This Is Shakespeare

by Emma Smith

But however much theatrical production and critical interpretation strive to settle the play’s ambiguities, I want to stress something different here. The Taming of the Shrew prompts questions rather than answers them. The question of how to interpret the play is hard-wired into its very structure and amplified in its ongoing reception. Shakespeare’s talent for interrogation and scepticism is on display here in this early play, and its history has exemplified one of our most persistent and inevitable recourses when reading Shakespeare. We make his work mean what we want it to mean. Whether Katherine is indeed tamed by the end of the play thus becomes a sharper interpretative parable: how to read Shakespeare?

Is she sarcastically rehearsing a prepared patriarchal conduct piece? Do the increasing rhymes of the speech – sway/obey, hearts/parts, yours/more, boot/foot, please/ease – suggest the harmony of a settled view, or the singsong of a speech learned off pat? Her condemnation of her sex is so long that perhaps it becomes satirical or sarcastic through repetition, undermining its ostensible meaning. And surely calling women ‘worms’ is deliberately excessive? Could this be a plot with Petruchio to win the wager? We have not seen them together in the play for several scenes, so it is impossible to know how, or whether, this set-piece might have been set up in advance. Is Katherine brought to proper wifely conduct and educated away from the anti-social behaviour of her earlier life? She seems to say so in this long account of women’s obligations to their husbands. Or has she had her spirit crushed?

Sometimes we assume that what seem to us ambiguities in Shakespeare’s plays – whether Henry V is a good king, or Othello a racist play, for example – are the result of different ethical frameworks then and now. So, this argument goes, scenarios which were quite unproblematic to early modern audiences have gained moral complexity because our attitudes to race, or military expediency, or, in the case of The Taming of the Shrew, the relationship between the sexes, have changed since Shakespeare’s time. But actually it seems that The Taming of the Shrew was always ambiguous, right from the start – and two contemporaneous and related plays help make that visible.

As we’ll see repeatedly in this book, Shakespeare’s plays are questions rather than answers.

Seeing blatant anti-women sentiments in the final speech of A Shrew helps us to look again at the particular arguments Shakespeare gives his Katherine. She argues that men have particular obligations to women, and so women have reciprocal responsibilities in turn. This is the rhetoric of mutual obligation, something that has a distinct role in sixteenth-century debates about Protestant ‘companionate marriage’. Marriage, while not a union of equals, nevertheless carried mutual responsibilities, in which each partner endured limits on their individual freedom within a bond of reciprocity. As the wife had responsibilities to the husband, so too he had responsibilities to her; the wife’s subservient conduct is secured by the husband’s generous protection of her.

So maybe A Shrew is clearer about its Kate’s taming, as it incorporates her into outdated ideas of marriage that have been replaced by a more mutual ideology promulgated by Protestant advice books on companionate marriage, and by Katherine at the end of The Shrew. Perhaps. But here too there are questions. The second point of comparison between these sister plays is their treatment of the wider framing narrative.

Answers to these questions can be only partial or contingent. What’s more important is to acknowledge, from the first chapter of this book, how Shakespeare’s works prompt questions rather than answering them. The ambiguity over whether Katherine is tamed at the end of The Taming of the Shrew is intrinsic to the play – it isn’t a problem that arises because we do not now accept the kind of gender ideology that the Elizabethan audience would have supported, so it’s not the problem of history. Rather, the early modern evidence of the Taming of a Shrew, that quarto version of the play from 1594, and of The Tamer Tamed, the Fletcher play in the Jacobean period – as well as the play’s own structure and ambiguities – mean that the question was always present. Shakespeare’s plays hold our attention because they offer narratives through which we can shape our own contemporary concerns. A flick through the modern production history of The Taming of the Shrew is exemplary: the suffragettes, the post-war reiteration of gender conservatism, and second-wave feminism have all found the play hospitable and relevant to their concerns. If the twenty-first-century iteration of the problems between the sexes looks different from its late-sixteenth-century counterpart, the questions still remain.

