The Taming of the Shrew and The Artificial Wife
It's no secret I loathe The Taming of the Shrew with a passion. It causes me anguish that the man who created Viola and Emilia also penned this misogynistic tosh.
Why are people so desperate to defend this one? We can all agree The Merchant of Venice is nakedly, abhorrently anti Semitic; no modern production would dare to play it straight, and quite rightly too. So why do we clutch at straws when it comes to this other wildly anachronistic, contentious play? Why do we insist that the inexperienced Shakespeare wrote a gross out comedy designed solely to put bums on seats, that no one would ever have taken it seriously? Why do academics waffle the Christopher Sly framing device (which most audiences have never seen) clearly positions the play as satire?
Shakespeare didn't invent the concept of shrew taming. It had been a staple of folklore for centuries, designed to bully wives into submission. These stories follow the same basic pattern as Shrew: a gold digger marries an unruly woman, "tames" her via physical and psychological violence, and ends up living happily ever after with her. Psychologists can suggest any number of reasons for this transformation, not least Stockholm Syndrome, but as far as the original stories are concerned, the ends justify the means. For - as the women listening to such tales were undoubtedly reminded - being a shrew or "scold" was punishable by law. If a woman was judged to have disturbed the peace with her behaviour, she was subjected to cruel and unusual punishments such as the ducking stool, the pillory or (most horribly) the scold's bridle, where a woman's head was encased in a cage and her tongue held still.
I have seen people perform the most extraordinary gymnastics to justify what Petruchio does to poor, beleaguered Katherina. "She deserves it," some - yes, even women - declare. Although I have never smashed a lute over somebody's head, I can still recognise someone who is deeply unhappy and fighting back in the only way she can. Katherina has the misfortune to be an intelligent, outspoken, non gender conforming woman in a society that values none of these things. To quote her most moving line, "My tongue will tell the anger of my heart/Or else my heart, concealing it, will break."
Let's analyse Petruchio's methods. Although he doesn't hurt her physically (she tells him he would be no gentleman if he did), he carts out practically every other item in the domestic abuser's toolkit. He humiliates her, starves her, deprives her of sleep, destroys everything she likes, won't give her new clothes and isolates her. Let's not forget the hideous gaslighting episode, where he forces her to say that the sun is the moon and an old man is a young girl - just because he says it is. This is a tragedy played out in millions of households, but because the word "comedy" is tacked onto it, we're encouraged to view it as a farce.
It's true British culture has an inglorious history of finding domestic violence funny. Look at the enduring popularity of Punch and Judy, a puppet show for children, where the "hero" clobbers his wife with a stick and murders his baby. I'll probably get called an overly sensitive SJW, but I always hated the show and found it sinister, even as a child. Andy Capp, the protagonist of a long running strip cartoon, regularly beat up his wife Flo - in fact this was the punchline of many of the strips. Petruchio is merely the forerunner of such characters.
It seems even Shakespeare's contemporaries found the play's sexism unpalatable. John Fletcher wrote The Tamer Tamed, a sequel to Shrew, where Petruchio's second wife Maria gives him a taste of his own medicine. She refuses to have sex with him until he behaves himself, and encourages her friends to do the same with their spouses. The defeated Petruchio ends up faking his own death to wring some sympathy from her, but Maria remains dauntless, reflecting "how far below a man, how far from reason" her late husband was. The corpse is so offended, he sits up in his coffin to protest! Tellingly, this is nowhere near as well known as Shrew - probably because it doesn't have the Shakespeare signature, but also because the idea of women rebelling against their husbands would be too controversial. Or something.
As a geeky, Shakespeare loving teen, I detested the play and the light it cast my idol in. The most disagreeable sequences - the echoing kiss, the sleep deprivation and destruction of property, Petruchio's ghastly speech where he gloats about his "reign" - lodged in my mind. I swore one day I would write such scenes from the woman's perspective. It wouldn't be slapstick but played in all its horror. The perpetrator wouldn't be a charismatic outlaw (as Petruchio is *still* played) but a contemptible misogynist. And it wouldn't end with the man triumphant and the woman lovestruck.
In The Artificial Wife, my Petruchio, Robert Percival, believes he can train a robot to fulfil his unhinged fantasy. He uses the tactics discussed above, reasoning that they work on animals, so why shouldn't they work on artificial intelligences? He believes he is in complete control of Summer and Elle, the two robots he has acquired.
