The Taming of the Shrew, by Shakespeare and Others

Author(s): Lucien Goldschmidt, Robert F. Fleissner, Thomas A. Pendleton and Barbara

Hodgdon
Source: PMLA , Jan., 1993, Vol. 108, No. 1 (Jan., 1993), pp. 151-154
Published by: Modern Language Association

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/462859

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 Forum
PMLA invites members of the as-
sociation to submit letters, typed
and double-spaced, commenting on
articles in previous issues or on
matters of general scholarly or
critical interest. The editor reserves
the right to reject or edit Forum
contributions and offers the authors
discussed an opportunity to reply
to the letters published. The journal
omits titles befbre persons' names,
discourages footnotes, and regrets
that it cannot consider any, letter of
more than 1,000 words. Letters
should be addressed to PMLA
Forium, Modern Language Asso-
ciation, 10 Astor Place, New York,for the "texts that lurk in [the play's] margins" (539, 538). She needs more
NY 10003-6981.
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The Taming of the Shrew, by Shakespeare and
Others
To the Editor:
In the May 1992 issue of PMLA you have printed a study by Barbara
Hodgdon called "Katherina Bound; or, Play(K)ating the Strictures of Ev-
eryday Life" (107 [1992]: 538-53). Once past this trendy title, what do we
find? The Taming of the Shrew, a text about four hundred years old, reflecting
the views of a patriarchal society, is blamed and ridiculed for expressing the
general consensus of that time and place. Calling Kate's final speech "recipe
discourse for a patriarchal dish to be swallowed whole" is just a crude way
of saying that Kate is at fault when reflecting the author's views. Hodgdon
goes on, "Kate ventriloquizes the voice of Shakespeare's culture and lets it
colonize her body" (541). Kate is Shakespeare's mouthpiece. It is an entirely
different question to examine whether the views of his time have lost validity
by now.
Hodgdon admits that she is "overreading" Shakespeare and that she hankers
to buttress her arguments and introduces lines by a recent author, Charles
Marowitz. She says that he "unsettles the value systems authorized by 'high
art' " (540). Actually, that witless scene of buggery is out of place. It clarifies
nothing. Graffiti smeared on a surface remain surface dirt; they do not de-
molish a construction.
It is worth noting that elsewhere in her study Hodgdon blames Columbia
Pictures' Taming of the Shrew as "perhaps even more infamous for its credit
line, 'by William Shakespeare with additional dialogue by Samuel Taylor' "
(543). If so, how infamous is Charles Marowitz? It would be fair to judge
offenses with equal weights.
Unjustified assumptions are everywhere in her piece. Hodgdon finds "near
rape" in the Induction; she also asserts that the play "shares affinities with
pornographic films." She does not substantiate these accusations, because
they are spurious. There is no whiff of obscenity in the text she is trying to
revise.
When Petruchio is beastly to his servants, to the tradesmen, and to Kate,
it is wrong to call him sadistic. The label suggests that he derives emotional
satisfaction from being brutish. Sadism implies a lustful pleasure in humil-
iating others.
151
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152 Forum

