text:
Theatre for a New Audience's The Taming of the Shrew 360
A VIEWFINDER: Facts and Perspectives on the Play, Playwright, and Production
T h e aT r e f o r a N e w a u d i e N c e The TamiNg of The shrew 360� A VIEWFINDER: Facts and Perspectives on the Play, Playwright, and Production 154 Christopher Street, Suite 3D, New York, NY 10014 � Ph: (212) 229-2819 � F: (212) 229-2911 � www.tfana.org Milton Glaser TABLE OF CONTENTS TABLE OF CONTENTS The Play 3 4 7 9 13 16 18 19 22 24 25 26 28 31 35 38 40 41 Synopsis and Characters Sources The Induction Sexual Politics and The Taming of the Shrew Perspectives Selected Performance History Biography Timeline of the Life of the Playwright Shakespeare and the American Frontier From the Director Scenic Design Building a Sustainable Set Costume Design Cast and Creative Team Glossary Bibliography Mission and Programs Major Institutional Supporters The Playwright The Production Further Exploration About Theatre for a New Audience Theatre for a New Audience's production of The Taming of the Shrew is sponsored by Theatre for a New Audience's production is part of Shakespeare for a New Generation, a national initiative sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts in cooperation with Arts Midwest. Notes This Viewfinder will be periodically updated with additional information. Last updated April 2012. credits Compiled and written by: Carie Donnelson, with contributions from Jonathan Kalb | Edited by: Carie Donnelson and Katie Miller, with assistance from Abigail Unger | Literary Advisor: Jonathan Kalb | Designed by: Milton Glaser, Inc. | Copyright 2012 by Theatre for a New Audience. All rights reserved. With the exception of classroom use by teachers and individual personal use, no part of this study guide may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by an information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Some materials published herein are written especially for our guide. Others are reprinted by permission of their publishers. 2 The TamiNg of The shrew 360� Milton Glaser THE PLAY: SYNOPSiS ANd CHArACTErS In a framing sequence, or Induction, Christopher Sly, a drunken tinker, falls asleep outside a tavern, and a wealthy Lord conducts a comic experiment in which Sly is carried to the Lord's house, dressed as a gentleman, and told upon awakening that he has been mad and confused about his identity for 15 years. A traveling acting troupe arrives and performs a play called The Taming of the Shrew as part of the experiment. In the play, Lucentio and his servant Tranio arrive in Padua from Pisa and eavesdrop as Baptista, a rich gentleman, tells Gremio and Hortensio, suitors to his mild-natured daughter Bianca, that he will not allow Bianca to marry until a husband is found for her shrewish sister Katharina (Kate). Lucentio falls in love with Bianca at first sight and schemes to present himself as a poor Latin tutor to gain access to her. Petruchio arrives from Verona, telling his friend Hortensio that he seeks a wealthy bride. Hortensio describes Kate, not hiding her scolding nature, and Petruchio instantly decides to woo her. Hortensio disguises himself as a music tutor to Bianca and both false tutors are accepted by Baptista. Tranio disguises himself as Lucentio and openly declares himself yet another suitor to Bianca. The first meeting of Kate and Petruchio is a fiery clash of wits and wills in which he does not respond to her insults but rather praises her gentleness and beauty. Declaring his intention to wed her the following Sunday, he leaves town to buy proper "apparel." Meanwhile, the disguised Tranio, trying to clinch his master's claim to Bianca, promises Baptista that Lucentio's father, Vincentio, would pass on his whole enormous fortune to the young couple. Baptista agrees to the match if Vincentio will confirm those terms, and Tranio engages a passerby to impersonate Vincentio and seal the bargain. Dressed in ridiculous clothes, Petruchio arrives rudely late for his wedding and insists on leaving with Kate immediately afterwards, deflecting all objections with blustering claims to defend her. They arrive at his home, tired and dirty, and he begins his "taming" regime by systematically depriving her of food, sleep and stylish clothes--all under the pretext of loving care. After some days, Petruchio and Kate return to Padua and on the road meet the real Vincentio, an old man whom Petruchio refers to as a "fair lovely maid." Playing along with the joke, Kate finally grasps the sort of partnership Petruchio seeks with her. In Padua, Hortensio has married a wealthy widow after recognizing Bianca's preference for Lucentio, and Lucentio and Bianca marry in secret. The real Vincentio is briefly taken for a fraud before Lucentio admits everything and begs his father's forgiveness. At a celebratory banquet, Petruchio proposes a wager over whose wife is most obedient. The widow, Bianca and Kate are sent for in turn but only Kate comes readily. Afterward she delivers an eloquent speech in which she censures the other two women and affirms the virtue of wifely obedience. Characters In the Induction: CHRISTOPHER SLY, a drunken tinker and beggar HOSTESS A LORd A COmPAnY Of PLAYERS In The Taming of the Shrew: KATHARInA mInOLA, of Padua, the shrew BIAnCA mInOLA, her younger sister BAPTISTA mInOLA, her father PETRuCHIO, from Verona, Katharina's suitor, later her husband GRumIO, Petruchio's servant CuRTIS, Petruchio's domestic servant GREmIO, of Padua, a wealthy old man, one of Bianca's suitors HORTEnSIO, another of Bianca's suitors, disguises himself as LITIO LuCEnTIO, from Pisa, youngest of Bianca's suitors, eventually her husband, disguises himself as CAmBIO TRAnIO, Lucentio's servant; disguises himself as LuCEnTIO BIOndELLO, another of Lucentio's servants VInCEnTIO, Lucentio's father A PEdAnT, from mantua, tricked into impersonating VInCEnTIO, sometimes called a schoolmaster or merchant A wIdOw, becomes Hortensio's wife Other Persons: TAILOR, HABERdASHER, and SERVAnTS attending on Baptista and Petruchio a ViewfiNder 3 THE PLAY: SOurCES First quarto of The Taming of the Shrew, 1634, copyright � The British Library Board Denis Butkus and Kathryn Saffell in The Taming of the Shrew, photo by Gerry Goodstein From its perplexing Induction and duel plot lines to its strange doppelg�nger with a confusingly similar name, The Taming of the Shrew is an interesting play to source. While a good deal of debate still surrounds the play, there is consistent agreement that the three main plots of the play--the courtship of Bianca, the taming of Katharina, and the fooling of Christopher Sly--all have their own distinct sources1. The main source for Bianca's story is a play from 1566 called Supposes, written and translated by George Gascoigne2 from an Italian play of 1509 called I Suppositi. Ludovico Ariosto, who wrote the original work and Orlando Furioso3, was a popular Italian poet whose work--and Gascoigne's--would have been well-known to Shakespeare. Supposes involves a series of disguised men, mistaken identities, and speculation surrounding rival suitors and a secret love-affair. In his "Prologue or Argument," Gascoigne describes the plot of his play: ...understand, this our Suppose is nothing else but a mistaking or imagination of one thing for another. For you shall see the master supposed for the servant, the servant for the master: the freeman for a slave, and the bond slave for a freeman: the stranger for a well-known friend, and the familiar for a stranger4. Just as Shakespeare's Lucentio falls in love with Bianca at first sight and then arranges to circumvent her father by posing as her tutor (while Tranio woos her father), Gascoigne's Erostrato is employed in the household of his loveinterest, Polynesta, while his servant negotiates with the father. In both, a bidding war for the girl ensues, and the disguised servant wins by employing a traveler to act as his rich father. Matters escalate in Supposes however, after Polynesta becomes pregnant, and Erostrato's servant, disguised as Erostrato, is thrown in jail by her father. Shakespeare, of course, alters this by having the lovers elope before their secret affair becomes public. Once all disguises are revealed in both plays, the lovers are free to resume life as a married couple. Except for the pregnancy, the deletion of one or two minor characters, and the addition of a third suitor to Bianca (Hortensio), Shakespeare borrows directly from the plot of Supposes. While the Katharina/Petruchio plot is much more difficult to source, Shakespeare seems to have combined the plots of several popular, misogynistic ballads with humanist pamphlets5, folktales, and the ubiquitous literary tradition of "the nagging wife6." It has also been effectively argued that the society into which Shakespeare was creating The Taming of the Shrew was obsessed with the notion of powerful women who upset the patriarchal hierarchy of early modern England. This argument is supported by "new legislation and increased rates of prosecution [in early modern England] targeting women for crimes such a witchcraft, disorderly speech, illegitimate pregnancy, and child murder7." With debates and anxieties raging about the proper role of women in marriage, the household, and society while at the same time--not by coincidence perhaps--Queen Elizabeth I had already 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Bevington, "Shakespeare's Sources," 214 For more information on George Gascoigne and for online versions his works, see luminarium.org/renlit/gascoigne Shakespeare took the Hero subplot of Much Ado about Nothing from Orlando Furioso Spelling modernized Ballads were "popular songs both sung in the streets and sold by the sheet," and pamphlets were "short, relatively cheap unbound booklets" that espoused basic social philosophies. Dolan, 2 Oliver, "Introduction," 48 Dolan, Texts and Contexts, 2-3 4 The TamiNg of The shrew 360� THE PLAY: SOurCES ruled the country for over thirty years, Shakespeare could have drawn upon any number of arguments and plots to create a taming story. Nevertheless, there is one ballad in particular upon which Shakespeare may have taken his narrative, A Merry Jest of a Shrewd and Curst Wife Lapped in Morel's Skin, for her Good Behavior. The Ballad, printed circa 1550-1560, concerns the eldest of two sisters, the youngest favored by her father because she is like him, and the eldest ill-favored because she is like her shrewish mother. When a man comes along who wishes to marry the eldest, the father--who has been desperate to rid himself of her--warns him of his daughter's curst tongue, but the man chooses to marry her anyway. He woos her with beautiful vows of love and faithfulness. She reciprocates his love, and though he is happy with her, he is also wary of her father's warning. Soon after their happy and festive wedding, the couple sours on each other. In order to tame his controlling wife, the new husband strips her, beats her until she faints, and then wraps her in the salted skin of an old workhorse named Morel, which he has killed especially for the purpose of subduing his wife. Later, the couple attends a feast at the house of her father, and the entire household is impressed by the tamed spirit of the wife. Fortunately for Katharina, Shakespeare's Petruchio tames her "with kindness8" rather than a whip. The third plot line is the Christopher Sly material. Like the Katharina/Petruchio taming plot, the Sly plot in which a beggar is tricked into believing himself wealthy and powerful may well have been taken from old folktales. Tales of deluded beggars exist in many cultures, one of the most famous being a tale from Arabian Nights. Although it is improbable that Shakespeare would have known about Arabian Nights in particular, its stories, which were also told within a framing device, are known to have been collected and disseminated as early as the fourteenth century. Finally, it is important to discuss a play--which may or may not be a source for the entire story--published in 1594 under the title A Pleasant Conceited History, Called the Taming of a Shrew, known hereafter as A Shrew. Both plays share the same basic plot elements of courtship, taming, and fooling, and similar passages of dialogue. While most of the differences between the two are superficial--A Shrew is set in Athens rather than Padua and all of the character names are different save Kate's--more substantial differences can be found in two areas. First, there are three sisters instead of two. The addition of a sister does little to alter the courtship plot, and, as in Shakespeare's play, three husbands wager on their respective wives' obedience in the final scene. The second, and perhaps more interesting difference lies in Kate's final speech concerning a wife's duty to her husband9. Whereas much anxiety has been spent over the meaning of Katharina's speech in Shakespeare's play, there can be no confusing the meaning of Kate's speech from A Shrew. Her argument is distinctly religious, following the Judeo-Christian creation story. She opens with the creation of the world in six days from "a form without a form, / A heap confused, a mixture all deformed...Where all the elements were orderless." Then God creates Adam "in his image," and from Adam, A rib was taken, of which the Lord did make The woe of man, so termed by Adam then Woman, for that by her came sin to us; And for her sin was Adam doomed to die.10 8 9 10 4.1.195 Dolan, 145 Found in Texts and Contexts, 151-52 Elizabeth I by Quentin Metsys, the Younger, c.1583; called the "Sieve Portrait" because of the sieve, a symbol of chastity and purity, Queen Elizabeth is holding; it is also known as the "Siena Portrait" a ViewfiNder 5 The Cruel Shrew, or the Patient Man's Woe: Declaring the misery, and the great pain, by his unquiet wife he doth daily sustain by Arthur Halliarg, c.1630; ballad title spelling modernized THE PLAY: SOurCES Since women, A Shrew's Kate claims, are created from men and bring about the fall from grace (tempting Adam to eat the fruit from a forbidden tree), they are inferior, both physically and morally. Therefore, husbands are masters to be obeyed and followed. Further, she says, "If they by any means do want our helps; / Laying our hands under their feet to tread, / If that by that we might procure their ease." She then ends the speech where Shakespeare's Katharina does, with her hand under the foot of her husband. Her sentiments express the prevailing theological philosophy on gender and marital relations that dominated both religious and secular society in Elizabethan England. Four distinct theories have formed around the relationship between A Shrew, published in 1594, and Shakespeare's play, written sometime in the early 1590s but not published until the First Folio of 162311. The first theory sees A Shrew and Shakespeare's play as "parallel or alternate versions, by two different authors, of an older lost play12." The text and themes of both plays are similar enough to be related, but the setting, character names, and even particular misogyny of both plays are distinct enough that it is possible, and even likely, that they were written by two separate individuals. The second theory stems from the first, designating A Shrew as the source upon which Shakespeare bases his text. It is certainly possible that Shakespeare could have revised the inferior text and dramatic weaknesses of A Shrew without an earlier source; he worked within a small community of actors and playwrights that frequently borrowed from one another. And since published plays of unknown playwrights rarely, if ever, announced the author on their title pages (Shakespeare's name did not appear on any of his plays until the Love's Labour's Lost quarto of 1598), many scholars suggest that authorship and indeed, the printed text, mattered less than the company and its patron and that the surviving theatrical texts of the period were probably collaborations anyway. The third theory holds that A Shrew is simply an early version of Shakespeare's play. The final theory argues that "A Shrew is derived from a now-lost earlier version [perhaps even a reconstruction from an actor or playgoer's memory] of Shakespeare's play, to which the compiler added original material and borrowed or even plagiarized from other literary sources as well13." Whatever the dizzying academic relationship, A Shrew has remained relevant to producers of theatre and thus, playgoers, only inasmuch as it contains an expanded version of the Sly material and as it offers an alternate view of shrew-taming that is contemporary to Shakespeare's. The text for Theatre for a New Audience's production of The Taming of the Shrew is based on the text printed in the 1623 Folio, but some lines from A Shrew have been incorporated into the production script. 