This Is Shakespeare

by Emma Smith

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.