When Hodgdon calls a country house "reminiscent
of remote Sadean territories," she strives for an un-
warranted association (539). That country retreat culture, stressing the adjective to the detriment of Kul-
would have evoked in Elizabethan times the setting oftur, almost always has drawbacks. The basic value of
the hugely popular Decameron. Bits of Freud, Sade, this play is partly in its mythic relation to the Mdrchen
or Foucault only help in obscuring Shakespeare.
Finally, it is not fruitful to compare the Elizabethan
habit of using boy actors to play female roles with pres-
ent-day transvestism. The two phenomena have clearly
very different causes and hence do not illuminate each
other. It is misleading to suggest that because the actor
playing Kate is a boy, her words and actions in the
final scene of the play can be moving "between mas-
culine and feminine positions" (540). Uneven doses
of behavior traits labeled masculine or feminine can
be encountered every day of our lives among the people
we meet. This was true also four hundred years ago.
The oscillation of Kate's speech is in the nature of
things. There seems no need to credit it to the existenceboy there is improper in a learned, academic periodical
of a boy actor.
LUCIEN GOLDSCHMIDT
New York, NY
To the Editor:
The main problem with performance-oriented lit-
erary criticism of Shakespeare is that it too often lends
itself to facile interpretations. In the case of Barbara
Hodgdon's article ("Katherina Bound; or, Play[K]ating
the Strictures of Everyday Life"), we can dismiss the
trivializing aspect of the punning in her title and turn
rather to the argument itself. For example, in discussing
the Burton-Taylor Shrew, Hodgdon starts a paragraph
off by alluding to the titular figure's "refusal to listen
to dirty jokes" (546); surely the subject of salacious
humor should be as foreign to PMLA as to the play-
wright himself. To introduce such a stereotype into
discussion of such a drama (which was basically a re-
sponse to the medieval wife-beating farce and not itself
farcical) is to belittle the play's value. It might also be
contended that any notion that sexuality is "dirty"
would have been the furthest thing from the minds of
Shakespeare and of his characters (who had common
sense enough to know that what is "natural" is not in
itself smutty). The distance between the play and the
film is particularly evident when Hodgdon admits that
some of the "box-office success" of the Zeffirelli pro-
duction derived from what she allows was "viewers'
voyeuristic fascination with its stars."
Further, in asserting that "Shrew is (always) already
Barbara Hodgdon's "Katherina Bound" repeats the
popular culture," she minimizes the impact of this notorious tale that the 1929 Pickford-Fairbanks Shrew
nonfarcical drama, putting it in the same category as
Hollywoodish slapstick. Clearly, the very term popular
tradition, granted, but that is no reason to go out of
one's way to be anti-intellectual. The claim that
"George Sidney's 1953 film of Cole Porter's Kiss Me,
Kate (1948) moves 'Shakespeare' even more defini-
tively toward its popular origins" is beyond the pale,
for a musical comedy is surely as far from the true man
from Stratford as a Verdi opera is closer to him. To
add to the demotion, Hodgdon enlists no less than
"Playboy's inaugural issue" in her defense (547), as if
pornography were not at the opposite end of what a
dramatist "not of an age, but for all time" was truly
after. (I applaud the correspondent in the English
Journal who protests that "a reference made to" Play-
[81 (1992): 97].)
Taking the perspective of some feminist critics,
Hodgdon reports on Carol Neely's observation about
the "tendency. . . to tame Kate's taming in order to
fracture the play's patriarchal panopticism" (541). This
drama, however, was historically not geared to any pa-
triarchal tendencies; if anything, what shines through
at the end is what even feminists often acknowledge is
true "mutuality" in Kate's final big speech. The major
taming device used throughout is rather that of fal-
conry: the image of the falconer artfully controlling
his bird (what was called "manning the haggard"). The
relation of falconer to falcon, moreover, is scarcely
"patriarchal." It is key imagery like this that is missed
in the filming of some of Shakespeare's plays. Instead
we get in Hodgdon's account passing gratuitous in-
nuendos on such matters as Taylor's "frequent suc-
cesses in 'bitch' roles" (surely her support for AIDS
victims is not one of them) and on how "the game in
Zeffirelli's film is to exchange 'Hump the Hostess' for
'Get the Guests' " (545; as if the dramatist would ever
have allowed for "gamey" delights of this sort).
All this is not to insist that Hodgdon is stagestruck
(she is obviously well qualified to speak on her subject),
though an element or two of that tendency does shine
through. But it does show how far we have got from
what Shakespeare wanted.
ROBERT F. FLEISSNER
Central State University
To the Editor:

