SOURCE: Schleiner, Winfried. “Deromanticizing the Shrew: Notes on Teaching Shakespeare in a ‘Women in Literature’ Course.” In Teaching Shakespeare, edited by Walter Edens, Christopher Durer, Walter Eggers, Duncan Harris, Keith Hull, pp. 79-92. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977.

[In the following essay, Schleiner examines the characterization of Katherina from a feminist perspective.]

The new discipline of women's studies brings home more clearly than many others that history is part of what we are. While Renaissance literature is apparently becoming more and more remote to undergraduates—a recent poetry anthology entitled Ancients and Moderns¹ begins with John Donne—the relevance of Shakespeare in a “women in literature” course will go undisputed. More importantly, consideration of his plays from this perspective is, as one might expect, an undertaking that provides both intellectual and existential stimulation.

Attention to Shakespeare's female characters is of course not new. Looking through Robert C. Steemsma's (by now dated) bibliography of Shakespeare and women,² one might feel the despair that Virginia Woolf experienced as she consulted the British Museum's catalogue entry on women and wondered: “How shall I ever find the grains of truth embedded in this mass of paper?”³ But most of these works have only incidentally considered the questions that will be asked by the generation of students emancipated by Germaine Greer's Female Eunuch.⁴ The older works, if they are anything more than journalism (like Heine's Shakespeares Mädchen und Frauen), usually limit themselves to drawing character portraits, sometimes impressively written from a performer's point of view (such as Shakespeare's Female Characters by Helen Faucit, Lady Martin). But often they are marred by excessive adulation of Shakespeare the man, defensiveness about women, and facile judgments about the Elizabethan age. Thus Anna B. Jameson writes in Shakespeare's Heroines: “If the freedom of some of the expressions used by Rosalind or Beatrice be objected to, let it be remembered that this was not the fault of Shakespeare or of women, but generally of the age.”⁵ Nevertheless as T. J. B. Spencer has shown, these works provide useful information for a history of the reception of Shakespeare's female characters.⁶ Germaine Greer observes that “it is still to be proved how much we owe of what is good in the ideal of exclusive love and cohabitation to Shakespeare” (p. 204).

Instead of pursuing so ambitious a topic I would like to present one way in which I have considered Shakespeare in a general course on the image of women in literature. Original stimulants for this section of the course were Greer's book, particularly the chapter “Romance,” and two brilliant but seemingly perverse arguments recently advanced: that Shakespeare's Kate is a “romantic” shrew,⁷ and that his romantic comedies expose romantic susceptibilities to ridicule.⁸

Although the value of theme and motif studies has been questioned⁹ and some scholars believe they are “most often apprentice work of young literary historians,”¹⁰ I organized my course according to motifs relating to the presentation of women characters. Practitioners of this method believe that a close comparison of versions of similar motifs against the background of a longitudinal cut through literary history can sharpen the observer's attention to detail in the individual work.¹¹ And ideally the new light generated is not shed upon the individual work alone, showing it finally in radiant isolation, but also upon the nexus between the theme and the society for which the author wrote. Furthermore, it would be a mistake to think of all motifs as conceptually “neutral,” as empty receptacles to be endowed with meaning at the will of the author. There are some that are “loaded,” and one of these is the motif I call “wives willfully tested.”

Kate the shrew was not a favorite of the earlier admirers of Shakespeare's women—Jameson, Martin, and Heine manage to avoid discussing her altogether. But if we open our diachronic lens wide enough we can hope for some insight even from one of Shakespeare's more controversial creations.

I began my survey of women willfully tested with Enide, the heroine of Chrestien's romance Erec and Enide, and ended it with Rennie, the unfortunate wife in John Barth's The End of the Road. In between there is the best-known English elaboration of the theme, Chaucer's “Clerk's Tale” (a version of Petrarch's Griselda story) and its derivative, the Elizabethan Patient Grissill by Dekker, Chettle, and Houghton, and then there is Margret the lodge-keeper's daughter of Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. Of course the list does not aim at completeness: if space (or in a course, time) permitted it could easily be doubled. But the examples are sufficient to point up the curious fact that these works never deal with male-female relationships in social isolation, but in the context of hierarchies of social rank.

