Robert Monkversion 1.1

Gestures Toward Change: class and gender reorganization in The Taming of the Shrew

In her article entitled "Renaissance Family Politics," Karen Newman focuses on gender in The Taming of the Shrew as the primary challenge to patriarchal authority. While the various forms of gender-instability in the play are an important aspect of its capacity to motivate social change, gender can be seen as one element of a more thoroughgoing critique that deploys gender and class subversion in undermining patriarchal authority at its core: the illusion of uncomplicated subjectivity. Newman identifies performativity and language as the two primary means by which women escape total subjugation in The Shrew. But the text itself does not make any clear distinction between the use of language and performativity to liberate women, as opposed to their use in creating an unusual class fluidity. Language and performativity ultimately pose a challenge to hierarchized subjectivity along multiple axes, among which are class and gender. This is not to change the direction of Newman's thesis at all, for the illusion of subjectivity is at the heart of any notion of authority and is therefore the basis on which society orders gender as well as class hierarchies. I only call for an opening out of linguistic and performative strategies to multiplied categories of resistance. (Indeed, by limiting myself here to class and gender, I may be imposing modern categories on a text whose fronts of power and resistance are characterized not by categories at all, but by a continuum of interrelated social formations.)
As I said, Newman emphasizes the performative and the linguistic strategies of scenes and characters in Shakespeare's text to open it up to the possibility of social change. She begins by situating it within a historical framework which also involves performance: the case of an early seventeenth-century tanner, one Rosyer, whose wife embarrasses both him and herself by transgressing her subordinate gender position and beating him for drunkenness and degeneracy. Both are punished by their community with the spectacle of a public reenactment of their eccentric behavior. In the legal proceedings that Rosyer brings against his neighbors, his wife remains nameless and voiceless. This 'scene' from the historical record makes The Shrew seem socially relevant and introduces the themes of performance and language. (pp. 35-6)
Newman then contrasts the gender ambiguity of Shakespeare's text with that of Rosyer's case, in which gender separation is rigidly maintained at the expense of the silenced woman. The Shrew figures women as the location of language from which male authority takes its cue.

Significantly, Sly is only convinced of his lordly identity when he is told of his "wife." ... By enacting Sly's identity as a lord through his wife's social and sexual (if deferred) submission, the induction suggests ironically how in this androcentric culture men depended on women to authorize their sexual and social masculine identities. [p. 38]

As Newman says, this origination of authority in gendered power relationships was coded in contemporary behavior hand-books and in the public discourse generally. What distinguishes The Shrew as a text from its contemporaries is its mode of performative representation. Thus, the performance of the 'wife' role by the lord's male page makes the power-relation between lord and 'lady' unnatural and calls the very structure of the relationship into question. Furthermore, Since the Induction is structured in the text as 'more real' than all that is performed by Kate, this role-playing cannot help but call attention to the several layers of gender role-playing that later go into the character of Kate, the Shrew, who was also played by a young man (pp. 37; 49-50). Like a hall of mirrors, the Induction and the body of The Shrew reflect one another's artifice ‹ male actors playing female characters who work either to structure or subvert patriarchal authority ‹ in a way that ultimately questions the unperformed status even of the audience.
So much for Newman's notion of performativity and its role in women's resistance. I said language was the other means by which women seem to her to have successfully resisted in The Shrew. She understands Kate's resistance to patriarchy to begin in ironic witticism and end in mimeticism. The latter is a concept Newman borrows from Luce Irigaray denoting, in the case of a woman, a process by which she tries

to recover the place of her exploitation by language, without allowing herself to be simply reduced to it. It is to resubmit herself...to ideas ‹ notably about her ‹ elaborated in and through a masculine logic, but to "bring out" by an effect of playful repetition what was to remain hidden: the recovery of a possible operation of the feminine in language. It is also to unveil the fact that if women mime so well they are not simply reabsorbed in this function. They also remain elsewhere. [p. 47]

Newman characterizes Kate's particular mimeticism as akin to a patient of Freud's who "pressed her dress to her body with one hand (as the woman) while trying to tear it off with the other (as the man)"(p. 45). The text that Kate must perform after being ostensibly tamed in the play's conclusion has the same bisexual tension as Freud's patient. In content it proclaims itself as emanating from a woman while in character and authority it belongs properly to a man (p. 48). Mimeticism, as the linguistic mode by which women resist patriarchy, is closely involved in performativity, since its basic character lies in borrowing the linguistic mask and persona of another ‹ the authoritative male. Newman's use of Freud's image of the dress neither worn nor discarded is apt, for mimeticism is ultimately a kind of discursive transvestism.
Transvestism, in the literal sense of changing costume, and in the figurative sense of 'wearing' the discourse of another is thus at the core of Newman's analysis as I understand it. But it is neither insignificant nor right that the word 'transvestism' typically has meaning for us in the axis of gender, and not class (or race, or nationality, or occupation, or...). The tendency to conceive transvestism as exclusively gender-oriented seems to have affected Newman's essay, whether merely narrowing its focus to something practicable or actually preventing it from more broadly ranging discoveries about the limitations and contingencies of subjectivity. Whichever is the case, I now venture to extend her performative-linguistic interpretation to the axis of class and to situate it within the larger project of challenging subjectivity itself.
Newman is right to emphasize the patriarchal structuring of the moment when Sly becomes convinced of his own lordship. However, the other linguistic measures brought to bear on his former identity are not unimportant. The page's address of Sly as husband is the critical breaking point in Sly's subjective solidity, but it could not have dissolved his identity all on its own. That final breaking point is preceded by sixty-seven lines of interchange in which Sly is addressed as "your honor", "lordship", and continually apprised of his estate and all that it has to offer: fine food, clothes, furniture, land, hawks, hounds, paintings, and music (Ind.2.1-60). And the servants present it all in such a way that it appears to require only the act of will and they appear before him:

