Sayers on Shrew

[bronze_ribbons]

For marymary, who was railing about The Taming of the Shrew a little over a year ago:

...the free will of a genuinely created character has a certain reality, which the writer will defy at his peril. It does sometimes happen that the plot requires from it characters certain behavior, which, when it comes to the point, no ingenuity on the author's part can force them into, except at the cost of destroying them. It may be that the Activity has chosen an unsuitable plot, or (this is perhaps more frequent) has imagined an unstable set of characters for working that particular plot out.

In such dilemmas, the simplest and worst thing the author can do is to behave like an autocratic deity and compel the characters to do his will whether or not. ... [W]restlings of natural truth abound in those romances where the heroine, after treating the hero for interminable chapters as though he were something the cat had brought in, is rescued by him under peculiarly humiliating circumstances and immediately falls into his arms in a passion of gratitude and affection. Knowledge of the very ephemeral nature of gratitude in proud and vain persons and of its irritating effect on the character, prompt the reader to wonder what the married life of the couple is likely to be, after thus starting from a false situation. It is a falsity of this kind that makes both actors and audience uncomfortable about The Taming of the Shrew; whether it is played as burlesque or softened into sentimental comedy, we are still left protesting that "'Tis a wonder, by your leave, she will be tamed so," and nothing will persuade us that characters like those would really subdue themselves to a plot like that.

- Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker (p. 69)

Comments

Still Not Tamed

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you!!

Mary

[decarnin.livejournal.com]

I always thought it would be interesting to do a production of The Taming of the Shrew with the ending played as a tragedy and a horror. Like, yes, he has tamed her, omg, she's an abused spouse! You could leave hints in the way the actors play it throughout that he is maybe a pretty creepy guy (wouldn't take a HECK of a lot of a stretch!) or at any rate, "of his time".

[mechaieh.livejournal.com]

I saw a still in a theatre history book a while back (can't remember which one, alas -- it wasn't in the one I just checked) which showed Kate pinned down over a table and being forced from behind by Petruchio while two other men watched. (Everyone still clothed in Elizabethan garb, but the implication was clear.) If memory serves, the gist of that production was that she isn't tamed but broken -- so, yes, I agree the seeds for that kind of interpretation are there.