|
COPYRIGHT 2004 University of Texas at Austin (University of Texas Press)
When Paulina boldly demands that he acknowledge the newborn Perdita as his child, Leontes vilifies her as both shrew and witch who shames her husband and threatens social order. Antigonus is said to be "woman-tir'd" or hen-pecked, "unroosted" by his "Dame Partlet" and "worthy to be hang'd" for "not control[ing] her tongue." Paulina herself is an "audacious lady," a "mankind witch," a "callet / Of boundless tongue, who late hath beat her husband, / And now baits me," and a "gross hag." Finally, Leontes threatens her with a witch's death: "I'll ha' thee burnt." (1) The seeming irrationality of this name-calling is not merely a register of Leontes' misogyny and hysterical jealousy. For early moderns, these categories of female deviance (shrew, mannish diabolist, scold or callet, hag or witch) were conceptually rooted in a scheme of moral and social inversions that overlapped and often converged. Catherine Belsey has shown how in Tudor and Stuart drama transgressive (i.e., "unwomanly") women are demonized; and how, conversely, contemporary women actually convicted of witchcraft were characterized as unwomanly in appearance and demeanor--especially in their volubility (184-91). While these patterns are striking in later tragedies like Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra, and in numerous Jacobean witch-plays, (2) they are also prominent in Shakespeare's earliest works. The Ephesian women of The Comedy of Errors are perceived as socially anomalous and consequently "are termed, with mounting anxiety and violence, siren, witch, sorceress and devil" (Roberts, 198). Witchcraft is intertwined with both gender transgression and treason in the earliest history plays, most obviously through Joan la Pucelle and Margery Jourdain (1, 2 Henry VI) and in the witchcraft metaphors and accusations of witchcraft in 3 Henry VI and Richard III (see Howard and Rackin; Willis, ch. 6; Cox, "Devils and Power," 57-64). My argument here is that another early play, The Taming of the Shrew, also exploits these linkages by representing Katherina through the Elizabethan cultural practices, the popular literary and dramatic types, and the political and theological discourses that identified scolds or shrews with witches. The play engages with these ideological manifestations of patriarchy in such a way, however, as to expose their internal contradictions and thus destabilize the logic of its patriarchally contrived ending. For the capricious, bluff Veronese who's "come to wive it wealthily" is--no less than the "shrewd and froward" Katherina Minola--inscribed within the discourse of demonology--its types, categories, and motifs. Petruchio is therefore the unwitting agent of his own system's failure.
Given the prominence of the unruly woman-witch nexus in so many of Shakespeare's other plays, it is odd that recent historicized feminist readings of The Shrew, like those of Lynda Boose which focus ("outside the text") on the early-modern "obsession with taming unruly women" ("Husbandry," 196), have not considered it. While Boose's emphasis on the gendering of antisocial crime and punishment has produced important insights into the cultural construction of scolds and has illuminated some of "the realities that defined the lives of sixteenth-century 'shrews'" ("Scolding," 181), the scold or shrew cannot stand alone as the "veritable prototype of the female offender in this era" ("Scolding," 185), for the ultimate embodiment of female unruliness was the witch, whose early-modern archetypal identity was simultaneously being constructed by the same cultural practices and discourses that helped produce "shrews" and "scolds."