LORD: Wilt thou have music? Hark, Apollo plays, MUSIC
And twenty caged nightingales do sing.
...
Or wilt thou ride? Thy horses shall be trapp'd,
Their harness studded all with gold and pearl. [Ind.2.30-45]

Sly's new identity, then, is built up on the several layers of transvestism, material surroundings, linguistic address, and, finally, the patriarchal ordering of gender relations on which Newman focuses. His identity is arbitrary, contingent on what surrounds him and the way in which people recognize authority in him.
It is in this light that one's subjectivity, at least in The Shrew, may be seen as predicated on what vocabularies surrounding people use and on the mode of their address. Once one's self-authority (subjectivity) is in this way laid bare to its own total contingency on what and how others speak, any notion of having a legitimate claim to social authority is fundamentally untenable. Sly is as fit to play lord as is the lord. Authority is arbitrary and its attending hierarchies of class and gender have no solid foundation.
I have already discussed elsewhere the ways in which class fluidity plays in the taming narrative itself (Response Journal, Week 2). Suffice it to say here that Petruchio's deployment of class-marked language, his mode of address, and class-marked material compulsion and withholding are all nicely prefigured in the Induction. But there are other instances of class transvestism. Lucentio and Tranio exchange clothing and roles, Tranio quite seamlessly assuming the office of nobleman. Indeed, the only concern that Lucentio seems to have for his abilities involves appearance:

Basta, content thee, for I have it full.
We have not yet been seen in any house,
Nor can we be distinguish'd by our faces
For man or master. Then it follows thus:
Thou shalt be master, Tranio, in my stead;
Keep house and port and servants, as I should. [1.1.198-203]

They have never been seen otherwise than they present themselves, and there is nothing in their faces to mark their 'true' class. Hortensio's transformation into school-teacher and the pedant's transformation into venerable father (and venerable father's consequent transformation into criminal) are all similar examples of this kind of easy class transvestism.
All these transformations are interesting, but they become significant only when considered in light of the Induction scenes. These characters in flux have all already been presented to lord, Sly, and theater audience as generic actors. In the body of The Shrew, their 'true' identities are already falsified, even prior to their transformations. But if their true identity lies in actor-hood, it is never recovered, for the secondary reality of the play-within-the-play usurps the representative authority of the Induction, foreclosing closure and trapping the characters in their respective states of flux.
The Shrew in its entirety is, in Newman's term, "missing frames"(p. 48). Shakespeare never contains the fiction of Kate's taming within the 'reality' of the Induction. In the Induction, the real lord is concerned with containing the mirth and eccentricity that accompany Sly's transformation, and he fails. Of his nascent jest, the lord says:

It will be pastime passing excellent,
If it be husbanded with modesty. [ind.1.67-68]

And again, some lines later:

And how my men will stay themselves from laughter
When they do homage to this simple peasant.
I'll in to counsel them; haply my presence
May well abate the over-merry spleen,
Which otherwise would grow into extremes. [ind.1.134-138]

Facially, this concern for containment involves merely the successful deceiving of Christopher Sly. Yet its repetition and the anxiety about "extremes" point to more deeply invested interests.
Whatever his own personal intentions, the lord's effort at containment becomes post facto more central to the play's meaning than merely the success of a prank. Reality itself is at stake. Shakespeare never recovers for us the layer of reality in which the Induction takes place. The gender and class fluidity to which the lord of the Induction gave freedom cannot be reigned in again at the end and framed. Lack of containment is expressed even in the forced rhyme of the play's last couplet:

HORTENSIO: Now go thy ways, thou has tam'd a curst shrow.
LUCENTIO: 'Tis a wonder, by your leave, she will be tam'd so.

The 'oo' of Shrew is by no means hard to rhyme, and the content of this couplet, unless it be precisely in its ironic over-determination, is not so profound that we can imagine Shakespeare settling for a half-rhyme merely for its sake. No, the conclusion does not rhyme because the taming does not ring true. We are left with the appearance of containment but with a reality most unsettled.
Of course Newman's focus on women's liberation parallel's The Shrew's own concentration on the story of Kate. But the structuring narratives of flux and containment that pervade apply equally to class and gender in the play. The reason for this is that both are a function of subjectivity. They are set in flux in The Shrew because subjectivity is set in flux in The Shrew. The radical identity shifts of Kate and Sly reveal the liability of the subjective self to the language, address, and material conditions of one's immediate (as opposed to historical) surroundings. The subject is constructed not only through time, but in each and every moment of its interaction with the world.

Bibliography

Newman, Karen, Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama
"Renaissance Family Politics"
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, c1991.

Monk, Robert, "Response Journal: Week 2: The Taming of the Shrew"
via email monk@sccs.swarthmore.edu

Scraps

In this sense, the layering of reality that structures the play is totally subverted. The Induction and the body of the play question each other's naturalness (status as unperformed) as in the infinitely receding re-presentations of facing mirrors. The meta-theater of the Induction calls attention to the un-reality of what is already structured as unreal in the body. The unreal play-within-the-play can in turn be said to challenge the order of the Induction, since our consciousness of artifice in the male playing Kate reflects on Sly's own artificial status.

The normally hidden presence of a male actor behind the mask of a female character becomes obvious to the audience through the intensified consciousness of costume introduced in the Induction. Kate's final speech cannot be understood to signify the simple subjugation of a subversive woman. The fact of its being performed by a man in a play where role-playing is fore-grounded raises two complications. It distances the character of Kate from what Kate says, and it suggests that gender itself has a role-played quality to it (pp. 49-50).