THE TAMING OF THE SCRIPT
Michael Flachmann
1236 Fairway Drive
Bakersfield, California 93309
Professor of English
California State University, Bakersfield
and
Company Dramaturg
Utah Shakespearean Festival
(661) 654-2121 office
(661) 831-9081 home
mflachmann@csub.edu
THE TAMING OF THE SCRIPT
Michael Flachmann
The Taming of the Shrew is a challenging play--both in the classroom and on the
stage. As difficult as it is for students to undertake a literary study of the
systematic subjugation of a fiery, high-spirited woman who is "tamed" by her
spouse, the process of watching a theatrical performance of the script can be
even more arduous because of our instinctive visceral response to Kate's
hegemonic predicament. In a live production, she becomes a "real" person with
whom we can identify, rather than an abstraction on the page from which we can
safely keep our intellectual and emotional distance. Historically accurate, "period"
productions of the play are sometimes forgiven because we tend to view them as
museum pieces, tolerable only as distant artifacts of our benighted patriarchal
past. The peril of theatricality becomes especially acute, however, through
updated productions of the play in which Kate's misogynistic brutalization seems
shockingly at odds with the twenty-first-century costumes, set designs, props,
music, and attendant ethical standards of our own modern and (hopefully) more
enlightened era. This disconnect between the script's latent chauvinism and our
current respect for women has spawned some intriguing and very effective
attempts to ameliorate the sexism of the play and render it more palatable to
modern artistic tastes on stage and on screen. Sadly, however, those of us who
teach Shakespeare as literature have yet to discover the same recipe for
success in our classrooms. Perhaps if we paid more attention to the creative
ways our theatrical colleagues have infused life into this antiquated text, we could
do a better job of presenting it to our students. Taking a brief look at some of
these innovative staging solutions is the best place to begin our inquiry into how
the play can best be taught.
The script of The Taming of the Shrew has had an especially volatile and
complex relationship with its performance history—a disparity that has led Ann
Thompson to argue that Shrew "has probably received fewer completely straight
performances than any other Shakespearean play of comparable popularity on
the stage" (The Taming of the Shrew, edited by Ann Thompson, Cambridge
University Press, 2003, page 24). Serious attempts to reanimate the play began
as early as John Fletcher's proto-feminist The Woman's Prize, or the Tamer
Tamed (ca. 1611), in which Kate dies and Petruchio's domineering second wife
tames him by withholding sex till he reforms his behavior. This impulse to
improve the script through adaptation soon produced a number of notable
successive revisions, including John Lacy's Sauny the Scott: or The Taming of
the Shrew: A Comedy (1667), in which the Sly induction is omitted entirely, and
Grumio (Sauny) speaks in an impenetrable Scottish dialect; James Worsdale's
"ballad-farce" titled A Cure for a Scold (1735); David Garrick's long-running
Catherine and Petruchio (1756); Hermann Goetz's operatic Der Widerspanstigen
Zahmung (1874); Columbia Pictures' 1929 adaptation featuring Mary Pickford
and Douglas Fairbanks (where Katherine's submission speech was delivered
with an ironic and knowing wink); Cole Porter's much-loved musical Kiss me Kate
(1948); Charles Marowitz' The Shrew (1973); and Warren Graves's zany and
aptly titled Chief Shaking Spear Rides Again or The Taming of the Sioux (1975).
Notable modern movie and television treatments have included Franco Zeffirelli's
1967 adaptation with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, the famous
Moonlighting sitcom "Atomic Shakespeare" (1986, season three, episode seven),
the popular 10 Things I Hate About You with Julia Stiles and Heath Ledger
(1999), and the 2003 adaptation Deliver Us From Eva.
