The “Silent” Shrew: The Taming of the Shrew in Text, Adaptation, and Performance

This dissertation writes a new performance history of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew that considers the play in a range of social, political, and historical contexts. I analyze the play’s texts, adaptations, and performances through theories of adaptation, while also deploying abject theory in response to my observation that, in order to insist on its real-world relevance in challenging injustice, the play has staged deeply unsettling epistemic and systemic violence as a way of mobilizing audiences to take action. My methodology also involves theories of the anecdote: Shrew actors have been received as enacting their notorious lives on stage, bringing the play to life, and giving it real-world efficacy. The first of this project’s four chapters addresses Shrew and its early responses, showing how nascent intertextualities in the discourse of Shrew and non-dramatic texts of the seventeenth-century gender debate resonated across modes in a way that I argue brought the debate to life. Chapter 2 explores how Katherine has been a defining role for the actress; I contend that Katherine-focused Shrews depended upon an idea that the actress was enacting her real persona, and that this made the role into a star-vehicle. Chapter 3 focuses on notorious and married couples who have played Katherine and Petruchio; I argue that anecdotes connected to leading actors were deliberately fashioned in service of transforming the play into a story about actors’ offstage relationships. The final chapter discusses how violence and the abject have been staged in radical adaptations, contending that these productions implicated audiences and demanded they acknowledge their privilege and reconsider their contributions to unequal and harmful power systems. My conclusion uses a production of an all-female Shrew I directed in 2013 in Saudi Arabia in order to reflect on what my performance history has demonstrated about Shakespeare’s play: Shrew has worked in the world as a reflection of real relationships and actual domestic violence, in turn functioning as an agent for challenging oppressive systemic structures. When audiences leave the theatre believing they have witnessed real violence, Shrew gains pressing real-world relevance, with audiences compelled to actively participate in social change.

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