The Beast of a Play That Can’t Be Tamed

In our popular culture, certain things acquire the aura of a classic simply by being there, reliably. Television reruns made “It’s a Wonderful Life” what it is today: something more “classic” than it is, really. And relentless recyclings, especially on outdoor festival stages, have bolstered the reputation of a particularly vexing play by William Shakespeare--the one about the tamer and his shrew.

For many, “Shrew” is vile, and that’s that. It endorses physical violence against women, especially in a lame or sloppy production. No matter what the directorial concept, Shakespeare’s comedy reinforces all the old swaggering patriarchal stereotypes. Misogyny, sexism, physical and psychological abuse run rampant, for laughs.

For others, depending on the tenor of an individual production, it really is a jolly romp, a roughhouse favorite whose characters have by now been slapped with the “classic battle of the sexes” tag so often, they could qualify for the Elizabethan GI Bill.

So could the rest of us battle-weary playgoers.

Furlough, I say. Whichever way directors want to take this piece, they must investigate more inventive ways of making sense of it--comic sense, sexual sense, social sense. Human sense.

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Most estimates date “The Taming of the Shrew” to 1591 or 1592, relatively early in a career that launched a thousand textual critics. Let’s not dwell on its tedious and not-brief subplot regarding Bianca and her suitors, other than to say Bianca cannot marry according to her father’s wishes until someone bags her “intolerable curs’t” sister, Katherine. (In the 1948 musical “Kiss Me, Kate,” Bianca cannot marry until she sings “Tom, Dick or Harry,” among other felicitous Cole Porter tunes.)

Kate’s fate is Petruchio, newly arrived in Padua to “wive it wealthily.” After Petruchio and Kate marry against the latter’s will, Petruchio embarks on his campaign of smiling domestic terror. Under pretense of love, he starves her, deprives her of sleep and messes with her foggy head, insisting that the moon’s the sun, the sun’s the moon.

It works. He tames her. Kate learns the value of submissiveness and--if finessed in performance--of gentleness.

Shakespeare wrote several works categorized (rather dismissively) by scholars over the years as “problem comedies,” romances energized--often nearly torn apart--by their mood swings of tragedy and comedy. Among them are “The Winter’s Tale,” “All’s Well That Ends Well” (in which all’s well that ends well, but barely) and “The Merchant of Venice,” with its eternally controversial portrait of Shylock the Jew.

Today “The Taming of the Shrew” officially ties with “Merchant” as Shakespeare’s most problematic comedy. And it isn’t even a problem comedy. It is political incorrectness incarnate. Must an entertainment conform to the PC winds of the moment? Of course not. Can we laugh off Petruchio’s brainwashing techniques as hearty folk comedy? Maybe. But am I the only one who hasn’t yet seen a “Shrew” that didn’t stick in the craw by the time Act 4 rolls around?

In an attempt to make the narrative palatable, most “Shrews” nowadays suggest a true-love bond between Petruchio and Kate. The master-slave dynamic therefore takes on the appearance, at least, of a match of equals, the mutual attraction of two overcompensating misfits.

Nowadays, too, the average “Shrew” finds a way of delivering Kate’s Act 5 repentance (“Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper . . .”), without drawing unwanted hisses.

More than usual, even, the play pops up everywhere. Topanga Canyon’s Theatricum Botanicum continues its Vietnam-vet and biker-chick “Shrew” through Sept. 24. A Wild West “Shrew,” replicating a popular production concept seen all over the world, closed last weekend at the Kingsmen Shakespeare Festival at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks.

Shakespeare Orange County wrapped up its version last month. Through Aug. 20, Santa Ana’s Rude Guerrilla Theater Company presents its role-reversal spin, with a female Petruchio (not in male drag) wooing a male Kate.

Chief among Southern California productions, South Coast Repertory’s 1996 Rat Pack spin on the old tale won the admiration of even confirmed “Shrew”-aphobes. Would that I had seen it. My theatergoing life has been pretty rich, but it remains bereft of a “Shrew” that dissolves enough of the play’s problems--or my problems with the play--to impart that longed-for “aha!” feeling of a puzzle solved.

