SOURCE: “Cultural Control in The Taming of the Shrew,” in Renaissance Drama, Vol. 26, 1995, pp. 83-104.

[In the essay below, Maguire analyzes the three forms of cultural control found in The Taming of the Shrew: the hunt, music, and marriage.]

To say that Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew is a play about taming is to state the obvious: the “wooing” of Katherine by Petruccio, perhaps more than any other main plot in Shakespeare, dominates performance and criticism of the play. But taming can take many forms, and I want to argue that The Taming of the Shrew is imbued with three forms of cultural control: the hunt, music, and marriage. These variations on a theme are linked subtly but crucially by the central image of music, and are introduced through the cynegetic motif that occupies the play's first two scenes.

I. HUNTING

The Taming of the Shrew opens with Christopher Sly, “old Sly's son of Burton Heath, by birth a pedlar, by education a cardmaker, by transmutation a bearherd, and now by present profession a tinker” (Ind.2.17-20). Further demoted by drink from tinker to “swine,” the sleeping Sly is discovered by a creature from the opposite end of the social hierarchy, a Lord, who is abroad with his men enjoying that activity of the allegedly civilized classes: the hunt.

The sixteenth-century hunt embodied class and privilege.¹ As Richard Leppert explains (123), it was a “ritualized exercise” requiring organization and control, the choreography of men and hounds.² It took place on one's own land; it was a musical activity; it was predominantly a male sport; and it demonstrated male power and ownership in its most primitive form: “the right to kill” (Leppert 126).

The musical component of Renaissance hunting was tripartite: a sequence or blend of the twelve-note French horn, the baying of hounds, and the human voice “sometimes playing separately and according a role to the individual soloist, sometimes joining in a spontaneous and joyful polyphony, crowned by a formal and triumphal coda” (Cummins 160). The French horn, more complicated and sophisticated than its English counterpart, delivered “calls” to direct the hunt. Sequences and combinations of long and short notes are described (and sometimes transcribed in linear form) in all hunting manuals. Thus, the musical sequence can indicate hounds running, a view of an animal (a different sequence for each kind), water, bay and request for help, death, a call for hounds to assemble, a call for hunters to assemble, a retreat, and so forth. Some of these situations also permitted oral calls, although usually the human voice was restricted to the encouragement or subduing of hounds. The hounds themselves were the most musical part of the hunt, selected more for their cry than for their speed (Theseus's hounds are “slow in pursuit, but matched in mouth like bells”: MND 4.1.122). Gervase Markham acknowledges “sweetnesse of cry,” “loudnes of cry,” and “deepnes of cry” as important factors in selecting a pack of hounds, and advises on breeds for bass, counter-tenor, and treble—beagles, for example, for trebles (Countrey Contentments, bk. 1, 7-8). “Of these three sorts of mouthes,” he continues, “if your Kennell be (as neer as you can) equally compounded, you shall finde it most perfect and delectable: for though they haue not the thunder and loudnesse of the great dogges, which may be compared to the high winde instruments, yet they will haue the tunable sweetnes of the best compounded consorts, & sure a man may finde as much Art and delight in a Lute, as in an Organ” (Countrey Contentments, bk. 1, 10). Whereas the horn's pitch was constant, hounds enriched the musical atmosphere through their variety of pitch. Such variety was not simply for acoustic pleasure. As John Cummins explains, this canine music was “crucially informative to the hunter skilled in its interpretation and intimately aware of the notes of each individual hound” (169).

Renaissance quarry were many and various, the noblest being the deer, although foxes and hares were frequent targets, particularly toward the end of the seventeenth century when deforestation, combined with the introduction of firearms, reduced the number of deer (Carr 23-24). Foxhunting had a long history, if only as a form of pest control,³ and the anthropomorphization of the fox as wily and cunning makes one dwell on the appropriateness of the Lord finding a creature who is literally Sly. Hunting took place very early in the morning: early morning is the ideal time to trap foxes, who feed at night and are slow and lethargic before dawn, their evening meal undigested. (Theseus, enjoying an early-morning hunt in A Midsummer Night's Dream, greets the sleeping lovers with the sarcastic surmise that they have risen early to observe the rite of May, and, in the eighteenth century, Sir Walter Bagot reprimanded his sons for their tardiness in arriving at four in the morning [Auden 3].) Christopher Sly is similarly victimized by his evening in the tavern, his inebriation not yet neutralized by sufficient sleep. Despite a temporary reprieve, in which he is elevated to a Lord and offered, as aesthetic pleasure, images of the chase (Venus and Adonis, Jove and Io, Apollo and Daphne), Sly is killed off by the dramatist in the course of the play.

