Sorry I didn't blog on Friday. I woke up in the middle of the night Thursday with what I think was food poisoning and afterwards slept through essentially the whole of Friday. Anyways...My individual Shakespeare play is "Taming of the Shrew". This is one of the Bard's plays that I've known the generals of the story for years, but have never actually read it, so I'm pretty excited to dive into it.
(Warning- this play may cause my slightly masked feminism to show its true colors)
Something that attracted me to this play/story what the bitterness of Katherina. In general I know that I can be/have been/sometimes still am a bitter and jaded person, but what do you know, my husband helped me let go and rid myself of most of that.
While doing some surface research I came across an article called "Taming of the Shrew: Shakespeare's Mirror of Marriage" by Coppelia Kahn. This gives an interesting perspective on the roles of each partner in the marriage relationship and how Kate learns to become submissive to her husband's will. And being in such a feminist era, this makes my female brain, say, "Excuse me? I don't think so." So I'd like to take a closer look at how Shakespeare portrays marriage while reading the play to see if he's encouraging women to be more submissive or telling them to stop being puppets.
While looking over the text I see that along with the standard five acts, there is a prologue. I don't know why he couldn't just make it six acts. I guess that the actual play is being performed for the characters in the prologue and they say it's a history. The prologue is the only part of the play, as far as I can tell that involves the character's observing the play, so I don't really know why they are in there at all.
"Taming of the Shrew" is a comedy, and generally I prefer tragedies over comedies, simply because romantic interests and drama and love stories don't really interest me. But I do know that Shakespeare can be absolutely hilarious, so that in and of itself makes up for the "mushy-gushy", someone-please-strangle-me stuff that is the actual plot. I'm pretty positive "Taming of the Shrew won't disappoint when it comes to humor, and I'm also hoping that because Kate is a "shrew" that the love aspect of it will be more appealing to me.
Hope you're feeling better.. This sounds like a really interesting play! Good luck with the marriage angle, hopefully Shakespeare is on our side:)
ReplyDeleteThere is a lot of controversy as to what Shakespeare was actually saying about women and marriage in this play. Hopefully you will be able to shed a little more light on the subject with your close reading. Do you think that your "slightly masked feminism" will be a strong bias while reading? Maybe you could compare his portrayals of women/marriage from the plays we have read.
ReplyDeleteOh dear! I hope that you are feeling better too. I got food poisoning once in Argentina... nasty stuff. I feel for you. I just have one honest, motive-devoid question (and maybe you will be able to help me out with this as you unravel all the parts of the play): Do you think that Shakespeare is a chauvinist?
ReplyDeleteSorry I took so long to get back to y'all.
ReplyDeleteCassandra: I'm not a huge bra-burning, man hating feminist. And I think women who are, are ridiculous and need to calm down. I think the way I feel about women is pretty complicated. I kind of don't like them as a whole. But I suppose it depends on the kind of woman an individual is. For example, the women in "Love's Labour's Lost" make me crazy. I feel like they are too manipulative and they do it for fun. Actually, I feel that way about majority of the women portrayed by Shakespeare that I know a good deal about (Juliet, Ophelia are two others that I can't stand). I'm enjoying "Taming of the Shrew" because even though Kate is a shrew, she has such an intensity of character that I don't want to skip over her lines when they come up.
Eric: I don't think that Shakespeare was a chauvinist. I think he had a lot of strong female characters (and a lot of weak minded, flat ones too). Something that probably really influenced this was probably having the main power of the state being the Queen. Having a strong woman ruling the country, instead of a man must have made at least a slight difference in the portrayal of women. I also think that Shakespeare tends to side with his women characters more than the men sometimes (like Prof. Burton said in class today).