(Below instructions are expectations for the introduction, the rest of the page should be a analysis of the Amy Smith Article)
1. Sentence one provides the name of the author, the genre (essay, novel, etc.) and title of the work with the date (in parentheses), a concise appropriate verb (claims, posits, argues) followed by a ?that? phrase in which the thesis of the work is stated (either paraphrased or quoted).
2. Sentence two provides an explanation of how the author goes about supporting his/her thesis. (Remember that brevity is important?you will not restate the details from the work, but explain the rhetorical method used by the writer to develop these supports.)
3. Sentence three states the purpose of the piece (which may reflect the thesis, but should also include the writer?s motive?why is she/he writing this piece?) This is accomplished with an ?in order to? phrase.
4. Sentence four explains the author?s intended audience and how the author positions his or herself vis-?-vis that audience. Excerpts from ?Performing Marriage with a Difference: Wooing, Wedding, and Bedding in The Taming of the Shrew? by Amy L. Smith
[pls excuse weird pdf/typos; footnotes are marked 1, 2, 3, etc. and are not raised.]
Article published on ProjectMuse: http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.wexler.hunter.cuny.edu/article/418431/pdf
Introductory 3 Paragraphs:
Even before the recent burgeoning of performance theory, The Taming of the Shrew was of great interest to critics interested in roleplaying, identity, and theatricality. And because Kate’s “taming” and her performative speech both take place in a play-within-a-play, Taming fostered a critical interest in the intersection between performance and gender long before the phrase “gender trouble” became commonplace. The recent debates about performance, culture, and theater sparked in part by Judith Butler suggest, however, that it is time to revisit our analysis of gender and performance in this play. Although there are a number of readings that have already investigated connections between patriarchy and performance in The Taming of the Shrew, critics can largely be grouped into two opposing camps: revisionist and antirevisionist.1 First there are those who, reading the play as Kate’s taming, see her role as reflective or constructive of early modern patriarchal hierarchies that contend that women must be subject to their husbands.2 Because such readings argue that Kate’s speech implies a straightforward acceptance of submission, they deny the play’s ability to foster critiques of wifely subordination. Second, there are those who read Kate’s final speech ironically, as an act or game.3 The emphasis on play in these revisionist readings sometimes results in the near avoidance of the uncomfortable taming aspects of the play: Kate’s game frees her from them. While the outcomes of these readings are very different, both seem to pretend that early modern patriarchal ideologies are unified and static: Kate submits or escapes subjection to them. And either way, these arguments implicitly suggest that the marriages performed in The Taming of the Shrew do not question or complicate gender hierarchies; rather, they applaud or escape them.
In contrast, I suggest that the wooings, weddings, and banquets performed in The Taming of the Shrew do not merely enact an acceptance or rejection of the subjection of wives to their husbands. Rather, they dramatize a marriage that leaves Kate and Petruchio negotiating not only gender hierarchies but also love, sexuality, and parental demands. The Turning’s particular reiteration of marriage enacts a series of negotiations for power, none of which results in a marriage based on simple domination and submission or perfect egalitarianism. By exaggerating husbandly dominance, for example, Petruchio’s performance draws our attention not to the power inherent in such dominance but rather to its inefficacy. Thereby a conception of marriage that expects hierarchy and mutuality to coincide effortlessly is questioned. Kate emphasizes the room marriage leaves for maneuverability by enacting one that incorporates her wit and sexuality into her very performances of submission. Thus by thinking of marriage (and the female subjection it requires) as performative, we can read Kate’s agency through her reiteration of the role of wife?a reiteration that stresses her reshaping of Petruchio and their marriage.
By using performance theory to contend that gendered institutions such as marriage can and do change, I suggest that the very institutions which some critics suggest Kate is forced either to accept or to escape are instead critiqued?and perhaps even shaped?by her.4 Indeed, one of the reasons that the field of performance studies is so prevalent today and has so much to offer our readings of this play is its contention that performance has the potential to “provide a site for social and cultural resistance and the exploration of alternative possibilities.”5 ?