Of the three pictures of the chase offered to Sly in the induction, two concern women being pursued and/or raped by a god, and show the relevance of the hunt to issues of gender. The characterization of women as the sexual victims of the male hunter has a long tradition. Virgil presents the lovesick Dido as “a doe caught off her guard and pierced by an arrow from some armed shepherd” (Aeneid 99). The poem “The wofull wordes of the Hart to the Hunter” in The Noble Arte of Venerie presents the stag at bay in sexually suggestive terms: “Since I in deepest dread, do yelde my selfe to Man, / And stand full still betwene his legs, which earst full wildly ran” (Turbervile 136). Titus Andronicus makes this connection more explicitly when Chiron and Demetrius view the rape of Lavinia as a variant of the more usual hunt:

My lords, a solemn hunting is in hand;
Single you thither then this dainty doe.

(2.1.113,118)

Chiron, we hunt not, we, with horse nor hound,
But hope to pluck a dainty doe to ground.

(2.2.25-26)

In Troilus and Cressida Pandarus sings a salacious song underpinned by complex metaphors of sex and hunting:

For O love's bow
Shoots buck and doe.
The shaft confounds
Not that it wounds,
But tickles still the sore.
These lovers cry, “O! O!”, they die.
          Yet that which seems the wound to kill
Doth turn “O! O!” to “ha ha he!”
          So dying love lives still.

(3.1.112-20)

David Willbern (164) lists further examples from medieval literature to Shakespeare that show the traditional association of hunting with sexuality.

In general in the Shakespeare canon, images of hunting evince nothing but sympathy for the hunted, who is presented as an innocent victim. Julius Caesar, harmlessly deaf, epileptic, and unfit, is butchered:

                                                            Here wast thou bayed, brave hart;
Here didst thou fall, and here thy hunters stand
Signed in thy spoil and crimsoned in thy lethe.
O world, thou wert the forest to this hart;
And this indeed, O world, the heart of thee.
How like a deer strucken by many princes
Dost thou here lie!

(3.1.205-11)

The slaughtered children of Macduff are “murdered deer” (Macbeth 4.3.207). Duke Frederick is troubled by conscience when killing venison in the forest of Arden, questioning why the “native burghers” should “in their own confines with forked heads / Have their round haunches gored” (AYLI 2.1.23-25). Similar scruples are voiced by the Princess of France in Love's Labor's Lost (4.1.7-35).⁴ Such sympathetic reactions were atypical in the sixteenth century, the notable other exceptions being Erasmus, More, and Montaigne (Cartmill 76-78).

Shakespeare's sympathy is of interest in light of the association of both Sly and Katherine with quarry in The Taming of the Shrew. These two social subordinates are linked in that both are manipulated and “practised upon” by a Lord. The common denominator of class and gender issues in the cynegetic motif is made clear in act 5, when the subject of the hunt is revisited metaphorically, thereby concluding Sly's apparently incomplete tale analogously in a discussion of marriage. The three husbands in act 5 compare and bet on their wives' performance, as the three huntsmen compare and wager on their dogs in the induction; the induction's wager of twenty pounds becomes the twenty crowns of act 5, a sum rejected by Petruccio in a hunting analogy: “I'll venture so much of my hawk or hound, / But twenty times so much upon my wife” (5.2.75-76).⁵ This episode is imbued with the language and attitude of animal sports, from Petruccio's and Hortensio's hortatory cries (“To her, Kate!” / “To her, widow!” / “A hundred marks my Kate does put her down” [5.2.35-37]) through the characterization of Bianca as a bird (“Am I your bird? I mean to shift my bush, / And then pursue me as you draw your bow” [5.2.48-49 and cf. lines 52-53]) to the depiction of Kate as a deer that attacks (“'Tis thought your deer does hold you at a bay” [5.2.58]). Like the tinker Sly, women are reduced to the status of animals. Shakespeare's sympathetic attitude elsewhere to the victims of hunting may suggest that he viewed the predicament of the cornered female in The Taming of the Shrew as one to be condemned, rather than the male position of tamer as one to be celebrated. However, before drawing any interpretive conclusions about the presentation of women as deer in act 5 of this play, we must first consider an analogous topic: the depiction of women as musical instruments.

II. PLAYING

There are over one hundred musical allusions in The Taming of the Shrew (Waldo and Herbert; and cf. West). From the Apollonian “twenty cagèd nightingales” whose singing is offered to Christopher Sly, to Petruccio's musical puns on “sol-fa” and “burden” and his snatches of popular songs; from Hortensio's disguise as a music master, with his broken lute in 2.1 and his new gamut in 3.1, to the matrimonial harmony that Lucentio musically anticipates in act 5—“At last, though long, our jarring notes agree”—the play uses the nodal image of music to chart the development of the characters' personal relationships. More important, musical images and actions reveal the personal makeup of Katherine. The figurative association between bad behavior and bad music was a Renaissance commonplace, and, as T. R. Waldo and T. W. Herbert note (193), “[t]wo strands of meaning, the musical and the belligerent, are united when Kate uses the musical instrument as a weapon.” Decisively rejecting musical instruction and the heavenly harmony associated with it, Katherine seems set to steer the play in the direction of “loud alarums.”