Additional recent efforts to solve the play for contemporary audiences have
sparked a number of innovative approaches at the regional theatre level,
including William Ball's 1976 ACT production, which attempted to defuse the
sexism by distancing it from the present through a commedia dell'arte motif; a
Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival production in 1978 during which Kate put her
hands beneath Petruchio's feet at the end of the submission speech, said the line
"may it do him ease," and then sent him unceremoniously sprawling off his chair;
a 1980 version at the now-defunct California Shakespearean Festival in Visalia
where Kate finished her final speech and then smugly took the wager out of
Petruchio's hands as if her whole submissive routine had been a set-up between
them; a New York Shakespeare Festival offering in 1990 that featured Morgan
Freeman and Tracey Ullman duking it out in the Old West; and two recent
versions at the Utah Shakespearean Festival: Henry Woronicz' 2006 outdoor
production in which the entire play was cast as Sly's dream, with Kate and
Petruchio (who doubled with Sly and the Hostess) sharing the final submission
speech, and Jane Page's creative 2008 indoor post-World-War-II play set in 1947
Padua during which Petruchio, an American GI, went through the same food and
sleep deprivation as Kate, his Italian war bride, thereby participating in the
"taming" process with her. Perhaps the most creative solution to both the
misogyny of the final speech and Sly's unexplained disappearance from the play,
however, took place in Peggy Shannon's feminist 1989 Berkeley Shakespeare
Festival production, where Kate, in a brilliant coup de theatre, was overcome by
disgust at having to deliver her last monologue, stopped abruptly in mid-speech,
and brought the Tinker up from the audience to finish it!
As these adaptations and revisions suggest, the stage history of the show has
been saturated with innovation, and these attempts to drag Shakespeare's play
into the modern world have been most useful and appealing when they have
found the human realities behind the characters and situations that transcend
social convention and speak to us regardless of the century in which we live. The
Taming of the Shrew remains one of Shakespeare's most popular and enduring
plays; in fact, the mere appearance of its name on a theatrical marquee
guarantees full houses and lucrative box office receipts. Although the success
with which our theatrical colleagues have learned to make the script more
accessible to their audiences invites those of us who teach drama as literature to
use similarly creative approaches in our classrooms, we still seem mired within
the same dully sluggardized range of questions that have dominated academic
discourse about the play for the past fifty years: What, for example, is the
relationship between Shakespeare's script and the earlier The Taming of a
Shrew, which may have been a precursor to the author's play? Would the
existence of such a document mean that Shakespeare's play itself was a revision
in response to this prior publication? To what extent is the script a compendium
of ways to improve or eliminate someone's bad habits: a primer for behavioral
change? How were women treated during the Renaissance, and in what ways
do modern feminist analyses of such themes as culture, power, sexual identity,
psychic metamorphosis, and romance give us insight into their struggles for
equality then and now? How much of Kate's allegedly "shrewish" behavior is
caused by an insensitive father, a collection of boorish suitors, and a simpering,
manipulative sister? What is the relationship between the two Induction scenes
and the rest of Shakespeare's play, and what happens to Sly when he
disappears abruptly after the framing device ends in 1.1? And finally, how
stereotypical are Shakespeare's characters, particularly in relation to the wellknown commedia archetypes he inherited from his predecessors?
Although such topics should certainly be staple ingredients of any classroom
investigation into the play, they do little to help bridge the gap between the
script's sexist stereotypes and our students' own twenty-first-century, liberated
lives. On the contrary, they often create distance through their relentless focus
on inanimate left-brained theory, structure, source material, and historicist
criticism at the expense of the right-brained "humanity" that enlivens the play. All
this begs the question of how a study of The Taming of the Shrew can be
relevant to today's students and how we can present the script as more than a
historical curiosity within the context of the objectionable treatment of women
throughout the centuries. So why have theatrical practitioners been successful in
resurrecting this script while we English teachers have not? The secret to
bringing the immediacy and relevance of theatre into the sterile confines of our
classrooms lies in the very nature of the art form itself. A play is a living,
breathing script intended for performance in much the same way a musical score
wants desperately to be an orchestral concert or a printed recipe fulfills its true
destiny only by becoming a steaming hot plate of coq au vin. The best way,
therefore, for our students to appreciate the power, complexity, and excitement of
a script like The Taming of the Shrew is to take them "inside" the characters and
situations that chronicle the story for modern viewers. Not surprisingly, the same
creative approaches that bring a play to life on stage can produce similar magic
when we study it on the page. Because of my dual background in theatre and
literature, I routinely try to do this in my own classroom through a number of
theatrical teaching techniques that supplement the more standard literary
methods I have long employed.