11 12 13 Bevington, "Shakespeare's Sources," 214. Dolan, Texts and Contexts, 144. Bevington, "Shakespeare's Sources, 214. 6 The TamiNg of The shrew 360� Second quarto of The Taming of a Shrew, 1596; A Shrew was published in quarto three times: 1594, 1596, and 1607 The Fall of Man by Peter Paul Rubens, 1628�29 THE PLAY: THE iNduCTiON Illustration of Sly and the Hostess by H.C. Selous in The Plays of William Shakespeare: The Comedies, 1830 Given the many productions, movies, and adaptations available to the modern playgoer, it is not surprising that viewers and readers enter the story expecting to see Kate and Petruchio's battle of wits. The text of The Taming of the Shrew, however, actually begins with material that acts as a framing device for the main story, which modern editors call the Induction. It consists of two scenes with less than 150 lines each. It has fallen in and out of favor for the last 400 or so years. The Induction opens with a drunk being thrown out of a bar by its angry Hostess and then passing out in the gutter. A lord enters proudly discussing the prowess of his hunting dogs. He is immediately disgusted at Sly's excesses--"O monstrous beast, how like a swine he lies!"--and then shrewdly inventive--"Sirs, I will practice on this man1." The Lord and his men will trick the unsuspecting Sly into thinking he is a great lord who dreamed he was a drunken tinker. And so the tinker becomes a lord, the serving boy his longsuffering wife, and the Lord, his grieving--if poetic--kinsman. So too the players, arriving soon thereafter, become who and what the play dictates, in order to entertain Sly. The players will perform a comedy called The Taming of the Shrew, to "frame [his] mind to mirth and merriment2." While neither the conventions of an Induction nor a play-within-a-play were especially new when Shakespeare wrote Shrew, he used them in a remarkably imaginative way. Shakespeare's Induction invites the playgoer to enter the world of The Taming of the Shrew, where the transformation of a person happens not with magic potions or tragic events, but on a whim, with a word, a change of clothing, and, especially, a different name. Scholar Frances E. Dolan discusses the Induction in the following terms: First, the Induction teaches viewers that characters form their identities by playing roles and that they can switch roles and thus identities; and that characters also form their identities in relation to other characters...In the process the Induction instructs readers/viewers that class and gender identities are not natural or fixed, but instead are roles--a matter of how one dresses, acts, and is treated--and, as such, can be changed3. Since Shrew is actually a play being performed for Sly as a ruse by the Lord and his household, the playgoer is constantly reminded of the artificiality of theatre, and, perhaps, of the artificiality of the structures and conventions that make up society. Arin Arbus, director of Theatre for a New Audience's production, writes, "If the only difference between a lord and beggar is their clothing, then the privileges awarded to the lords are without merit. And suddenly it all comes tumbling down." The Taming of the Shrew thus raises questions about the sources of legitimate authority, and about the means of achieving and maintaining power. Shrew can be construed as an early modern mirror, subtly reflecting and subverting the society into which it was born. If the play's opening is startling, then it is even more surprising when the characters of the Induction simply fall away over the course of the play. Although Christopher Sly speaks two lines at the end of Act 1, he never appears again in the text. Because of this inconsistency, some editors, 1 2 3 Induction 1.31 and 33 Induction 2.132 The Taming of the Shrew: Texts and Contexts, edited by Frances E. Dolan, 6 a ViewfiNder 7 Jonathan Pryce as Christopher Sly in The Taming of the Shrew directed by Michael Bogdanov, 1978, photo copyright � Shakespeare Birthplace Trust THE PLAY: THE iNduCTiON Oscar Asche as Christopher Sly in The Taming of the Shrew, 1904; Asche also played Petruchio in this production John Pankow, Paul L. Coffey, Matthew Cowles, Denis Butkus, and Varin Ayala in The Taming of the Shrew, photo by Gerry Goodstein producers, and directors of the play have chosen to eliminate the Induction altogether. Since there were no editions of the play printed in quarto--small single editions--during Shakespeare's lifetime, the play of his First Folio is the text upon which most modern editions are based. There was, however, a play entitled A Pleasant Conceited History, Called The Taming of a Shrew first printed in quarto in 1594, just after the period in which most scholars believe Shakespeare wrote his play. Both plays have framing devices featuring Christopher Sly, but only A Shrew opens and closes the play with him. (See the "Sources" section of this Viewfinder for a more detailed discussion about the relationship between the two plays.) At end of A Shrew, the tapster (barman) says to Sly, "you had best get you home, / For your wife will curse you for dreaming here tonight." "Will she?" Sly replies. "I know now how to tame a shrew. / I dreamed upon it all this night till now4." Some productions have used this material to close out the play, since it effectively brings the play back to where it began: at the tavern with the drunken tinker. Arin Arbus has chosen to include much of the text of the Induction. She writes, "The Induction is a mysterious and essential device which sets down all the major themes of the play (class and gender wars, role playing and transformation) and establishes the central story, to dizzying effect, as a play within a play...This meta-theatrical structure is deeply connected to the piece's meaning." 4 Lines 178-81 in Texts and Contexts, 153-54 8 The TamiNg of The shrew 360� THE PLAY: SExuAL POLiTiCS ANd THE TAmiNg OF THE SHrEw Lion Tamer Tamed by Banksy, 2009; photo copyright artofthestate.co.uk The Taming of the Shrew has incited as much controversy for its depiction of the interaction between the sexes, or sexual politics, over the course of its long, tortured history as any of Shakespeare's so-called problem plays. It has compelled heated debates and imaginative interpretations since it was first performed in the early 1590's; and centuries later, Shrew still divides artists and audiences alike. Some see it as a play about the domination and submission inherent in marriage and the patriarchal society from which it emerged; some view the play through the lens of their own time, revising the play to reflect the prevailing attitudes on relations between genders; others see it as a play about love and marriage; still others view it as a play about theatre and role-playing. Much of the tumult surrounding the play has focused on how compliant or submissive or ironic or even mechanical Katharina's final speech is delivered. Ultimately the extent of the controversy depends on how the sexual politics are enacted or envisioned. An early example comes from John Fletcher, a playwright and collaborator from Shakespeare's own company. Fletcher flipped the sexual politics of The Taming of the Shrew, in which Katharina is allegedly tamed by Petruchio, in his response entitled The Woman's Prize, or The Tamer Tamed, written sometime around 1611. Scholar Frances E. Dolan notes, "This play suggests that not all Shakespeare's contemporaries assumed that Petruchio had triumphed [in taming Katharina] decisively1." The Tamer Tamed begins after the mysterious death of Katharina--the play hints that Petruchio may be the cause--and Petruchio is haunted by his tumultuous relationship with her. Theirs was not a happy marriage, but one of constant struggle since Katharina was never truly "tamed." In a way, Fletcher seems to be commenting on the flaw in Petruchio's strategy: Kate could never have been tamed since she not only refused to accept the natural order of things, but she also did not understand the nature of her true powers as a wife. Petruchio's new wife Maria very clearly understands her powers and "constantly asserts her desires and needs, conspires with other women, and participates fully in negotiations with her husband for a marriage on her terms2." She holds the keys to both the household and the marriage bed, and she bars him from both until he amends his ways and behaves like a proper husband, not the rough, domineering tamer, but a patient guardian and companion to his wife, the weaker vessel. The Tamer Tamed seems to have been as well, if not better received than was Shrew during the first half of the seventeenth century. For the following hundred years, The Taming of the Shrew only existed in performance in the form of strange adaptations or highly truncated afterthoughts, one of which was to become extraordinarily popular. David Garrick's pleasant milquetoast diversion Catharine and Petruchio, revised and rewritten from the text of Shrew in 1754, is worth discussing with regard to Garrick's revision of Katharina's final speech where he rearranges and reassigns her lines. Gone is any sense of uncomfortable ambivalence for the audience. First Garrick breaks up the speech with prods from Petruchio, "Why, well said, Kate," and "On, on, I say." Then, Garrick cuts her short at "And craves no other tribute at thy hands, / But love, fair looks, and true obedience-- / Too little payment for so great a debt." Baptista declares his daughter tamed and offers up a second dowry. Petruchio gallantly declines, acknowledges her complete transformation, and then completes Shakespeare's 1 2 Texts and Contexts, 37 Dolan, Texts and Contexts, 38 a ViewfiNder 9 Mr. Kemble & Miss De Camp as Catherine & Petruchio by J. Roach, 1802 THE PLAY: SExuAL POLiTiCS ANd THE TAmiNg OF THE SHrEw "Tameing a Shrew; or, Petruchio's Patent Family Bedstead, Gags & Thumscrews" from Caricature magazine by `Williams,' 1814 A New Year's Gift for Shrews by Thomas Cecil, c.1625; Engraving from early modern Britain showing a man beating his wife and sending her to the devil so that he can "eat his meat in peace on the Sunday" (britishmuseum.org). The Arnolfini Portrait by Jan van Eyck, 1434 original speech. "How shameful," he says, "`tis when women are so simple / To offer war where they should kneel for peace, / Or seek for rule, supremacy, and sway, / Where bound to love, to honor, and obey3." And thus the play ends. One can imagine Petruchio's self-satisfied smile as he finishes up these lines and looks into Catharine's adoring, deferential face. Some of the finest actors of the eighteenth and nineteenth century performed Garrick's adaptation, sometimes revising the revision. John Philip Kemble's adaptation gave birth to Petruchio's whip, a traditional prop that lasted to the end of the twentieth century. Scholar Elizabeth Schafer writes, "...the overall effect of [Catharine and Petruchio] was to produce a simple, farcical battle of the sexes, which proclaims the duty wives have to submit and makes The Taming of the Shrew seem a masterpiece of ambiguity and complexity by comparison4." Since it was restored in the late nineteenth century to the text of Shakespeare's First Folio, The Taming of the Shrew has continued to be a touchstone upon which both men and women, critics and producers, have measured their acceptance of--or revulsion from--the sexual politics from which the play emerged and still contains. Some historicists and feminists see Shrew as a marriage-play. But where others might see it as exemplifying the day-to-day concessions that two fiery lovers must make in order to thrive, historicists "bind" Shrew to the time in which it was written. Scholar Lynda Boose writes, To insist upon historicizing this play is to insist upon placing realities from the historically literal alongside the reconstructive desires that have been written onto and into the literary text. It is to insist upon invading privileged literary fictions with the realities that defined the lives of sixteenth-century "shrews"--the real village Kates who underwrite Shakespeare's character. Ultimately, it is to insist that a play called "The Taming of the Shrew" must be accountable for the history to which its title alludes. However shrewish it may seem to assert an intertextuality that binds the obscured records of a painful women's history into a comedy that celebrates love and marriage, that history has paid for the right to speak itself, whatever the resultant incongruities5. Rather than apologize for or agonize over "the play's formidable show of patriarchal domination6," historicists use artifacts from Shakespeare's cultural tradition to illuminate the condition of marriage during Shakespeare's time. A woman's behavior could be considered domineering or shrewish if she talked too much or too loudly, gossiped and/or scolded too much, beat or humiliated her husband, withheld sex, or any number of other offenses. Dolan asserts, "But above all, they strive for mastery7." Recent scholarship has centered on societal and governmental tools of taming, or righting the natural order. From "cucking," strapping a woman to a stool or a specially designed chair and repeatedly dunking the offending woman, to being forced to wear a "scold's bridle," punishment ranged from humiliation to downright torture. Husbands who did not control their shrewish wives could also be humiliated by the community, by being forced to ride backward on a horse or donkey 3 4 5 6 7 In Texts and Contexts, 158-9 "Introduction" in Shakespeare in Production: The Taming of the Shrew, edited by Elizabeth Schafer, 11 "Scolding Brides and Bridling Scolds" in The Taming of the Shrew: Critical Essays, edited by Dana E. Aspinall, 132. Lynda E. Boose, "The Taming of the Shrew, Good Husbandry, and Enclosure" in Shakespeare Reread: The Texts in New Contexts, edited by Russ McDonald, 194. Dolan, Texts and Contexts, 10 10 The TamiNg of The shrew 360� THE PLAY: SExuAL POLiTiCS ANd THE TAmiNg OF THE SHrEw Other productions see the play