Kates for the Table and Kates of the Mind: A Social Metaphor in The Taming of the Shrew

Abstract

KATES FOR THE TABLE AND KATES OF THE MIND: A SOCIAL METAPHOR IN THE TAMING OF THE SHREW R A N D A L L M A R T IN University of Toronto I T h e vigour of recent critical debate over Petruchio’s treatment of Katherine has turned The Taming of the Shrew into the first of Shakespeare’s prob­ lem comedies. Traditionally it has been staged as a whip-cracking farce in which Katherine’s need for reform is taken for granted and Petruchio’s strat­ egy of giving her more than a taste of her own medicine is seen as justified and reasonable. Any anxiety audiences might feel about the harshness of Petruchio’s methods is allegedly relieved by the play’s conventional slap­ stick context, which presupposes characters of limited human sensitivities who are insulated from experiencing “real” pain, thus making compassion for Katherine’s ordeal unnecessary.1 This easygoing and still prevalent view of the play has been increasingly challenged, however, by critics and pro­ ductions reinterpreting it as a vexatious social comedy. They anatomize the cultural assumptions of male superiority behind Petruchio’s attempt to change Katherine and at the same time redefine her aggressive behaviour as self-preserving resistance to patriarchal repression.2 This recontextualizing leads to rejection of the argument that the negative impact of Petruchio’s actions is neutralized by the operation of artificial or essentializing dramatic formulas, since the play maintains a realistic historical dimension insofar as it parodies contemporary marriage customs (Hibbard 15-28). The presence of this dimension also counters assumptions that Katherine is tamed in any facile way, and prompts critics and directors to see her notorious submission speech as defiantly ironic (rather than facetious, as a farcical interpretation might play it), although some concede that she may be knowingly complicit at the end of the play so as to satisfy, in a purely pro forma way, the the­ atrical conventions of romantic comedy. Such revisionist readings make it increasingly difficult to continue seeing the play as an uncomplicated romp whose sexist premisses can be overlooked, as if gentle Shakespeare did not really mean them. Yet however indebted we are to this new orientation for refreshing the play’s critical- and stagelife , its persuasiveness may ultimately be weakened by inherent aspects of English Stud ies in Ca n a d a , x v ii, i , March 1991 the approach itself: marginalizing certain historical and theatrical perspec­ tives that may partially mitigate our impatience with the play’s outmoded assumptions; reading into speeches ironies that are unlikely to have been available to Shakespeare’s audience and that cannot be supported by direct textual evidence. The interpretations produced by such re-readings may be stimulating and provocative, but may also tend to belie the complexity and pluralism of the original cultural context, and to deny the possibility of characters’ motivations being anything other than good or bad. Strictly polemical readings, moreover, often seem out of touch with the play’s history of searching and enjoyable productions (Morris 88-104, Thompson 17-24). What I wish to suggest in this paper is that the tendency to polarity among late twentieth-century views of The Taming of ihe Shrew can be re­ versed, not by blurring the play’s distinct conflicts within a universalizing middle ground, but by rehistoricizing those conflicts. Situating the play within its contemporary context of social ideas and practices will help to show that Petruchio’s treatment of Kate reflects genuinely contradictory Elizabethan attitudes about the nature of women, and that the contradic­ tions are the result of sixteenth-century revaluations of traditional views. Petruchio’s undeniable urge to master Kate has led recent accounts to de­ monize him and thus to bar anything but a negative assessment of his mo­ tives, even though Shakespeare suggests something more multidimensional by contrasting his attitudes with those of characters in the plots involving, respectively, Christopher Sly and Bianca. And while Petruchio’s actions rep­ resent the most ruthless expression of the play’s dominant social paradigm of male supremacy, they are mediated through certain social metaphors that posit a variant yet equivocal paradigm: intellectual and spiritual equality between...