They say Shakespeare was born on April 23 or April 26, or sometime in April, but my own close look at the Bard began a bit earlier, when I poked through my old college papers and became nostalgic for university days. If only I could catch those boats I missed in my penny-pinched youth, I thought. Back then, a student of literature could convince herself she had plenty of time to take up a master’s degree after a few years of earning a living. But earning a living seems to take a lifetime, and meanwhile an education in literature is being replaced by a degree market. If the gloomiest reports are true, “no one” reads the texts any more, they just read summaries and source their essays from somewhere.
I still hope those reports are not true, but in any case no one can stop an old fogey from taking up self-education. There are online courses now, we can hear lectures on Youtube, scholarly papers are up on websites to enlighten us all, there’s a fat Shakespeare Commentaries by a Prof. Gervinus on our shelves, and I have the plays themselves right here.
The Bard himself was self-educated, and look how well he has done. So this year, my Year of the Bard, I plan to read every play and sonnet written by Shakespeare, because so far in my reading career I seem only to have repeatedly studied about a dozen plays. After reading some of the respectable works for a start, I plunged right into The Taming of the Shrew.
If a woman reader is to relish this play without being offended by its misogyny, she’ll have to do some cherry-picking and sidestepping, but don’t we do that even with holy scripture? Why shouldn’t we have our way with Shakespeare? And is the play all that offensive? With its sappy lovers, impudent servants, and quick-witted women, Taming is often just plain funny or hilariously filthy.
The “shrew” is Katherine, the outspoken, sharp-tongued elder daughter of a wealthy merchant. Bianca is her younger, milder sister. How do we know one sister is mild and the other wild? Well, the fortune hunters hanging around them say so, if we wish to believe them.
Never mind how the character is played by Elizabeth Taylor and her orange-tanned cleavage, Shakespeare’s Katherine does not shriek, she skewers with her words. Saddled as she is with a goody-two-shoes sister, she is probably labelled the “curst” one simply for not suffering
fools. Her father seems a fair man, educating and indulging his daughters equally, and he knows that unless he rules that the elder must marry first, Katherine will be overlooked. Petruchio is the first man rough and ready enough to match her. He never even notices the younger sister but declares the elder his “bonny Kate ... the prettiest Kate in Christendom.”
Along with this flattery, they exchange insults and puns that we can’t reprint in a nice family newspaper, all refreshingly tart after Bianca’s dialogues with her lovers. But there is really no good girl versus bad girl to be found here. Bianca and Katherine are sisters in every way. Both have a gift for words, both refuse to marry men they cannot respect, and both contain a kernel of stubbornness that will keep them safe and prosperous.
As for the reader, let’s just skip Katherine’s last speech on wifely obedience and we can all go home happy.
(Latha is a writer and editor. Read her work at lathaanantharaman.blogspot.com. You can write to her at anantharaman.bookwise@gmail.com)