as an historical artifact to be updated to comment on the politics of domination and submission that the so-called sexual revolution of the late 1960s sought to blow apart. In 1973, Charles Marowitz sought to highlight the cruelty of a paternalistic world by turning The Taming of the Shrew into a tragedy called The Shrew. "Shakespeare's combative couple," he said," had to leave the realms of farce and transmute themselves into a kind of Grimm fairy-tale world of sinister archetypes and hopeless victims8." In order to accomplish this, he edited and re-organized Shakespeare's text and added some of his own. The production was filled with both physical and psychological violence, the worst of which was the addition of a rape scene. Marowitz viewed Petruchio's `taming' of Katharina as a particularly cruel form of brainwashing and torture, and the delivery of her final speech showed that the process was complete. Wearing an "institutional gown," she recited the speech mechanically and as if her life depended on it. Although the tragic revision of The Taming of the Shrew--or at least of Katharina--was not necessarily new when Marowitz's production was staged, his vicious interpretation affected many later productions, if not always in text then in intention. Often these productions insist on Katharina's physical, but not mental, submission, and her final speech is performed with extreme sarcasm, dripping with irony and cynicism. Some productions and scholarship see Shrew as Shakespeare's great treatise on marriage, with an emphasis on negotiating sexual chemistry between Katharina and Petruchio as much as their domestic roles. Harold Bloom believes, "One would have to be tone deaf (or ideologically crazed) not to hear...a subtly exquisite music of marriage at its happiest9" and scholar David Daniell writes, "It is a truly Shakespearean marriage-play, and as such takes marriage seriously and makes as high a claim for the state of matrimony as, from experience of him elsewhere, we should expect Shakespeare to do10." Arin Arbus has directed her production from a similar point-of-view: For me, Shrew is a great love story. It's one of Shakespeare's only investigations into the struggles within a marriage. The core of the play is an intimate, brutal, profound, hilarious negotiation between a husband and wife about the terms of their contract, about their respective roles and responsibilities. Productions that are interested in marriage dynamics also emphasize theatricality as exemplified in the Induction, and it is clear that in order to accentuate Shrew's theatricality, as in director John Barton's 1960 production, the Induction must be included (for a discussion on the Induction in The Taming of the Shrew, see page 7 of this Viewfinder). Barton was one of the first directors to include the Induction and keep Christopher Sly on stage through the entire production, constantly reminding the audience of the fiction and the farce of the play-within-a-play. He also focused on restoring Shakespeare's poetry; speaking with "an intelligent understanding of the form and expression of the text11;" and using the quick dialogue between Katharina and Petruchio to accentuate their physical chemistry. The result apparently softened the sexual politics of the play. Scholar Graham Holderness writes, "Barton was content both to revive the play as a high-spirited farce, and to retain in place 8 9 10 11 In Shakespeare in Performance: The Taming of the Shrew, edited by Graham Holderness, 92 Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, 33 "The Good Marriage of Katherine and Petruchio" in The Taming of the Shrew: Critical Essays, 71 Holderness, Shakespeare in Performance, 29 Thelma Holt and Nikolas Simmonds in The Shrew, 1973, directed by Charles Marowitz, photo by Donald Cooper/Photostage; in Shakespeare: An Illustrated Stage History --indicating that his passivity has upset the natural order of the community. a ViewfiNder 11 Andy Grotelueschen and Maggie Siff in The Taming of the Shrew, photo by Gerry Goodstein Peggy Ashcroft and Peter O'Toole in The Taming of the Shrew, 1960, photo Angus McBean, photo copyright � Shakespeare Birthplace Trust THE PLAY: SExuAL POLiTiCS iN THE TAmiNg OF THE SHrEw Laurence Olivier as Katharina in an amateur production of The Taming of the Shrew, 1922 Movie poster, The Killer Shrews, 1959 those romantic and sentimental appropriations of the taming plot which deliver it as a playful and energetic love-story12." Barton's Katharina and Petruchio were very much in love from the very beginning. Played by the handsome and charming Peter O'Toole, Petruchio's motivations to tame Katharina came out of playfulness and sexual attraction. Peggy Ashcroft's Katharina, then, became a spirited participant, drawn in by Petruchio's masculinity, hesitant, but willing to submit to the promise of love fulfilled. Ashcroft approached Katharina's final speech "with an eager, sensible radiance13." Barton's production and others like his have been seen as both a faithful representation of Shakespeare's play and a backlash to feminism. There are, of course, those individuals who simply do not like the sexual politics of the play, and therefore seek to dismiss it altogether. Scholar Penny Gay writes, "It is worth questioning whether The Taming of the Shrew would still be in the dramatic repertoire if it did not have the magic name `Shakespeare' attached to it14." For Gay and other critics, the play's inherent misogyny, made even more distasteful by the notion that Katharina was originally played by a boy who, as the Lord says in the Induction, would "well usurp the grace, / Voice, gait, and action of a gentlewoman15." Katharina's suffering, starvation, sleep-deprivation, and even final speech are wiped away by the comedy of drag, of "a male performance of female compliance16." So familiar is the dynamic between Katharina and Petruchio, the tamed and the tamer, that most readers or playgoers enter the world of the play visualizing a brutal or manly or crazy Petruchio, a strong or wild or beautiful or ugly Kate, each depending on the particular fantasy or nightmare of the individual. And it is upon this imagined Petruchio and Katharina that the actor, director, scholar must decide the manner and totality of her compliance. Just as Bloom asserts, "The perpetual popularity of the Shrew does not derive from male sadism in the audience but from the sexual excitement of women and men alike17," Penny Gay states, "...Shrew has remained consistently popular because it reinforces a profoundly-held belief of its audiences...It offers the audience the chance to revel in and reinforce their misogyny while at the same time feeling good. It ends happily, so all must be right with the world18." And so the argument continues. 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 Shakespeare in Performance, 43 Schafer, "Introduction," 38 As She Likes It: Shakespeare's Unruly Women, 86 Induction 1.128-29 Margie Burns, "The Ending of The Shrew" in The Taming of the Shrew: Critical Essays, 84 Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, 29 As She Likes It: Shakespeare's Unruly Women, 86 12 The TamiNg of The shrew 360� THE PLAY: PErSPECTivES The following quotes are selected perspectives on the play from notable scholars and artists. --GeorGe Bernard Shaw, 1897 --Germaine Greer, The Female eunuch, 1970 --JonaThan miller, 1981 a ViewfiNder 13 Maggie Siff in The Taming of the Shrew, photo by Gerry Goodstein "I think that The Taming of the Shrew has been bedeviled in the past by a lot of horseplay, a lot of rough-house and also a tremendously flamboyant, twinkle-eyed cavalier image of Petruchio, the gay, dashing cavalier that, `By God, come kiss me, Kate', tames the young lass and brings her to heel. As with almost all of Shakespeare's comedies, it really is a more serious play than people have taken it for...as for Kate, I've always wanted to get away from this game, this twinkling, bridling, high-spirited young colt image of her. These things give the audience the impression that there's going to be a great deal more humour than, in fact, there is in the play. It's a play about many important themes in family life � fathers who distribute their love unfairly between their children and then are surprised to find that the deprived child is behaving cantankerously; the failure of men to recognize who the truly valuable woman is and who can see in cantankerousness nothing but viciousness; the failure of unsophisticated lovers to see that the young and the bland is more likely to be the shrew than Kate herself. " Detail, The Shrew Tamed by Edwin Henry Landseer, 1861 "Kate is a woman striving for her own existence in a world where she is a stale, a decoy to be bid for against her sister's higher market value, so she opts out by becoming unmanageable, a scold. Bianca has found the women's way of guile and feigned gentleness to pay better dividends: she woos for herself under false colors, manipulating her father and her suitors in a perilous game which could end in her ruin. Kate courts ruin in a different way, but she has the uncommon good fortune to find Petruchio who is man enough to know what he wants and how to get it. He wants her spirit and her energy because he wants a wife worth keeping. . . . Kate's speech at the close of the play is the greatest defence of Christian monogamy ever written. It rests upon the role of a husband as protector and friend, and it is valid because Kate has a man who is capable of being both, for Petruchio is both gentle and strong (it is a vile distortion of the play to have him strike her ever). The message is probably twofold: only Kates make good wives, and then only to Petruchios; for the rest, their cake is dough." Interrupted Reading by Jean Baptiste-Camille Corot, c.1870 ". . . the last scene [of The Taming of the Shrew] is altogether disgusting to modern sensibility. No man with any decency of feeling can sit it out in the company of a woman without being extremely ashamed of the lord-of-creation moral implied in the wager and the speech put into the woman's own mouth." THE PLAY: PErSPECTivES detail, Marriage Portrait of Isaac Massa en Beatrix van der Laen by Frans Hals, c.1622 Peasant Couple Dancing by Urs Graf, c.1525 Portrait of a Woman with a Man at a Casement by Fra Filippo Lippiltalian, c.1440 "Is there any reason to revive a play that seems totally offensive to our age and our society? My own feeling is that it should be put back firmly on the shelf." --michael BillinGTon, The Guardian, 1979 "Those critics who find [Katharina] degraded in Act V tend to ignore the much worse degradation of her situation in Act I." --KenneTh muir, ShaKeSpeare'S comic Sequence, 1979 "Kate and Petruchio . . . clearly are going to be the happiest married couple in Shakespeare." --harold Bloom, ShaKeSpeare: The invenTion oF The human, 1998 "After [the sun and moon scene], the victory is all [Kate's], and like most human wives that are the superiors of their husbands she can afford to allow him mastery in public. She has secured what her sister Bianca can never have, a happy marriage." --nevill coGhill, "The BaSiS oF ShaKeSpearian comedy," 1950 "In medieval mystery plays and Tudor interludes, shrews were already married to their pusillanimous husbands and were shown as domestic tyrants. Male fears of female freedom were projected onto the wife, who was truly a threatening figure because she treated her husband as he normally would have treated her. When the husband attempted rebellion, he usually lost. Shakespeare departs from this literary tradition in order to sketch Kate as a victim of the marriage market." --coppelia Kahn, "The TaminG oF The Shrew: ShaKeSpeare'S mirror oF marriaGe," 1975 "To dramatize action involving linguistically powerful women characters militates against Tudor and Stuart ideologies of women's silence. To maintain their status as desirable, Shakespeare's heroines frequently must don male attire in order to speak: Rosalind, Portia, even the passive Viola. The conflict between the explicitly repressive content of Kate's speech and the implicit message of independence communicated by representing a powerful female protagonist speaking the play's longest speech at a moment of emphatic suspense is not unlike Freud's female patient who `pressed her dress to her body with one hand (as the woman) while trying to tear it off with the other (as the man).'" --Karen newman, FaShioninG FemininiTy and enGliSh renaiSSance drama, 1991 14 The TamiNg of The shrew 360� THE PLAY: PErSPECTivES Meryl Streep and Raul Julia behind the scenes of Taming the Shrew, directed by Wilford Leach, 1978 "The play explores the arbitrariness, variety, and fluidity of roles and their constructive as well as constricting potential ...Through its array of role changes, Taming demonstrates that stable identity can persist beneath radical transformations of role . . . and that role playing can create some flexibility within social hierarchies without threatening their essential stability." --carol ThomaS neely, BroKen nupTialS in ShaKeSpeare'S playS, 1985 "What I'm saying [in Kate's final speech] is, I'll do anything for this man. Look, would there be any hang-up if this were a mother talking about her son? So why is selflessness here wrong? Service is the only thing that's important about love. Everybody is worrying about `losing yourself'--all this narcissism. Duty. We can't stand that idea now either. It has the real ugly slave-driving connotation. But duty might be a suit of armor you put on to fight for your love. I don't think the last speech jumps out of nowhere. It's the logical emotional end." --meryl STreep, 1978 "And in the end The love you take Is equal to the love You make" --lennon and mccarTney a ViewfiNder 15 Andy Grotelueschen and Maggie Siff in The Taming of the Shrew, photo by Gerry Goodstein THE PLAY: SELECTEd PErFOrmANCE HiSTOrY 1594 Henry Woodward as Petruchio in Catharine and Petruchio by Benjamin van der Gucht, 1773-74 Lily Brayton and Oscar Asche in The Taming of the Shrew, 1904 Ada Rehan in The Taming of the Shrew, 1888 First known performance of The Taming of the Shrew, performed on tour at Newington Butts, within the modern borough of Southwark, London. Acted by the King's Men at both the Globe and Blackfriars, according to title page of 1631 quarto. Performed at King Charles I's court, followed two days later by The Tamer Tamed (a response to Shrew by John Fletcher written around 1611, in which Petruchio's new wife tames him). Shrew is "liked," but The Tamer Tamed is "very well liked" according to Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels1. The Master of the Revels records a performance by Thomas Killigrew's company, the King's Company, of a `Revived Play Taming the Shrew.' If the reference is to Shakespeare's play, it is the last recorded performance of the play as Shakespeare wrote it until 1844. Various performances of adaptations are recorded, including Sauny the Scot: or, The Taming of the Shrew by John Lacy (seen by Samuel Pepys in 1667); and Catharine and Petruchio, the extremely popular adaptation by David Garrick, which is first performed in 1754 with Garrick in the role as Petruchio and Hannah Pritchard as Catharine. It plays in England and America up until the mid nineteenth century. Garrick's is the most popular version of Shrew, eclipsing the original for almost a hundred years. Over the years, the title characters are played by leading actors, including Henry Woodward, Kitty Clive, Sarah Siddons, John Philip Kemble, and in 1867, a young Henry Irving and Ellen Terry. Neither of these adaptations include the Induction. Benjamin Webster, manager of the Haymarket Theatre in London, and J.R. Planch� revive Shakespeare's original text in an unusually stripped down, almost Elizabethan production. They include the Induction in the production. American producer Augustin Daly revives the play in New York, with Ada Rehan as Katharina and John Drew as Petruchio. at his theatre Daly's on Broadway (at 30th St.) in New York City. The production runs for over 120 performances and is the opening production at Daly's Theatre in London in 1889. Oscar Asche and Lily Brayton, themselves a married couple, win great success with their production at London's Adelphi Theatre in 1904. Martin Harvey is the first director to use portions of the Sly material found in The Taming of a Shrew interspersed throughout the production. 