From Boethius the Renaissance inherited a tripartite understanding of musical relations: musica mundana referred to the harmony of the universe; musica humana referred to the harmony that resulted when man was tuned by reason; musica instrumentalis referred to practical music making (Hollander 24-25; Ross 108; Finney 88-90). The dominant iconographic image linking all three was a stringed instrument, a universal lute-harp-lyre “possessing the ethical and esthetic values of the Greek kithara” (Hollander 128). It was logical that, if the heavens were perceived as “a tuned stringed instrument, so man with his cords and fibers, physiologically associated with stringed musical instruments, could be considered to require an analogous harmonious tuning spiritually as well as medically. Hence the idea of Concord very often is represented … by a stringed instrument” (Ross 109).

Presented as (or presenting herself as) a paragon of personal harmony and feminine perfection (at least in public), Bianca expertly manipulates the conventional musical associations:

Sir, to your pleasure humbly I subscribe.
My books and instruments shall be my company,
On them to look and practise by myself.

(1.1.81-83)

Lucentio responds appropriately, comparing Bianca with Minerva (not only the Roman goddess of wisdom but the “mythical originator of musical instruments” [Waldo and Herbert 197]), an equation restated by Hortensio in 3.1.4-5: “this Bianca is, / The patroness of heavenly harmony.” In her Cambridge edition of the play Ann Thompson reprints Holman Hunt's suggestive painting of Bianca, Patroness of Heavenly Harmony, in which Bianca's perfectly tuned character is symbolized by the lute in her hands. Throughout The Taming of the Shrew Katherine is presented in musical opposition to her sister as a woman who mistakes her frets, a discordant instrument who must be tuned.

This is just another way of saying that she is a volatile animal who must be tamed, as Katherine herself seems to realize when she rejects the lute and the lute lesson. Although, prima facie, the ambience of this episode seems innocuous enough, Katherine's violence may be prompted by the degrading horse-breaking attitude of her father, implicit in his question to Litio, “thou canst not break her to the lute?” (2.1.147; emphasis added. Cf. Kahn 108). The vocabulary of breaking in untamed horses, of teaching them “the manage,” is plentiful in the play, and resurfaces in a seventeenth-century treatise, Thomas Tryon's The Way to Health (1683). This book of medical miscellany and related advice concludes with a chapter that combines astrological and musical wisdom: “Cyterns and Gitterns are under the Moon and Venus, in the Sign [of] Sagitary; being well managed, they yield pleasant, soft, effeminate Harmonies” (ch. 21).⁶ This musical language, in which citterns (wire-strung members of the lute family) and gitterns (an etymological if not musicological cognate of the guitar⁷) are viewed as female instruments (“under the Moon”) who must be properly handled (“well managed”) before making appropriately feminine sound, epitomizes the treatment of Katherine in the play.

Music was, like woman, both divine and dangerous, capable of soothing or exciting, able to lead progressively to an appreciation of higher things (beauty, the good, the spiritual) or to damnation (for music encourages passivity, idleness: like sex it requires a receptive partner who could be physically or aurally “ravished”; Hollander 200-201). In this respect music is linked to those other artistic skills, rhetoric and face painting, which may embellish a natural attribute (eloquence, beauty) for the glory of God or may conceal and deceive.⁸ In addition, the technical vocabulary used for musical playing was unmistakably suggestive. “Touch” denotes both a musical action and a caress: Rolliardo in James Shirley's The Bird in a Cage boasts, “I can touch a Wench better then a Lute” (1.1.11-12), and a gentleman in Thomas Nashe's Anatomie of Absurditie tells what it is “to tickle a Citterne or haue a sweet stroke on the lute” (7; emphasis added). It was hardly a large or difficult step for the Renaissance to map attitudes to music onto attitudes to women.⁹

This equation of music with women leads easily to a series of images in which musical instruments, and music in general, are used as an elaborate synecdoche for sexual organs or sexual activity. In 1566, in Lewis Wager's The Life and Repentance of Mary Magdalene, we find explicit and extended sexual/musical punning (lines 837-44):

INFIDELITIE
Mistresse Mary can you not play on the virginals?
MARY
Yes sweete heart, that I can, also on the regals,
There is no instrument but that handle I can,
I thynke as well as any gentlewoman.
INFIDELITIE
If that you can play vpon the recorder,
I haue as fayre a one as any is in this border,
Truely you haue not sene a more goodlie pipe,
It is so bigge that your hand can it not gripe.(10)