As in Shakespeare's plays, so in Elizabethan culture generally, the categories "shrew" and "witch" were often conflated. An unruly woman's social "disorderliness," popular wisdom held, "led her into the evil arts of witchcraft" (Davis, 124-25). Indeed, accusations of witchcraft were aimed not at actual village sorceresses, who were largely tolerated, but at "inassimilable women," including spinsters, widows, prostitutes, and obstreperous wives (Comensoli, 49). The skeptic Reginald Scot was aware of this, averring that the "cheefe fault" of supposed witches "is that they are scolds" (Discoverie of Witchcraft [1584], 2.10; 50). (3) Punishments for lesser crimes of witchcraft, in the form of ritualized public humiliation, sometimes overlapped with those for other female transgressions, thus confirming their perceived affinity. (4) In Elizabethan court proceedings, the crimes of witchcraft and scolding were sometimes explicitly connected (Underdown, 120), and cucking stools--built and maintained by manorial leet juries or by town juries or parishes (Underdown, 123-26)--were, according to Jean E. Howard, "used to discipline scolds, shrews, and witches" alike (137). A vividly horrific symbol of this coalescence is a seventeenth-century metal "brank" or gag for punishing shrews, called the "Witches Bridle" (Hartwig, 290, 294n). (5)
These common attitudes and social practices were not bereft of learned endorsement; in fact, the theme of Stuart Clark's recent magisterial study, Thinking with Demons, is that early-modern witchcraft beliefs were fully coherent with--were actually part of--mainstream intellectual discourses: science, historiography, politics, and religion. Especially important was Reformation theology's explicit strengthening of the well-established popular connection between shrewishness and witchcraft. The notorious Catholic demonological handbook, Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger's Malleus Maleficarum, had argued in 1486 that "truly the most powerful cause which contributes to the increase of witches is the woeful rivalry between married folk and unmarried women and men" (45), citing among others Jason's shrewish wife and the witch Medea. Erasmus equated witches with bad wives, too, but among Protestant writers demonology was often integral to their discussions of marriage, an institution to which they gave new value (Brauner, 38-40). Martin Luther, for example, articulated his theories of female witchcraft squarely in the context of his theology of marriage, and directly explored the analogy between witches and froward wives who rebelled against the God-given order within the family. In effect, the Reformation significantly redefined witchcraft itself as more insidious and threatening than ever; veering from the attack on magical practices as such, it instead censured female behavior:
The choice women made of whether or not to become a witch receives more emphasis than it did in the Malleus.... In Protestant thought, women must fight the Devil every day through the exercise of their own free will. The power of free will in women, however, remains as ambiguous as in orthodox Catholic thought. While women, like men, possess free will, they possess less reason; they are therefore more liable to sin than men. From this emerges a dangerous double image of woman, namely that the pious housewife, who behaves submissively, might only be disguising her true nature as a passionate witch. And, furthermore, the witch, now defined as the unruly wife, becomes a potential member of every Christian family. (Brauner, 40-41)
Widely expressed by Puritan theologians, the "very real masculine fear that deep down all wives are potential witches" was clearly still alive during the Salem witch-trials, when a certain William Good (reveling no doubt in his fortuitous surname) told one of the judges that "he was afraid that [his wife Sarah] either was a witch or would be one very quickly" because of "her bad carriage to him." (6) This anxiety is one component, I think, in what Coppelia Kahn calls the "disparity between the extent and nature of Kate's 'shrewish' behaviour and the male characters' [exaggerated] perceptions of it" (108); for their perceptions and fears are exactly those of Master Good, and they express them by identifying Katherina with the devil. In a typical matrimonial handbook, Ercole and Torquato Tasso's Of Marriage and Wiving (English trans., 1599), we are told that shrews "will neither say nor doo any thing but all by contraries, such and so vile is their perverse and Diabolicall nature." Citing this text along with many similar ones, Stuart Clark concludes that shrews, scolds, and viragos were, by virtue of their inversion of the natural order, universally considered "demonic," a fact that "made shrew-taming an analogue of counter-witchcraft; in England it was, indeed, habitual to use the word 'charm' when referring to it." (7) Shakespeare's familiarity with this analogy is obvious in Tranio's claim that Petruchio teaches how "To tame a shrew and charm her chattering tongue" (4.2.58), and the play's representation of Katherina as a shrew-witch is, as we shall see, consistently developed from the opening scene onwards.
Despite the demonization of Katherina and the facile validation of male dominance that her submissive recantation of witch-like "foul contending rebel[lion]" (5.2.159) seems to promise, the play does not enable an unproblematic patriarchal appropriation. The obstacle lies in the very agent of patriarchy itself: the shrew-taming, witch-charming Petruchio, whose characterization is informed by the late medieval stage-devil and Vice-figure, and by comic devils of tales and plays who marry shrews. Virtually all his behavior is "perverse" and "by contraries," and hence characteristically demonic: his inversions of social and sacred ritual as he woos and weds, the hellish "hurly" of his country household, the perverse regimen of his "taming school." This fundamental contradiction, whereby Petruchio deploys demonic inversions to mock, mirror, and thus cure Katherina's witch-like contraventions of patriarchal norms, undermines the very orthodoxies upon which his enterprise rests, as well as the romantic-comic (and hence patriarchal) end toward which he attempts to steer the play's conclusion. To recognize Petruchio as a devil-patriarch who "charms" a shrew-witch is, furthermore, to discover a bewitched text that lays bare the contradictions inherent in the fundamental cultural discourses and practices based on categorical binaries like "godlike king" versus "demonic rebel" and "godlike husband" versus "demonic shrew." Finally, seeing The Shrew as "bewitched" enables a historicized reading that both "save[s] this play from its own ending" and supplants our "comic desire" with a nobler yearning. (8) The opening sequence of the play, by portraying both Katherina and Petruchio as demonic, lays the groundwork for such a reading.