1610-31 1633 1633-34 16671842 1844 1887 1904 1913 1 Gurr, The Shakespeare Company, 194. 16 The TamiNg of The shrew 360� THE PLAY: SELECTEd PErFOrmANCE HiSTOrY Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford in The Taming the Shrew, 1929; Hulton Archive/Getty Images 1929 Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks star in the film of The Taming of the Shrew, the first feature-length sound production of a Shakespearean play. Pickford winks at the camera after delivering Katharina's final speech. Harcourt Williams directs Shrew at the Old Vic in London. Williams' is the first significant production staged in the style of Italian Commedia dell'Arte. Harry Wagstaff Gribble directs Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt at the Theatre Guild in New York, and then it tours the country. The production and Fontanne and Lunt's backstage antics are said to have inspired Kiss Me Kate1. Kiss Me Kate, the Cole Porter musical based on The Taming of the Shrew and the 1935 Gribble production, premiers on Broadway starring Alfred Drake and Patricia Morison. John Barton's production for the Royal Shakespeare Company includes additional Christopher Sly material from The Taming of A Shrew. Sly, his `wife' and the Lord remain as an on-stage audience throughout. At the end, the players pack up their costumes and set, and walk off the stage. Peggy Ashcroft and Peter O'Toole play Katharina and Petruchio. Michael Bogdanov directs a disturbingly misogynistic modern dress production starring Jonathan Pryce for the Royal Shakespeare Company. The production begins with Pryce, playing Christopher Sly and, eventually, Petruchio, yelling a misogynistic rant at a theatre staff usher. In New York, Wilford Leach directs Raul Julia and Meryl Streep in a production at the Public's Delacourte Theatre. The production focused on the love found within the Katharina and Petruchio story. Gil Junger directs a modern film adaptation of Shrew called 10 Things I Hate About You starring Julia Stiles and Heath Ledger. The film updates the story by transforming it into a high school romantic comedy. Phyllida Lloyd directs an all-female production at Shakespeare's Globe in London. Kathryn Hunter plays Katharina with Janet McTeer as Petruchio. 1931 1935 1948 1960 1978 1999 2003 1 Elizabeth Schafer, "Introduction" in Shakespeare in Production: The Taming of the Shrew. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Page 32. a ViewfiNder 17 Julia Stiles and Heath Ledger in 10 Things I Hate About You, 1999 Paola Dionisotti and Jonathan Pryce in The Taming the Shrew, 1978, photo by Joe Cocks, photo copyright � Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Alfred Drake and Patricia Morison in Kiss Me Kate, 1948 THE PLAYwrigHT: BiOgrAPHY Chandos Portrait, artist and authenticity unconfirmed, 1610 The most celebrated and widely produced of the world's great playwrights, Shakespeare was born and raised in the small country town of Stratford-uponAvon, where his parents were prominent citizens, though his father, a tanner and glove-maker, seems to have suffered financial reverses around the time young William's formal education apparently ceased in 1577. He married a local girl, Anne Hathaway, in 1582, and over the next decade the marriage produced three children. Shakespeare's only son, Hamnet, died at age 11, in 1596; his daughters Judith and Susanna survived him. How and why Shakespeare entered the theatrical profession is unclear. He seems to have come to London in the late 1580s, and quickly made himself indispensable as a reviser of old plays and a supplier of new ones. By 1594, he had become a shareholder, along with the prominent actor Richard Burbage and the latter's business-manager brother, Cuthbert, in the Lord Chamberlain's Men, one of the dominant theatre companies of its day, popular with the public and frequently in demand for performances at Queen Elizabeth's court. In the reign of her successor, King James I, the troupe was officially taken under royal protection and became the King's Men. While he appeared regularly in works by others, Shakespeare's principal function seems to have been turning out new plays for his companies. Working in all the standard genres of the time--tragedy, comedy, romance, and episodes from British history--he rapidly developed both remarkable expertise and a startlingly individual, innovative style. The Taming of the Shrew was one of his earliest plays, possibly his first. It was extremely popular with audiences in the Elizabethan era, prompting a sequel by John Fletcher soon after (A Woman's Prize, or The Tamer Tamed, also performed by the King's Men). It later inspired numerous adaptations. Shakespeare retired from the King's Men around 1612, spending the last years of his life with his family in Stratford, where he died in 1616. His plays have never been off the stage. Theatres return to them time and again for their brilliant storytelling, theatrical excitement, incisive character expression and memorably intense poetry. To this day, Shakespeare is still the most performed, translated, adapted, quoted, analyzed, and discussed author in the entire history of dramatic literature. Figures from his plays like Hamlet, Falstaff, Lear, Rosalind, Viola, Shylock, Prospero, Petruchio and Kate have virtually taken on an independent existence in the world. 18 The TamiNg of The shrew 360� THE PLAYwrigHT: TimELiNE 1558 1564 1565 1566 1568 1569 At the age of 25, Elizabeth Tudor is proclaimed Elizabeth I Queen of England, succeeding Mary I. William is born to John Shakespeare and Mary Arden of Stratfordupon-Avon. John Shakespeare is made an alderman of Stratford. James Stuart is born to Mary Queen of Scots and Henry Stuart. Elizabeth is made his Godmother. John Shakespeare is elected Bailiff of Stratford. Richard Burbage is born. Richard, the son of James Burbage, will eventually play most of Shakespeare's leading parts like Hamlet, Richard III, Othello, and Lear. The "Act for the Punishment of Vagabonds" is enacted, requiring all companies of players to be authorized or licensed by individuals of the nobility. With licensure comes the financial backing and stature that solidifies and legitimizes repertory companies in London, effectively laying the foundation for the explosion of dramatic literature, players, and purpose-built theatres of the following decades. James Burbage opens the Theatre, London's first purpose-built playhouse, north of the city walls. Mary Arden Shakespeare pawns her estate at Wilmcote and her lands at Snitterfield to help pay off family debts. John Shakespeare is sued for his inability to redeem Mary's pawned properties. 18-year old William Shakespeare marries Anne Hathaway. Susanna is born to William and Anne Shakespeare. Miniature of an Unknown Man by Isaac Oliver, c.1595 1572 1576 1578 1580 1582 1583 1585 Twins, Hamnet and Judith, are born to William and Anne Shakespeare. John Shakespeare is fined for not attending church. John Shakespeare loses his position as alderman. Henry VI, part 11 Henry VI, parts 2 and 3 Theaters are officially closed in London due to an outbreak of the plague. Richard III In London, deaths from the plague are listed at over 10,000. Comedy of Errors; Titus Andronicus; The Taming of the Shrew 1587 1590 1591 1592 1593 1 Throughout this timeline, plays listed alone under a specific year denote the probable year in which the play was written. a ViewfiNder 19 Queen Elizabeth Receiving Dutch Ambassadors by unknown artist, c.1570-1575 THE PLAYwrigHT: TimELiNE William Shakespeare becomes a shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain's Men, helmed by James Burbage and his sons, Richard and Cuthbert. The Two Gentlemen of Verona; Love's Labour's Lost; King John "Venus and Adonis" and "The Rape of Lucrece," Shakespeare's epic poems, published. 1595 1596 Richard II; Romeo and Juliet; A Midsummer Night's Dream John Shakespeare is granted a coat of arms. Shakespeare's son, Hamnet, dies at the age of eleven. The Merchant of Venice; Henry IV, Part 1 1597 James Burbage refurbishes the Blackfriars Theatre, located within the walls of the City of London. The company is unable to occupy it due to complaints from its neighbors. Various companies of boy players are allowed to occupy the Blackfriars after 1600. The Merry Wives of Windsor 1598 James Burbage's the Theatre is closed. Building materials from the Theatre are used in building the Globe. Henry IV, Part 2; Much Ado About Nothing 1599 1600 1601 The Globe opens. Henry V; Julius Caesar; As You Like It Hamlet John Shakespeare dies. Twelfth Night; Troilus and Cressida "The Phoenix and the Turtle," Shakespeare's last epic poem, is published in Robert Chester's Love's Martyr. 1602 1603 All's Well That Ends Well Queen Elizabeth dies, and James VI of Scotland is declared James I King of England. The Lord Chamberlain's Men, Shakespeare's Company, are licensed by King James and renamed the King's Men. 1604 1605 1606 Measure for Measure; Othello King Lear Parliament passes "An Act to Restrain Abuses of Players." The Act censures specific language in plays. Macbeth; Antony and Cleopatra 1607 1608 Coriolanus; Timon of Athens; Pericles The King's Men are permitted to occupy the Blackfriars Theatre. Mary Arden Shakespeare dies. Sketch of the Swan Theatre by Arend van Buchell after the sketch by Johannes de Witt, 1596 King James I of England and VI of Scotland by John De Critz the Elder, c.1600 1594 London's theaters officially reopen. 20 The TamiNg of The shrew 360� THE PLAYwrigHT: TimELiNE 1609 1610 1611 1612 1613 1614 1616 1619 1623 1625 Sonnets published. Cymbeline The Winter's Tale The authorized King James Bible published. The Tempest Shakespeare retires to Stratford. Henry VIII co-written by John Fletcher and Shakespeare; Cardenio, a play that is not extant The Globe catches fire during a performance of Henry VIII and burns down. Two Noble Kinsmen co-written by John Fletcher and Shakespeare. The Globe is rebuilt and opens. Shakespeare dies on April 23 and is buried in Stratford's holy Trinity Church. Richard Burbage dies. The First Folio of Shakespeare's complete works is published. Anne Hathaway Shakespeare dies. King James dies and is succeeded by Charles I. a ViewfiNder 21 Detail from "Long View" of London from Southwark, engraving by Wenceslaus Hollar, 1647; Hollar mislabeled the Globe as the "Beere bayting" (bear bating) arena and vice versa. Shakespeare's indoor theatre, the Blackfriars, was located across the Thames in the Blackfriars liberty within the walls of the city of London. THE PLAYwrigHT: SHAkESPEArE ANd THE AmEriCAN FrONTiEr Although America had only just entered the collective imagination of early modern England when he wrote his plays, Shakespeare eventually became an American institution. In the nineteenth century especially, Shakespeare was enormously popular in America. During his travels to the U.S. in the 1830's, French writer Alexis de Tocqueville discovered Shakespeare "in the recesses and forests of the new world...There's hardly a pioneer's hut that does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare. I remember that I read the feudal drama of Henry V for the first time in a log cabin1." In his book Notions of the Americans, published in 1833, writer James Fennimore Cooper called Shakespeare, "the great author of America." And Ralph Waldo Emerson said of Shakespeare: ...he is like some saint whose history is to be rendered into all languages, into verse and prose, into songs and pictures, and cut up into proverbs; so that the occasion which gave the saint's meaning the form of a conversation, or of a prayer, or of a code of laws, is immaterial, compared with the universality of its application...He wrote the airs for all our modern music: he wrote the text of modern life; the text of manners: he drew the man of England and Europe; the father of the man in America... he read the hearts of men and women2." Many great English Shakespearean actors visited America. One prominent English Shakespearean actor after another--George Frederick Cooke, Edmund Kean, Junius Brutus Booth, Charles and Fanny Kemble, Ellen Tree, William Charles Macready--sought the fame and financial rewards that awaited them in their tours of the United States. They made their way east and then by boat along the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. Shakespeare was in large and small theatres, in hotel lobbies and in bars on billiard tables, in mining camps and on riverboats throughout America. Historian Lawrence Levine wrote: Shakespeare's plays had meaning to a nation that placed the individual at the center of the universe and personalized the larger questions of the day. Shakespeare's characters--like the Davy Crocketts and Mike Finks that dominated American folklore and the Jacksons, Websters, Clays and Calhouns who dominated American politics--were of epic proportions: their passions, appetites, and dilemmas were larger than life3. Shakespeare was so popular in the nineteenth century that the best actors grew wealthy. Ellen Tree and Charles Keen in Macbeth, 1858 During the California Gold Rush, 2,000 people saw Hamlet and King Lear in San Francisco's Jenny Lind Theatre. Othello and Macbeth were seen throughout California in towns such as Ted's Valley, Chip's Flat, Rattlesnake, Mud Springs and Red Dog. When a miner was appreciative, he threw a bag of gold dust or nuggets onto the stage. In How Shakespeare Won the West, Helene Wickham Koon writes, The average miner was between twenty and thirty, had at least a sixth grade education and was familiar with Shakespeare...They The information in this article is based primarily on Lawrence Levine's article "William Shakespeare and the American People: A Study in Cultural Transformation." American Historical Review 89.1, 1984. 