Preparing a seduction scene between Doll Common and the Spanish count in Jonson's The Alchemist, Face prompts: “Sweet DOL, / You must goe tune your virginall, no loosing / O' the least time” (where “tune” means “play” as well as “tune”; 3.3.67-68). In the same scene Doll is urged to keep a client nocturnally awake with her “drum” (3.3.44).¹¹ In Cymbeline Cloten confesses:

I am advised to give her music o' mornings; they say it will penetrate. Enter Musicians Come on, tune. If you can penetrate her with your fingering, so; we'll try with tongue too.

(2.3.11-14)

The clowns in Lyly's Midas make sexual jokes on “fiddle” (1.2.8) and “notes” (1.2.84-87), and there is sexual innuendo on “fiddle” in Middleton and Dekker's The Roaring Girl (2.2.20-22). Music, musical “parts,” and the touching of instruments all provide double entendres in Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore (2.1.13-14, 68, 78-79). In Heywood's A Woman Killed with Kindness the servant Nick returns the lute to the unfaithful Anne with the aside “would that had been the worst instrument you ever played on”; “instrument” also has a bawdy connotation in the anonymous Wit of a Woman (lines 175-79). In Pericles the hero compares Antiochus's daughter to a viol, distinguishing between the heavenly music of sex in marriage and the discordant sounds of illicit intercourse:

You're a fair viol, and your sense the strings
Who, fingered to make man his lawful music,
Would draw heav'n down and all the gods to hearken,
But, being played upon before your time,
Hell only danceth at so harsh a chime.

(1.124-28)

A madman in Dekker and Middleton's 1 Honest Whore reprimands an imaginary schoolmaster who taught his wife to “play vpon the Virginals, and still his Iackes leapt vp, vp: you prickt her out nothing but bawdy lessons” (5.2.270). In The Wit of a Woman a traditional musical refrain becomes slang for the female pudenda: sometimes women who are dancing jump “so high, that you may see their hey nony, nony, nonyno” (434-35).

The most frequent sexual-musical image in the Renaissance concerns stringed instruments, with lutes being the favorite metaphor. The image of the beloved as a lute to be played upon was a frequent Petrarchan conceit. Thus men could be imaged as lutes, as for example, in the ninth sonnet in the 1599 edition of Drayton's Idea or Wyatt's poems “My lute, awake” and “Blame not my lute” or Campion's “When to her lute Corinna sings.” In Renaissance drama the association between women and stringed instruments is primarily sexual and far from complimentary. In The Duchess of Malfi (2.4.33-36) Webster uses the image of a lute to express the Cardinal's salacity. The Cardinal compares his treatment of Julia with Castruchio's:

Thou hadst only kisses from him, and high feeding,
But what delight was that? 'Twas just like one
That hath a little fing'ring on the lute,
Yet cannot tune it.

When one considers that those Renaissance musicians who did not have lute cases took their lute to bed with them as protection against cold and damp (Hollander 139), the sexual equation of women with lutes is doubly appropriate.¹² Furthermore, the lute was sometimes associated with seventeenth-century prostitutes: in Middleton's Your Five Gallants (1605), Primero's brothel presents itself as a music school.¹³ This identifying accessory of prostitutes may perhaps explain the following reference to a gittern that appeared in the Book of Orders of the Merchant Adventurers of Newcastle upon Tyne in 1554 (Records 25). Rules governing the appearance and behavior of apprentices provide a lengthy list of prohibitions; among them, we are told, no merchant is to allow his apprentice “during the tyme of his apprentishood to daunse. dyse. Carde. or mvm. or vse any gytterns.” The denial of social pastimes such as dancing and playing at dice or cards suggests that the gittern reference may refer innocuously to musical entertainment, but it is tempting to suspect a sexual implication.¹⁴

The terms “fiddle” and “fiddler” were not confined to violin playing but applied equally to the fingering on all stringed instruments. In The Taming of the Shrew Katherine rejects not just the lute but the lute-master, who explains, “I … bowed her hand to teach her fingering” (2.1.149-50). Given the bawdy associations of “fingering” in Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Duchess of Malfi, it is hardly surprising that Katherine should reject Hortensio's very physical lute instruction.¹⁵ The sexual insult is underlined a few lines later in Katherine's terms of abuse: “she did call me rascal, fiddler.” “Fiddler” is a common slang term for a violator of chastity, as in Chapman's Bussy d'Ambois (“my chastity … you shall neither riddle nor fiddle” [3.2.258-59]) or Dekker's Match Me in London (1.1.57-61):

BILBO
and he [the barber] stood fidling with Tormiella [daughter of Malevento].
MALEVENTO
Ha?
BILBO
Fidling at least halfe an houre, on a Citterne with a mans broken head at it, so that I think 'twas a Barber Surgion.