I
To the men around her, Katherina epitomizes the witch-like shrew who "will neither say nor doo any thing but all by contraries, such and so vile is [her] perverse and Diabolicall nature." No fewer than six times in the very first scene, they label Katherina's unruly behavior demonic or hellish. When Baptista invites Gremio and Hortensio to court her, Hortensio mocks, "No mates for you / Unless you were of gentler, milder mould" (1.1.56-60). Katherina's riposte indicates that marriage--to Hortensio, at least--would only convert her from an unmarried shrew to a married scold:
Iwis it [marriage] is not halfway to her heart-- But if it were, doubt not her care should be To comb your noddle with a three-legged stool And paint your face and use you like a fool. (1.1.61-5)
This image of domestic disorder, with its homely (and therefore disquieting) detail of the stool, evokes Hortensio's exclamation, "From all such devils, good Lord deliver us!" Adapted from the Litany (Oliver, 1.1.66n) and so heightening the genuine horror beneath the jeer, this response is seconded in Gremio's anxiously comic antiphon, "And me too, good Lord!" (66-67). A few lines later Gremio asks why Baptista will "mew [Bianca] up ... for this fiend of hell" (87-88) and upon Katherina's departure wishes that she "may go to the devil's dam!" (105), the proverbial archetype of shrews (de Bruyn, 132), thought worse than the devil himself (Oliver, 1.1.105n; cf. Errors 4.3.44-47). Hortensio then proposes finding a husband for Katherina to clear their way to Bianca:
GREMIO. A husband? A devil! HORTENSIO. I say a husband. GREMIO. I say a devil. Think'st thou, Hortensio, though her father be very rich, any man is so very a fool to be married to hell? (1.1.118-21)
According to some demonologists, a witch took the devil as her husband or lover (Clark, Thinking, 132); here Gremio alludes to the related popular motif of devils marrying shrews, whose importance we'll examine below.
Katherina's demonization continues in absentia in the second scene, where she is three times described as curst, signifying her perverse crossness, but also linking her with the overweening creature who first deserved God's curse. (A similar association is conveyed by the word shrew itself, which as a verb means "to curse.") Her epithet "Katherine the curst" (1.2.122, 123) suggests a kind of diabolic regality, and she reappears in the third scene tormenting and striking the manacled Bianca as her "bondmaid and ... slave," for which Baptista calls her a "hilding of a devilish spirit" (2.1.2, 26). Katherina's unwarranted violence and anger here are born of "envy" (18), a typical motive in the witch's profile, and the malicious "revenge" that she vehemently threatens (28, 36) confirms her kinship with typical witch-figures like the malefic First Witch in Macbeth: denied chestnuts, she will vengefully torment the denier's sailor-husband out of all proportion to the offence given (1.2.3-25; see also Willis, 30-32; King James VI and I, Daemonologie, 43). Even Katherina's angry parting accusation--that her father's love for Bianca will make her the proverbial old maid "lead[ing] apes in hell" (2.1.34)--ironically confirms the male perception that such a destination is doubly apt. Later in the scene, Hortensio/Litio describes the "most impatient devilish spirit" (2.1.147) with which she broke the lute (symbol of harmony) over his head. By the time Katherina and Petruchio meet, then, the audience has been told repeatedly that this daughter of Padua's perverse shrewishness is demonic and witch-like, and that the only fit mate for her is not a "husband" but the "devil" himself. The setting for all this provides ironic emphasis to these ideas, because Padua was not only famous for its ancient university, but was also "renowned as a citadel of common sense" and rare scientific skepticism with regard to the witch-craze that was gripping much of contemporary Europe (Thompson, 1.1.2n; Trevor-Roper, 58-61). (9)