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 Forum 153

includes the credit "by William Shakespeare with ad- that the credit line attributing additional dialogue to
ditional dialogue by Samuel Taylor" (543). The storyTaylor does not match that on the Library of Con-
has appeared frequently, sometimes with seemingly gress film print, but the cartoon, which does exist,
reliable derivation-in mentioning the credit in neatly sends up Taylor for disrupting Shakespeare's
author-ity, a question also at issue here. Quite rightly,
Shakespeare and the Film, Roger Manvell, for instance,
Pendleton pinpoints Garrick's Catherine and Petruchio
cites Laurence Irving, a scenic director on this Shrew,
as it
as his source. The story is so good that it's a shame the source of some of that dialogue. However, my
isn't true. point is that Kate, not Petruchio, speaks the raided
lines. On the one hand, Taylor's additions accord her
The print of the film held by the Museum of Modern
Art-Fairbanks's own copy, which he donated to the greater agency; on the other, that choice underscores
museum-has only "Adapted and Directed by Sam Kate's unruly nature. Pickford, not Fairbanks, changes
Taylor." Scott Eyman, whose Mary Pickford, Ameri- "Shakespeare." And, according to Pendleton himself,
ca ' Sweetheart is much the most reliable work on the it is male ownership of texts that counts: he cites Fair-
actress's career, corroborates the credit and reports that banks's copy of the film as his authority and describes
it appears as well in the film's script and press book. a man's account as the "most reliable work on [Pick-
It is somewhat surprising that the tale has persisted ford's] career." Women, it appears, may be seen but
so long, since the film contains almost nothing in the heard only selectively, their voices circumscribed and
way of additional dialogue for Taylor to claim. There managed by those of men.
is "O Petruchio, beloved" (which Hodgdon cites), spo- However problematically, at least Pendleton evokes
ken by Kate after she unintentionally combs his noodle an empirical base; one cannot say the same of Lucien
with the three-legged stool. There is her howl of pain, Goldschmidt and Robert F. Fleissner. Their letters
which passes for an "I do," when Petruchio steps on claim a space for old readings of old plays that has
her toes during the wedding. Beyond these, the one been regularly excavated in PMLA's pages (the return
significant addition is lifted from David Garrick's ad- of the repressed?), most notoriously in the "Bardgate"
aptation, Catherine and Petruchio. Both at the end of controversy between Richard Levin and the feminist
the wooing scene and after arriving soaked and shiv- Gang of Twenty-Four (104 [1989]: 77-79). Gold-
ering at Petruchio's house, Kate mutters, with grimly schmidt's letter contains a host of anxious, even hys-
comic determination: "Look to your seat, Petruchio, terical, objections, all characteristic of a foundationalist,
or I throw you / Cath'rine shall tame this haggard; or antitheoretical position that bears absolutely no relation
if she fails / Shall tie her tongue up and pare down her to my work. Moreover, his scattershot strategy attempts
nails." The imagery is strange, if not incoherent; but to reinstall a "general consensus" remarkably unin-
in relation to the version's "sexual negotiations," the flected by recent historical work that uncovers how
speech is significant. Although Shakespeare leaves the early modern social practices demeaned and punished
audience to infer Kate's motives for entering the mar- women (see, for example, Lynda E. Boose's "Scolding
riage, Garrick-and Taylor after him-offers a shrew Brides and Bridling Scolds: Taming the Woman's Un-
who intends to win the taming match. ruly Member," Shakespeare Quarterly 42 [1991]: 179-
213), by any awareness of how present-day represen-
THOMAS A. PENDLETON tational strategies position "woman," or by how current
lona College sociopolitical discourse seeks to regulate real women's
bodies.
I do, however, find it immensely heartening that
Reply: feminist critics of early modern texts now have new
allies in those whose critical practice engages with
What strikes me immediately about all three "performance-oriented
letters literary criticism" (Fleissner's
phrase).
is that each aims at instructing me and amending my By pulling the dirty materiality of the stage
essay's "faults." It is tempting to suggest thatinto the same space as cultural-materialist feminist cri-
Petru-
chio's position as teacher-tamer seems to come natu- tique, Fleissner puts me among excellent good com-
rally to all these gentlemen-that is, I would say so if pany; the association is especially comforting when one
I did not consider "naturally" such an extremely vexed is so roundly blamed for degenerative effects-an as-
term. Thomas A. Pendleton chides me (explicitly) for persion like that cast by Matthew Arnold's anxiety
perpetuating a bit of cinematic gossip that even he ad- about the inroads of mass culture and by modernism's
mits is tantalizing, if untrue, and (implicitly) for ig- pointed exclusion of women writers. Of course, Fleiss-
noring Scott Eyman's biography of Pickford. I admit ner claims an even more authoritative position than