In this quotation the sexual associations of “fidling” are reinforced by the reference to “Citterne,” which, like the musical instruments cited above, could function rhetorically as a euphemism for the female genitalia (see, for example, King's The Passenger [Benvenuto 7], in which Pipa does not “permit her wanton louer to lay his hand vpon her Citterne”). Thus, musical instruments in general, and stringed instruments in particular, have strong associations with the female body.

I have argued elsewhere that the nonsensical sartorial criticism Petruccio offers in 4.2, when he sees the pinking on the sleeves of Katherine's dress, requires emendation. Petruccio's complaint reads as follows:

Whats this? a sleeue? 'tis like [a] demi cannon,
What, vp and downe caru'd like an apple Tart?
Heers snip, and nip, and cut, and slish and slash,
Like to a Censor in a barbers shoppe.

(TLN 2073-76; 4.3.88-91)

I have suggested that “Censor” should read “cittern.” The cittern (renowned for its grotesquely carved neck) is used metaphorically elsewhere by Shakespeare and at least ten of his contemporaries in similarly derogatory contexts. In the drama of the period the association between barbers and citterns is almost a commonplace: the cittern can be amply documented as a standard item in barbers' shops, where it was provided for the musical enjoyment of waiting customers. In Jonson's The Staple of News (1.5.127-30) Pennyboy Junior recounts how his “barber Tom, … one Christmas, … got into a masque at Court, by his wit, / And the good means of his cittern, holding up thus / For one o' the music.” In Lyly's Midas (3.2.35), Motto, the barber, reminds his man that he has taught him several skills of the trade, including the “tuning of a cittern” (“tune” has the dual meaning “play” and “put in tune”; see OED tune 3a). Oliver the weaver, in Middleton's The Mayor of Queenborough (3.3.166-67), tells how he helped a poor barber who, it seems, was forced to pawn his cittern: “I gave that barber a fustiansuit, and twice redeemed his cittern: he may remember me.” In Jonson's Epicoene Morose chooses his deceptively silent bride on the advice of Cutbeard the barber. When his bride proves talkative, Morose exclaims, “That cursed barber! … I have married his cittern, that's common to all men” (3.5.58, 60). The equation of silence with chastity and speech with promiscuity was a Renaissance commonplace; Morose's cittern analogy subtly links his wife's noise-making capacity with her presumed general availability. Dekker and Middleton similarly suggest sexual availability in 2 Honest Whore when Matheo denounces Bellafront as a whore, “A Barbers Citterne for euery Seruingman to play vpon” (5.2.151).¹⁶

The ambience of the barber's shop was social (ale was served and games played), medical, tonsorial—and egregiously masculine. When Katherine rejects the lute (an emblem of femininity à la Bianca) in 2.1, and Petruccio rejects the cittern (an emblem of female pliability and passivity from an exclusively masculine environment) in 4.3, we may perhaps discern the couple's kinship: both are expressing hostility to stereotypical gender associations.

III. MARRIAGE

It cannot be denied, however, that Petruccio's behavior in the sun/moon scene looks suspiciously like that of a man intent on playing an instrument to produce the sounds that he wishes to hear. An eighteenth-century riddle (the answer to which is: a lute) is based on this image:

Her Back is round, her Belly's flat withal,
Her metamorphos'd Guts are great and small.
Her Navel's comely, and her Neck is long,
Bedeck'd with Ornaments, though small, yet strong.
Being thus compleat, her Master's chief Ambition,
Is to make known to all her sweet Condition.

(Burton 97 … )

The explanation of the riddle concludes: “being very well tuned, the Master is ambitious to delight his Auditors with his Sweet Musick … and will not conclude till he hath play'd over his Lessons, to the content of the Company” (Burton 98). A four-line rhyming observation follows, which describes the journey of a “Well bred Damsel” from deformity to “excellent Virtues”: “She's then for him that loves her, Musick Sweet” (Burton 98).

Such a musical partnership may be viewed positively—a lute cannot make music without a player, and a public performance of music making is the natural consequence of private practice. It may equally be perceived negatively—the lute will always be the passive receiver of, and conduit for, the tunes imposed by the dominant player. The most obvious example of the player's dominant control and the instrument's passivity is seen in the myth of Syrinx, the Arcadian nymph who fled from the attentions of Pan; she was metamorphosed into a reed from which Pan subsequently made a flute. Given dramatic life by Lyly, Pan says:

This pipe, my sweet pipe, was once a nymph, a fair nymph, once my lovely mistress, now my heavenly music. Tell me, Apollo, is there any instrument so sweet to play on as one's mistress?