Enide, the heroine of Chrestien's romance, is the daughter of a poor vavassor. Of course it is not her upbringing in poverty that causes her tribulation. But it may not be an accident that the poet thought this background fitting for his paragon of wifely obedience and love. Even at the end of the romance, after she has shown her willingness to follow every caprice of Erec's will and has been reinstated as his dame, her submissive love retains an element of gratitude to him for having lifted her out of poverty.¹² The disparity of wealth and rank between male tester and tested wife in Chaucer's “Clerk's Tale” is so obvious that I would hardly need to mention it except to note the interesting circumstance that Chaucer further heightened the disparity of wealth that he found in his source.¹³ Splendor is Walter's attribute as much as poverty is Griselda's.

While Chaucer does not entirely condone Lord Walter's cruel treatment of his low-born wife, the Elizabethan play on the same subject forces the most out-spoken critic of the husband's actions to admit finally: “None else but Kings can know the hearts of Kings, / Hence foorth my pride shall fly with humbler wings” (Patient Grissill, V.ii.217-218). This may also be the message of the Margret-Lacy subplot of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, where after being wooed by Lord Lacy, the lodge-keeper's daughter receives a stunning letter from him, denouncing his affection and announcing his engagement to a high lady of the court. As she is about to become a nun Margret learns that the letter was only a device to test her constancy. She passes the test and marries happily, and we must assume that in the eyes of Greene's audience, a lord who stooped to woo a lowly maid was justified in testing her.

I have argued elsewhere that such disparities of rank are not simply reflections of the societies for which the respective authors wrote, but that they enter very deeply into the construction of these works, affecting the sense of verisimilitude and probability, the choice of characters, and the shape of the plot. Renaissance versions of the theme of a low-born girl marrying beyond her rank can be viewed in another way as well, from another perspective, as instances of the kind of “romance” whose survival in our times has been so well documented from modern literature and sub-literature by Germaine Greer. By romance she means a sex-specific and stereotyped fantasy about the marriage partner, and shows that such projection, in spite of its vicarious nature, is potent enough to distort actual behavior: “The lover in romance is a man of masterful ways, clearly superior to his beloved in at least one respect, usually in several, being older or of higher social rank and attainment or more intelligent and au fait.” And again a few pages later, “The strength of the belief that a man should be stronger and older than his woman can hardly be exaggerated. I cannot claim to be fully emancipated from the dream that some enormous man, say six foot six, heavily shouldered and so forth to match, will crush me to his tweeds, look down into my eyes and leave the taste of heaven or the scorch of his passion on my waiting lips. For three weeks I was married to him” (pp. 170, 171).

There is no disparity of rank in The Taming of the Shrew; nor is there any difference of wealth between Kate and Petruchio. It may seem, then, as if the tests to which Kate is subjected are generated purely by an assumed male superiority. Many readers take the play this way. Some of them find Kate's final speech on matrimonial obedience unbearable and therefore, assuming that what should not be cannot be, go beneath the letter to interpret her disquisition ironically.¹⁴ Actresses sometimes underscore this interpretation with smiles or flippant gestures.

