Yesterday I saw the Boston-area Actors’ Shakespeare Project‘s production of The Taming of the Shrew. It was the first production of theirs that I’d seen; I’d heard great things about them and it didn’t disappoint.
But what are we to make of a play that so unabashedly supports male dominance of marriage? I saw the play on Sunday afternoon, and that performance had a brief question-and-answer session with the cast. I asked them how they dealt with the issue, ending up by saying (in jest, mostly), “How do you look at yourself in the mirror each morning?” Clearly, it was something that they all struggled with, and how could they not? One actor said that while it is true that the play is patriarchal, it’s not true that the play is misogynist, that they’re not the same thing. True enough. The woman who played Katharina, said, if I’m recalling correctly, that she tried to look at the play mainly as a love story and she was glad that while she was playing the character she didn’t have to think about the broader implications. She did a fantastic job, so I’m glad she didn’t have to look at them while she was at it either. I don’t mean to be getting down on the cast here in any way, incidentally: they did a great job with a play that can’t be anything but deeply troublesome these last forty years or so.
In any case, there’s no need to needle the cast: how can I look at myself in the mirror after acknowledging that at the end of the play, Katharina’s apparently total subjugation to Petruchio felt to me to be not merely acceptable, but happy and even necessary? After such feelings, what forgiveness? Continue reading “The Taming of the Shrew”
