"Look not big, nor stamp, nor stare": Acting Up in The Taming of the Shrew and the Coventry Herod Plays

Abstract

In his 1945 study of Shakespeare's use of humoral psychology, John W. Draper noted that supposedly choleric Petruchio's strategy for subduing equally volatile Katherine to out-Herod Herod. (1) Though Draper doubtless intended his remark to be no more than metaphorical, I propose to take it literally. Shakespeare's Taming of Shrew, I shall argue, is subtly informed by a metatheatrical awareness of Herod and, more specifically, of styles of that distinguished his character on early English stage. That Shakespeare knew of conventions and characters of Corpus Christi cycle drama is beyond question. What remains unclear is whether his knowledge was derived, either wholly or at least in part, from first-hand childhood experience as an audience member. Although young Shakespeare may have developed a taste for live theater in Stratford itself, which frequently played host to licensed traveling players from 1569, (2) his home town had no tradition of Corpus Christi drama. But as many scholars have speculated, Shakespeare may have witnessed one or more performances of biblical cycle play staged during week-long Great Fair of Corpus Christi at nearby Coventry. He certainly had ample opportunity to do so. Although no longer regular annual event it had been before Reformation--it was not performed during plague years of 1564 and 1575, for example--the city's cycle play was staged on numerous occasions during Shakespeare's childhood prior to its discontinuation in 1580, when he was sixteen. The Coventry Fair was evidently a large tourist draw, attracting thousands of visitors and their purses. One seventeenth-century antiquary noted that the confluence of people from farr and neare to see that Shew was extraordinary great, and yielded noe small advantage to this Cittye. (3) As son of one of Stratford's leading local politicians in 1560s and 1570s, whose official administrative business took him to Coventry on several occasions, it is hard to imagine Shakespeare and his father not attending a nearby event invested with considerable civic and even national significance. In absence of any incontrovertible evidence that Shakespeare was an audience member at a performance of Coventry cycle, however, potentially illuminating points of contact between mystery drama and his own have been for most part neglected. (4) A passage in wedding scene of The Taming of Shrew--a play that contains more references to Warwickshire locations than any other by Shakespeare (5)--hints that he did see Coventry cycle, and that one of its episodes may have made a lasting impression on him. The specific connection I shall sketch between Coventry play and The Taming of Shrew differs from type of strictly intertextual relation conventionally adduced by scholars of source studies. I am proposing instead a relation of intertheatricality. This different relation, I shall argue, consists less in textual transmission--although there may be elements of that too--than in critical reproduction of a style of performance most notable for actor's over-the-top self-presentation, including exaggerated gestural techniques, dazzling costumes, and deafening verbal delivery. I shall term this style acting up. The phrase not only suggests hyperbolic tendencies of style, which required actor's volume knob to be decisively turned (loud delivery! loud body language! loud apparel!); it also captures something of socially transgressive behavior tyranny, shrewishness--that style was frequently employed to represent on early English stage. The phrase additionally hints at potentially transgressive status gap that so frequently obtained between player and his character; to impersonate a middle eastern tyrant or even a young woman from a rich Paduan mercantile family, player of provincial Corpus Christi stage and London commercial theater alike had to act up in a class as much as a histrionic sense. …