But Kate's shrewishness and its cure must be taken seriously. In Germaine Greer's view, “Kate is a woman striving for her own existence in a world where she is a stale, a decoy to be bid for against her sister's higher market value, so she opts out by becoming unmanageable, a scold” (p. 205). This reading projects too much modern sensibility and motivation into her. A more likely meaning of the word “stale” in the context where Kate uses it (I.i.58) would be laughing-stock. To see virtue in her shrewishness goes against the drift of the play. Not only is she described from the beginning as “stark mad” and “wonderful froward” (I.i.69), but the spectator witnesses her defying her father's request (I.i.102-4), torturing her sister, and maltreating her presumed music teacher. Therefore I think that in his attempt to see Kate as a “romantic shrew” Charles Brooks overemphasizes Shakespeare's “humanizing of the shrew” (giving her attractive traits that temper her shrewishness)¹⁵ when he points to Kate's sense of shame and her pity for the servants abused by Petruchio. The shame and pity are fruits of Petruchio's “cure,” and mark stages in her transformation from the shrew she was at the beginning. Her shrewishness is conceived of as a condition of dissonance or intemperance.

The medical concepts of humoral psychology are quite appropriate here. Summarizing a host of earlier views in his usual fashion, Robert Burton describes a distemper to which young women (notably virgins) are prone, listing among the symptoms “perverse conceits and opinions” and “preposterous judgement. They are apt to loathe, dislike, disdaine, to be weary of every object, etc., each thing is almost tedious to them.”¹⁶ Young women living at ease “in great houses” are especially likely to be afflicted by this malady, which is said to be caused by “vicious vapours” arising from excess menstrual blood in a physically and sexually inactive woman who is not bearing children. (Nuns and widows are also prone to this “feral” condition.) Again basing himself on his sources, Burton suggests that in serious cases “labour and exercise, strict diet, rigour and threats may opportunely be used, and are able of themselves to qualify and divert an ill-disposed temperament” (I, 417).

Petruchio's diagnosis of Kate as choleric or distempered is clear from his description of her at their first meeting, once we read his words in their ironically intended reverse sense:

For she's not froward, but modest as the dove;
She is not hot, but temperate as the morn;
For patience she will prove a second Grissel.

(II.i.293-95)

We must also take note of Petruchio's reference to Kate's “mad and headstrong humor,” especially since it occurs in a soliloquy, where he can be assumed to be speaking his mind:

This is a way to kill a wife with kindness,
And thus I'll curb her mad and headstrong humor.
He that knows better how to tame a shrew,
Now let him speak; 'tis charity to shew.

(IV.i.208-11)

His “killing kindness” consists in pretending to take her for more seriously affected by choler than she is (he hints at this pretense in the same monologue). Thus the details of his therapy are in a sense mere show: they are intended to wear her out physically and at the same time make her aware of her eccentricity.

In the scene preceding his central monologue, Petruchio had shown a sample of his technique in throwing the food at the servants before Kate could touch it and claiming,

I tell thee Kate, 'twas burnt and dried away,
And I expressly am forbid to touch it;
For it engenders choler, planteth anger,
And better 'twere that both of us did fast,
Since of ourselves, ourselves are choleric,
Than feed it with such overroasted flesh.

(IV.i.170-75)

The servant Grumio's subsequent refusal to serve her certain food because “I fear it is too choleric a meat” (IV.iii.19, 22) is a variation of the same idea.

The anonymous The Taming of a Shrew likewise has Grumio's analogue Sander refer to Kate's choler in this scene (scene xi), the only reference to Kate's “humor” in that play.¹⁷ Thus this passage (or its antecedent in a possible common source) may have been a source of stimulation for Shakespeare. More importantly, the difference between the plays in this respect tends to support my idea about the significance of medical concepts in Shakespeare's conception of Kate.¹⁸ The leading idea of the plot seems to be to show how a woman is changed from a shrew into a “second Grissel” (II.i.295). The fact that Shakespeare presents us at the outset with a singularly obnoxious shrew suggests a clear line of progression. In the anonymous Shrew play, Sly walks away, after partly watching the play and partly sleeping through it, thinking that he now knows how to tame his wife if she should become shrewish. I cannot imagine that Shakespeare's audience was expected to react very differently, although some of my students have objected that Sly may not be the most reliable informant.