1 Levine, "William Shakespeare and the American People," 38 2 Shakspeare; or, the Poet, 17 3 Levine, "William Shakespeare and the American People," 38-39 22 The TamiNg of The shrew 360� Junius Brutus Booth, photo by Mathew Brady, c.1850 Fanny Kemble by Thomas Sully, 1834 THE PLAYwrigHT: SHAkESPEArE ANd THE AmEriCAN FrONTiEr spent long days knee deep in water, digging, chopping and washing the stubborn rock...they suffered from almost unbearable loneliness and suicides were common. When they did find gold they were eager to enjoy it and they flocked into towns...The miners may have felt a special kinship with Shakespeare's larger-than-life characters, perceiving them as living epic lives like themselves...The violent confrontations of an Othello or Macbeth were paralleled every week on the streets of Poker Flat and Hangtown. The language did not trouble them. The ringing Elizabethan cadence was not alien to a generation raised on the King James Bible. American audiences in these frontier theatres were comparable in rowdiness to those of Shakespeare's theatre, the Globe. In Sacramento, a gallery audience reportedly threw "cabbages, carrots, pumpkins, potatoes, a wreath of vegetables, a sack of flour and one of soot, [and] a dead goose4" when they didn't like the actor's enactment of Richard III. Seeing a Shakespeare play was like going to the movies: the play was the main attraction, but Shakespeare was presented along with other popular entertainments. One could see As You Like It alongside magicians, gymnastics, songs, and comedians. So ingrained had Shakespeare become that Shakespearean parody entered American humor. Richard III, the most popular play in the nineteenth century was lampooned in a version called Bad Dicky. There were other parodies like Julius Sneezer, Hamlet and Egglet, and Much Ado about a Merchant of Venice. By 1884 Shakespeare was so well known to the American public that Samuel Clemens (as Mark Twain) could rely on their familiarity with the texts. In Huckleberry Finn, his parody of poor Hamlet is a comic masterpiece: To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin That makes calamity of so long life; For who would fardels bear, till Birnam Wood do come to Dunsinane, But that the fear of something after death Murders the innocent sleep, Great nature's second course, And makes us rather sling the arrows of outrageous fortune Than fly to others that we know not of. There's the respect must give us pause: Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou couldst; For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, The law's delay, and the quietus which his pangs might take, In the dead waste and middle of the night, when churchyards yawn In customary suits of solemn black, But that the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns, Breathes forth contagion on the world, And thus the native hue of resolution, like the poor cat i' the adage, Is sicklied o'er with care, And all the clouds that lowered o'er our housetops, With this regard their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action. `Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. But soft you, the fair Ophelia: Ope not thy ponderous and marble jaws, But get thee to a nunnery--go! 4 In "William Shakespeare and the American People," 45 a ViewfiNder 23 Illustration by E. W. Kemble in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1885 Edwin Booth as Iago in Othello, c.1870 THE PrOduCTiON: FrOm THE dirECTOr Among many of my Shakespeare loving friends, The Taming of the Shrew is considered a bit of an embarrassment. As one of my favorite critics, Michael Feingold, once wrote that Shrew purports a "redneck, barefoot-and-pregnant view of a woman's role that makes the play repulsive to reasonable human beings." It has certainly been performed as a sad, misogynistic tale about an abusive husband, a bitter struggle for power between a man and a woman in which the woman is broken and the man is victorious. For me, that interpretation holds little interest. Perhaps because I grew up with the privileges that emerged as a result of the feminist movement, I am able to view the play, as a feminist, from a different lens. For me, Shrew is a great love story. It is one of Shakespeare's only investigations into the struggles within a marriage. The core of the play is an intimate, brutal, profound, hilarious negotiation between a husband and wife about the terms of their contract, about their respective roles and responsibilities. In this central story, The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare depicts a rough, sexist, classist world filled with tricksters, clowns, fools, brutes and con-men. It is a dog eat dog world. Almost everyone is out for himselfscheming, hiding beneath disguises, attempting to subvert the prescribed hierarchies, fooling each other, breaking the rules. Most characters cannot see beyond the surface. In this world, marriage is a transaction. Kate and Petruchio are pioneers--they are the only characters in the play who see things as they are and refuse to accept them. They each do this in their own way. Petruchio responds to the world by refusing to take things seriously. He mocks tradition, ceremony, decorum, and custom. Kate rails against the world--against her sister, her father, the suitors, the tutors. Both Kate and Petruchio are fiercely individualistic--willing to fly in the face of tradition and to boldly speak out against the superficial values of their society. Once married, Kate and Petruchio are confronted with the terrifying challenges of encountering life together as a couple. Petruchio is one of the few men in all of Shakespeare who has the vision and the chutzpah to teach a woman how to love. As Germaine Greer writes, "Petruchio is man enough to know what he wants and how to get it." His methods are maddening, improvisatory, ridiculous, but they most assuredly have a purpose. And a profound one at that. Petruchio shows Kate that marriage has the potential to be a partnership, where both voices are essential. His antics inspire empathy in her. He enables her to understand that he loves her for her mind, not her looks or her clothes. And in the sun and the moon scene, they discover how to play, how to say `yes' to each other. Kate has been misjudged by everyone all her life. Her violent temper is a result of that fact. Until she meets Petruchio, nobody has ever seen her for who she is. Throughout the course of the play, Kate discovers that she is not the person that everyone always told her she was. Petruchio helps her uncover new facets of herself, and, in doing so, she is freed from the role of the shrew. Just like actors in a play, she can continually reinvent herself, adopt different roles, believe in fictions. All while remaining true to herself. What is remarkable about their relationship is not that they fight. War in marriage is a given. But that through their wars they find love and mutual admiration. By the end of the play, they have fallen in love. They have found something very special together. And they know it. They are the only people on the stage who possess anything of value. There is a beautiful quote from the film My Dinner with Andre which reminds me of Petruchio's final and most important lesson: "I realized that what I wanted most in my life was to always be with her. But at that time, Wally, I hadn't learned what it would be like to let yourself react to another person, to follow your impulses with another person from moment to moment along a chain of feeling that can change from one second to the next. And you see, if you can't react to another person, then there's no possibility of action or interaction, and if there isn't, then I don't really know what the word `love' means � except duty, obligation, sentimentality, fear." This is the terrifying, exhilarating territory of Shrew. 24 The TamiNg of The shrew 360� Arin Arbus, photo by Gerry Goodstein THE PrOduCTiON: SCENiC dESigN Donyale Werle's set for The Taming of the Shrew, directed by Arin Arbus, is made of reclaimed wood and sustainable materials, which gives it a sense of age and warmth. Werle's intention is to evoke many different locations...a tavern, an innyard, the main street of a ghost town, the frontier...whatever the setting requires in any given scene. Set, The Taming of the Shrew, designed by Donyale Werle, photo by Gerry Goodstein a ViewfiNder 25 Graham Winton in The Taming of the Shrew, photo by Gerry Goodstein Maggie Siff and Andy Grotelueschen in The Taming of the Shrew, photo by Henry Grossman Set model, The Taming of the Shrew, designed by Donyale Werle THE PrOduCTiON: BuiLdiNg A SuSTAiNABLE SET Donyale Werle's scenic design for The Taming of the Shrew was realized by Paper M�ch� Monkey, a Brooklyn-based art and design studio that uses sustainable, green practices to create specialty scenery, props, and costume crafts for on- and off-Broadway clients. The studio debuted their work in with the creation all of the handcrafted set dressing and props for Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson on Broadway. Founders Kenneth Grady Barker and Meghan Buchanan answer questions from the Theatre's education and humanities department. Q: You describe Paper M�ch� Monkey "as a creative team, [priding] itself on being comprised of multi-disciplined designers and sculptors in their own right." Is there a line between design, sculpture, and set building? If so, where is that line? A: For many companies, I think there is a much more distinct line than the ones we have created for ourselves at Paper M�ch� Monkey. We are each artists and designers in our own right, and we try to take on projects in which we are not only building something, but also contributing a thoughtful aesthetic expertise. I don't think there is necessarily a line, but really a marriage of sculpture, fabrication, and the art of set design. Q: Donyale Werle has described her process as collaborative and a "teambased approach." How would you describe your collaboration with her? Especially with respect to the Shrew set? A: We have had the opportunity to work on several shows with Donyale, and have really developed an understanding working together. Her designs have a specific direction, but are also open to interpretation. We respect what she has put on the table, and she acknowledges that we are not only builders, but artists that are able and willing to enhance her design. Everyone's ideas count in this process (and we hire people who have equally great ideas). For us, it's a very liberating and truly collaborative process. Q: What does "sustainable" mean to you? A: We have had a lot of conversations regarding sustainability. As we all know, the theater is an inherently wasteful industry. Shows are built out of entirely new materials, installed, performed on, and dumped in the trash sometimes in a matter of weeks. Though convenient for a show's quick turn-over in a theater, this practice is not good for the environment. Large amounts of perfectly good materials go to waste constantly, especially in an urban area as big as New York City. Finding and re-purposing those waste materials to create new sets and props is just one step that we can take toward a greener theater. To us, sustainability is thoughtful resourcefulness. Q: Where did the set's salvaged wood come from? Were there any other materials salvaged for the project? A: The wood in our show came from a number of places. Build It Green and Materials for the Arts are a couple of our "go to" resources for doors, lumber, paint, and fabrics. We have also established a relationship with a company that recycles the wood from used shipping pallets to create new ones for sale. We were able to talk them out of some of their lumber 26 The TamiNg of The shrew 360� Pallet and other sourced salvaged wood Down stage right wall THE PrOduCTiON: BuiLdiNg A SuSTAiNABLE SET prior to manufacturing. We claimed and re-purposed 14 theatrical flats and several jacks from a movie set that had wrapped up production a couple weeks ago. We received an e-mail that the entire set was all headed for the trash, so we hopped in a truck and went to pick it up. This is oftentimes how it works when a large community knows that you are working in a recycled sustainable way: it is more or less organized scavenging. Q: Considering the many fire and building codes and safety requirements involved in building a set, have you found that using recycled or salvaged materials means that the actual building process is more labor intensive, especially considering that the Shrew set is mostly wood? A: Building codes, fire codes, and actor safety are some of our utmost concerns. Using re-purposed materials means we are paying much closer attention to the condition of the materials prior to use than if we were buying new lumber. While recycled materials oftentimes are much cheaper than buying new, the time spent processing the materials (sanding wood down and picking out old staples) is significant. The budget, in that regard, is reallocated away from the new material costs to an investment into human labor, which we as a studio feel much more proud to support as an ongoing resource. Q: What will happen to the set materials after Shrew closes? A: This is an on-going question. There is a giant network in New York of people looking for materials to reuse and recycle into new things. As a studio, we try to take back what we can to reuse materials into other projects. We list items on group forums and contact others who feel might benefit from our sets. Many of the props are on loan from other theaters, and will go back into their rightful owners who generously let us borrow them. As a whole, we make an effort to find a new home for as many of the materials as we can, in order to save them from being thrown out completely. Photography courtesy Paper M�ch� Monkey and Donyale Werle. In addition to Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (Broadway), Paper M�ch� Monkey created the handcrafted set dressing and props for Merchant of Venice (Broadway), Wonderland (Broadway, Straz Center, FL), Peter & the Starcatcher (New York Theatre Workshop), costume crafts for Measure For Measure (Public's Free Shakespeare in the Park) and sculptures for YouTube & Google video shoots (Newseum, Washington D.C.). They can be found at www.papermachemonkey.com Kenneth Grady Barker's design credits include Birthday Boy (World Premier, Berkshire Theater Festival), K2 (BTF), All Shook up (Barrington Stage Company), Electra in a One Piece (The Good Company), Mine (Slant Theater Project), Call Me Anne (Access Theater), and Dogs (Grid Company). His associate/assistant design credits include Peter and the Starcatcher (New York Theater Workshop), Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (Public and Broadway), Broke-ology (Lincoln Center Theater), Dance Dance Revolution (Ohio Theater), and Pippin (Mark Taper Forum), and Williamstown Theater Festival. Meghan Buchanan has spent a significant time working in the downtown theater scene, creating 5 years worth of props and costumes for Richard Foreman's Ontological Hysteric Theater. Her shows at the OHT include Zomboid, Wake Up Mr. Sleepy Your Unconscious Mind is Dead, Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland, Astronome: A Night at the Opera, and Idiot Savant (props only.) Meghan has served as Prop Designer/Prop Master for the Actors Studio at Pace University, Williamstown Theater Festival, New York Theater Workshop, The Roundabout Underground, Primary Stages, Classic Stage, as well as the 40th Anniversary Concert production of Hair, and Jollyship the Whizbang at Ars Nova. Meghan designed the set for the NYMF production of Rainbow Around the Sun, and the costumes for the Paper Industry's Sine Wave Goodbye. She received her BFA in Scenic and Costume Design from the University of Oklahoma. Stage left wall; carpenter Josh Hackett works in the background Carpenter Danny Moss prepares salvaged wood a ViewfiNder 27 THE PrOduCTiON: COSTumES Anita Yavich's design sketches for The