Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew has been a cornerstone of the ninth grade English curriculum since before I came to work at George School thirteen years ago. This year marks my ninth year teaching the text; I taught ninth grade for my first eight years here, then took three years off to be a full-time administrator, and now I’m back teaching just one section of grade nine.
It is a pleasure to get to teach Shakespeare again, but I returned to this particular play this autumn just as the confirmation process for Supreme Court nominee (now justice) Brett Kavanaugh was dominating the headlines. I took an informal poll of my students, and some of them keep up with current events and were following the confirmation process and its controversies, but many of them were not. Fourteen-year-olds typically don’t follow politics and world news very closely, but nonetheless, the backdrop of the Kavanaugh hearings has forced me to attend to issues within the play that I often deemphasize with my students.
Directors can take Shrew in many different directions depending on how they choose to stage the physical performances of the actors. The play can feature virtually no physical violence or abuse between Katherine and Petruchio, or it can feature comic violence/abuse that amuses the audience but does not shock it, or it can feature upsetting violence/abuse. That last choice makes the play very much about a man who alters an “ill-behaved” woman’s behavior through physical torture. Because Shakespeare left us few stage directions, there is no one, true interpretation, and like all of Shakespeare’s best plays, each generation can find in the text the play that they most need.
I have always highlighted the multiple ways the play can be understood for my students, but I have tended to focus on issues of feminism and misogyny minus the concern for actual assault. The Bard has left us many clues that the play isn’t meant to be understood superficially, but instead many of the characters’ utterances are ironic, and Katherine’s grand final speech is best when delivered archly. I work with my students to help them understand that the play actually derides the idea that husbands can control their wives. We should ultimately come to believe that Katherine, the shrew of the play’s title, is the most interesting and admirable character in the drama. She isn’t a conformist, she’s courageous, and she’s smarter than everyone around her.
But this year the play feels different. The hinted-at abuse in the play (e.g. Petruchio starves Kate and denies her sleep. Petruchio emotionally abuses her by keeping her away from her family.) can’t be so easily ignored or brushed aside as “just comedy” during a national debate about the responsibility a man bears for drunken sexual assault. I continue to use the American Conservatory Theater’s wonderful 1976 production of the play as the go-to video to share with the class as we grapple with the text, but it is a performance full of broad physical comedy and slapstick violence, and I feel uneasy making excuses for that violence as we watch it. (In truth, I know of no better performance to use as a teaching tool with this play, and the director William Ball made many interesting choices that lead to great discussions in class. The moment in Act 2 when the actress portraying Kate ogles Petruchio’s derriere is divine.) The ACT production carefully balances the comic violence between Kate and Petruchio; she gives as good as she gets, so the audience doesn’t feel like it is witnessing a vulgar display of domestic violence.
My students aren’t naive, though. When we watched the ACT video of Petruchio forcing his first kiss on Katherine in Act 2 (“And kiss me, Kate.”), students called out that the kiss was non-consensual! How right they are, and how uncomfortable it feels to grapple with this text in 2018. While earlier audiences might have accepted the logic that Kate, through her “curst and shrewd” behavior was somehow deserving of this forced kiss (if it leads to a good marriage, anyway), our adolescents today are trained to reject those stereotyped gender roles. Candidly, we hope that they would report such a forced kiss in our community to a trusted adult.
Is Shrew becoming, like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a corner of the canon that is just so dangerously close to radioactive topics that we will have to lay it down and stop teaching it? Are we less capable of processing and deciphering satirical content today? There really are no “safe” Shakespeare plays, after all. Every day in class I have to make chancy decisions regarding the sexual innuendos and double entendres in the play. Do I point each one out to my students and risk a swift descent into giggles and loss of focus? (There are no fewer than three penis jokes in Act 3 scene 1 alone!)
For me, the correct answer is to take the plunge, teach the risky text, and address the issues head on. Expect maturity and sophistication from the students, and make class a safe place to discuss adult topics. High school is a bridge between childhood and adulthood, and ninth grade is a bridge between middle school and high school. I’m proud that we set the tone by teaching Shrew in the fall, and I’m not ducking the ugly side of the play this year.
[And if you’ll excuse the brief commercial message: George School is now in its third year of collaboration with The Philadelphia Shakespeare Theatre, and we’ll be welcoming their actors to our campus for a weeklong residency later this month. They take over teaching the entire ninth grade for a week and teach the play from the performing artist’s perspective. I’m proud that we teach the play two ways: as a text in an English class, and as a living script for the theater.]
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