Framing the Taming: Metatheatrical Awareness of Female Impersonation in 'The Taming of the Shrew'

Abstract

Kate's speech of submission at the end of The Taming of the Shrew raises problems for producers and critics who want to dissociate Shakespeare from normative Elizabethan views about the subordination of married women to their husbands. Some modern directors have devised stage business for subverting Kate's declaration of submissiveness, occasionally using it to grant her subtle or not-so-subtle powers of manipulation and control. Although much of the critical debate over the play has centred on whether the ending subverts or reinforces patriarchal attitudes, Linda Woodbridge concludes a brief survey of feminist efforts to recuperate the play and its ending with the sceptical observation that 'I see little evidence that he was ahead of his time in his attitudes toward women'.1 Other critics whose work is no less historically based than Woodbridge's find reason to argue that the play is more problematic than conventional. As Michael Hattaway asserts, 'there can be no authoritative reading.'2 Some directors and critics have tried to solve the problem by enclosing the submission of Kate in some kind of frame, thereby hoping to find an ironic perspective which undercuts the wife-taming, or at least qualifies it. In the Folio text, the Induction provides such a perspective, but unfortunately it disappears after the first act. Some directors, following Pope, adopt the ending from The Taming of A Shrew, the so-called 'bad' quarto published in 1594. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor have recently buttressed the authority of this ending by suggesting that it may reflect 'Shakespeare's final text [...] more fully than the Folio does' or else may be a 'paraphrase or imitation' of an earlier Shakespearian text behind the Folio version.3