It would seem that Shakespeare deliberately ruled out a simple “romantic” interest as Petruchio's primary motive for attempting a cure. He states programmatically that his only requirement for a prospective wife is wealth, be she “curst and shrowd / As Socrates' Xantippe” (I.ii.70-71). (Romantic habits of thinking being what they are, many readers and spectators will object that Petruchio has not yet met Kate at this point, and that he falls in love with her as soon as he sees her.) Moreover, in contrast to the other works presenting female testing that we reviewed briefly, the two protagonists are not differentiated in any scale of rank or wealth: there is none of the disparity which in later versions of the testing theme (Gerhart Hauptmann's Griseldis of 1909 might also be considered), and in such modern popular spectacles as Love Story and Five Easy Pieces serves as the source of “romance” in the wider sense. But there is a sense of male-female hierarchy at the center of the play. Petruchio excels Kate not only in physical strength but also in intelligence, as is evidenced by his resourcefulness in manipulating people. Whether we experience this superiority as crushing depends partly, as I have tried to show, on how seriously we take Kate's shrewishness. Of course such male-female disparity is by itself potentially a source of romance (and probably in any modern work actually its source). But the female obedience advocated by Kate in her final plea is based not on a mythic belief in male dominance but on a social conception of male-female hierarchy. As M. C. Bradbrook has rightly seen, “her grand oration does not evoke the muddled theology which winds up The Taming of a Shrew, but recalls man's social claims as a bread winner, protector and temporal lord.”¹⁹ In a central passage Kate says a husband is

                                                                      one that cares for thee,
And for thy maintenance; commits his body
To painful labor, both by sea and land;
To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,
Whilst thou li'st warm at home, secure and safe.

(V.ii.147-51)

Surely these elements of her speech are based on a social order so natural and commonplace to the playwright and his audience that the presence of romance is ruled out. Kate's cure has enabled her to represent the old hierarchical view of marriage as a beneficial relationship in which the husband rules, protects, and “husbands,” and the wife submits, supports, and produces.

Since the result of our consideration of the Shrew in relation to romance was essentially negative, I decided to illustrate the functioning of romance in one of the comedies usually called “romantic.” I started with M. A. Shaaber's stimulating suggestion that for several of Shakespeare's romantic comedies, among them As You Like It, the stress in the term should be on the noun rather than on the adjective: “And in fact—what should be no surprise at all—the comic view of life in these plays is largely a comic view of love” (p. 172). Comparing As You Like It with its source, Lodge's Rosalynde, Shaaber found a world of difference in the dialogue of the courting situations. The difference was not merely one of euphuistic prose style versus dramatic presentation: “The truth is that Shakespeare's characters are Laodiceans in the religion of love. Not heretics: there is nothing in their conduct or their ideals which is clearly repugnant to its tenets, but they are perfunctory and indifferent worshippers at its altars” (p. 169).

From a number of plays Shaaber compiles a chorus of witty disparagement of love and says:

In As You Like It this gibing at love reaches a peak, for Rosalind's undertaking to cure Orlando of his infatuation, to wash his liver as clean as a sound sheep's heart, that there shall not be one spot of love in it, affords an unparalleled opportunity to canvass the affectations of lovers. She describes the marks of a lover—his lean cheek, his sunken eye, his unsociableness, his neglect of his dress—and the changeableness of women, “longing, and liking, proud, fantastical, apish, shallow, inconstant, full of tears, full of smiles.” She admonishes Orlando that “Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love,” that love lasts not “for ever and a day” but a day without the “ever,” that the wiser a woman is, the waywarder. … The indictment is quite comprehensive.