Marriage as Performance (early para)
While my essay centers on Kate and Petruchio’s performance of marriage, their marriage is best seen as part of a larger set of marital performances. After all, the play begins with a page pretending to be the wife of a poor drunk tricked into believing he is a lord and husband. It is significant that The Taming of the Shrew begins not with the courtship and marriage of Kate and Petruchio but with the “marriage” of Sly and the Page because the Induction encourages us to examine performance’s role in loosening even naturalized hierarchies. That the Induction highlights the constructedness of gender and class hierarchies has been duly noted by a number of feminist critics. Barbara Hodgson, for example, suggests that “the Induction teaches that there is no such thing as discrete sexed or classed identity.”20 Yet it is not merely that identities are constructed but that they are in continual formation which is important here. Indeed the lord’s trick in the Induction is not simply about the ability of characters to switch gendered or classed identities but rather about their ability to create those identities through performance. Thinking of the Induction as an opportunity to watch the creation of new gendered and classed identities emphasizes the instability of those identities?identities dependent on performance. As one of the huntsman makes clear in his description of the trick, the key to convincing Sly lies in performance: “My lord, I warrant you we will play our part/As he shall think by our true diligence/He is no less than we say he is” (Ind. 1.69-7 1).21 Indeed the Induction’s emphasis on performance can serve to remind us that the roles of husband/lord and wife always consist of a series of performances rather than fixed entities; and as such, they leave room for a series of power negotiations.
?While Karen Newman has argued that Sly’s realization of this “newly discovered self involved calling for the lady [and] demanding from her submission to his authority,”25 the details of the scene reveal almost the opposite: it is the “wife’s? ?submission” that elicits the “husband’s” “authority.” It is the page/wife who “herself” asks Sly, “What is thy will with her?” (Ind.2.103). And while Sly is attempting to understand what noble husbands and wives call each other?”Are you my wife and will you not call me husband?”?his “wife” is using his lesson in semantics to insist on “her” submissive obedience: “My husband and my lord, my lord and husband, /I am your wife in all obedience” (Ind.2. 105-07). Thus it is the “wife,” manifestly aware of “her” own clever performance, who shapes “her” unwitting lord. Because wifely submission is marked as a performance, this scene is less about the lord’s power than about how through enacting subjection the wife can establish a powerful position of her own. As audience members we are privy to the “wife’s” trick from the beginning and see “her” as the one in control of the scene; Sly merely follows her lead. Thus, the fact that this “husband” and his clever “wife” sit down to watch a play about the marriage of Kate and Petruchio highlights that marriage’s performativity in a specific light and prepares audiences for performances of subjection and domination that actually reshape rather than reinforce gender hierarchies.
?Having come to The Taming through the Induction, we can therefore read it not only as a play within a play but as one that emphasizes performance’s ability to reiterate courtship and marriage with a difference.
[further argument against Karen Newman?s ideas:]
Thus, while Petruchio attempts to regain his dominant position by categorizing Kate and all women as “made to bear,” their banter is far too dynamic to support a reading which claims that Petruchio intimates and Kate recognizes “that marriage is a sexual exchange in which women are exploited for their use value as producers.”27 Indeed, this banter precipitates a series of fluid power shifts between Kate and Petruchio?first one, then the other is “on top”?and thereby contradicts the idea that courtship and marriage are exchanges in which women necessarily, by definition, lose.
The Betrothals of Kate and Bianca
The complexity of Kate’s betrothal negotiation seems especially clear when we compare it to Bianca’s?a parody of purely financial dealings and their objectification of women. Baptista, in a reversal of his demand that Petruchio get Kate’s love before he gets her money, argues that whoever gives the most money will get Bianca’s love: Faith, gentleman, now I play a merchant’s part, And venture madly on a desperate mart. [He] … [t]hat can assure my daughter greatest dower Shall have my Bianca’s love. (2.1.326-27, 343-44) Her love as represented here is not something that must be earned but rather something that can be given by her father: “Now … shall Bianca /Be bride to you, if you make this assurance; /If not, to Signior Gremio” (2.1.395-97). This parody of a betrothal agreement as a blatant bidding war certainly seems to use exaggeration to critique rather than to reify the objectified exchange of women. But it does so without giving Bianca much stage time to perform a reiteration of wooing or betrothal which could provide an alternative. Even the planning of the forged betrothal document that allows her to bamboozle her mercantile father is concocted onstage by Biondello and Lucentio, not Bianca and Lucentio. Thus while Bianca’s secret wedding allows her to marry the man of her choosing without her father’s permission, all we see her do onstage is worry about her father’s reaction while Lucentio comforts her: “Look not pale, Bianca, thy father will not frown” (5.1.138). Although Bianca and Lucentio’s secret betrothal and wedding circumvent fatherly authority, the play does not dramatize a sexually charged or dynamic relationship between them. In contrast, Kate and Petruchio’s vexed performance of betrothal, which enacts a combination of financial, patriarchal, erotic, and mutual definitions of marriage, makes visible an exciting alternative. Thus although Petruchio may end the betrothal negotiations with a declaration of his dominance?”I am he born to tame you, Kate, /and bring you from a wild Kate to a Kate /Conformable as other household Kates” (2.1.276-78)?his words are juxtaposed to the complex courting and betrothal we have both seen and will continue to see Kate and Petruchio perform.