Taming of the Shrew reflect the late 19th century American frontier setting chosen by director Arin Arbus. Christopher Sly Christopher Sly as Lord The Hostess The Lord Bartholomew Bartholomew as the Lady Lucentio Lucentio as Cambio Tranio Tranio as Lucentio Baptista Minola Gremio 28 The TamiNg of The shrew 360� THE PrOduCTiON: COSTumES Hortensio Hortensio as Litio Bianca Minola Katharina Minola Katharina's wedding dress Katharina's new dress Biondello Petruchio Petruchio's wedding suit Grumio Grumio's wedding suit Sugarsop a ViewfiNder 29 30 THE PrOduCTiON: COSTumES The Tailor The TamiNg of The shrew 360� The Pedant Vincentio Widow Denis Butkus, Kathryn Saffell, and Saxon Palmer in The Taming of the Shrew, photo by Gerry Goodstein THE PLAY: dirECTOr'S ANd THE PrOduCTiON: CASTNOTESCrEATivE TEAm NY theatre: 365 Days/365 Plays (The Public); Las Facultades, The Beep (Pregones); ...BarberSurgeons (Studio 42); The Dweller (INTAR); End of Summer, Love's Labour's Lost (Kaleidoscope at Cherry Lane). Regional theatre: The Motherf**ker with the Hat (TheaterWorks), God's Board Meeting (The Blank), Underground (Boston Court), The Road to Washington (Mountain Playhouse), Angels in America (Civic Theatre of Allentown). TV/film: "Lie to Me," Antifaz. Training: The Actors Center Conservatory, Shakespeare Lab at The Public. Varin ayala (Biondello) andy grotelueschen (Petruchio) Theatre for a New Audience: Cymbeline. NYC: Cymbeline (Fiasco Theater/Barrow St. Theatre), Henry V (The Acting Company/Guthrie), Twelfth Night (Fiasco Theater), Balm in Gilead (dir. Brian Mertes), Monstrosity (13P), The Scariest (The Exchange Theatre), The Amazing Ted Show! (Ars Nova, South African tour). Regional: Servant of Two Masters (Yale Rep., Shakespeare Theatre); Mrs. Smith Presents... (A.R.T.); The Moli�re Impromptu, Moon for the Misbegotten, A Christmas Carol (Trinity Rep.), Ivanov (Lake Lucille Chekhov). Training: M.F.A. Brown/Trinity, �cole Philippe Gaulier. Fiasco Theater Company member, apprentice to Christopher Bayes and he's from Iowa. John christopher Jones (gremio/Nathaniel) Theatre for a New Audience: Don Juan, Engaged, All's Well That Ends Well, Hamlet, Measure for Measure, Macbeth. Broadway: Otherwise Engaged, The Suicide, Hurlyburly, The Iceman Cometh, The Rise and Fall of Little Voice, A Month in the Country, London Assurance, The Goodbye Girl, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Beauty and the Beast, Heartbreak House, Democracy. New York: Aristocrats, Prin, Sight Unseen, Slavs!, The Day Room, Golden Child. Shakespeare: Troilus, Hal, Proteus, Mercutio, Antipholus Ephesus, Cloten, Lavatch, Gravedigger, Elbow, Porter. Jones' translation of The Cherry Orchard was recently produced by Classic Stage Company to critical acclaim. a ViewfiNder 31 John Christopher Jones Andy Grotelueschen Olwen Fou�r� olwen fou�r� (The hostess/widow) Recently appeared in The Broken Heart for Theatre for a New Audience and is best known for her extensive work in theatre in Ireland and also works in the UK, France and internationally. Recent stage appearances include her award-winning performance of Sodome, My Love by Laurent Gaud� and a world tour of the Abbey Theatre production of Terminus by Mark O'Rowe. Stage appearances in the US include: Rosaura in Life is a Dream directed by Calixto Bieito at BAM in 1999; Play and Come and Go with the Gate Beckett Festival at Lincoln Center; the title role in Wilde's Salom� directed by Steven Berkoff at Spoleto Festival USA in1989. Recent films include This Must be The Place by Paolo Sorrentino and The Other Side of Sleep by Rebecca Daly. www.olwenfouere.com Matthew Cowles matthew cowles (christopher sly/The merchant) Has made a living dying. He made his debut in Edward Albee's Malcolm in which he, as the title character, married the nymphomaniac and died from sexual hyperesthesia. Not all his death adventures have been so exotic, but they have been plentiful. His characters have been shot by bullets and arrows, and thrown from high places in The Juror (by Alec Baldwin) and "All My Children." Cowles had the honor of dying twice in The King Stag at Yale Rep, adapted and directed by Evan Yionoulis. Paul L. Coffey Paul L. coffey (The Lord) With Theatre for a New Audience: Fiasco Theater's Cymbeline (Theatre for a New Audience and Barrow Street Theatre). New York: The Public, Ars Nova, HERE, Rattlestick, Ensemble Studio Theatre, The Mint, New York Theatre Workshop, Playwrights Horizons, blessed unrest, Aquila Theatre Co. Regional: Trinity Repertory Co., Pig Iron Theatre Co., The Vineyard Playhouse, Company of Fools, The Theater at Monmouth, BoarsHead Theater, Peterborough Players and Berkshire Theatre Festival. Paul received his M.F.A. from the Brown/Trinity Graduate Acting Program where he was a Stephen Sondheim Fellow. Denis Butkus denis Butkus (Lucentio/sugarsop) Theatre for a New Audience: Othello, Measure for Measure and Macbeth. Broadway: The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial. Lincoln Center Theater: The Coast of Utopia. Off-Broadway: Unfold Me at SPF, The Revenger's Tragedy with Red Bull, Walking Down Broadway and The Skin Game at The Mint, St. Crispin's Day at Rattlestick. International: Old Wicked Songs at The English Theatre of Vienna. Upcoming film: Gods Behaving Badly, Frank the Bastard. Literary Manager, Rattlestick Playwrights Theater; Artistic Associate, Rising Phoenix Repertory. Training: Juilliard. Varin Ayala THE PrOduCTiON: CAST ANd CrEATivE TEAm John Keating (Tranio) New York: Theatre For A New Audience (The Broken Heart, Measure for Measure), Atlantic Theatre (The New York Idea), Mint (Is Life Worth Living?, John Ferguson), Roundabout (Juno and the Paycock), Irish Rep (11 shows, including Aristocrats and Around the World in 80 Days). Regional: A.C.T, McCarter, Westport Playhouse, Old Globe, Wilma (Barrymore nom. � Lead Actor), Hartford Stage, Cincinnati Playhouse. TV: Recurring in HBO's "Boardwalk Empire," Pickering in HBO miniseries "John Adams," "Lipstick Jungle," "Nurse Jackie," "Law & Order SVU." Sixty audiobook narrations (four Earphone awards, Audie nomination). robert Langdon Lloyd (Baptista minola/gregory) For Theatre for a New Audience he appeared in Othello, Measure For Measure, Macbeth, and The Broken Heart. He was a founding member of Peter Brook's Paris Company and a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company. American credits include Marat/Sade (Broadway), Lear (San Francisco Opera), Conference Of The Birds (La Mama), The Mahabharata (BAM), VOICEtheatre's Hay Fever (dir. Shauna Kanter; Woodstock, NY). Television includes "Gefahrliche Traume" (Germany), "Mr Ma And Son" (China), "Fragile Heart" (UK). Film includes Paul Scofield's King Lear and the music video for "Wrong Number" by The Cure. Peter maloney (Bartholomew/curtis/The Tailor/Vincentio) Broadway: West Side Story, Judgment at Nuremburg, Stanley, Poor Murderer, Hughie, Dinner at Eight, Arcadia, Six Degrees of Separation, Carousel, Abe Lincoln in Illinois, Our Town (Lincoln Center Theater). Film: 50 movies including Boiler Room, Requiem for a Dream, The Crucible, JFK, Washington Square, Desperately Seeking Susan and John Carpenter's The Thing! Television: Uncle Red on "Rescue Me." Writer: Leash and Witnesses (from his Abu Ghraib Triptych) published in Best American Short Plays; Mandragola (from Machiavelli), published by Broadway Play Publishing; other plays published by Samuel French and Faber & Faber. Member: Actors Studio, Atlantic Theater, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Irish Repertory Theatre. Jonathan mastro (Piano Player/Philip) Off-Broadway: David Cromer's Our Town (also original music and music direction). Regional: Broad Stage, Goodman (Frank's Home and King Lear, dir. Robert Falls) Lookingglass, Second City, Chicago Children's Theatre, etc. TV: "CBS Sunday Morning," "Jamie Kennedy Experiment." Film: Circumstance (co-writer, Sundance Audience Choice Award). Also music director for Emily Bergl (upcoming show at the Caf� Carlyle, May 2012). Love to S, G and H. saxon Palmer (hortensio) Theatre for a New Audience: The Broken Heart, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice (NYC & RSC), The Jew of Malta. Broadway: Three Sisters, Design for Living. Other New York: Measure for Pleasure (The Public Theater), You Never Can Tell (Roundabout Theater), A Flea in Her Ear (Bill Irwin, dir), Twelfth Night (LaMaMa), Belle's Stratagem (Davis McCallum, dir). Regional: Tonight at 8:30 (Williamstown), King (NY Stage and Film), David Copperfield (JoAnne Woodward, dir), The Pillowman (Wilma), title roles in Hamlet and Coriolanus (John Dillon, dir). Film/T.V.: Limitless, "Law and Order," "Ed," "All My Children," "As The World Turns." Training: Florida State University and Florida School of the Arts. John Pankow (grumio) Broadway: Cymbeline, Twelve Angry Men, The Iceman Cometh, Amadeus, Serious Money. Off-Broadway: Henry V; Measure for Measure; The Two Gentlemen of Verona; The Tempest; Equivocation; Why Torture is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them; Keep Your Pantheon; Cloud Nine; Aristocrats; North Shore Fish; Italian American Reconciliation. Film: Morning Glory, The Extra Man, To Live and Die in L.A., Mortal Thoughts. Television: "Mad About You," "Episodes." Kathryn saffell (Bianca minola) Native of San Antonio, TX, spent many of her days teaching at The Magik Theatre's children's theatre camp. After recently graduating from University of North Carolina School of the Arts with a B.F.A. in acting, she decided to move straight to New York. After making her New York debut as Helen in Franklin Stage Company's Trojan Women, The Taming of the Shrew will be her Off-Broadway debut. 32 The TamiNg of The shrew 360� Kathryn Saffel John Pankow Saxon Palmer Jonathan Mastro Peter Maloney Robert Langdon Lloyd John Keating THE PrOduCTiON: CAST ANd CrEATivE TEAm Recent theatre: The Escort (Geffen), A Lie of the Mind (The New Group), Or, (Women's Project), The Ruby Sunrise (The Public Theater), Frank's Home (Playwrights Horizons, Goodman), Dollhouse (Goodman). Television: series regular, "Mad Men" (Rachel Menken), "Sons of Anarchy" (Tara Knowles); recurring roles, "Nip/Tuck," "Life on Mars." Film: Funny People, Leaves of Grass, Push. SAG Award nomination, L.A. Drama Critics Circle nomination, Barrymore Award, Jefferson nomination. M.F.A.: NYU/Tisch; B.A.: Bryn Mawr. maggie siff (Katharina minola) graham winton (The Pedant) Theatre For A New Audience: Macbeth, Measure For Measure, Othello, Julius Caesar, Don Juan, Pericles. Broadway: A Man For All Seasons, The Tempest, Two Shakespearean Actors. The Public Theater: ten productions including Henry VI, The Controversy, The Winter's Tale. CSC: Age Of Iron, Richard III, Richard II, Hamlet. Roundabout: The Doctor's Dilemma. Regional: Yale Rep, Log Wharf, Arena Stage, Shakespeare Theatre D.C., Guthrie, Hartford Stage, many more. Television: "Blue Bloods", All "Law and Orders", "Brooklyn South", "NY Undercover", "Swift Justice", "Bull", Soaps. Film: My Sassy Girl, Gettysburg, Blonde Fist. arin arbus (director) Associate artistic director of Theatre for a New Audience, for which she directed Macbeth, Measure for Measure (Lortel nomination for Best Revival) and Othello (six Lortel nominations). She has directed at Houston Grand Opera, Woodbourne Correctional Facility/Rehabilitation Through the Arts, Intiman Theatre, Working Theater, Hangar Theater, FringeNYC, HERE Arts Center, Juilliard, New School for Drama and Williamstown Theatre Festival Workshop. Arbus was a Playwrights Horizons directing resident and a member of Soho Rep's Writer/Director Lab, and is a Drama League Directing fellow and a Princess Grace Award recipient. donyale werle (scenic designer) Broadway: Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (2011 Tony nom.), Peter and the Starcatcher. Off-Broadway: Peter and the Starcatcher (New York Theatre Workshop, 2011 Lucille Lortel nom.), Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (The Public Theater), Broke-ology (Lincoln Center Theater), Jollyship the Whiz-Bang (Ars Nova). Regional: Paper Mill Playhouse, The Old Globe, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Magic Theatre. Awards: 2011 Obie Award, 2011 Lucille Lortel Award, 2010 Henry Hewes Design Award, 2010 Outer Circle Critics nomination. Co-chair: Broadway Green Alliance's Pre/Post Production Committee. anita Yavich (costume designer) Theatre for a New Audience: Macbeth, Coriolanus, Svejk. Broadway: Venus in Fur, Chinglish, Anna in the Tropics. New York: The Submission, Coraline, The Wooden Breeks (MCC); Orlando, New Jerusalem, Texts for Nothing (CSC); Henry V (New Victory); Iphigenia 2.0 (Signature). Opera: Cyrano de Bergerac (La Scala, Metropolitan Opera and Royal Opera), Les Troyens (Metropolitan Opera), puppets and costumes for The Sound of Music (Salzburger Marionetten Theater). 2006 Obie Award. marcus doshi (Lighting designer) Designs for theatre, opera & dance as well as collaborating with artists & architects on a wide array of non theatrical ventures. With Theatre for a New Audience: Othello (Lortel nomination), Hamlet (Drama Desk & Henry Hewes nominations), Measure for Measure, Macbeth, and The Broken Heart. His work has been seen internationally in Edinburgh, London, Amsterdam, Castres, Venice, Vienna, Kuwait, Mumbai, New Delhi, Phnom Penh and Jakarta, and most recently in Beirut, Lebanon and Tunis & Sousse, Tunisia with the international tour of The Speaker's Progress, a play written in the shadow of the Arab Spring, with Sabab Theatre. His work has been seen in the US with Seattle, Florentine, Boston Lyric, and Baltimore Operas, Lincoln Center Festival, NYTW, Signature, Civilians, Seattle Rep, Steppenwolf, Huntington, Chicago Shakespeare, Yale Rep, among others. www.marcusdoshi.com. michael friedman (original music/ arrangements) Theatre for a New Audience: All's Well That Ends Well. Broadway: Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. With The Civilians: composer/lyricist for The Great Immensity, In the Footprint, This Beautiful City, [I Am] Nobody's Lunch, Gone Missing, and Canard, Canard, Goose? Also music and lyrics for Saved and The Brand New Kid. With Steve Cosson, he is the co-author of Paris Commune. Dramaturg for the recent Broadway revival of A Raisin in the Sun. Barron Visiting Professor at the Princeton Environmental Institute; Artistic Associate at New York Theatre Workshop; MacDowell Fellow, Meet the Composer Fellow, Princeton University Hodder Fellow. Obie Award for sustained achievement. a ViewfiNder 33 Graham Winton Maggie Siff THE PrOduCTiON: CAST ANd CrEATivE TEAm Peter Maloney, Saxon Plamer, and John Pankow in The Taming of the Shrew, photo by Gerry Goodstein John Keating in The Taming of the Shrew, photo by Gerry Goodstein Robert Langdon Lloyd in The Taming of the Shrew, photo by Gerry Goodstein Jeffrey horowitz (Producer) Began his career in theatre as an actor and appeared on Broadway, Off-Broadway and in regional theatre. In 1979, he founded Theatre for a New Audience. Horowitz has served on the Panel of the New York State Council on the Arts and on the Board of Directors of Theatre Communications Group. He is currently on the Advisory Board of The Shakespeare Society and the Artistic Directorate of London's Globe Theatre. He received the John Houseman Award in 2003 and The Breukelein Institute's 2004 Gaudium Award. The Taming of the Shrew is the fourth production of Shakespeare directed by