message is a humiliating one for women, however much it may be so in a theatre where women actresses play Kate, seems to me in Shakespeare's theatre to be belied by the realities of the theatrical world in which the boy actor earns his momentary supremacy by means of a brilliant performance of a speech proclaiming subjection. If the boy actor winked at Petruchio, he might also have winked at the women watching him in the theatre. Did the women in the audience hear words which send them back to domestic drudgery, or did they share the heady sensation of mastery which the boy actor infuses into one of the longest and most exciting parts he has ever played, in which, in the end, he silences with his eloquence the greatest actor in Shakespeare's company, and surpasses even that actor's wildest expectations of good performance? The boy actor invites women in the audience to participate not in what he says, but in the theatrical power which orchestrates the act of speaking.

Notes

1. The valuable edition of The Taming of a Shrew by Graham Holderness and Bryan Loughrey has stimulated a number of questions in this paper, although I disagree with some of the editors' conclusions, and find it surprising that in a cultural materialist edition there should be no specific analysis of the effect on the play of the theatrical condition that Kate would have been played by a boy.

2. Bentley argues that although there was no player's guild to which boys were officially apprenticed, there is plenty of evidence that boys were attached as apprentices to particular adults in the company. Rastell finds no evidence that post-pubertal youths played Shakespeare's women.

3. Induction I. 79-83, The Taming of the Shrew. All quotations from Shakespeare's Shrew are from this edition unless otherwise stated.

4. Leeds Barroll's argument for the bunching of plays in the Jacobean period when Shakespeare could foresee performance in the public theatre, if taken back to the earlier decade, must oblige scholars to rethink the dating of the plays in relation to outbreaks of plague in the 1590s. The Shrew on this reckoning might have been written after the 1592-4 outbreaks which would put it in the same period as the plays discussed in my text, although of course this speculation would force a reconsideration of the memorial reconstruction theory in relation to A Shrew.

5. I am indebted to Wentersdorf's analysis of the ending of The Shrew although my conclusions differ from his, as he believes that Shakespeare did provide a “Sly” ending to the play. Wentersdorf remarks that its absence in the Folio may be because the Folio editors “believed the revision to have been carried out with Shakespeare's approval and therefore that the shortened text constituted an authentic if artistically less satisfactory version” (215).

6. Thompson, Taming 3. This would put early 1592 as the last possible date for the composition of A Shrew.

7. In the 1992 Royal Shakespeare Theatre production at the main house in Stratford-upon-Avon, directed by William Alexander, Tranio almost succeeded in wooing Bianca, and the tension between his performance as Lucentio and the subservient role the real Lucentio was forced to play became a notable part of the drama.

8. The Victorian William Cory wrote in his journal: “I have formerly thought I should like to see gentlefolks act Taming of the Shrew, of course as a mere trifle” (398). His wish might have been fulfilled in the RSC 1992 Shrew which rewrote the Induction in order to emphasize its modern upper-class equivalents, and forced these genteel persons then to play the parts of Petruchio's servants.

9. Fineman's argument for the restoration of patriarchal modes at the end of the play ignores this vital dimension of underlying theatrical interchange between audience and player, which creates its own dynamic of difference.

10. My argument is based on a theatrical exigency: the ways in which the playwright has written into the part the realities of the player's own situation in order to facilitate his representation of the woman he plays. The effect in this speech is not to present the woman as a construction of “masculine self-differentiation” (Greenblatt 51) but to draw out of the woman's own role an energy implicit in the creation of Kate herself, and related to Zemon Davis's perception of “unruliness” discussed earlier.

11. This is not to underestimate the importance of Boose's fascinating research into the treatment of scolds in Elizabethan England, although I do find it more relevant to the world of The Taming of a Shrew, with its much more popular frame of reference, than to Shakespeare's (to my mind) very courtly play.

Works Cited

Barroll, Leeds. Politics, Plague and Shakespeare's Theater: The Stuart Years. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991.

Bentley, Gerald Eades. The Profession of Player in Shakespeare's Time 1590-1642. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1984.

Boose, Lynda. “Scolding Brides and Birdlime Scolds: Taming the Woman's Unruly Member.” Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991): 179-213.