(p. 174)

I cannot agree with this reading of Rosalind's words, although I recognize that Shakespeare added a new dimension to the plot by introducing the Touchstone-Audrey and Jacques subplots. If there is a hint of an indictment of women and romantic love in the words of Lodge's Rosalynde, there is even less in Shakespeare's Rosalind's speech; while Lodge's Rosalynde as she makes some of these remarks is playing a boy, posing as a girl, in Shakespeare's play the seriousness is one more step removed: the girl pretending to be a boy, now on a stage playing a girl, is played by a boy actor. It is curious to find even Germaine Greer taking Rosalind's false claim that she can cure love by pretense seriously: “In As You Like It Rosalind finds the means to wean Orlando of his futile Italianate posturing, disfiguring trees with bad poetry” (p. 204). But Shakespeare signals clearly that Rosalind is serious neither in word nor in action when she announces in an aside: “I will speak to him [Orlando] like a saucy lackey, and under that habit play the knave with him” (III.ii.295-97). The later “indictment” of women and love is likewise spoken “like a saucy lackey.” Rosalind immensely enjoys the “playing” she refers to—it allows her an even greater level of control over Orlando than a simple courting situation would. If Germaine Greer is right that at the center of the female view of romance is the dream of being “the mistress of all she surveys, the cynosure of all eyes” (p. 182) as summarized in a courting situation, then Rosalind's play represents the ne plus ultra of romantic fantasy.

Shakespeare's reworking of the dénouement of one strand of the main love intrigue from his source seems to confirm this emphasis. I have argued elsewhere that Lodge's technique in his romance, despite his supposedly egalitarian setting, consists in playing with certain differences in rank among his characters.²⁰ In terms of implied hierarchical values, the final revelation scene on the eve of the wedding day deserves attention, since it is the conclusion of the love story between Saladyne and Aliena (Shakespeare's Oliver and Celia). Rosalind has just revealed that she is the princess, and has fallen into the arms of Saladyne's brother, the noble Rosader. The shepherdess Phoebe has finally accepted the shepherd Montanus as her groom. (There is no need to regret her lack of passion for the shepherd; both she and the reader know him to be her peer in wealth and beauty, and we are to assume that they are well matched.) Along with these weddings a third is to occur: the noble Saladyne will wed the shepherdess Aliena, who has not yet made known her noble parentage. How is this love affair to be brought to an aesthetically pleasing conclusion?

Aliena seeing Saladyne stand in a dumpe, to wake him from his dreame, began thus. Why how now my Saladyne, all a mort, what melancholy man at the day of marriage? perchaunce thou art sorrowfull to thinke on thy brothers high fortunes, and thyne owne base desires to chuse so meane a shepheardize. Cheare vp thy hart man, for this day thou shalt bee married to the daughter of a King: for know Saladyne, I am not Aliena, but Alinda the daughter of thy mortal enemie Torismond.

(AYLI, New Variorum, p. 385)

The reader who would expect Saladyne to protest against the suggestion that “base desires” led to the choice of “so mean a shepherdess” is disappointed. Saladyne does not protest. Nor is there any reason to suppose that he is not sad about the prospect of marrying a shepherdess while his brother's fiancée has turned out to be a princess. Saladyne is “in a dump.” In terms of later love theory he seriously mars the entire love experience that has gone before. Of course the idea that love can transcend social rank has since become a staple of romance. A later writer might, for example, have viewed Aliena's presumed low status as proof of the sincerity and power of Saladyne's love. For Lodge, however (if we exclude the possibility that he blundered), the aesthetic satisfaction of matching two persons of comparable rank overruled other considerations.

We cannot determine why the passage did not appeal to Shakespeare, whether because of its unromantic quality or because it did not seem dramatic enough: for whatever reason, he left it out. Led by Hymen, Celia (Lodge's Aliena) and Rosalind simply enter the stage undisguised, whereupon Hymen then pairs off the lovers. Thus our impression of Oliver's love for the lowly shepherdess (“Neither call the giddiness of it in question, the poverty of her, the small acquaintance, my sudden wooing,” etc.—V.ii.5-7) remains intact. We never leave the realm of romance.