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154 Forum

either Pendleton or Goldschmidt: he is in touch with some of the complexities of Shakespeare's balanced
Shakespeare's intentions. Yet his notion of "Come vision.
back, Little William, and tell us what you wanted" Although Helms twice refers to Charmian and Iras
represents a theater of the mausoleum, floating free ofas though she were analyzing Shakespeare's depiction
history and especially of theater history. Fleissner's of the deaths of three women, she makes no specific
"true man from Stratford"-it's always useful, in such reference to the death of Iras or to Cleopatra's peculiar
an argument, to evoke a geography of origins-is the response to it. After seeing Iras die, Cleopatra says:
Bard of High Culture, not Low; Verdi, not Cole Porter.
Many theatrical venues, including the Bankside spaces
This proves me base:
where nobility mixed with the "base, common, and If she first meet the curled Antony,
popular," get erased in his value-laden opposition. In- He'll make demand of her, and spend that kiss
deed, Fleissner's ahistoricism enables him not only to Which is my heaven to have. (5.2.299-302)
enclose "Shakespeare" within protective barriers but
to fly across centuries with the ease, if not the grace,
Shakespeare does not allow his Cleopatra even in her
of the falcon he names as Shrew's major taming device.
dying moment to trust the unreliable Antony to be
To be sure, falconry is one of the rhetorical figures of
faithful. Moreover, the difference between Iras's death
taming, one Fleissner himself refers to as "manning
and that of her mistress contains another significant
the haggard," though without noting both the power
Shakespearean touch. Iras, like Enobarbus, dies from
relation and the gendered term that link bird to fal-
sadness; Cleopatra, like Antony, must use "a swifter
coner. Yet in Shrew, as in any text, language is neither
mean."
as transparent nor as stable as Fleissner might wish;
The importance of the contrast is evident from
rather, it has sociocultural effects that get played out
Shakespeare's emphasis on it earlier. Shakespeare has
on bodies: it allows Petruchio to deprive Katherine of
Antony (4.14), Cleopatra (1.3), and Enobarbus (4.6)
food, drink, and sleep, in a campaign that frequently
announce expectations of dying from broken hearts.
gets embodied on the stage. The contexts Fleissner calls
Only Enobarbus and his Egyptian female counterpart,
up, however, effectively deny Shrew's actors any bodies
Iras, have such an honor. The contrast between An-
at all-and certainly not sexed or gendered ones; in
tony's almost comic death scene and Enobarbus's death
his account, sexuality and gender lie down together in
by "swift thought" underscores Enobarbus's ability to
a chaste procrustean bed called "common sense." As
command his heart to break, a force of will that Shake-
for his claim that I am "stagestruck," I will take that
speare's Antony lacks. The subsequent parallel with
as a compliment, given both the context of his letter
the deaths of Cleopatra and Iras serves to reinforce and
and that in which my essay appeared: a special issue
complicate further the judgments made by the audience
of PMLA devoted to performance.
about the play's two central characters. Helms's essay,
despite its strengths, overlooks these complexities.
BARBARA HODGDON
Much can be said about Shakespeare's vision of Cle-
Drake University
opatra and Antony. Here it must suffice to suggest that
various aspects of Shakespeare's treatment of the two
death scenes work to demythologize Cleopatra and An-
Death Scenes in Antony and Cleopatra tony, even while the playwright is taking advantage of
the figures' mythic status. Shakespeare drags out An-
To the Editor: tony's death scene, emphasizing that the great soldier
is actually a man who could never stop talking-espe-
As impressed as I am with Lorraine Helms's learned cially about himself. Antony's claim to be "a Roman,
and thought-provoking" 'The High Roman Fashion': by a Roman / Valiantly vanquish'd" (4.15.57-58),
Sacrifice, Suicide, and the Shakespearean Stage" (107 almost exactly the same as Plutarch's "overcome . . .
[1992]: 554-65), for me its interpretation of Antony valiantly, a Romane by an other Romane," takes on
and Cleopatra goes wrong by giving an intriguing un- a self-deluded and inglorious tone because it follows a
dercurrent an emphasis that distorts the total experi- Shakespearean addition-"Not Caesar's valour hath
ence of an extremely complex play. In analyzing o'erthrown Antony, / But Antony's hath triumphed
Shakespeare's presentation of Cleopatra's death, Helms on itself" (4.15.14-15)-that makes it clear that
overlooks the other deaths in the play. Because of these Shakespeare's Antony, far from having learned from
omissions, Helms's depiction of Shakespeare's attitude his experience, wants to deny Caesar credit for the vic-
toward "the high Roman fashion" of suicide neglects tory while refusing to attribute any blame to himself.

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