Richard III’s opening lines are also their most familiar: ‘Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this son of York’ (1.1.1–2). Their recognizability may obscure just how unusual they are. Richard is the only one of Shakespeare’s major characters to begin his own play. You may recall – perhaps you’ve experienced this in the theatre – the bewilderingly oblique way Shakespeare tends to begin his plays, via marginal characters whom we struggle to place as they recount or anticipate some major narrative event in a conversation that begins in the middle, leaving us flailing (beginning Shakespeare’s plays at their beginning is not always the easiest place to start).

Richard III is described as a ‘tragedy’ in its first publication, but the story of Richard’s path to the throne, and of his eventual defeat in battle reads more like a modern criminal biopic. The details of the plot are less important than its overall shape of rise and fall. In large part Richard’s success is due to his capacity for ruthless violence.

Richard’s primary tactic in the play is seduction rather than elimination.

Those previous historical dramas on the Wars of the Roses dramatize the absence of any authoritative leader by distributing the roles widely across the theatrical company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, originally formed in 1594 by a group of eight shareholders, including Shakespeare. The plays’ historical politics and their dramaturgical politics are aligned: no single character is any more important than any other. By contrast, Richard registers his own ambition, seizing his own play by the scruff of the neck right from the start, and he doesn’t let go: his hold on the politics of his country is matched by Shakespeare’s fascist dramaturgy which is designed explicitly to showcase his charismatic authority.

Richard (III) is himself a consummate actor, so much so that we wonder if there is anything underneath. He performs his own role self-consciously: his cues to his loyal sidekick Buckingham in his appearance before the Lord Mayor and citizens, when he appears as a devout hermit between two bishops, are good examples of his actorly delight (he’s the opposite, in a way, of the theatre-phobic Coriolanus, discussed in Chapter 18).

There’s so much to dislike about Richard, and yet – or so – he is beguiling, seductive, ravishing, within the play and outside it. It’s almost as if the play’s popularity itself testifies to a kind of audience masochism.

The morality of the story and the pleasure of the performance are at odds. By the time he came to write 1 Henry IV, Shakespeare had already experienced a similar impasse in Richard III. Because the end of Richard’s story can’t really be the jubilant accession to the throne he has so long plotted to possess. No: in Richard III Shakespeare’s pragmatic end goal is actually the defeat of Richard by Henry, Earl of Richmond, better known to history as Henry VII and more familiar to his own audiences as the grandfather of the Tudor dynasty and of Queen Elizabeth I.

Richmond thus has a vital historical role. He is Richard’s nemesis, the end of his megalomaniac progress to the English throne. But he also symbolizes and enacts the end of the Wars of the Roses, that long historical fallout from the deposition of Richard II that scarred the second half of the fifteenth century and animates Shakespeare’s history plays.

Mid-twentieth-century approaches to Shakespeare were very clear that in Richmond Shakespeare presented the idealized solution to all that dynastic and political turmoil he had previously dramatized. The

After a sequence of illegitimate kings following the deposition of Richard II, and a period of violent and turbulent civil expiation for this political and ethical crime, according to Tillyard, Richmond comes to reinstate the tarnished monarchy in the blessed form of the Tudors. In this play, writes Tillyard, Shakespeare ‘accepted the prevalent belief that God had guided England into her haven of Tudor prosperity’.

Many more recent critics, trying to assess how Shakespeare’s history plays might intervene in contemporary political debates, have suggested that their role is rather to rehearse repressed anxieties about the Elizabethan succession. This argument goes that history plays try out different versions of monarchies in decline, different versions of power changing hands, so they are documents of political uncertainty rather than of historical triumph. The turn to history in the culture of the late sixteenth century can itself be seen as a sign of cultural anxiety – a turn to the past rather than a step forward into the future. The political future, for the Elizabethans, was decidedly uncertain, so they looked instead to the lessons of the past.

History is full of examples of tyrants who looked like liberators.