Arin Arbus in which Jeffrey and Arin have worked together (Othello, Measure For Measure, Macbeth). andrew wade (Voice director) Resident Director of Voice at Theatre for a New Audience where he has coached The Broken Heart, Macbeth, Hamlet, Chair and Notes from Underground and will coach The Taming of the Shrew later this season. Head of Voice, RSC, 1990�2003. Assistant Voice Director, RSC, 1987�1990. Co-directed/devised "Journeys," "Words, Words, Words," "More Words" and "Lifespan" with Cicely Berry for BBC World Service, awarded Bronze Medal, International Radio Festival, New York, 2000. Verse Consultant, Shakespeare in Love. Andrew teaches, lectures and voice coaches internationally. Adjunct Faculty at Juilliard and Stella Adler Studio. Voice and Text Consultant for The Acting Company and Guthrie Theater, Minneapolis: Two Gentlemen of Verona, Henry V, Antony and Cleopatra, The Comedy of Errors, Othello, As You Like It, Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo & Juliet, and The Winter's Tale. Literary Advisor and Resident Artist at Theatre for a New Audience and Professor of Theatre at Hunter College, CUNY. He has published five books on theater, including studies of Samuel Beckett and Heiner M�ller, and written theatre criticism for The New York Times, The Village Voice and other publications. His new book Great Lengths: Seven Works of Marathon Theater was published in October. Jonathan Kalb (dramaturg) doug elkins (choreographer) Previously choreographed Othello for Theatre for a New Audience. He is a two-time New York Dance and Performance (Bessie) Award-winning choreographer who began his career as a B-Boy, touring the world with break dance groups New York Dance Express and Magnificent Force, among others. He has created over 40 original dances during his career for Doug Elkins Dance Company (1988-2003), doug elkins choreography, etc., and a number of university and professional companies. dougelkinschoreography.com B.h. Barry (movement consultant) Theatre for a New Audience: Troilus and Cressida, Macbeth, Richard II, Richard III, Saved, Hamlet, Othello, Measure for Measure and Macbeth. Recent productions: Treasure Island (Irondale Center); Happy Now? (Primary Stages); Frank Wildhorn's Wonderland; Twelfth Night (Westport Country Playhouse); Stiffelio, Simon Boccanegra, La Fanciulla del West and Wozzeck (The Metropolitan Opera); Romeo and Juliet (Salzburg and La Scala); Flora (Spoleto Festival USA). He has been awarded a Tony Honor, a Drama Desk and an Obie for his Fight Directing. L. U. O. K. L. H. renee Lutz (Production stage manager) Theatre for a New Audience: The Merchant of Venice (New York, Royal Shakespeare Company and national tour), The Jew of Malta, Othello, Measure for Measure, Antony and Cleopatra, All's Well That Ends Well, etc. Venues include Barrington Stage, Goodspeed, The Public Theater, La Jolla, Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan Theatre Club, Vineyard and numerous Off-Broadway and regional productions. As always, her best credit and longest run is her husband, actor Gordon Stanley. 34 The TamiNg of The shrew 360� FurTHEr ExPLOrATiON: gLOSSArY OF TErmS ANd PLACES Adonis: In Greek mythology, a youth whose physical beauty enchanted the goddess Venus as she watched him bathe. Peter Maloney in The Taming of the Shrew, photo by Henry Grossman Glossary definitions and text from the Barnes and Noble edition: Radel, Nicholas F. The Taming of the Shrew. New York: Barnes and Noble, 2007; and the Oxford edition: Shakespeare, William. The Taming of the Shrew. Ed. H. J. Oliver. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. these may be quasi-pornographic pictures, perhaps the "wanton pictures" mentioned earlier in the Induction. Characters of the play: Many of the characters in The Taming of the Shrew are stock comic "types," or characters who serve as broad and exaggerated representations of a kind of person rather than fully-realized human beings. The stock characters used in The Taming of the Shrew have their roots in the Italian dramatic tradition of Commedia dell'Arte, where actors and actresses donned masks to represent their types and improvised skits and scenes based on a loose outline. Cytherea: Another name for Venus, goddess of love, who was born off the coast of Cythera. Io: A virgin raped by Jupiter, the king of the Gods in Greek mythology, who surprised her by hiding himself in a cloud. She was later transformed into a cloud to hide her from Jupiter's wife, Juno. daphne: A nymph who infatuated the god Apollo. He tried to rape her but she was saved by the river god Peneus, who changed her into a laurel tree. "In this waning age": In this degenerate time. In the Elizabethan view of human history, it was commonly believed that the world had once existed in a state of grace or perfection, like the biblical Garden of Eden or the classical Golden Age, but was since then steadily deteriorating. "Because she brought stone jugs and no sealed quarts": Because she shortchanged her customers. Sealed quarts were quart jugs marked with a seal guaranteeing their size. A plain, unmarked stone jug could appear to hold a quart, yet in reality contain less. Greece: Possibly Greet, an English village not far from Stratford-upon-Avon. "Congealed your blood": Elizabethan doctors believed that sadness, or melancholy, could cause the blood to thicken, which in turn could cause fits of insanity, or frenzy. induction, scene 1 Paucis pallabris: A misquoting of pocas palabras, which means "few words" in Spanish. The phrase was popularized in Thomas Kyd's play The Spanish Tragedy (c.1587). that happiness can be obtained through virtuous behavior, which was the argument of the classical Greek philosopher Aristotle's Ethics. The Ethics, which consist of three texts, study how people should best live, and Aristotle's writings heavily influenced Elizabethan intellectual thought. mi perdonato: Italian for "pardon me." "Let's be no stoics nor stocks": The Stoics were a Greek school of philosophers who believed in the restraint of emotions and the rejection of worldly comforts. Stocks were wooden posts, and incapable of feeling. "Or so devote to Aristotle's checks / As Ovid be an outcast quite abjured": `Or be so committed to Aristotle's moral rigor that the erotic poetry of Ovid is completely rejected.' Tranio is encouraging Lucentio to enjoy himself while he's in Padua, and not spend all his time studying. Pantaloon: Shakespeare identifies Gremio as a pantaloon, another stock figure in Commedia dell'Arte (where the character was known as Pantalone). Pantalone is a wealthy and greedy old man, and his foolishness makes him the butt of the other characters' jokes. "To cart her": Baptista has just given Hortensio and Gremio permission to woo Katharina, and Gremio responds by punning on the word court. Prostitutes were often placed in carts and driven through town as part of their punishment. Unruly women, or shrews, were also sometimes carted and driven through town while fitted with painful "scolds' bridles"--metal headpieces with an iron bit that extended into the woman's mouth to depress her tongue "Go by, Saint Jeronimy": Sly misquotes another popular line from The Spanish Tragedy, in which the hero is warned "Hieronimo, beware! Go by; go by!" Sly has conflated the name of the play's hero, Hieronimo, with that of Saint Jerome, best known for translating the Bible into Latin. "Go by" is a dismissive phrase, like "forget it." Soto: Most scholars believe that Shakespeare is referring to a character in a play now lost to us. induction, scene 2 Burton Heath: Probably Burton-onthe-Heath, a village not far from Shakespeare's home village of Stratfordupon-Avon. "On the score": In debt. Taverns accounts were recorded by scoring, or cutting notches on a stick, wall, or door. Apollo: Greek god of music. Semiramis: A queen of ancient Assyria, notorious for her sexual exploits. "dost thou love pictures?": The subject matter of the paintings derives from Ovid's Metamorphoses, a classical Latin poem about the miraculous transformations of various characters drawn from Greek and Roman mythology. The topics suggest that act 1, scene 1 Padua: The Italian city in which The Taming of the Shrew takes place. Padua had a world-renowned university, founded in 1228. Lucentio mentions that he has traveled to Padua to study. Lombardy: A region in northern Italy. In The Taming of the Shrew, Padua is in Lombardy; in actuality, Padua is in a different region of Italy, the Veneto. "Treats of happiness / By virtue specially to be achieved": Refers to the idea a ViewfiNder 35 FurTHEr ExPLOrATiON: gLOSSArY OF TErmS ANd PLACES and gag her. minerva: Roman goddess of wisdom and creator of musical instruments. "I found the effect of love-in-idleness": I fell in love. Love-in-idleness was another name for the pansy, a flower whose juice was believed to make people fall in love--as it does in A Midsummer Night's Dream. "As Anna to the Queen of Carthage was": In Virgil's Aeneid, Dido is the Queen of Carthage, who kills herself after being abandoned by Aeneas, the legendary founder of Rome. Anna is Dido's sister, who counseled her to have an affair with Aeneas and who subsequently was the primary mourner at Dido's funeral. Hercules. Alcides was another name of Hercules, derived from the name of one of his ancestors. Ben venuto: Italian for "welcome." In this context, it means "host." act 2, scene 1 "Lead apes in hell": Unmarried women were proverbially said to spend eternity leading apes into hell, because they could not lead children into heaven. her mind, with wholesome precepts." Domestic violence, no doubt too easily, was usually viewed as a mark of lowerclass status, so when Petruchio says he is a "gentleman," Katharina decides to test (try) his assertion by seeing if he will strike her back. Bacare: Bad Latin for "step back." Rheims: A city in northern France with a renowned university. "what dowry shall I have with her to wife?": Marriage was primarily an economic and/or dynastic arrangement in early modern England. This does not mean that love was irrelevant, but it would not have been the only motivation for this important social institution. It was assumed that love would follow a marriage carried out with proper consideration for all involved. Petruchio here wants to know what Katharina's family will offer, but follows by indicating what he will provide for her. "Ask the banns": Elizabethan marriages were preceded by a public reading of the banns (a formal announcement of an impending wedding) normally at three consecutive Sunday church services. Kate Hall: May mean only "the house Kate rules over" or (ironically) "the house that is known because Kate lives there." Perhaps a reference to Katherine Hall, a large house in southern England. "dainties are all Kates": Punning on the fact that both dainties and "cates" refer to small cakes or candies. "I swear I'll cuff you if you strike again": Although men were traditionally authorized to use force against their wives, servants, and children to maintain order in their households, by Shakespeare's time the practice was increasingly discouraged. The impact of Protestant ideas of marriage as a companionate relationship inhibited the use of force. The Elizabethan "Homily of Matrimony," for instance, compared the control of one's wife to the farming of land, whereby the husband/farmer should "diligently apply [himself] to weed out little by little the noisome weeds of uncomely manners out of "did ever dian so become a grove": Diana was the Roman goddess of chastity, and was worshiped at a famous shrine in a grove in the Alban hills. Grissel: Patient Grissel, or Griselda, was a model of wifely obedience despite her abusive husband. Numerous versions of the Griselda story appear throughout English literature, including "The Clerk's Tale" in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. Lucrece: A classical paragon of chastity, who killed herself in despair after having been raped by her brother-in-law Tarquin. Shakespeare recounts the story in his poem "The Rape of Lucrece." Tyrian: Tyre, a coastal city in modern Lebanon, was famous for its expensive fabric dyes. "Valance of Venice gold in needlework": A valance was the fringed border around a bed canopy. Venice gold refers to an expensive gold thread produced in Venice. marseilles's road: The protected harbor of Marseilles, in France. "faced it with a card of ten": A proverbial phrase for "bluffed my way through it." From the card game Primero, in which the ten was a low-valued card. Redime te captum quam queas minimo: Latin for "ransom yourself out of captivity as cheaply as possible." "The daughter of Agenor": Europa, whom Jupiter abducted by transforming himself into a bull and carrying her off when she climbed upon his back. Basta: Italian for "enough." act 1, scene 2 Con tutto il cuore, ben trovato: Italian for "with all my heart, well met." Alla nostra casa ben venuto, molto honorato Signior mio Petruchio: Italian for "welcome to our house, my most honored Signor Petruchio." "Be she as foul as was florentius' love, / As old as Sibyl, and as curst and shrewd / As Socrates' Xanthippe": The women Petruchio mentions are all famously ugly, old, or shrewish. Sir Florent was the knight in John Gower's Confessio Amantis, who, to get the answer to a question that will save his life, marries an ugly hag. The Sibyl was a prophetess to whom Apollo granted as many years of life as the number of grains of sand she could hold. Xanthippe was the notoriously shrewish wife of Socrates. Leda's daughter: Helen of Troy, described in classical mythology as the most beautiful woman in the world. Paris: Helen of Troy's lover. He abducted Helen from her husband Menelaus, which incited the Trojan War. Alcides' twelve: The twelve labors of act 3, scene 1 Hic ibat Simois, hic est Sigeia tellus, / Hic steterat Priami regi celsa cenis: Lucentio reads to Bianca from book 1 of Ovid's Heroides, a series of poems in the form of fictitious love letters written by legendary women to their husbands or lovers. Lucentio quotes Penelope's letter to Odysseus: "Here is where the Simois used to flow, here is the Sigeian land, / Here once stood the lofty palace of aged Priam." By Shakespeare's time, Ovid was considered too scandalous to be used in the formal education of young ladies. "for sure Aeacides / was Ajax, called so from his grandfather": Lucentio quickly returns to his lesson so as to avoid 36 The TamiNg of The shrew 360� FurTHEr ExPLOrATiON: gLOSSArY OF TErmS ANd PLACES suspicion. Aeacides was an alternate name for the Greek warrior Ajax, given to him in honor of his grandfather Aeacus. fully scrubbed on the inside, while jills were a kind of small metal drinking cup, the outside of which required polishing. act 4, scene 4 "Pitchers have ears": Proverbial for "someone might overhear us." A pitcher's handle was called an ear. "The ground of all accord": The basis of all harmony. Both the ground, or key note, and the scale itself could be called the gamut. The notes of a scale (A, B, C, etc.) were sung on the syllables re, mi, fa, etc., as described in Hortensio's lesson. "She is my goods, my chattels; she is my house / my household stuff, my field, my barn, / My horse, my ox, my ass, my anything": While Petruchio sarcastically accuses the men of coveting Katharina, in fact, in the early modern period in which Shakespeare wrote, Petruchio's words would