Wednesday
I’m currently in Slovenia for six weeks to teach courses on Shakespeare and Post-Colonial Literature at the University of Ljubljana. I’ll also be visiting various classes. I will report on the experience from time to time, something I used to do regularly when I was a full-time teacher. Yesterday I lectured on The Taming of the Shrew and Much Ado about Nothing.
Pairing the two works gave me new insight into both. I headlined the class “Sexual Attraction as Comic Combat,” explaining that sometime potential lovers fight because they fear the vulnerability that opening themselves to the other requires. In other words, they desire each other but fear getting hurt.
Battling lovers is at the heart of the romantic comedy genre, especially those films where the couple literally battle. I think of the screwball comedies of the 1930s (especially His Girl Friday) and, even more, films like War of the Roses, Roses, True Lies, and (my favorite) Mr. and Mrs. Smith.
Before we examined the two Shakespeare comedies, I provided the class with a theoretical understanding of why we laugh. I set forth three theories, starting with Thomas Hobbes’s grim notions. The author of The Leviathan, writing in an era that had seen civil war and the execution of a king, contended that we laugh because we seek to triumph over others. Laughter is aggressive, predatory and hostile—or as he put it,
a sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly.
Such laughter involves hitting down, targeting a scapegoat or mocking someone with a deformity. Although Hobbes doesn’t mention it, such laughter can often mask insecurity.
The Earl of Shaftesbury in 1711 countered Hobbes with a far more benign theory. We laugh with rather than at, laughter functioning as social glue rather than combat. In Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, Shaftesbury writes, “We polish one another, and rub off our Corners and rough Sides by this amicable Collision.”
Finally I mentioned Sigmund Freud’s theory in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905): We laugh to relieve anxiety, especially the tensions and anxieties built up by sexual repression (although relationships produce anxiety even without repression).
As I mentioned in a recent post, Shakespeare borrowed the shrew-taming trope from ballads and folk tales. The reality could be dark, with society sometimes fitting shrews with bridles, dunking them, or parading them around in carts to be mocked. For an instance of Hobbesian humor, there was a 1580 English ballad entitled “A Merry Jest of a Shrewd and Curst Wife Lapped in Morel’s Skin for Her Good Behavior.” In it, a man beats his wife with sharp rods until she bleeds and then wraps her in the salted skin of a dead horse to intensify the pain of her wounds. By the end she is tamed.
Although one character mentions that Katharina should be carted rather than courted, she is not subjected to these particular measures. However, Pretruchio does employ techniques used by torturers, including sleep and food deprivation, public humiliation, and gaslighting. I shared the following instance of the latter with the class:
PETRUCHIO Come on, i’ God’s name; once more toward our father’s.
Good Lord, how bright and goodly shines the moon!
KATHARINA The moon! the sun: it is not moonlight now.
PETRUCHIO I say it is the moon that shines so bright.
KATHARINA I know it is the sun that shines so bright.
PETRUCHIO Now, by my mother’s son, and that’s myself,
It shall be moon, or star, or what I list,
Or ere I journey to your father’s house.
Go on, and fetch our horses back again.
Evermore cross’d and cross’d; nothing but cross’d!
HORTENSIO Say as he says, or we shall never go.
KATHARINA Forward, I pray, since we have come so far,
And be it moon, or sun, or what you please:
An if you please to call it a rush-candle,
Henceforth I vow it shall be so for me.
PETRUCHIO I say it is the moon.
KATHARINA I know it is the moon.
PETRUCHIO Nay, then you lie: it is the blessed sun.
KATHARINA Then, God be bless’d, it is the blessed sun:
But sun it is not, when you say it is not;
And the moon changes even as your mind.
What you will have it named, even that it is;
And so it shall be so for Katharina.
HORTENSIO Say as he says, or we shall never go.
KATHARINA Forward, I pray, since we have come so far,
And be it moon, or sun, or what you please:
An if you please to call it a rush-candle,
Henceforth I vow it shall be so for me.
PETRUCHIO I say it is the moon.
KATHARINA I know it is the moon.
PETRUCHIO Nay, then you lie: it is the blessed sun.
KATHARINA Then, God be bless’d, it is the blessed sun:
But sun it is not, when you say it is not;
And the moon changes even as your mind.
What you will have it named, even that it is;
And so it shall be so for Katharina.
Over the past decade Americans have come to understand what it means to be gaslighted by a person in charge. How many have succumbed to DJT’s contention that he won the 2020 election?
The challenge for modern audiences is how to respond to Petruchio’s taming. Should we, like all the men in the play, applaud Katharina’s final admonition to her fellow wives:
Then vail your stomachs [lower your pride], for it is no boot [use],
And place your hands below your husband’s foot:
In token of which duty, if he please,
My hand is ready; may it do him ease.
How does Shakespeare feel? If he too enjoys the surrender, does that make him just a guy like all the rest? Is he playing to the mob? Fellow playwright Ben Jonson famously wrote that Shakespeare “was not of an age but of all time,” but this would make him just of an age.
My contention that Shakespeare surpasses all authors in capturing our full humanity comes into question with Taming. Did he only later become Shakespeare?
Modern renditions of the play, however, suggest that Katharina doesn’t entirely surrender, and I myself am willing to give Shakespeare the benefit of the doubt. She certainly soars above the small and petty men around her. She commands the stage the way another problematic creation, Shylock, commands the stage. Some modern productions have her and Petruchio giving each other a knowing wink, as if they are jointly playing the others. (If so, it’s a profitable collaboration as they emerge from the affair 22,200 crowns richer.)
More than demonizing forceful women, Shakespeare exposes male fragility. It’s a point made recently about rightwing men by Chris Hayes and Adam Serwer on Why Is This Happening? For all their macho posturing, the Pete Hegseths and Andrew Tates of the world whine incessantly.
The focus on male fragility was further brought home to me when I compared Taming with Much Ado. That play, as I’ll discuss tomorrow, revolves around men’s obsessive fear of being cuckolded. In the end, however, Shakespeare reveals these fears to be, well, much ado about nothing. Beatrice and Benedick realize they can have much more fun if they stop worrying about being stereotypical women and men and just enjoy each other. If Katharina and Petruchio are in on the joke together, then maybe they are discovering this as well.
