In the third of a four-part series on Shakespeare\u27s The Taming of the Shrew, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner asks, what if Kate’s story isn’t the play’s only reality? Pollack-Pelzner explores how a drunken beggar and an earlier version of the script shift the brawling balances of the play and call into question who the real shrew is

Pollack-Pelzner, Daniel

English

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Linfield College DigitalCommons@Linfield Faculty Publications Faculty Scholarship & Creative Works 7-19-2013 Summer of Shrew, Part 3: A Sly Conceit Daniel Pollack-Pelzner Linfield College, dpollack@linfield.edu Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.linfield.edu/englfac_pubs  Part of the Dramatic Literature, Criticism and Theory Commons DigitalCommons@Linfield Citation Pollack-Pelzner, Daniel, "Summer of Shrew, Part 3: A Sly Conceit" (2013). Faculty Publications. Published Version. Submission 64. https://digitalcommons.linfield.edu/englfac_pubs/64 This Published Version is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It is brought to you for free via open access, courtesy of DigitalCommons@Linfield, with permission from the rights-holder(s). Your use of this Published Version must comply with the Terms of Use for material posted in DigitalCommons@Linfield, or with other stated terms (such as a Creative Commons license) indicated in the record and/or on the work itself. For more information, or if you have questions about permitted uses, please contact digitalcommons@linfield.edu. Summer of Shrew, Part 3: a Sly conceitHow a drunken beggar and an earlier version of the script shift the brawling balances of the playJuly 19, 2013 // THEATER // Oregon ArtsWatchBy DANIEL POLLACK-PELZNERIs there another ending to “Shrew”? And who’s the real shrew in the play?In the last installment, we looked at evidence from the script of “The Taming of the Shrew” to see if Kate might not be tamed after all, and we explored the many layers of irony that frame her final speech. There’s one more layer to consider: What if Kate’s story isn’t the play’s only reality? What if it’s a play within a play, or even a dream within a dream?This isn’t just an Inception-fueled fantasy; this is actually what happens in the original “Shrew” script. The play that was printed in the 1623 First Folio begins not with the world of Kate and Petruchio, but with a drunken beggar named Christopher Sly getting kicked out of a tavern for failing to pay his tab and passing out on the floor. (Note the English name: we’re in Shakespeare’s contemporary world, not a fictional Italian setting.) Along comes a Lord on a hunting trip who decides to play a prank on Sly. He instructs his servants to dress the beggar in a lord’s attire and tell him he’s been suffering from madness until now, and he hires a troupe of traveling actors to put on a “comedy” for Sly’s entertainment. What’s the comedy? “The Taming of the Shrew.”So the whole Kate-Petruchio business is not the play’s claim to nature; it’s an act that’s staged as a practical joke on a drunken beggar. What’s more, part of the Lord’s prank involves dressing one of his poor male pages in drag and presenting him/her to Sly as his wife, whom Sly eagerly greets and invites to bed. The play is a kind of diversion to defer that consummation (like the plot of any romantic comedy, which piles up obstacles to postpone the final union). We’re watching Sly, dressed as a lord, with a boy dressed as his wife, watching actors act out “The Taming of the Shrew,” a play about lords and wives. The Lord even suggests to his page that being a conventional lady is itself an act: he has to trot out “kind embracements” and “tempting kisses,” and if he can’t cry on command, a concealed onion held to his eye should do the trick. It’s über-meta. Before the main story has started, the Sly beginning primes us to note that all the power relations that the story relies on—husband/wife, father/child, master/servant—are just mutable roles that actors play. All you need is a costume change, and a beggar becomes a lord, or a boy becomes a wife, or a male actor from the traveling troupe becomes Kate.Editors often quarantine the Sly scenes from the rest of the play, calling them an “Induction” (following an eighteenth-century tradition) and numbering them on a different system, reserving Act One, Scene One for the entrance of Lucentio and Tranio in Padua. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s snappy production this season excluded Sly for an understandable reason: he stretches out the running time.But in the First Folio, Actus Primus, Scoena Prima opens with Sly’s drunken entrance. He’s the beginning of the play, and in fact there are no act or scene divisions when the players start their Italian show; they’re part of the Sly prank, too. Given Sly’s importance to the way we perceive the rest of the play, the Portland Shakespeare Project decided to keep him (with compensatory cuts later on), and theresult is quite remarkable. With Sly sitting in the front row of the audience, a reluctant cross-dressedpage on his knee, you’re always conscious that you’re watching a (very funny) staged entertainmentwith actors taking on stereotypical social roles.Bartholomew (Matthew Kerrigan), a page indrag, cozies up to Christopher Sly (NathanDunkin) at the Portland Shakespeare Project.Photo: David KinderIn the Folio, Sly just fades away once the Italian business gets going. He seems to fall asleep and tellshis man-wife that he wishes the play were over—presumably so they could go to bed—and then wedon’t hear from him again. But here’s the tricky part. There’s another version of “The Taming of theShrew” that was published anonymously in 1594, thirty years before the First Folio, called “The Tamingof a Shrew.” Scholars are still debating whether “The Shrew” was based on “A Shrew” or vice versa, orwhether they both derive from some lost earlier “Shrew.” Until the end of the eighteenth century, theywere treated as variant scripts for the same play. Editors often conflated material from both