Is Richmond, then, the play’s hero? Perhaps we could phrase the question another way. Imagine you are an ambitious actor going to a casting call for Richard III. What’s the part you’re hoping for? Right. Shakespeare has done as much as he possibly can, I think, to minimize and to downplay Richmond’s role. We know that Shakespeare cannot, in writing history plays, change historical fact, although he does lots of work to shape the baggy narratives of the chronicles into drama. Winners and losers, kings and challengers, appear in his plays as they do in the historical record, even as events, battles and motives are collapsed or manipulated.

Richmond’s role is as nemesis, but it is also as the figure known to classical drama as the deus ex machina – a person, sometimes divine, sometimes human – who comes in unexpectedly at the end of the play to sort things out.

Richmond has only that most equivocal of triumphs, that of being alive at the end of a Shakespearean tragedy. This is the hallmark of the nonentity (the Prince in Romeo and Juliet, Fortinbras in Hamlet, Malcolm in Macbeth: who cares?).

Richmond’s minor presence in the play disrupts the historical telos – from the Greek, meaning the end or purpose, from which we get ‘teleology’, the movement towards that end or purpose. The play’s position in a wider sequence of Shakespearean history plays also complicates that telos. Shakespeare writes his histories rather as George Lucas makes his Star Wars films; that’s to say, he writes towards an ‘end of history’ moment.

Only if we order the plays in the order of their historical reigns do we get Richmond’s victory as the final instalment: as audiences experienced these plays in the Elizabethan theatre, Richmond’s victory was only provisional, temporary – rather like the victory at Shrewsbury at the end of 1 Henry IV, or the Battle of Agincourt in Henry V. It concluded only an episode, a single afternoon at the theatre, not the whole story. Next time they came to the playhouse it was all swords and conspiracies and jostling for the crown again.

There is no evidence from the Shakespearean period that these history plays were seen as serial or episodic in their own time, or ever performed in this way back then: rather they were complete and self-standing dramatic entertainments.

It’s worth reiterating that this idea of historical and ethical sequence is a later construction, not the experience of the first playgoers to the histories. Nor is it necessarily the experience of Richard III itself. To be sure, the play can end only one way, but it also puts off that conclusion as long as it can.

Shakespeare has amplified the role of women in the play, in contrast to his later history plays where he seems to squeeze them

As such she is one of the structural features that is constantly dragging the play backwards, away from its teleological resolution in Richmond, reminding Richard that he cannot forget the past casualties of his rise to power. The women are established as mourners for the dead, and their speeches are full of recollection and remembrance.

This indicative encounter between Richard and Margaret therefore takes on something of a meta-theatrical quality about the play itself as a version of history, and a contested one. Tudor historians since Sir Thomas More, writing in the reign of Richmond’s son, Henry VIII, had worked to demonize Richard III – and Shakespeare’s Richard embraces this vision enthusiastically: ‘I am determinèd to prove a villain,’ he declares in his opening soliloquy (1.1.30). The line is double-edged: ‘determinèd’ has the dual meaning both of human agency, and of some sort of cosmic direction.

The Richard III Society – ‘working since 1924 to secure a more balanced assessment of the king and to support research into his life and times’ – has long tried to challenge Shakespeare’s distorted portrait of the king. But the question of whether the portrait of Richard is historically accurate or not is less important than the fact that its charismatic power challenges historical narrative itself. Audiences at Richard III are drawn to Richard and kept at a distance from Richmond: and, like Shakespeare himself, none of us bothers to stick around to see what happens next. It is Richard, not Richmond, who begins and ends this story.

Writing in the late eighteenth century, George Steevens observed of The Comedy of Errors that ‘in this play we find more intricacy of plot than distinction of character.’ He didn’t mean it as a compliment. Complex, multi-faced characterization has become intrinsic to what we most value about Shakespeare, and at its most extreme, this critical method tends to minimize the plays’ plots or, at best, to read them solely as vehicles for the revelation and development of character. Shakespeare’s comedy about two sets of identical twins whirling around the ancient coastal city of Ephesus (situated in modern Turkey) certainly seems to prioritize plot over character, even though that plot is fairly simple.