Kate?s Agreement with Petruchio
?because Kate joins in Petruchio’s playful banter?calling the moon the sun and old Vincentio a ” [y] oung budding virgin”?her performance of subjection in this scene has been read as the beginning of what Petruchio calls their “first merriment” (4.5.37, 76). While there is definitely a sense of mutual play at work here, Kate’s replies do not need necessarily to be read only as part of what Marianne Novy calls “the new world of the game” where “ordinary social identities and inequalities are arbitrary and unimportant, because other identities can so easily be assigned.”36 Such readings often emphasize the playful mutuality of the game at the expense of the game’s simultaneous affirmation of gender hierarchies. In fact, in such readings social inequalities become “unimportant” in the world of the play, and we are left with a disturbingly comfortable Kate: “Faced with irrational demands, she has experienced the benefits of seeing them as a part of a game and playing along. It will soon become apparent that her education in folly has taught her how to live with relative comfort in a patriarchal culture, and this coincidence implies a certain detachment about that culture’s assumptions.”37 1 would contend that if Kate is living in relative comfort in a patriarchal culture, it is a culture that her performance of subjection discomfits. The banter may playfully suggest the arbitrary and unimportant nature of social identities; after all, an old man “becomes” a virgin. But the banter concomitantly suggests that social identities are not easily overturned: Old Vincentio is not comfortable with the “change” and is immediately “changed” back. Indeed, Kate’s exaggerated submission during this banter hints at something more serious than playing along with irrational demands; it hints at the inequality inherent in the subject positions of husband and wife. Because Kate’s submission consists of obediently calling the old Vincentio a young maid and just as obediently admitting it is mad to do so (“Pardon, I pray thee for my mad mistaking” [4.5.49]), it mocks complete wifely obedience. Thus the scene can be read as challenging identities and inequalities in a more profound way than calling them unimportant. Indeed, Kate’s lively and exaggerated performances throughout this scene imply not a “detachment about” but a performative intervention in early modern assumptions that wifely obedience is an inevitable and quiet fact of life.
About the ending speech:
While merely placing the conservative marital hierarchies in Kate’s mouth ensures neither that the play supports nor challenges them, her reiteration of them does at least allow us to consider a performative intervention. Thus it is important to examine not only the words spoken but their context within the play. Boose, for example, sees the finale as a “corrected replay” of the earlier parodic marriage. She suggests that the play is using the archaic model of the Sarum wedding ceremony that required a visual performance of subjection in which the bride put her hand under her husband’s foot, for Kate says, “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” (5.2.177-79). To Boose, this scene “idealizes and romanticizes that model embracing it with nostalgic value of a vision of social order passing away.”42 But I would suggest that even if Kate’s submission echoes that archaic ceremony, it does little to idealize or romanticize it. Kate’s performance is not part of an orderly banquet that sets such a tone; it is part of an ultraperformative contest amidst a witty erotic (and perhaps drunken) crowd. When she finishes her speech and offers her hand, she is greeted by what seems to be a shout of approval for her show, not a serious acceptance of her hand: “Why there’s a wench! Come on, and kiss me, Kate” (5.2.179). Thus, rather than a replay of the parodic marriage, it seems to be a continuation (and reversal) of that earlier farce. At the marriage, rather than allowing a traditional wedding to speak his entry into dominance, Petruchio focused the guests’ attention on his exaggerated performance of that marital dominance?a performance left them shocked and ashamed. Here the exaggeration continues but in a different direction with different results. Rather than allowing the banquet or even Kate’s arrival when called for to speak her entry into patriarchy, the play draws our attention to Kate’s exaggerated and lengthy performance of this submission?a performance which, in contrast to Petruchio’s, is a crowd pleaser. The end of the play does not serve as a somber corrective to the parodic wedding. Rather, it offers an equally outrageous parody of a wedding banquet where husbands bet on their wives and a wife gives the longest speech in the play about how weak women are.