be almost literally true. Upon marriage, a woman's legal identity became subsumed by her husband's, a condition referred to as coverture. Her right to execute legal arrangements could only be performed through her husband. All property that was not specifically reserved for the woman's use before marriage, as well as the woman's right to utilize such property, was transferred to her husband. In practice, however, women often managed the household finances, kept expense accounts, bought necessary goods, and sold some of what they made for extra money. When Sir Anthony Fitzherbert describes a wife's duties in The Book of Husbandry, he says that wives should "buy all manner of necessary things belonging to a household, and make a true reckoning of what she hath received and what she hath paid. And if the husband go to the market to buy or sell (as they oft do), he then [is] to show his wife in like manner. For if one of them should use [practice] to deceive the other, he deceiveth himself, and is not like to thrive, and therefore they must be true either to other." "It was the friar of orders gray": The opening line of a bawdy song about a nun's seduction by a Franciscan friar. Choler: Anger; hot-headedness. According to Elizabethan physiology, choler was caused by an excess of yellow bile, one of the four humors (bodily fluids) that determined a person's mood, health, and personality. Choler was associated with heat and dryness, and therefore burnt and dried-up meat was to be avoided. "Thus have I politicly begun my reign": In what follows, Petruchio compares his taming of Katharina to the training of a hawk or falcon. The metaphor connects to other images in the play describing Katharina as a wild creature. But equally important, it marks Petruchio's claim to be a gentlemen and hence perhaps to his insistence on taming rather than physical coercion. According to George Turberville's The Book of Falconry or Hawking; For the Only Delight and Pleasure of All Noblemen and Gentlemen (1575), falconry was a sport of wellborn men and designed not to break the spirit of the bird but to train it. "never looks upon her lure": Never obeys the falconer's command. The lure was the device used to recall the falcon. Cum privilegio ad imprimendum solum: Latin for "with the sole right to print." Used to indicate a publisher's monopoly, and used here to express the husband's exclusive right to father a child on his wife. act 4, scene 5 "Thus the bowl should run, / And not unluckily against the bias": `Now we are on the proper course.' In the game of bowls, the ball swerves because of a weight (bias) placed on one side. Petruchio claims that his relationship with Katharina now follows her natural inclination rather than running against it. act 5, scene 1 Bergamo: Bergamo, an inland city about twenty-five miles northeast of Milan, was notorious for rude speech. "Cambio is changed": In Italian, cambio means "change." act 5, scene 2 "A hundred marks": I'll bet a hundred marks. A mark was worth 2/3 of a pound. As a laborer in Elizabethan England might make only five or six pounds a year, this was a very large bet. Crowns: Gold coins. "Fie, fie! Unknit that threat'ning unkind brow": Katharina's speech ignores the traditional biblical justification for women's inferiority as punishment for Eve's transgression in Eden that predominated in texts about appropriate roles for women. Instead, it appeals to a more secular argument grounded in nature and the difference between the sexes: the distinction between women's "soft and weak and smooth bodies" and those bodies that men commit "to painful labor" for women's "maintenance." Also, as Lynda E. Boose points out, Katharina's final gesture of placing her hand beneath Petruchio's foot in "token" of her "duty" replicates one of the rituals of the wedding ceremony that women were often required to perform in pre-Reformation England and Europe. act 4, scene 2 The Art to Love: Ovid's poem on erotic love and seduction. Its Latin name is Ars Amotoria. "Tricks eleven and twenty long": Comes from the card game one and thirty, in which the objective is to end with a score of precisely eleven and twenty. act 4, scene 3 "Thou liest, thou thread, thou thimble / Thou yard, three-quarters, half-yard, quarter, nail!": No doubt because of their association with women and women's clothes, tailors were regarded as effeminate. Petruchio asserts his own masculinity by mocking the tailor's small size, particularly the inadequacy of his rapidly shrinking "yard" (or "yardstick"), a slang word for penis. A nail was onesixteenth of a yard. act 4, scene 1 "Fire, fire. Cast on no water": An allusion to a popular song, "Scotland's Burning." The refrain was, "Fire, fire! Fire, fire! / Cast on water! Cast on water!" "Be the jacks fair within, the jills fair without": Jacks and jills refer to the male and female servants of the household, but also to types of drinking cups. Jacks were leather cups that needed to be a ViewfiNder 37 FurTHEr ExPLOrATiON: BiBLiOgrAPHY Aspinall, Dana E. "The Play and the Critics" in The Taming of the Shrew: Critical Essays. Ed. Dana E Aspinall. New York and London: Routledge, 2002. Pages 3-38. Bate, Jonathan and Russell Jackson, eds. Shakespeare: An Illustrated Stage History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Bevington, David. "Introduction," "The Taming of the Shrew on Stage," "Date and Text," and "Shakespeare's Sources" in The Taming of the Shrew. Ed. David Bevington and David Scott Kastan. New York: Bantam Books, 2005. Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead Books, 1998. Boose, Lynda E. "Scolding Brides and Bridling Scolds: Taming the Woman's Unruly Member" in The Taming of the Shrew: Critical Essays. Ed. Dana E Aspinall. New York and London: Routledge, 2002. Pages 130-167. Boose, Lynda E. "The Taming of the Shrew, Good Husbandry, and Enclosure" in Shakespeare Reread: The Texts in New Contexts. Ed. Russ McDonald. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994. Pages 193-225. Brown, Pamela Allen. "`O such a rogue would be hang'd!' Shrews versus Wife Beaters" in Better a Shrew than a Sheep: Women, Drama, and the Culture of Jest in Early Modern England. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003. Pages 118-149. Burns, Margie. "The Ending of The Shrew" in The Taming of the Shrew: Critical Essays. Ed. Dana E Aspinall. New York and London: Routledge, 2002. Pages 84-105. Chambers, E. K. The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923. Daniell, David. "The Good Marriage of Katherine and Petruchio" in The Taming of the Shrew: Critical Essays. Ed. Dana E Aspinall. New York and London: Routledge, 2002. Pages 71-83. Dolan, Frances E. "Introduction" and "Early Modern Debates" in The Taming of the Shrew: Texts and Contexts. Ed. Frances E. Dolan. Boston: Bedford Books, 1996. Pages 1-32; 141-324. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Shakspeare; or, the Poet. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1904; Bartleby.com, 2000. www.bartleby.com/90/. Evans, G. Blakemore. "Chronology and Sources" in The Riverside Shakespeare. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1974. Varin Ayala in The Taming of the Shrew, photo by Gerry Goodstein Special Note: All Act, scene, and line numbers noted in this Viewfinder are from the Oxford edition. 38 The TamiNg of The shrew 360� FurTHEr ExPLOrATiON: BiBLiOgrAPHY Heilman, Robert B. "The Taming Untamed, or, the Return of the Shrew" in The Taming of the Shrew: Critical Essays. Ed. Dana E Aspinall. New York and London: Routledge, 2002. Pages 45-57. Holderness, Graham. Shakespeare in Performance: The Taming of the Shrew. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991. Howard, Jean E. "Introduction: The Taming of the Shrew" in The Norton Shakespeare. Gen. ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York: Norton, 1997. Pages 133-141. Gay, Penny. "The Taming of the Shrew: Avoiding the Feminist Challenge" in As She Likes It: Shakespeare's Unruly Women. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Gurr, Andrew. Playgoing in Shakespeare's London, 3rd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Gurr, Andrew. The Shakespeare Company: 1594-1642. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Gurr, Andrew. The Shakespearean Stage: 1574-1642, 3rd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Helene Wickham Koon How Shakespeare Won the West: Players and Performances in America's Gold Rush, 1849� 1865. London: McFarland, 1989. Levine, Lawrence W. "William Shakespeare and the American People: A Study in Cultural Transformation." American Historical Review 89.1, 1984: 34. Academic Search Premier. McDonald, Russ. The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare: An Introduction with Documents, 2nd edition. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2001. Oliver, H. J. "Introduction" in The Taming of the Shrew. Ed. H. J. Oliver. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Pages 1-64. Rackin, Phyllis. "Our Canon, Ourselves" in Shakespeare and Women. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pages 51-62. Radel, Nicholas F. "Significant Performances" in The Taming of the Shrew. New York: Barnes and Noble, 2007. Schafer, Elizabeth, ed. Shakespeare in Production: The Taming of the Shrew. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Shakespeare, William. The Taming of the Shrew. Ed. H. J. Oliver. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Wright, George T. Shakespeare's Metrical Art. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. a ViewfiNder 39 ABOuT THEATrE FOr A NEw AudiENCE about Theatre for a New audience Founded in 1979 by Jeffrey Horowitz, the mission of Theatre for a New Audience is to develop and vitalize the performance and study of Shakespeare and classic drama. Theatre for a New Audience produces for audiences OffBroadway and has also toured nationally, internationally and to Broadway. We are guided in our work by five core values: a reverence for language, a spirit of adventure, a commitment to diversity, a dedication to learning, and a spirit of service. These values inform what we do with artists, how we interact with audiences, and how we manage our organization. Theatre for a New audience education Programs Theatre for a New Audience is an award winning company recognized for artistic excellence. Our education programs introduce students to Shakespeare and other classics with the same artistic integrity that we apply to our productions. Through our unique and exciting methodology, students engage in hands-on learning that involves all aspects of literacy set in the context of theatre education. Our residencies are structured to address City and State Learning Standards both in English Language Arts and the Arts, the New York City DOE's Curriculum Blueprint for Teaching and Learning in Theater, and the Common Core Learning Standards for English Language Arts. Begun in 1984, our programs have served over 122,000 students, ages 9 through 18, in New York City Public Schools City-wide. a New home in Brooklyn After over 30 years of being an itinerant theatre, Theatre for a New Audience has broken ground on a new home in the BAM Cultural District in Downtown Brooklyn. Scheduled to open in fall 2013, our new home will be a place to gather, learn and explore. In it, we will be able to expand our education and humanities programs to include activities on weekends, after-school and during school vacations for students; as well as lectures, seminars, workshops, and other activities for artists, scholars, adults and families. Board of directors Chairman: Henry Christensen III President: Jeffrey Horowitz Vice President and Secretary: dorothy Ryan Members: staff founding Artistic director: Jeffrey Horowitz managing director: dorothy Ryan General manager: Theresa Von Klug Director of Development: James J. Lynes Education director: Katie miller finance director: Elizabeth Lees Capital Campaign director: Rachel Lovett Associate Artistic director: Arin Arbus Associate General manager: Lee Helms manager of Humanities Programs: Carie donnelson Associate finance director: Andrew Zimmerman development Associate: daniel Bayer Education Associate: Carter niles Capital Associate: Elizabeth Carena Assistant General manager: Courtney F. Caldwell Associate to the Artistic director: danya Taymor Associate to the managing director: Emily Ernst Robert Arnow Robert Ascheim, M.D. John Berendt* Cicely Berry, CBE, Hon. D.Lit* marl�ne Brody Sally Brody Zoe Caldwell* Robert Caro* merle debuskey* Dr. Sharon Dunn* Dr. Charlotte Frank Richard R. Hadar Sir Peter Hall* dana Ivey* david Scott Kastan* John J. Kerr, Jr. Seymour H. Lesser william Lloyd Larry M. Loeb Catherine maciariello* Gloria messinger Anne messitte Audrey Heffernan meyer Caroline niemczyk Janet C. Olshansky Henry F. Owsley Theodore C. Rogers Philip R. Rotner mark Rylance* Robert T. Schaffner Daryl D. Smith douglas Stein* michael Stranahan Julie Taymor* Monica G.-S. Wambold Jane wells frederick wiseman* Emeritus: Francine S. Ballan Herbert mitgang* *Artistic Council 40 The TamiNg of The shrew 360� THEATrE FOr A NEw AudiENCE mAjOr iNSTiTuTiONAL SuPPOrTErS THEATrE FOr A NEw AudiENCE mAjOr SuPPOrTErS Even with capacity audiences, box office and other earned income account for just 30% of the Theatre's $3.5 million operating budget. The Theatre expresses its deepest thanks to the following Foundations, Corporations and Government Agencies for their generous support of the Theatre's Humanities, Education, and Outreach programs. Theatre for a New Audience's Humanities programming receives support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in these programs do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Theatre for a New Audience's productions and education programs receive support from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; and from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. Additional support for these programs is provided by the generosity of the following Foundations and Corporations through their direct support of the Theatre's Education programs and through their general operating grants to the Theatre's Annual Fund: Principal Benefactors Bloomberg Philanthropies The SHS Foundation Producers circle--The artistic director's society Axe-Houghton Foundation Consolidated Edison Company of New York, Inc. The Joseph & Sally Handleman Charitable Foundation Litowitz Foundation, Inc. Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. Michael Tuch Foundation, Inc. Leading Benefactors Deloitte LLP Sidney E. Frank Foundation The Shubert Foundation, Inc. The Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust major Benefactors The The The The Heckscher Foundation for Children DuBose and Dorothy Heyward Memorial Fund Blanche and Irving Laurie Foundation Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation Producers circle--executive Jerome and Dolores Zuckerman Gewirtz Charitable Trust The Mnuchin Foundation Producers circle--associate Actors' Equity Foundation, Inc. Barbara Bell Cumming Foundation DeWitt Stern Group, Inc. The Friars Foundation The Irving Harris Foundation sustaining Benefactors The Howard Bayne Fund The Bay and Paul Foundations Bloomberg LP The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation Jean and Louis Dreyfus Foundation, Inc. The Educational Foundation of America The Lambent Foundation a ViewfiNder 41