The Comedy of Errors has been consistently under-appreciated, I’d argue, in part because we don’t know how to appreciate plot. Contemporary culture, the study and performance of Shakespeare and our own intrinsic narcissism tend to encourage the view that character is destiny. Errors challenges this humanistic view of the world by emphasizing, in ways that anticipate the experience of modernity, the alienation of a mechanical universe. Think Charlie Chaplin on the accelerating assembly line in Modern Times (1936), and you have something of the comic terror captured in The Comedy of Errors.

I want to suggest that it’s not so much that Shakespeare fails to develop character in this play (although I’m not averse to calling Shakespeare out for his failures); rather, that he rejects its causational significance. That’s to say, the play’s flat characterization is meaningful, not a mistake. It delivers a world in which humans are at the mercy of cosmic forces – and those cosmic forces are represented in this play as plot.

Marriage is here indistinguishable from the watery commingling that seems to be the recurrent difficulty of individuation. What The Comedy of Errors seems instead to suggest is that characterization is a property not of the internal but of the external. Things outside us bolster or secure our identity. In particular, it is in being recognized by others that identity is fixed; it is by operating within a social system that personhood is achieved and secured.

In some ways this is a more general point about Shakespearean comedy, where individuals find their true selves in romantic, social and economic ties within communities and the movement of the drama is towards joint celebration (like the banquet that is always the last panel in the Asterix stories) rather than – as in tragedies – isolation and death. But it might be possible for us to think about this in a more explicitly psychoanalytical way and thus to link The Comedy of Errors with something that Shakespeare explores elsewhere in his work: the idea of a split personality, or a self refracted across several characters.

What the plot reveals is that such liberation can only be temporary. The characters are caught up in accelerating and repeated dreamlike scenarios in which their identities blur and dissolve under pressure of events.

Maybe the designation of the play as farce helps with the question of how to appreciate its priority of plot over character. But it also raises the issue about laughter’s relationship to comedy. We may feel that laughter and comedy are twins, birthed at the same moment, but that was not the case in the early modern period.

It is not human warmth that gives rise to laughter, but the encounter with something rigid and mechanical: ‘we laugh every time a person gives us the impression of being a thing.’ People are things in The Comedy of Errors, defined by exterior appearance and by the transfer of props, and as the plot accelerates they become increasingly, frenetically mechanical. And our response, according to Bergson, is decidedly unsentimental.

Richard II is a play in which one king is deposed and another takes his place. What is remarkable about the depiction of this momentous transfer is that we don’t really know whether it was a good thing or not. The great unanswered question of the play is whether it was right – historically, politically, ethically, personally, dramatically – for Bolingbroke to take the throne from his cousin Richard. This question insinuates itself into the play’s imagery and choreography, and hangs over its stage history and critical reception – and the following sequence of history plays struggle with its unquiet legacy.

Richard II is a signal example of Shakespeare’s simultaneous interest in politics and his avoidance of the partisan. It’s this feature of his writing that has enabled the plays to be co-opted for very different ideological agendas (see the chapter on Julius Caesar for more on this). It is impossible to derive any stable sense from Richard II of Shakespeare’s own view on the conflict between Richard and Bolingbroke. On one hand, Richard is the legitimate king, but/and he is solipsistic, selfish and potentially tyrannical. On the other hand, Bolingbroke is a usurper, but/and he is pragmatic, charismatic and widely supported.

What would contemporary audiences have thought? An official Elizabethan sermon inveighed against rebellion, arguing that Lucifer was the ‘founder of rebellion’, that earthly kings were ‘ordained of God’ and that even rebellion against a wicked ruler was not to be sanctioned: ‘a rebel is worse than the worst prince, and rebellion worse than the worst government of the worst prince that hath hitherto been.’ This might suggest that orthodox contemporary sympathies ought to be with Richard (although it’s always worth recalling that the messages that an institution most actively promulgates are often, by definition, ones to which not all its members automatically subscribe – otherwise why the need to keep telling them?).