In Charles Marowitz’s notorious freehand 1975 adaptation titled “The Shrew,” seen in Los Angeles in 1986, Petruchio’s reign of terror destroys Kate’s personality altogether. (The destruction is literalized by an onstage rape.) The Kate we see at the end is, for all practical purposes, dead.

In other “Shrews,” among them the hourlong 1929 early talkie, Kate delivers the supplication soliloquy with a just-kidding wink. In that film, Mary Pickford plays Kate. Midway through, she overhears Douglas Fairbanks’ Petruchio talking to his dog about his brainwashing plans. She’s on to him, in other words, and exerts the upper hand, somewhat against Shakespeare’s design. But it works. No classic, this film is nonetheless quite savvy. Even its opening sequence, a close-up of a Punch-and-Judy show (talk about your horrifying sexual politics), sets up a provocative context for the coming warfare.

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“Shrew” wasn’t written in a vacuum. Shakespeare wasn’t depicting anything alien to Elizabethan culture. He pulled his narrative together from various sources, including a play--authorship unknown, possibly co-written by Shakespeare--called “The Taming of a Shrew,” not the Shrew.

A probable earlier inspiration indicates the sheer viciousness of 16th century literary shrew-taming. Around 1550 came a comic ballad titled “A Merry Jest of a Shrewd and Curst Wife Lapped in Morel’s Skin, for Her Good Behavior.” In this version, the bullying righteous husband smacks his wife as they “dally,” promising not to hit her again if she agrees “in all sports to abide my will.”

When she doesn’t obey, the husband beats his wife bloody with a wooden rod--”so many a great clout/That on the ground the blood was seen.” Then, with the wife’s wounds exposed, the husband wraps her in a salted horsehide.

“How canst thou do this villainy?” the wife entreats, amid her domestic education. How indeed. She learns her lesson and keeps her mouth shut.

Compared to this, “The Taming of the Shrew” is the soul of enlightened humanism, much as “The Merchant of Venice” represents for its time a remarkably complex stage Jew. (Surrounding that complexity, the “Merchant” plot nonetheless deploys Shylock as a villain, in tune with the flagrant prejudices of the day--a day like many more to come.) Judged against “A Merry Jest,” Shakespeare’s Petruchio and Kate are like, well, like Shakespeare’s Beatrice and Benedick, the paragons of the later, vastly greater “Much Ado About Nothing.”

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Contemporary productions of “Shrew” frequently try to take our minds off the nastiness by slapsticking it--in effect by turning it into a Punch-and-Judy show. The Kingsmen Festival’s Wild West “Shrew” (similar to a 1996 San Diego Old Globe Theatre staging) settled for sluggish gunslinger routines, saloon girls and yee-has. Other versions, such as the recent Royal Shakespeare Company touring edition, featuring Prodigy’s “Smack My Bitch Up,” steer the Marowitz course, heightening the cruelty, or at least acknowledging it.

A lot of American critics have spent half their careers apologizing for “Shrew,” laughing a little too loudly at it, in an attempt to make peace with something they know they’ll be running into pretty often in life.

In England, it’s different. “Shrew” has proven persistently popular there, as here. But most present-day London critics have officially had it with this “horrid” (Daily Telegraph), “miserable” (Observer) and “impossible to stage” (Sunday Mail) Shakespearean comedy.

The infernal conundrum about Shakespeare’s blueprint is simple: “Shrew” retains a strong hold on our collective imagination. Maybe it’s simply an easy play to “get,” reducing marital relations to martial ones.

Recently the mother of a 9-year-old girl wrote to The Times regarding the Botanicum “Shrew,” pronouncing it “vile.” Though I found director Ellen Geer’s production more shrill than vile--full of the over-exertions you find in most “Shrews”--something insidious remains about the play’s stageworthiness. Shakespeare knew his audience: He played right to it. Often, he elevated the genres he touched: “Much Ado,” “Hamlet,” others. Sometimes, he simply delivered the popular goods, as with “Shrew.”

Shakespeare’s reputation probably can survive a few people having a few problems with the implications of a few of his plays. His great works aren’t merely great theater; they’re a significant part of millions of lives, a mirror as well as a prism. They are life itself, and as Harold Bloom put it, their maker could be said to have invented our behavior.

But we could leave “Shrew” alone for a while. At least until someone has an urgent and surprising answer to the question: What to do with the old jest about the tamer and the tamed?