Observing the projection of male and female fantasy and its nexus with senses of social hierarchy in Shakespeare's plays can be a stimulating experience. Differences of rank at the core of most versions of female testing (potentially a source of “romance” in Greer's sense) are absent in Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew. Male-female hierarchy as advocated by Kate at the end of the play can of course also be a romantic projection, but I resist this interpretation because Kate's eccentricity at the opening is extreme and her cure dominates the action, and further because her final submission appears to be couched in conceptions commonplace to the Elizabethans. While I thus find Kate not romantic, not even in Brooks's sense of good-natured shrewishness, I see Rosalind and Celia of As You Like It, who thrive on the courting situation which makes them “mistresses of all they survey,” as truly romantic heroines. The approach requires an attention to the self and to the text, and most interestingly highlights the problem of historical perspective.

Notes

1. Ed. Stewart A. Baker (New York: Harper and Row, 1971).

2. “Shakespeare and Women: A Bibliography,” Shakespeare Newsletter 12 (1962), 12. The most important recent book on the subject is by Juliet Dusinberre, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women (London: Macmillan, 1975).

3. A Room of One's Own (New York: Harcourt, 1957), p. 27.

4. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970).

5. (Philadelphia: H. Altemus, n.d.), p. 66. First ed. London, 1832.

6. “Shakespeare and the Noble Woman,” Shakespeare-Jahrbuch (1966), 49-62.

7. Charles Brooks, “Shakespeare's Romantic Shrews,” Shakespeare Quarterly 11 (1960), 351-56.

8. M. A. Shaaber, “The Comic View of Life in Shakespeare's Comedies,” in The Drama of the Renaissance: Essays for Leicester Bradner, ed. E. M. Blistein (Providence: Brown Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 165-78.

9. In his chapter “Stoff und Motivgeschichte,” which summarizes trends in this field of studies, Ulrich Weisstein cites the serious reservations of some of the ancestors of comparative literature, Baldensperger and Van Tieghem, and also of Wellek (Einführung in die Vergleichende Literaturwissenchaft [Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1968], p. 71).

10. Reported by Manfred Beller, “Von der Stoffgeschichte zur Thematologie: ein Beitrag zur komparatistischen Methodenlehre,” Arcadia 5 (1970), 1.

11. See Beller, p. 8. Also Adam J. Bisanz, “Zwischen Stoffgeschichte und Themathologie: Betrachtungen zu einem literaturtheoretischen Dilemma,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 47 (1973), 148-66.

12. For details see my “Rank and Marriage: A Study of the Motif of ‘Woman Willfully Tested,’” Comparative Literature Studies 9 (1972), 365-75.

13. Schleiner, pp. 365-75.

14. Margaret Webster sees in Kate's speech a “delicious irony,” and to prove her point supplies an interlinear gloss for it in Shakespeare Without Tears (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1942), p. 142. Although Juliet Dusinberre does not follow such a reading, she maintains in a somewhat similar vein that the very end of the play “casts a shadow of ambiguity across its conclusions” (p. 108).

15. Brooks, p. 352.

16. Anatomy of Melancholy, 1.3.2.4 (London: Dent Everyman, 1932), I,415-16. For Burton any distemper comes to be subsumed under “melancholy” in a broad sense. John Draper, in The Humors and Shakespeare's Characters (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1945), p. 112, briefly refers to Petruchio's treatment of his choleric “patient.”

17. Theories about The Taming of a Shrew as possible source of The Taming of the Shrew are briefly summarized by Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, I (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1964), 57-58.

18. In her Voices of Melancholy (London: Routledge, 1971), p. 54. Bridget Gellert Lyons notes that according to the Induction the play proper is put on as Sly's “cure” of melancholy. There is no analogue of this idea in A Shrew either.

19. “Dramatic Rôle as Social Image: A Study of The Taming of the Shrew,” Shakespeare-Jahrbuch 94 (1958), 145.

20. “‘That virtue is not measured by birth but by action’: Reality versus Intention in Lodge's Rosalynde,” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 23 (1975), 12-15.