texts, whichPortland Shakes chose to do as well. Artistic Director Michael Mendelson and the production dramaturg,Linfield graduate Kate McMullan, interpolated scenes from “A Shrew” into “The Shrew” to infuse thecontemporary world of Sly into the imaginary world of Padua.In “A Shrew,” Sly never vanishes; he keeps commenting on the play and at one point even interrupts theactors to protest a plot twist. The Lord has to remind Sly (still dressed in borrowed finery), “My lord,this is but the play. They’re but in jest.”A stagehand (Rusty Tennant) looks on as Sly (Dunkin) interrupts the play atthe Portland Shakes. Photo: David KinderThat sense of a jest on Sly–both by the Lord and by the actors–continues in “A Shrew” through the endof Kate’s final speech. Sly has conked out again by this point, and after the actors depart, he is returnedto his beggar’s clothes and woken up by the Tapster, the guy who keeps the keg at the tavern. Theirconcluding dialogue highlights the challenge of taking any easy moral away from the play.TAPSTER: Come, art thou drunken still? SLY: Who’s this? Tapster? O lord, sirrah, I have had the bravest dream tonight that ever thou heard’st inall thy life. TAPSTER: Ay, marry, but you had best get you home, for your wife will course you for dreaming heretonight. SLY: Will she? I know now how to tame a shrew. I dreamt upon it all this night ’til now, and thou hastwaked me out of the best dream that ever I had in my life. But I’ll to my wife presently and tame her,too, an if she anger me.TAPSTER: Nay tarry, Sly, for I’ll go home with thee and hear the rest that thou hast dreamt tonight.If this is the true ending to the play, then it offers a different attitude toward Kate’s taming. Sure, it mightsuggest that the play teaches men how to tame their wives. But for most viewers, the point is that only adrunken beggar would think that the play teaches men how to tame their wives. Such an interpretation isjust a wish-fulfillment fantasy for a henpecked husband. That, at least, seems to be the tapster’s view, ashe pulls Sly back from his shrew-taming ambitions.What’s more, the entire Sly story raises the question of who the real shrew is in the play. If you look upthe non-rodent sense of “shrew” in the Oxford English Dictionary, the first definition is: “A wicked, evil-disposed, or malignant man.” That’s right, a man–not a woman. The example the OED provides that’sclosest in time to Shakespeare’s play comes from Thomas Dekker’s “Ravens Almanack”: “Such as wereshrewes to theire wives”–the opposite of the gender roles we would typically imagine. Shakespearedraws on that definition midway through Shrew when one of Petruchio’s servants hears about his wildbehavior toward Kate after their wedding and exclaims, “By this reckoning he is more shrew than she.”And if we think about the subsequent terms in the OED’s definition, “a mischievous or vexatiousperson,” and recall that the first mischievous, vexatious person we meet is the drunken, obstreperousChristopher Sly, he emerges as a shrew candidate as well.There’s an interesting connection between the transformation Sly undergoes and the journeys Kate andPetruchio experience. To rise in status from a beggar to a lord, as Sly does in jest, was to become agentleman. Renaissance England had a word for that ennobling process: “to gentle” (as when KingHenry V tells each common soldier at the battle of Agincourt that “this day shall gentle his condition”).To become “gentle,” though, also had begun to acquire the sense it has for us today: to be kind andconsiderate, as befits a gentleman. The two senses converge in “Shrew” when Kate covets a cap thatPetruchio has ordered and then dismissed. Kate protests that “gentlewomen wear such caps as these,”and Petruchio replies, “When you are gentle you shall have one too, / And not till then.” Kate has tobecome gentle in order to dress as a gentlewoman. Yet Petruchio’s gentle status is also in doubt. Whenhe threatens to cuff Kate if she strikes him again, she warns him: “If you strike me you are nogentleman”–neither kind nor dignified. Petruchio, Kate, and Sly all have to learn how to behave gently,in both their rank and conduct.Petruchio (Farmer) and Kate (Porter): ungentlebehavior. Photo: David KinderPetruchio (James Farmer) and Kate (Maureen Porter) demonstrate ungentle behavior at the PortlandShakespeare Project. Photo by David Kinder.Productions that show Petruchio being tamed as well as Kate are often seen as distorting the play,blunting the plot’s apparently misogynist thrust to make it more palatable today. But after looking at theChristopher Sly frame and the Renaissance definition of a shrew, we can see that expanding the range ofthe titular “Shrew” to include male characters is actually a return to its original meaning. In the nextinstallment, I’ll explore how a long-forgotten Renaissance sequel to “Shrew” takes the taming of meneven further.NOTES:If you’d like to read the full script of “The Taming of a Shrew,” Cambridge University Press offersa scholarly edition edited by Stephen Roy Miller. Hackett Publishing has also put out a convenientpaperback called Three Shrew Plays, edited by Barry Gaines and Margaret Maurer, that includes“The Taming of the Shrew,” “The Taming of a Shrew,” and “The Tamer Tamed.”In a provocative essay, “The Shakespearean Editor as Shrew-Tamer,” Leah Marcus argues that theeditorial tradition of preferring “The Shrew” to “A Shrew” and cutting Sly’s ending has madeeditors complicit in a patriarchal strategy to tame Kate. *ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Dr. Daniel Pollack-Pelzner is Assistant Professor of English at Linfield College and scholar in residence at the Portland Shakespeare Project.*WEDNESDAY: An introduction to the Portland and Ashland productions.THURSDAY: Who does the taming, and who’s getting tamed?TOMORROW: In our final installment, a long-forgotten sequel further tames the men.

Summer of Shrew, Part 3: A Sly Conceit

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Summer of Shrew, Part 3: A Sly Conceit

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