(Midas, 4.1.13; emphasis added)

Bubulcus in Shirley's Love Tricks (2.1, p. 22) says of his beloved that “there is no music without her; she is the best instrument to play upon.” From one angle Petruccio seems to be behaving as Pan, pursuing his mistress, and metamorphosing her into an instrument for music (“For she is changed as she had never been” [5.2.120]). Rosencrantz and Guildenstern attempt to do the same thing with Hamlet:

HAMLET
Will you play upon this pipe? [the Player's recorder]
GUILDENSTERN
My lord, I cannot. … I have not the skill.
HAMLET
Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery, you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak. 'Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me.

(3.2.338-40; 350-60)

Hamlet can resist Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's attempts so easily because these would-be players have no musical skill (“I know no touch of it, my lord” [3.2.344]). Petruccio, however, has considerable musical knowledge, as his vocabulary and snatches of song continually testify. What Hamlet can dismiss in one scene Katherine must struggle against for four acts.

For a more positive musical interpretation we must turn to Othello; here Shakespeare uses stringed music to represent marital concord. Othello's and Desdemona's kisses are viewed as “the greatest discords … / That e'er our hearts shall make!” (2.1.199-200; the frequent association of heart strings with music strings arose from a “false etymological relationship” [Hollander 210] derived from Latin puns on cor/cordis/chorda). Iago continues the image with the contemptuous “O, you are well tuned now, / But I'll set down the pegs that make this music” (2.1.200-201).¹⁷ Another “well-tuned couple” in a contemporary domestic tragedy have their nuptial bliss portrayed musically. The Frankfords' happiness at the opening of A Woman Killed with Kindness is described by Sir Charles: “There's music in this sympathy; it carries / Consort and expectation of much joy” (1.69-70). Heywood presents this musical/marital emblem physically with an onstage lute, a gift from Frankford to Anne, which is symbolically broken at the end of the play when Anne, “who used to make sweet music on her lute, has made sour music of her marriage” (Cary 114).

Katherine's marriage in The Taming of the Shrew may move in the opposite direction to that of Desdemona or Anne Frankford. The Katherine who refuses to play on the lute and makes discordant sounds in the early acts responds harmoniously to the commands of her husband in acts 4 and 5. Harmony in marriage, like harmony in lute-playing, depends on sympathetic pairs. Lute strings are strung in double courses and produce cacophonic sounds when they vibrate against each other in a “struggle for independence” (Hollander 233). So Katherine's independence in rejecting partners is presented as cacophony: she “[b]egan to scold and raise up such a storm / That mortal ears might hardly endure the din” (1.1.170-71). But as Sidney's Arcadia makes clear (262v), and as Katherine herself comes to realize, “one string [cannot] make as good music as a consort.” After some initial clashes of sound as Katherine takes the measure of her partner's musico-rhetorical style, Katherine progresses from the ostinato “dumps”¹⁸ of the play's opening to the harmonious playing in partnership with her musical and marital “consort.” All levels of music fuse in the play's conclusion, from the rhetorical duet to the nuptial kiss (“the greatest discord that e'er [their] hearts shall make”) to the final exit to bed: “the true concord of well-tuned sounds / By unions married” (sonnet 8, lines 5-6).

It is clear that this optimistic conclusion is not the only possible interpretation of the lute/cittern association and the allied references to stringed music in the play. No matter how harmonious the resultant music, the lute remains an object that the male subject uses for pleasure; and as in so many positive images of the married couple—for example, that of the rider and horse working in partnership—the “well-tuned” image conceals the hierarchical inequality of the relationship between player and instrument. For clarification and contextualization of the interpretive ambiguities of the play's musical images we must return to the motif of hunting.

IV. CULTURAL CONTROL AND THE PRICE OF PROGRESS

As a sport, hunting demonstrates power, predominantly masculine power, over wild nature. It has analogies in the wooing in The Taming of the Shrew, where Katherine is a wild creature who must be controlled. Petruccio lays his patriarchal cards on the table:

I am he am born to tame you, Kate,
And bring you from a wild Kate to a Kate
Conformable as other household Kates.

