Love and marriage are the concerns of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. Lucentio’s marriage to Bianca is prompted by his idealized love of an apparently ideal woman. Petruchio’s wooing of Katherine, however, is free of idealism. Petruchio takes money from Bianca’s suitors to woo her, since Katherine must marry before her sister by her father’s decree; he also arranges the dowry with her … with her father. Petruchio is then ready to marry Katherine, even against her will.
Katherine, the shrew of the play’s title, certainly acts much changed. But have she and Petruchio learned to love each other? Or is the marriage based on terror and deception?
The authoritative edition of The Taming of the Shrew from The Folger Shakespeare Library, the trusted and widely used Shakespeare series for students and general readers, includes:
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-An annotated guide to further reading
Essay by Karen Newman
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Book Review
The Taming of the Shrew is one of William Shakespeare’s earliest plays and comedies, produced in the mid-1590s. We read this play in 8th or 9th grade as one of the introductions to Shakespeare in an English course. I’d rank this somewhere in the middle in terms of his comedies as well as works in general. It’s got several funny moments (ironic humor) but it’s also a bit weaker in terms of style and hidden meanings among all the words and characters. The plot is strong, and copied by many in the last 420+ years. Two men want to date / marry two women; sisters, brothers or friends, doesn’t really matter. But only if both girls are married at the same time, thus forcing the hand where 1 man must step up and “take one for the team.”
Some argue the play is sexist. I won’t debate that, only say it is over 400 years old and probably more forward-thinking than most others at the time. Not saying it’s right or fair, tho. What does a man do when he agrees to marry the “shrewish” girl… especially when she won’t have anything to do with him. Inject some humor, fiendish plot and sarcasm, of course. What makes this an interesting play is there is a lot of action and definition in the characters. There’s enough to go around, unlike some of the other works where you can’t quite tell which characters are important… and sometimes mix up a few. Much easier to stay focused here. But it’s not as funny as you’d like it to be. I like plays with strong female characters. Katherine is strong but unfortunately has a few weak moments. And the ending doesn’t fit for me.
But… as far his plays go, definitely worth a read!
We like to say Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson were practically the first modernists because they did come along in the early 20th century after the Great War or WWI, and they did help to drive the last nail into the coffin of Romanticism. But closer study of Shakespeare’s plays, particularly Hamlet, started to make us wonder if we were maybe three centuries off with our dates. Hamlet says something in that play that no romantic character or Elizabethan character should be capable of saying let alone thinking. In the “To be or not to be” speech Hamlet essentially asks what is the point to any human action. His uncle, Claudius, has seized the throne by killing Hamlet’s dad, so now Hamlet is obligated to avenge his father by killing Claudius. But what if he does nothing? Then he won’t have to become a king who killed somebody who killed somebody to become king. It’s an existential moment, in other words, a concept that wasn’t formalized until Sartre did so in the 20th century. Then we got to thinking: if we got the start of Modernism completely wrong, what if we are also wrong about Post-Modernism? What if Post-Modernism began much, much earlier than the 1960s works of Pynchon or the 1930s works of Joyce or the 1850s works of Flaubert or the 1760s works of Sterne? Consider Taming of the Shrew, from 1590, ten years before Hamlet. The play opens with an odd framing device, one in which a drunken tinker named Christopher Sly is collapsed outside a house, talking to a maid, and then passes out. The lord then comes home, sees Sly’s terrible condition and concocts a plan to make him think he’s woken up in a new reality in which he’s the lord of the house. Some actors happen by, meanwhile, and the lord hires them to put on a special play for the tinker, all the while pretending he is a lord and this is all for him. Suddenly this play has become very post-modern. The idea behind Modernism has always been for the audience or reader to forget the artifice of storytelling and to enter a state of self-forgetting in which the people on stage are real, the action is real, and they themselves are temporarily gone. But when Shakespeare asks the audience to watch a person watching a play, there’s a confusion about which action is the one they are treating as real. It makes the most sense to regard the larger action with the most characters as real and to regard Sly himself as a spectator to a real action, meaning he is now the same as they are. So now they are engaged in both a self-forgetting of watching a real action and a self-remembering or self-conscious act of watching a person who represents a theatre-goer like them. This makes them self-aware in a way they aren’t normally at a play. To underscore the artificiality of this relationship between audience member and actor on stage is to ask what is real, the basic post-modern question. So who invented post-modernism? Was it this guy?
Another comedy that drew some laughs from me. I was disappointed by the manipulation by the men towards the women. Then again I am viewing this from modern times. Despite all of that was a good play although it was drawn out.