The play neither hides nor maximizes Richard’s faults, and its apparent impartiality means that neither candidate is idealized. Richard has his favourites, those ‘caterpillars of the commonwealth’ (2.3.165), but Bushy, Bagot and Green are less effective and less venal than in other narratives of the story. The chronicler Raphael Holinshed, one of Shakespeare’s sources, summarizes Richard’s downfall as the result of his shortcomings as a ruler: ‘by reason he was so given to follow evil counsel, and used such inconvenient ways and means, through insolent misgovernance and youthful outrage’. These sound very dramatic and stage-worthy behaviours, but Shakespeare ignores the

In making Richard a weak king Shakespeare is obviously influenced by Edward II, a history play by his brilliant contemporary, Christopher Marlowe. Yet where Marlowe depicts a sexual relationship between Edward and Gaveston, homoeroticism in Richard’s court is largely underplayed and does not seem to be a factor in the king’s apparent inadequacies

Richard himself lays claim to occupy the central dramatic role, if not the moral pole position, conventionally offered to the titular character in tragedy. As with King Lear, or Coriolanus, or Macbeth, or Romeo and Juliet, it is Richard’s death that brings the play to a close. Shakespeare has cut his historical material into this particular shape: obviously, there’s lots more of the story still to come, since, unlike tragedy, history does not come to an end. As we saw when thinking about Richmond in Richard III, in the final scene of a tragedy there tends to be little investment in what is coming next.

But there is another aspect to Richard II, which is its engagement with the ongoing processes of history. History continues. The death of one king inevitably means the coronation of another: the king is dead, long live the king.

But try telling that to Richard, who certainly believes he’s in a tragedy. Sometimes favourably characterized by critics as a ‘poet king’, he deploys a range of emotive and figurative language to describe the events of the play from his own perspective.

For some analyses of the play, its governing principle has been understood as one of opposition, built on a perceived contrast between the two protagonists. Thus Richard versus Bolingbroke, poetry versus realism, metaphor versus plain-speaking, the feudal king versus the pragmatic politician, divine right versus realpolitik, chivalric jousts versus political murder, the medieval world of absolute monarchy versus the modern world of expediency.

The theme of the scene here is divisive conflict and unspoken tension, but that’s lacquered over with the formal quality of rhyme, which urges towards harmony and connection. If you find it difficult to work out what’s actually happening as Richard II begins, your fog is absolutely spot-on: this is a scene about obscuring rather than communicating meaning. Basically, what can’t be said here, for obvious reasons, is that the king himself may be implicated in the death of the Duke of Gloucester. (It’s one of the ways this history play is preoccupied with what can’t be truly known about the past.) So rhyme functions in this scene to try to keep the lid on its potentially explosive energies: it’s the linguistic embodiment of Richard’s regal authority.

The difference between the old and the new kings or, more pointedly, between the legitimate and the usurping sovereign, is not the difference between the true and the copy, the real monarch and the counterfeit player, as we might expect from the simile. Rather, the contrast is between a good, ‘well-graced’ actor and the ‘tedious’ one who follows him. Both kings are likened to actors, both are pretending, and neither, according to the logic of the imagery, can fall back on authenticity to endorse their claim. Rather, Bolingbroke is just a better, more pleasing and convincing, actor.

The logic of the theatre – that the audience prefers the better actor and is restless and contemptuous of a lesser performer – is deeply subversive when attached to the issue of monarchy, because it replaces authenticity with facility: it overlays the question of who is the rightful king with the one of who is the better king. Even to ask whether Bolingbroke’s actions in taking the throne might be justified is therefore a politically challenging question, and the play’s even-handedness becomes itself a highly charged political intervention. It’s a political act specific to the circumstances of the play’s composition, when the story of Richard II resonated through late Elizabethan culture.