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In his 1945 study of Shakespeare's use of humoral psychology, John W. Draper noted that the supposedly choleric Petruchio's strategy for subduing the equally volatile Katherine "is to out-Herod Herod." (1) Though Draper doubtless intended his remark to be no more than metaphorical, I propose to take it literally. Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, I shall argue, is subtly informed by a metatheatrical awareness of Herod and, more specifically, of the styles of acting that distinguished his character on the early English stage.
That Shakespeare knew of the conventions and characters of Corpus Christi cycle drama is beyond question. What remains unclear is whether his knowledge was derived, either wholly or at least in part, from first-hand childhood experience as an audience member. Although the young Shakespeare may have developed a taste for live theater in Stratford itself, which frequently played host to licensed traveling players from 1569, (2) his home town had no tradition of Corpus Christi drama. But as many scholars have speculated, Shakespeare may have witnessed one or more performances of the biblical cycle play staged during the week-long Great Fair of Corpus Christi at nearby Coventry. He certainly had ample opportunity to do so. Although no longer the regular annual event it had been before the Reformation--it was not performed during the plague years of 1564 and 1575, for example--the city's cycle play was staged on numerous occasions during Shakespeare's childhood prior to its discontinuation in 1580, when he was sixteen. The Coventry Fair was evidently a large tourist draw, attracting thousands of visitors and their purses. One seventeenth-century antiquary noted that "the confluence of people from farr and neare to see that Shew was extraordinary great, and yielded noe small advantage to this Cittye." (3) As the son of one of Stratford's leading local politicians in the 1560s and 1570s, whose official administrative business took him to Coventry on several occasions, it is hard to imagine Shakespeare and his father not attending a nearby event invested with considerable civic and even national significance. In the absence of any incontrovertible evidence that Shakespeare was an audience member at a performance of the Coventry cycle, however, potentially illuminating points of contact between the mystery drama and his own have been for the most part neglected. (4)
A passage in the wedding scene of The Taming of the Shrew--a play that contains more references to Warwickshire locations than any other by Shakespeare (5)--hints that he did see the Coventry cycle, and that one of its episodes may have made a lasting impression on him. The specific connection I shall sketch between the Coventry play and The Taming of the Shrew differs from the type of strictly intertextual relation conventionally adduced by scholars of source studies. I am proposing instead a relation of intertheatricality. This different relation, I shall argue, consists less in textual transmission--although there may be elements of that too--than in critical reproduction of a style of performance most notable for the actor's over-the-top self-presentation, including exaggerated gestural techniques, dazzling costumes, and deafening verbal delivery. I shall term this style "acting up." The phrase not only suggests the hyperbolic tendencies of the style, which required the actor's volume knob to be decisively turned up (loud delivery! loud body language! loud apparel!); it also captures something of the socially transgressive behavior tyranny, shrewishness--that the style was frequently employed to represent on the early English stage. The phrase additionally hints at the potentially transgressive status gap that so frequently obtained between the player and his character; to impersonate a middle eastern tyrant or even a young woman from a rich Paduan mercantile family, the player of the provincial Corpus Christi stage and the London commercial theater alike had to act "up" in a class as much as a histrionic sense.
Shakespeare's reproduction of cycle-drama performance styles in The Taming of the Shrew bespeaks not only a personal history of dramatic influence, however, but also an institutional history of theatrical rivalry and transformation. For I wish to argue that if the play contains echoes of the Coventry cycle drama--and I believe it does--it is because Shakespeare and his company were engaged in a project of theatrical and cultural redefinition that entailed a critical relation to not only the artisanal Corpus Christi drama of the provinces, but also the acting up demanded by the most popular plays from the London commercial stage of the late 1580s and early 1590s. It is not just shrews that Shakespeare's play endeavors to tame, I shall argue, but also those contemporary London players who perpetuate the histrionic bodily techniques of the artisans who performed the Coventry Herod.
