I love literary detective work and coming up with new theories. My kids and I have lengthy discussions about the books we read and plays we see. The good thing about theorising about long dead authors is that no-one can prove you wrong. My 16 year-old son, Ahren, just came up with a theory that I love so much I begged to be allowed to write an essay about it. He agreed as long as I made it clear it was his idea.
So here is Ahren’s theory on Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew: ‘This play only makes sense if Katharina was planning on killing Petruchio.’ Yes! A play that had troubled me, and scholars, for years, suddenly makes perfect sense. Let’s have a look at the plot. Katharina, an intelligent, independent, self-willed young woman is enraged by her status in a society where women are the goods and chattels of men, to be disposed of by those men with no say in their own future. Used to dominating her father, Baptista, she has no wish to be married off to a husband who wants to dominate her. Her subservient sister, Bianca, who has no more ambition in life than to be the chattel of some man, has three suitors. But Baptista has decreed that the younger sister cannot marry before the older. Enter Petruchio, an unlikable adventurer who bargains with Baptista to marry Katharina at a good price. So Katharina is literally sold to a man she loathes. Petruchio decides to ‘tame’ Katharina by ‘killing her with kindness.’ He humiliates her at their wedding and makes her leave before the wedding feast. After making her walk hours to his house she is exhausted and half-starved. Petruchio demands food from his servants then dashes the food from Katrina’s hand, declaring that the meat is burnt and not fit for her to eat. He does the same with her clothes and her bed, declaring that they are not good enough for her, stopping her from eating and sleeping for three days, torturing the poor woman in order to establish mastery over her. Katharina, realising that her husband is a psycho, does the sensible thing and plays along with him until she can figure out an escape. Options were extremely limited for women of her day. She has no money of her own, all her goods belong to her husband. She knows that if she runs away from her abusive husband to her father’s house her father will turn her away. Nor will her sister accept her. She could become a nun but the obedient, cloistered life is not for Katharina. She is a highly intelligent woman so her mind, revolving through all the possibilities, would surely come to the conclusion that the only avenue of escape for her was for her husband to die. She had no money to hire an assassin and anyway, they could be forced to reveal who hired them. No, the only safe way was to kill him herself. But she would have to arrange an iron-clad alibi. Leaving Petruchio’s house to travel to visit Baptista, Petruchio again plays his psychotic games, making Katharina say first that the sun is the moon and then that it is the sun and that an old man is a beautiful young woman. The long suffering Katharina, after going along with his insanity for a while, decides to beat him at his own game and enters into the spirit of the charade so enthusiastically that Petruchio gets miffed and starts to wonder if his Katharina is as tamed as he thinks she is. Katharina, knowing that she won’t have long to wait until she is free, lulls his suspicions again. At the wedding banquet of Hortensio, Petruchio’s friend, Petruchio, convinced he has ‘tamed’ Katharina, boasts to his friends of his meek, mild, obedient wife. His friends, scorning him, vie to see who has the most obedient wife. No doubt Katharina has put this idea into Petruchio’s head somewhere on the journey for she responds as if perfectly prepared and the elaborate charade gives her the opportunity to portray herself to society as an obedient and loving wife. Petruchio and his friends send for their wives, each boasting that their wife will come instantly. His friends’ wives more or less tell their husbands to go boil their heads. Only Katharina, all coy, simpering smiles, comes instantly at her ‘master’s’ behest. When Petruchio tells Katharina to instruct those other wives in their true duty she gives the most sickeningly revolting speech ever, which can only be excused by its intention of painting her as a virtuous, loving, dutiful, doting wife and thereby providing her with a solid alibi. "Fie, fie! Unknit that threatening, unkind brow. And dart not scornful glances from those eyes, To wound thy lord, thy king, thy governor: It blots thy beauty as frosts do bite the meads, Confounds thy fame as whirlwinds shake fair buds, And in no sense is meet or amiable….. Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper, Thy head, thy sovereign; one that cares for thee, And for thy maintenance commits his body To painful labour both by sea and land, To watch the night in storms, the day in cold, Whilst thou liest warm at home, secure and safe; And craves no other tribute at thy hands But love, fair looks and true obedience; Too little payment for so great a debt. Such duty as the subject owes the prince Even such a woman oweth to her husband; And when she is froward, peevish, sullen, sour, And not obedient to his honest will, What is she but a foul contending rebel And graceless traitor to her loving lord? I am ashamed that women are so simple To offer war where they should kneel for peace; Or seek for rule, supremacy and sway, When they are bound to serve, love and obey. Why are our bodies soft and weak and smooth, Unapt to toil and trouble in the world, But that our soft conditions and our hearts Should well agree with our external parts? 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 weakness past compare, That seeming to be most which we indeed least are. Then vail your stomachs, for it is no boot, 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." Are we really supposed to believe that this Elizabethan Stepford Wife is the intelligent, proud, independent Katharina who has fallen in love with a boorish oaf whose intellect is less than hers and who tortured her into submission? Or can we just imagine the glint in her eye as she puts her hand under his foot, inwardly laughing at the fate she has planned for him? Now that she has painted herself as the meek, subdued, ‘tamed shrew’, when a sudden accident befalls her ‘beloved’ husband she will prostrate herself with grief and nobody will suspect her, for ‘she was such a loving, devoted wife.’ And was this her plan all along? When she first meets Petruchio they argue fiercely and Petruchio tells Katharina that he will marry her whether she is willing or not. Petruchio then falsely tells Baptista that Katharina has agreed to marry him. Katharina is uncharacteristically silent. Is she already hatching a plan? She knows her father can compel her to marry, it’s just that no-one has ever wanted to marry her before. Has she already worked out that her only chance for autonomy, for a respectable establishment of her own, away from a father who just wants to get rid of her, free from society’s expectation of marrying and bearing heirs to some overbearing, patriarchal man, is to be the wealthy widow of a man that no-one will miss? And all Petruchio’s ‘taming’ of her will have just given her more of a taste for the task.
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AuthorFiona Lohrbaecher suffers from the, all too common among writers, IIHTMINTWAI syndrome (If It’s Happened To Me I Need To Write About It) ArchivesCategories
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