The first of these involves the use of videotapes and DVDs, which I never show
in their entirety, but introduce rather in tantalizingly short complementary
segments from first one production, then another. For example, among the
Shrew videos I have in my collection are the 1929 Mary Pickford and Douglass
Fairbanks movie; the 1967 Zeffirelli film with Richard Burton and Elizabeth
Taylor; the 1967 ACT stage performance featuring Fredi Olster and Marc Singer;
the 1980 BBC Time/Life version starring John Cleese and directed by Jonathan
Miller; the 1982 Stratford, Ontario, stage production; and the 1983 adaptation
with Karen Austin and Franklyn Seales. I love, for instance, to show brief clips
contrasting the Stratford version, which has Sly remain on stage for the entire
play, with the Zeffirelli production, which omits the Tinker's scenes entirely. This
usually prompts a spirited discussion about the pros and cons of including the
Induction in a production of the script. Similarly, I often compare a few minutes
of Olster and Singer's acrobatic wooing scene in the ACT commedia adaptation
with equal time from the same section in the BBC production, in which Cleese
and his Kate, Sarah Badel, are remarkably cerebral and subdued. As teachers
might expect, comparisons between the 5.2 "submission" speeches from
different productions can also elicit similar insights and reactions from students,
who will invariably lobby for their favorite version with great enthusiasm.
This procedure of juxtaposing scenes from different versions of the play helps
students understand with unalloyed clarity that each unique Shakespearean
production is in some fashion itself an adaptation or revision of an original,
antecedent script that has been massaged, tweaked, and interpreted by its
director, designers, actors, and other theatrical personnel to support some
particular vision of the play. We cannot talk, for example, about the "Zeffirelli,"
"Burton/Taylor," or "John Cleese" versions of this script without realizing that
actors and directors love to put their unique stamp on the material, thereby
claiming it as "their own" in the eyes of an adoring audience. When students
realize there's no such thing as a perfect, definitive, or "historically accurate"
production of one of Shakespeare's scripts, they are well on their way to
understanding the true nature of this protean, seductive, and thrilling art form.
This important insight will also enable them to use their own creativity in
analyzing the dynamic relationship between the printed script of a play and its
eventual realization on stage or screen, which should be at the heart of any study
of that ephemeral oxymoron we call "dramatic literature."
The second series of techniques comes out of my work as dramaturg (textual
consultant) for the past twenty-five years at a wide variety of professional
theatres, where I have routinely been involved in finding research materials,
making script cuts, writing program notes, helping with doubling assignments,
and fulfilling all the other "literary" duties associated with many of today's
theatrical productions. I've had great success taking my students inside this
"real world" of Shakespeare in performance, where a number of assignments
have been quite successful in helping them appreciate a play like The Taming of
the Shrew as a challenge to perform for modern audiences, as opposed to a
hopelessly chauvinistic relic from the past that should never be produced.
Presented properly, these in-class exercises can open a unique and exciting
doorway into the play that encourages students to consider both literary and
theatrical questions associated with the script.
For example, I'll often ask the students to determine the running time of the script
using the simple formula that 1,000 lines of dialogue equal one hour of stage
time. Although the final temporal estimate will be influenced, of course, by such
variables as whether the lines are in verse or prose and whether the production
includes stage fighting, dancing, or music, the 1,000 lines per hour estimate is
usually fairly accurate. Since Shrew has approximately 2580 lines (79% of which
are in verse, with 21% in prose), this means an uncut production of the play
would run slightly over two and one-half hours. Assuming that most regional
theatres prefer to bring in their shows under 2½ hours and that an average
production of the play will have one 15-minute intermission (equal to
approximately 250 lines), here are some questions that might accrue from such a
"theatrical" investigation into the play: (1) Which 250 lines would you cut from
the script if you want the running time close to 2½ hours including intermission?
(2) Would you take all 250 lines from one or two scenes or spread them evenly
throughout the script? And how would the placement of these cuts change the
script? (3) Which lines would be ripe for excision and why? (4) How much time
would the Induction scenes add to the production? (or, phrased another way,
how much of the play's running time could you cut if you omitted the Induction
entirely?) (5) Where would you put the intermission, assuming that (a) you'd
want it to split the play approximately in half and (b) you should break the action
at a crucial moment in the script or at a natural pause involving a shift in time or a
movement to a new location? (6) How could Kate's final speech be delivered so
that her character maintains as much dignity as possible at the conclusion of the
play? (7) If the final speech is, in fact, divided between Kate and Petruchio, which
characters should say which lines? And, finally, (8) If Kate has a change of heart
in the production, where and why does it occur? In the food and sleep deprivation
scene at Petruchio's country house (4.1)? In the tailor scene (4.3)? In the sunmoon scene (4.5)? Or elsewhere in the script? Students can work on these
problems individually or in groups, reporting their findings back to the entire class
after an appropriate period of examination and analysis. One obvious result of
such a mode of inquiry will be that students immediately become part of a
pragmatic discussion of creative ways to solve the play, rather than finding
reasons why they shouldn't have to study it at all.
