Taming of the Shrew AO5 Flashcards
(21 cards)
Friedman
‘a metadrama designed to confuse and later clarify the relation between social roles and theatricality’
Garner - Domination
The play contains a ‘pervasive anxiety and need to dominate and subject’
Bloom - Rhetorical War
‘The rhetorical war begins as a mutual sexual provocation’
George Bernard Shaw on Petruchio
“coarse, thick-skinned, money hunter, who sets to work to tame his wife exactly as brutal people tame animals or children - that is, by breaking their spirit by domineering cruelty.”
George Bernard Shaw on the last scene
“no man with any decency can sit it out in the company of a woman without being extremely ashamed of the lord-of-creation moral implied in the wager and the speech put into the woman’s own mouth.”
Sara Reimers - Racism and Misogyny
“The universality ascribed to England’s national poet renders innocuous the seams of racism and misogyny which run through his works.”
Leah Marcus - infantilization
Casting a woman in a physically demanding role rejects the infantilization of female performers and forces the audience to confront the fact that men’s violence towards women is all too common in our society
Sara Reimers - domination violence
Locating violence only in physical injury, denies the inherent violence of domination itself.
Sara Reimers - wedding shame
Katherine’s shame does not fundamentally lie in Petruchio’s behaviour but in her community’s interpretation of that behaviour.
Clara Sigmon - Gender Roles
In Elizabethan England, social constructs of gender upheld that women were, by natural law or divine will, physically weak, mentally enfeebled, subdued, obedient, chaste, beautiful, gracious, and domestic.
Men were encouraged to be active and competitive, to move through the world with a sort of sexual, intellectual, physical, emotional, and economic dominance by which they could both produce a male heir and provide for their household.
Clara Sigmon - Kate’s Rage
Kate rages against a society which normalises the objectification and oppression of women.
Kate refuses to be an object to be desired and pursued by Petruchio and insists upon her active vocal participation in courtship in a taboo preservation of her autonomy and sexual desire.
Clara Sigmon - Creation of norms
The Induction serves as a sort of creation myth for the ways in which social constructs are established and normalised.
Clara Sigmon - Male insecurity
Men are or naturally or completely do infant over women, because their sense of dominance depends on whether or not women validate their sense of dominance by submitting to them.
Amy Smith - Kate and Petruchio’s dimension
And the rapid-fire puns and sexual invitations and rejections combine to form a scene in which there is no dear winner or loser but rather a series of sexually charged power plays between mutually desiring partners
Theresa Kemp - Katherine’s final speech
Katherine’s final speech ventriloquizes the patriarchal party line on wifely submission, perfectly articulating the gender stereotypes justifying male dominance
Clara Sigmon - Performativity of social constructs
Shakespeare suggests that even those who seem to give testament to the validity of gender constructs are merely performing, either because of social pressure or subversively, but certainly not by nature.
It is significant that Kate’s final speech..is the first time that Kate is heard and respected by all the characters in the play, emphasising the power which her mastery of language and performance has afforded.
Amanda Fawcett - fragility of gender roles
Kate’s exaggerated submission, Bianca’s femininity, and Petruchio’s dominance all reveal the inherent instability of gendered roles and hierarchies due to their performative nature.
Shapiro - Kate’s speech
Kate’s final speech is the final incarnation of an elaborately but transparently constructed ideal of upper-class femininity: that is to say, a doubly theatrical replication of a socially generated role.
Amanda Fawcett - Challenging norms
While The Taming of the Shrew does not explicitly challenge patriarchy, the play’s metatheatrical performance of patriarchal systems… reveals the systems as inherently unstable and unnatural.
The Taming of the Shrew neither condemns nor supports its inherent sexisms; rather, it utilizes a complex depiction of gender to challenge patriarchal constructions… and converse with the various tensions that threatened the social world of the early modern period.
Amanda Fawcett - Induction
The Induction literally sets the stage for a play dependent on the actors’ productions of gender and the characters’ abilities to create gender identity through performance.
Amanda Fawcett - Elizabethan society
The play’s double-layered dialogue reveals the artifice of power structures that early-modern England feared to lose.