Aside from Katherina, the only character in the play to be called a devil is Petruchio, the very man to "hold" (i.e., make a bargain with) (10) Katherina and "be married to hell." Indeed, from his first entrance, Petruchio exhibits the traits of several popular demonic and near-demonic types: the comic stage-devil of the mystery plays (he is imperious, unreasonably irascible, and violent in his treatment of Grumio); the comic Vice of the moralities (he is Spivack's "nimble trickster, dissembler, and humorist" [132] in his first encounters with Katherina and the other Paduans); and the comic devil of popular tales and ballads (who often enters into human relationships). (11) In particular, his boasts that he will marry Katherina, though she were "as foul as was Florentius' love, / As old as Sibyl, and as curst and shrewd / As Socrates' Xanthippe or a worse," and "though she chide as loud / As thunder" (1.2.66-8, 91-92), identify Petruchio with the specific strain of comic devils whose mates were scolds. In the Towneley plays, for example, the devil's mistress is a shrew, while in the Newcastle play of the Ark, the popular shrew-figure of Noah's wife is made the devil's confidante (de Bruyn, 130, 134). These congenial medieval devils, like those in popular ballads (e.g., The Devil and the Scold), lived on in sixteenth-century prose and drama. The shrew-devil theme is thoroughly developed in John Heywood's The Foure PP, while in Machiavelli's Belfagor a devil actually marries a shrew, a plot motif imitated in Italian by Giovan Francesco Straparola (thence translated into French by Jean Louveau), in German by Hans Sachs, and in Barnabe Rich's Farewell to Militarie Profession (1581), well known to Shakespeare (de Bruyn, 85, 141-44; Cranfill, 334-35). Shakespeare also knew a dramatized version, Grim the Collier of Croydon; or, The Devil and his Dame, written between 1593 and 1600, and alluded to in Twelfth Night. (12)
Presented with the challenge of wooing Katherina, Petruchio turns to the audience--as a stage-devil or Vice would--and reveals his strategy. Since perverse backwardness is the mark of witch-like shrews, he himself will adopt this contrarious demonic behavior:
Say that she rail, why then I'll tell her plain She sings as sweetly as a nightingale. Say that she frown, I'll say she looks as clear As morning roses newly washed with dew. Say she be mute and will not speak a word, Then I'll commend her volubility And say she uttereth piercing eloquence. If she do bid me pack, I'll give her thanks As though she bid me stay by her a week. If she deny to wed, I'll crave the day When I shall ask the banns, and when be married. (2.1.166-76)
Petruchio seems to have read George Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie (1589), or at least the "merry Epigrame" he wrote to illustrate the rhetorical figure of antitheton or contentio (which he calls "the Quarreller"). This ditty portrays an "importune and shrewd wife" who counters her husband "all by contraries," and is therefore nicknamed "overthwart Jone"--as Katherine's dubbed "Kate the curst." Cited by Stuart Clark as exemplifying the "ritualized contrariety" that gives witchcraft its definition, the poem begins,
My neighbour hath a wife, not fit to make him thrive, But good to kill a quicke man, or make a dead revive. Bid her be still her tongue to talke shall never cease, When she should speake and please, for spight she holds her peace, Bid spare and she will spend, bid spend she spares as fast, What first ye would have done, be sure it shalbe last. Say go, she comes, say come, she goes, and leaves him all alone ... (176; qtd. in Clark, Thinking, 106)
As he explains to Baptista (2.1.127-31), Petruchio will fight fire with fire: as the shrew's prospective mate and the witch's willing "husband," he will outdo Katherina's contrariness through exaggerated, devilishly "ritualized contrarieties" of his own. If it is not until Act 4 that he "kills her in her own humour" (4.1.151), he woos her "in her own humour" from the very beginning. Several critics have observed that Petruchio offers Katherina a "mirror" or "picture" of what she is and/or what she might become (e.g., Heilman, 322; Mack, 280; Perret, 232), while others have stressed his role-playing (see Perret, esp. 223n1). In playing the devil, I suggest, Petruchio combines these functions in ways not recognized--and in ways that undercut the very ideology his mimetic diablerie strives to validate.
Petruchio's strategy is anticipated early in the play's third scene, where his bargaining with Baptista is given a thoroughly backward, diabolical twist. Having just been introduced to her father, he is "marvellous forward" in thrusting himself in front of the other suitors. Gremio's annoyance he bluntly soothes with "O pardon me ... I would fain be doing," to which the Pantaloon replies, "I doubt it not, sir, but you will curse your wooing" (2.1.72-74). Gremio's odd locution has gone unnoticed by editors; he probably means that Petruchio's haste will blast or mar his success, but in fact Petruchio deliberately "curses" his wooing in that he makes it a demonic parody of...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