(2.1.270-72)

This statement comes in act 2, immediately after the episode in which Katherine has rejected both music and music master by breaking the lute over Hortensio's head. Katherine's violent behavior here is not as malapropos or uncivilized as it might appear, for musical instruments such as the lute are, like hunting and marital taming, a paradoxical blend of civilized life and violence, demonstrating male power over nature. Trees are felled, wood is split, to create lutes, harpsichords, virginals, viols da gamba, bandoras, citterns. Man the creator is also man the destroyer. These apparent irreconcilables come together in the figure of Apollo, who is both god of hunting and god of stringed instruments, and in The Tempest in the tyrannical/beneficent Prospero who releases the ethereal and musical Ariel by splitting the cloven pine in which he is imprisoned. Violent and destructive action is not separate from so-called civilized behavior, and in some cases may even lead to it, as the mottoes engraved on harpsichords, virginals, and spinets explicitly acknowledge (McGeary #27, 49, 25):

Io da le piaghe mie forma ricevo.
[I receive form from the blows (I received).]

Virginal, 1527

Non nisi mota cano.
[Not unless struck do I sing.]
                                                            Harpsichord, seventeenth century
Intactum sileo percute dulce cano.
[Untouched, I am silent; strike me, I sing sweetly.]

Spinet, 1741

Created by blows (inflicted on wood), or made musical by being struck, musical instruments—the epitome of the civilized classes—are symbiotically linked to violence.

The characterization of violence as a creative or harmonious teleology is disquieting to twentieth-century sensibility, not least because of the Renaissance's explicit gendering of music and musical instruments as feminine. The aestheticization of violence against women in musical mottoes or virginal lids (see below) suggests that such violence is civilized, productive, acceptable.¹⁹ Although Petruccio does not actually strike the instrument to produce the sweet sounds in act 5, his taming is presented in unremittingly musical terms. Wealth is burden of his wooing dance; Katherine's railing is, to him, the sweet singing of a nightingale (we remember an earlier ominous reference to the caged nightingales who will sing sweetly for Christopher Sly); and the “Friar of Order Grey” of which Petruccio sings a portion is, as P. J. Croft explains (8), “a bawdy tale of male domination and female submission.” Although critics frequently contrast the taming treatment Katherine receives from Petruccio with the more civilized education in music and the humanities that Bianca receives, the two are not as different as one might think. By this argument both Bianca and Katherine are cornered and controlled.

It is surely no coincidence that, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, one of the most common topoi to be painted on virginal and harpsichord lids (of which women were the primary players) was the hunt. As Richard Leppert explains, “To place a hunting scene on a clavichord effectively linked this power over life to the activity of music, the apparent radical opposite to the hunting scene. … [A]rt and power are one and the same. In other words, the distance is collapsed between art, typically theorized as a spiritual and spiritualizing realm of human experience, and a man's power to shape the physical world” (Leppert 126, 133). Thus considerations of music bring us back to the hunt, for, like the hunt, music is associated with class (the music master comes into the home), with power (musical notation provides orders for players to follow), and with violence (from the creation of wooden instruments to the mottoes that advocate domestic violence as a prelude to harmony). The issues come together dramatically, comically, in venery, which the preface to The Roaring Girl promises the reader: “To the Comicke Play-readers, Venery, and Laughter.” As Jean Howard explains (170), venery can mean both sexual pursuit and hunting with hounds.

In act 5 Katherine is characterized as a deer (5.2.57-58); but, as Margie Burns points out (44), and as the betting language in the scene makes clear, Katherine also functions as a retriever. This slippage between quarry and helpmate illustrates a duality in Renaissance attitudes to marriage, first broached in The Taming of the Shrew in the series of references to horses.²⁰ Renaissance marriage and equestrian manuals frequently link the training of horses with the training of women: both are taught to obey the “manage.” The “brank” or scold's bridle worn by shrews was modeled on the horse bridle, a symbol of harness which survives in miniature in the wedding ring (until recently wedding rings were worn only by women); and yet once the horse was trained, rider and mount were viewed as a noble if unequal partnership, as were husband and wife. (This relationship between animal management and marriage is coincidentally encoded in the homonymic bridle/bridal.)

Thus, despite notable ambiguities in interpretation, it is in the end difficult to see how references to women as hunted animals or musical instruments, in this play at least, can be flattering or ennobling. The linked images of hunting, music, and taming suggest in fact that marital relations are but one part of The Taming of the Shrew's larger skeptical analysis of so-called civilized behavior. The play analyzes cultural control in the three areas of life that are considered indices of man's progress: musical entertainment, sporting activity, and Christian marriage. Man's progress in music, sport, and conjugal relations is grounded in manipulation: of nature, animals, and social subordinates. The underlying motif may be play (the gulling of Sly is a “jest,” a “pastime passing excellent”; New Criticism sees Petruccio's taming strategies as an invitation to Katherine to enter a playful world of transforming reality; the recreation in music and hunting is obvious), but such play is not without its victims or its dangers. Although the exiled Duke Senior in As You Like It learns to appreciate unadorned nature in the forest of Arden, finding “tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,” in reality urban “civilized” man uses trees to make musical instruments and books. Women, animals, and the environment suffer for the sake of conjugal convention, sport, and musical leisure. The creation of civilized life is a paradox, involving uncivilized behavior. Progress comes, quite literally, as the musical references in The Taming of the Shrew show, with strings attached.

