The Taming of the Shrew Act One - "No profit grows where is no pleasure ta'en..."

The Taming of the Shrew Act One - "No profit grows where is no pleasure ta'en..."

'The Taming of the Shrew' is amazing for an early Shakespeare play. The  basic story of a man wooing and marrying a strong willed woman has echoes of Socrates and his strong and independent wife Xanthippe although Shakespeare probably used Gascoigne's 1573 version based on Ariosto's 1551 'Suppositi' but Kate is shrewder than the original. In The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare dispenses with trying to do too much with too many ideas as he does in 'Two Gentlemen of Verona' and I think he starts to learn how to create engaging characters and relationships as the centre piece to a drama. It explores the fine lines between romance and abuse, love and hate, between being cruel and being kind. 

The play was probably written in 1591 or 1592, about a year after Shakespeare arrived in London. It was definately performed before June 1592, when Shakespeare had his first experience of The Plague hitting London and the theatres being closed. When Shakespeare started writing the play early in 1591, he would have experienced one of the coldest winters in England in many years. He would have had trouble getting back to Stratford for Christmas as most of the roads out of London were impassible. As the year drew on, he would have experienced one of the worst droughts in living memory in England. It is said that the Thames almost dried up around London Bridge. If he wrote the play later in the year, he would have been stuck inside because of cold weather and early snow in late November. All in all, the weather would have made writing a welcome pursuit.

The Induction scenes of 'Taming of the Shrew' (often left out in most productions) are crudely written but they do serve to frame the play even though this framing is lost at the end of the play. Although Shakespeare uses the framing of a play within a play in other pieces (most successfully the Mechanicals in 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' and the Players in 'Hamlet'), this is the one and only time he uses it at the beginning of a play. Perhaps this was fashionable or perhaps Shakespeare is trying to copy and better another version of this story from around the same time where Sly is a commentator on the story and in parable-like fashion, he decides in the end to tame his own wife. Who are we to judge. We seem to have a pre-occupation in films and plays at the moment with post-scripts so maybe this was the passing fad. The Induction scenes do reinforce the central theme of marriage and the concerns of the play proper that marriage is something that people use for their own benefit. It does warm an audience up and help them to think deeper about events and ideas.

When the real play starts in Act 1 Scene 1 with Lucentio arriving with his manservant Tranio in Padua (yes, Shakespeare is obsessed at this time with Italy since 'Two Gentlemen of Verona' is set in Milan and of course Verona), Lucentio is hell bent on continuing his studies but fate interrupts his pursuits. I cringed here because I could see elements of the duologue talking heads which holds back ‘Two Gentlemen of Verona’ as a play. But Shakespeare has moved on. Here we see Shakespeare realising that action and character create great drama. Enter a crowd and Katherine and Bianca take centre stage. Katherine is raging and cursing. Finally, Baptista (Katherine and Bianca’s father) announces that he will not allow the beautiful Bianca to marry until Katherine is married. The scene is wonderful, filled with character, tension, action, clever dialogue and the focus and pace shift beautifully. As the crowd and individuals disperse at the end of the scene (what a great sense of the stage picture and direction Shakespeare even in these early years), we are left with Lucentia and Tranio again. Lucentia has forgotten his academic quests and has fallen in love with Bianca and is determined to court her. He decides to disguise himself as a school teacher in that hope that he may tutor Bianca's heart as well as her mind. 

I think the dramatic action of this scene is wonderful. I also think that Shakespeare is playing with our conceptions of women. We are shocked by Katherine's anti-social rants and perhaps Shakespeare is preparing the ground for us to accept the independent women he will write about later. I think we understand Katherine's rage and her desire to be listened to and recognised as an individual and perhaps some of Shakespeare's original audience did think this also, more than we give them credit. After all, they had an unmarried woman on the thrown and even in my country, Australia, the general public seem to have (had) a huge problem with that. We are also drawn into the way that Lucentio objectifies Bianca as something to be won or a conquest to be achieved. Even Tranio points out that if Lucentio has only fallen in love with Bianca that he lacks understanding of love. We then move onto meeting the new kid on the block in Padua - Petruchio.