Another theatrical project that immerses students into the world of the play is to
have them put together "research books" that could be used by acting companies
in staging a production of the script. As long-time company dramaturg at the
Tony-Award-winning Utah Shakespearean Festival, I do this each year by
dividing my students into research groups and asking them to create such books
for use by the director, designers, and actors at our theatre. A typical research
book for Shrew might contain reviews of past productions, articles and book
chapters about the script, and information about sixteenth-century Padua, the
history of commedia dell'arte, different types of lutes and musical scales,
schoolmasters, Renaissance marriage customs, induction scenes, servantmaster relationships, Ovid's Heroides, the power men had over women during
Shakespeare's time, and other related topics. If the production is to be updated,
the research areas will change accordingly, of course. Through providing such
information, students will begin to understand and appreciate the vast amount of
background work that goes into first-rate productions of Shakespeare's plays.
They will also gain insights into the intimate and symbiotic relationship between
literary investigation and theatrical performance. During the past twenty years,
many students who compiled these research books have traveled to Utah to see
the plays they helped create, which gives them a tremendous sense of
ownership and accomplishment when they sit spellbound as accomplished actors
convert their research to vibrant, animated life on stage before hundreds of
appreciative spectators.
I also encourage students to go en masse to live Shakespearean performances
whenever possible. Prior to arriving at the theatre, we go over the script carefully
in class, after which I'll assign specific production areas for small groups of
students to scrutinize, such as costuming, set design, lighting, music, props,
blocking, and other important areas. Our ensuing discussions about the
production are always richer and more detailed because of these small "interest
groups," wherein students are responsible for analyzing specific areas of the
show in addition to taking in the entire dramatic presentation. Because of my
connections with our local theatre community, I also try to organize a "talk back"
after each performance during which students can take a backstage tour and ask
the actors questions—all of which further enrich the experience of seeing
productions of the plays we cover in class.
Finally, I end each semester with in-class student performances of short scenes
from Shakespeare's plays. Most participants enjoy acting live or on videotape,
but I permit those who are shy to work behind the scenes building costumes,
designing sets, selecting music, or contributing to other important production
areas. We've had sock puppet versions of Romeo and Juliet, an entire scene
from A Midsummer Night's Dream portrayed by Barbie Dolls, a spaghetti western
Hamlet, a "Cops" version of Othello, the music tutor scene from Shrew done
entirely by clowns, a Kabuki Macbeth, Lear in a modern retirement home, a
cheerleader rendition of Julius Caesar where the central character was "pompommed" to death in the Forum, and a myriad of other inventive ways of
performing Shakespeare live for contemporary audiences. Not only does the
Bard survive the experience, but he's always better off for it because the students
have taken ownership of the scenes through their imagination, creativity, and
investment of time and energy. Mimicking the motions of a "real" theatre, they
develop a company of actors, take on roles, edit the script, invent a "concept,"
make decisions about costuming and set design, and then perform their scene in
front of an audience with the distinct, nerve-wracking, and adrenaline-inducing
possibility that they may fall flat on their proverbial faces in doing so.
Remarkably, however, that's the one moment of the class that everyone recalls
years later when they come back to visit me. ("Dr. Flachmann, remember when I
played the Wall in A Midsummer Night's Dream?") And it's also the moment
during which most of them fell in love with Shakespeare. And isn't this what we
ought to be doing in our classrooms: making certain our students truly love these
brilliant, transcendent, and glorious plays? If it's true that people remember 10%
of what they hear, 20% of what they read, and over 80% of what they say and
do, this maxim provides indisputable proof why the process of acting out
Shakespeare's plays in the college English classroom is such a powerful
aphrodisiac.
If I've been successful teaching Shrew over the years, it's because the students
and I have treated the play as a "script" that begs to be solved through
performance—an approach that fits squarely within the rich and varied tapestry
of revisions and adaptations that have dominated the stage for the past four
centuries. In the final analysis, the most important debate generated by the play
may be less about the morality of taming a fiery, high-spirited woman like Kate
than it is about ways in which we can tame Shakespeare's script for a new
generation of students and theatre-goers, which is a challenge certainly worth the
effort!