He couldn't be more wrong.
Why are people so desperate to defend this one? We can all agree The Merchant of Venice is nakedly, abhorrently anti Semitic; no modern production would dare to play it straight, and quite rightly too. So why do we clutch at straws when it comes to this other wildly anachronistic, contentious play? Why do we insist that the inexperienced Shakespeare wrote a gross out comedy designed solely to put bums on seats, that no one would ever have taken it seriously? Why do academics waffle the Christopher Sly framing device (which most audiences have never seen) clearly positions the play as satire?
Shakespeare didn't invent the concept of shrew taming. It had been a staple of folklore for centuries, designed to bully wives into submission. These stories follow the same basic pattern as Shrew: a gold digger marries an unruly woman, "tames" her via physical and psychological violence, and ends up living happily ever after with her. Psychologists can suggest any number of reasons for this transformation, not least Stockholm Syndrome, but as far as the original stories are concerned, the ends justify the means. For - as the women listening to such tales were undoubtedly reminded - being a shrew or "scold" was punishable by law. If a woman was judged to have disturbed the peace with her behaviour, she was subjected to cruel and unusual punishments such as the ducking stool, the pillory or (most horribly) the scold's bridle, where a woman's head was encased in a cage and her tongue held still.
I have seen people perform the most extraordinary gymnastics to justify what Petruchio does to poor, beleaguered Katherina. "She deserves it," some - yes, even women - declare. Although I have never smashed a lute over somebody's head, I can still recognise someone who is deeply unhappy and fighting back in the only way she can. Katherina has the misfortune to be an intelligent, outspoken, non gender conforming woman in a society that values none of these things. To quote her most moving line, "My tongue will tell the anger of my heart/Or else my heart, concealing it, will break."
Let's analyse Petruchio's methods. Although he doesn't hurt her physically (she tells him he would be no gentleman if he did), he carts out practically every other item in the domestic abuser's toolkit. He humiliates her, starves her, deprives her of sleep, destroys everything she likes, won't give her new clothes and isolates her. Let's not forget the hideous gaslighting episode, where he forces her to say that the sun is the moon and an old man is a young girl - just because he says it is. This is a tragedy played out in millions of households, but because the word "comedy" is tacked onto it, we're encouraged to view it as a farce.
It's true British culture has an inglorious history of finding domestic violence funny. Look at the enduring popularity of Punch and Judy, a puppet show for children, where the "hero" clobbers his wife with a stick and murders his baby. I'll probably get called an overly sensitive SJW, but I always hated the show and found it sinister, even as a child. Andy Capp, the protagonist of a long running strip cartoon, regularly beat up his wife Flo - in fact this was the punchline of many of the strips. Petruchio is merely the forerunner of such characters.
It seems even Shakespeare's contemporaries found the play's sexism unpalatable. John Fletcher wrote The Tamer Tamed, a sequel to Shrew, where Petruchio's second wife Maria gives him a taste of his own medicine. She refuses to have sex with him until he behaves himself, and encourages her friends to do the same with their spouses. The defeated Petruchio ends up faking his own death to wring some sympathy from her, but Maria remains dauntless, reflecting "how far below a man, how far from reason" her late husband was. The corpse is so offended, he sits up in his coffin to protest! Tellingly, this is nowhere near as well known as Shrew - probably because it doesn't have the Shakespeare signature, but also because the idea of women rebelling against their husbands would be too controversial. Or something.
As a geeky, Shakespeare loving teen, I detested the play and the light it cast my idol in. The most disagreeable sequences - the echoing kiss, the sleep deprivation and destruction of property, Petruchio's ghastly speech where he gloats about his "reign" - lodged in my mind. I swore one day I would write such scenes from the woman's perspective. It wouldn't be slapstick but played in all its horror. The perpetrator wouldn't be a charismatic outlaw (as Petruchio is *still* played) but a contemptible misogynist. And it wouldn't end with the man triumphant and the woman lovestruck.
In The Artificial Wife, my Petruchio, Robert Percival, believes he can train a robot to fulfil his unhinged fantasy. He uses the tactics discussed above, reasoning that they work on animals, so why shouldn't they work on artificial intelligences? He believes he is in complete control of Summer and Elle, the two robots he has acquired.
He couldn't be more wrong.
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