Burns, Margie. “The Ending of The Shrew.” Shakespeare Studies 18 (1986): 41-64.

Cory, William. Extracts from the Letters and Journals. Ed. Francis Warre Cornish. Oxford: n.p., 1865.

Duthie, G. I. “The Taming of a Shrew and The Taming of the Shrew.” The Review of English Studies 19 (1943): 337-56.

Fineman, Joel. “The Turn of the Shrew.” Shakespeare and the Question of Theory. Ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman. London: Methuen, 1985. 138-59.

Furnivall, F. J. “Sir John Harington's Shakespeare Quartos.” Notes & Queries 7th Series, IX (May 17, 1890): 382-3.

Gaw, Alison. “John Sincklo as One of Shakespeare's Actors.” Anglia 49 (1926): 289-303.

Greenblatt, Stephen. “Fiction and Friction.” Reconstructing Individualism. Ed. Thomas Heller, Morton Sosna, and David E. Wellbery. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1986. 30-52.

Greg, W. W. Dramatic Documents for the Elizabethan Playhouses. Oxford: Clarendon, 1931.

Gurr, Andrew. Playgoing in Shakespeare's London. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.

Harington, Sir John. Epigrams. 1600. Bound into the Orlando Furioso, in English Heroical Verse. London: Richard Field, 1591.

———. Sir John Harington's A New Discourse of a Stale Subject, called The Metamorphosis of Ajax. Ed. Elizabeth Story Donno. London: Routledge, 1962.

Hinman, Charlton, ed. The First Folio of Shakespeare: The Norton Facsimile. London: Hamlyn, 1968.

Holderness, Graham. The Taming of the Shrew: Shakespeare in Performance. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1989.

Holderness, Graham, and Bryan Loughrey, eds. The Taming of a Shrew. Memel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992.

Howard, Jean E. “Scripts and/versus Playhouses: Ideological Production and the Renaissance Public Stage.” Renaissance Drama 20 (1989): 31-40.

Jonson, Ben. Cynthia's Revel's. Ben Jonson. Ed. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson. Oxford: Clarendon, 1966.

Marston, John. The Malcontent. Ed. Bernard Harris. London: The New Mermaids, Benn, 1967.

McLuskie, Kathleen. “The Act, the Role, and the Actor: Boy Actresses on the Elizabethan Stage.” New Theatre Quarterly 3 (1987): 120-30.

McMillin, Scott. “Casting for Pembroke's Men: The Henry VI Quartos and The Taming of A Shrew.” Shakespeare Quarterly 23 (1972): 141-59.

———. “Simon Jewell and the Queen's Men.” Review of English Studies 27 (1976): 174-7.

Moore, William. “An Allusion in 1593 to The Taming of the Shrew?” Shakespeare Quarterly 15 (1964): 55-60.

Pepys, Samuel. The Diary of Samuel Pepys. Ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews. London: Bell, 1971.

Rastall, Richard. “Female Roles in All-Male Casts.” Medieval English Theatre 7 (1985); 21-51.

Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works. Ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor. Oxford: Clarendon, 1986.

———. The First Folio of Shakespeare: The Norton Facsimile. Ed. Charlton Hinman. London: Hamlyn, 1968.

———. The Taming of the Shrew. Ed. Ann Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984.

———. The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke. Ed. Graham Holderness and Bryan Loughrey. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992.

The Taming of a Shrew. Ed. Graham Holderness and Bryan Loughrey. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992.

Thompson, Ann, ed. The Taming of the Shrew. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984.

———. “Dating Evidence for The Taming of the Shrew.” Notes and Queries 29 (1982): 108-9.

Trewin, J. C. Going to Shakespeare. London: Allen & Unwin, 1978.

Wentersdorf, Karl P. “Actors' Names in Shakespearean Texts.” Theatre Studies 23 (1980): 18-30.

———. “The Original Ending of The Taming of the Shrew: A Reconsideration.” Studies in English Literature 18 (1978): 201-15.

Zemon Davis, Natalie. “Women on Top: Symbolic Sexual Inversion and Political Disorder in Early Modern Europe.” The Reversible World. Ed. Barbara A. Babcock. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1978. 147-89.