Monday, June 27, 2016
Is ‘Shrew’ Worth Taming? Female Directors Keep Trying
NYTimes.com: The director Julie Taymor was on a quiet rooftop in Shanghai late one recent Saturday night, talking on the phone. She was in China with “The Lion King,” but the topic of conversation was “The Taming of the Shrew.”
It’s a play she relishes, partly because she sees it as being about a profound love and partly because Shakespeare put at its center not the alluring Bianca, a young woman with a queue of eager suitors, but Bianca’s older sister, Kate, who is prickly and brilliant, and whom no man will have.
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2 comments:
I absolutely LOVE Shakespeare's works, but even I have to agree with everyone who says this show, especially the last scene, is degrading to women. But I think, along with some others, that this show is the perfect piece to bring to light the issues that existed with the treatment of women and have remained even to this day. When I first saw this piece, I was appalled at the way Kate was treated by Petruchio, but looking back at my reaction, I think this is what Shakespeare might have intended. Shakespeare doesn’t baby the audience when it comes to the way Kate’s treated; instead, he puts it out in the open with no semblance of hiding it, so that it makes you ashamed to watch it. This show reveals to the audience that which might have seemed normal, and makes people reflect on their actions. I am conflicted in my opinion of the best presentation of the play. Attempts to lessen the shows blatant degradation of women are a way to present the show to more modern audiences, but at the same time, it takes away from the message of the show, which although was meant to be a comedy, and does achieve that on a certain level, reveals a terrible truth about society. We can never know what Shakespeare was going for when he wrote the show, but I think it is important to look at the show from many different angles, and disregarding the show for what it says may not be the best way to approach it. As one of my teachers puts it, you may not have to like or agree to what someone is saying, but there is always a lesson you can take from it.
Both sides of the argument presented in this article are understandable to me. On one hand, Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew is a beautiful piece of dramatic literature which, as Julie Taymore points out in the beginning of the article, touches and even focuses on subjects like "un-marriable" women, which, at the time, were not subjects that were regarded as important or even spoken publicly about. On the other hand, however, it is easy to see the ending of The Taming of the Shrew as no better than any other play or literature of the time that could not go without sexist situations like Kate's admission that a wife should stay loyal and somewhat "under" her husband. To me, while yes, these comments are obviously degrading to women, I think that having strong female characters like Kate did lay the path for strong female protagonists to be written in years after. The way of fixing this issue through have single-sex productions of Shakespeare's play sheds a new light on what was or may have been originally sexist writing. As a theatre student at an all-girls school, all of our productions solely have female actors, and I think in many ways, this is beneficial. It allows student actors to explore what it takes to play roles of the opposite gender, it allows costumers to explore new ways of making females look like males, etc. It also allows our audiences to look at characters more than actors; if every person onstage is of the same gender, then there is nothing left to notice than the characters and their stories that the production strives to bring alive.
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