This performance when seen in the context of the play as a whole? the Induction’s “marriage” of Sly and the Page, the erotic wooing, farcical wedding, exaggeratedly obedient sun-moon speech, and witty banquet? allows audiences (early modern and modern) to question just how meaningful strict marital hierarchies can be when represented at the end of such a complex web of affection, sexuality, and lively performances. Yet, to some, the fact that this speech comes at the end and is not framed by a return to the page/”wife” and sly/”lord” makes Kate’s submission seem naturalized.43 1 would suggest that the opposite is true. Kate’s speech is not naturalized by the lack of a frame, but rather it becomes a frame that completes the ultraperformative scene which began The Taming of the Shrew. Indeed, that the end of the play brings us a scene in which a husband calls for his wife, who then offers a speech of submission, seems an uncanny echo of the Induction. There, too, there is an audience at a banquet of sorts, and there, too, there is a “wife” whose witty performance alters the meanings of the words “she” says. When Kate gives her speech, there is room to read it as a performance with a history within (and outside) the play?a history of loosening rather than reinforcing gender hierarchies: Such duty as the subject owes the prince, Even such a woman oweth to her husband. Come, come, you froward and unable worms! My mind hath been as big as one of yours, My heart as great, my reason haply more, To bandy word for word and frown for frown; But now I see our lances are but straws, Our strength as weak, our weaknesses past compare, That seeming to be most which we indeed least are. (5.2.155-57, 169-75)
Even in these few lines we see a self-aware Kate who is using eloquent and witty language to achieve a position of power. While telling women to obey their husbands, she emphasizes not the husband’s dominance but the wife’s submission, and thereby she gives the power of future performances to the wives. And because this submission is described largely in terms of its opposites (great hearts, bandying words, big minds), it recalls Kate’s lively performances, including her performances of submission which continue to “bandy word for word” even here in what is, after all, the longest speech of the play. Indeed, even in these words there is a hint of the uncontainable: “that seeming to be most which we indeed least are.” Not unlike the page, Kate is not determined by her script of obedience but rather reiterates it in a way that reminds the audience that all of the power in this relationship does not lie entirely with the husband.
Performing submission through speech rather than silence also affords Kate opportunity to continue to rework marital hierarchies through her shaping of her marriage to Petruchio.
Last Para
As the play begins, the page acts the part of a submissive wife to convince Sly that he is a husband, and they sit down to watch a play; within that play there is a wedding that eventually culminated in a banquet, a marital show of sorts; within that banquet Kate comes to her husband and gives a long, eloquent speech that echoes the page’s original performance of subjection. This focus encourages us (and presumably early modern audiences as well) to look at the marriages presented in the play as metacommentary on early modern culture. And as metacommentary, The Taming of the Shrew brings alive what social historians have been arguing for at least a decade?that is, that marriage was never simply patriarchal or companionate, but an unwieldy combination of the two. Early modern marriage, The Taming of the Shrew reminds us, was not about love or sex or dominance or submission or nurture or money or parents’ interests; it was about combining all of them in a way that met at least some of the needs of the community, the parents, and/or the couple some of the time. Thus, we need not ignore the domination or the mutuality enacted in The Taming. To recognize performances that enact complicated visions of both is not to recuperate marriage but to emphasize its instability both within each performance and from one performance to the next. Early modern marriage, like all institutions, exists only in the imperfect and often resistant repetitions of its subjects.
[Note to Hunter students: Amy Smith uses end notes. Below is an example. For papers shorter than 8 pages or so, this is not usually necessary or recommended for undergrads.]
NOTES
1 John Bean uses the terms revisionist and anti-revisionist to describe the two basic lines of Shrew criticism in “Comic Structure and the Humanizing of Kate in The Taming ofthe Shrew? in The Woman’s Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 65-78. Bean concentrates not on analyzing the feminist implications of those types of criticism but on creating a third which argues that Kate obeyst hrough love and hence forms a nontyrannical hierarchy informed by mutual affection (73). While his contention that the play presents both gender hierarchies and mutual affection is sound, I doubt that the play combines them through an obedient and loving Kate as seamlessly as Bean proposes.