Notes

1. For information in this paragraph, and throughout this section, I am indebted to Carr, English Fox Hunting; Cartmill, A View to a Death; Cummins, The Hound and the Hawk; Markham, The Gentlemans Academie and Countrey Contentments; Cockaine, A Short Treatise; Leppert, ch. 6 of The Sight of Sound; Turbervile, The Noble Arte (this is a free translation of Jacques du Fouilloux's La Venerie [c. 1561]); and Twiti, The Art of Hunting.

2. The medieval and Renaissance hunt was a much slower activity than its modern descendant, and horses were not always used. For the speed of the Renaissance hunt, see Cockaine, who does not mention horses, and cf. Carr 28.

3. But see Cockaine's A Short Treatise, which puts the fox above all other quarry.

4. For discussion of these examples, see Cartmill 78-80.

5. For other similarities between the induction and 5.2, see Burns.

6. I quote from the second edition, 1691, p. 446.

7. For differing views on this subject, see Munrow 26 and Ward passim.

8. Thomas Peacham compares music to rhetoric; Phillip Stubbes compares music to cosmetics. For these references, and further information on the equation of women with music, see Austern, “‘Sing Againe’”; “‘Alluring the Auditorie’”; “Music and the English Renaissance.” Cf. also Hollander 104-22. For a related analysis of Sir Philip Sidney's Defence of Poetry showing how the terminology of the debate about poesy is also the terminology used in debates about face painting, see Dolan.

9. The conflated sexual-musical associations of “play” are still current in a 1995 Museum of London advertisement, which invites the reader to view Lady Hamilton's guitar with the elaborate pun “See what Nelson's mistress was playing when she wasn't playing the strumpet.” A pun on (s)trumpet also seems indicated in Othello 2.1.181. Iago concludes the speech in which he has been observing Cassio's over-gallant behavior with Desdemona by announcing Othello's arrival; Iago's phrase resonates with unambiguous elision: “The Moor—I know his trumpet” (emphasis added).

10. Although published in 1566, the play seems to have been written in the reign of Edward VI; see White xxii-xxiii.

11. For the sexual significance of “drum” in All's Well that Ends Well, see Stanton.

12. In The Vanities of Human Life (c. 1645; National Gallery, London) the Dutch painter Harmyn Steenwyck uses the round-bellied lute to symbolize the female body, and the phallic flute and shawn (a medieval oboe) to symbolize the male body.

13. For the association between prostitutes and lutes, see Dirck Van Baburen's Procuress (1622; Boston Museum of Fine Arts) and Frans Huys's The Lute Maker's Shop (sixteenth century, reproduced in Moxey). For discussion of these works, see Williams 2: 834-35 (lute) and cf. 3: 1481 (viol). In Hieronymus Bosch's triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1500; Prado, Madrid), the third panel shows the results of lust: damnation. Male bodies are depicted crushed by, or crucified on, two giant musical instruments: a lute and a harp.

14. I am grateful to S. P. Cerasano for drawing my attention to this reference.

15. In The Taming of a Shrew this covert innuendo is made more explicit. Kate's threat of violence is prompted by Valeria's lewd “What, doo you bid me kisse your arse?” (a mishearing, deliberate or otherwise, of Kate's vituperative command to “mend it [her lute playing] …, thou filthy asse”). See The Taming of a Shrew 6.24-30, in Bullough.

16. For further taunts and criticisms based on cittern metaphors, see Shakespeare, Love's Labor's Lost 5.2.602-16; Ford, Love's Cure 2.2.108; Ford, The Fancies 1.2, p. 234; Ford, The Lover's Melancholy 2.1.36-39; Marston, The Scourge of Villainy, p. 301; and Massinger, The Old Law, pp. 533-34.

17. See King for an analysis of the importance of music in Othello.

18. A “mournful song or melody”; see Morris 2.1.277n.

19. For a more recent example, see Susan Stroman's choreography for the Gershwin musical Crazy for You (1992-95). Adorned with taut strings from chin to toe, the female chorus cleverly emulated basses that the male chorus plucked, while the company sang “Slap that Bass” (emphasis added).

20. See Roberts, Wayne, and Boose on this subject. See also Thomas Tryon's The Way to Health (446), which uses the language of horse training to refer to musical control.

I am grateful to Thomas L. Berger, S. P. Cerasano, Frances E. Dolan, Lynn Hulse, and George Walton Williams for commenting on earlier drafts of this essay. I wish also to record my thanks to the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada for a grant that funded part of this research.

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