I
After Petruchio has peremptorily announced in the bizarre wedding scene of The Taming of the Shrew that he and Katherine will forgo their banquet and return immediately to his country house, he tells his surprised guests to "look not big, nor stamp, nor stare" (3.2.230). The line stands out for the explicit attention it draws to players' facial gestures and body language. In doing so, it foregrounds the hyperbolic style of performance demanded less of the actors who play the wedding guests than of those who play the larger-than-life Katherine and Petruchio themselves. Katherine has in all likelihood just exhibited the kind of body language from which Petruchio enjoins the wedding guests to refrain: she may very well look big, stamp, and stare as she delivers the lines preceding Petruchio's, for example, in which she exclaims that "I will be angry ... Father, be quiet: he shall stay my leisure" (3.2.218-9). And Petruchio, giving Katherine a taste of her own melodramatic medicine, doubtless resorts to some serious stamping and staring himself. We are told that he "stamp'd and swore" during the wedding ceremony (3.2.169), an over-the-top (albeit unseen) technique of acting up that erupts onto the stage during his honeymoon, when he physically abuses his servants and throws his dinner at them in feigned disgust (4.1.136).
Petruchio's wedding-scene invocation of exaggerated theatrical body language is all the more striking given how seldom Shakespeare explicitly instructs his actors to resort to it. (6) Stage directions call for Cardinal Beaufort to "rave and stare as if he were mad" (I Henry VI, 3.1.1) and the raging Cleopatra to "strike" a messenger, "hale him up and down," and "draw a knife" on him (Antony and Cleopatra, 2.5.61,64, 73); Prince Edward remarks how King Louis "stamps as he were nettled" (3 Henry VI, 3.3.169), and Brutus notes the passionate Cassius' "rash choler" and "staring" eyes (Julius Caesar, 4.2.93-4). But such cues to hyperbolic performance are the exception rather than the rule. Shakespeare largely avoids asking his actors to look big, stamp, or stare; in this respect, his playscripts subtly reinforce the advice of Hamlet to the players: "do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently" (Hamlet, 3.2.4-5).
As a result, Petruchio's line sounds like it has been interpolated from a completely different tradition of theater. And indeed it may have been: it recalls one of the more memorable lines in the Shearmen and Taylors' play from the Coventry cycle. Like the other surviving Coventry cycle pageant of the Weavers, the Shearmen and Taylors' play is an omnibus entertainment, telescoping themes and episodes from the life of Christ that the cycle dramas of larger cities, such as York, usually divided up among separate guilds. After presenting the Annunciation, the play turns to the Nativity and a sequence of prophecies, and concludes with the Slaughter of the Innocents. The most dramatically powerful sequences occur in this last episode, during which Herod commands the stage. Having discovered that the three kings have eluded his trap for them, Herod responds with an angry outburst in distinctive language that closely resembles Petruchio's: "I stampe! I stare! I loke all abowtt!" (779). (7) Herod's tantrum is punctuated by an equally noteworthy stage direction, moreover, one that translates his previous remark into a bravura performance of sustained stamping, staring, and looking all about: "Here Erode ragis in the pagond and in the strete also" (783).
The potential echo of Herod's declamation in Petruchio's "look not big, nor stamp, nor stare"--which, if indeed an echo, is a command not to behave like Herod--demands careful, not to mention sceptical, attention. Stamping and staring were two of the symptoms conventionally associated by early modern English writers with rage; Joseph Hall, for example, speaks of anger as a "stamping with the feet" and a "glaring of the eies." (8) Indeed, the OED asserts that "to stamp and stare" was a commonplace phrase denoting the expression of uncontrolled fury, and cites the line from the Shearmen and Taylors' pageant as an early instance. One cannot rule out the possibility that the well-attended annual performances of the Coventry cycle drama may have been at least partly responsible for the popularization of the phrase, and that use of it in the sixteenth century may often have deliberately conjured up, or at least implicitly presumed, the stage Herod's behavior. Nevertheless, variations on "to stamp and to stare" were frequently employed by playwrights who almost certainly had no direct experience, let alone knowledge, of the Coventry cycle drama. In Christopher Marlowe's Jew of Malta, for example, Pilia-Borzia reports that Barabas "star'd and stamp'd and turned aside" while reading Ithamore's letter of extortion. (9) Marlowe was born and raised in Canterbury, whose Corpus Christi play had been discontinued in 1500; his reference to stamping and staring obviously cannot be regarded as firm evidence of any first-hand experience of a cycle-drama Herod, let alone that of the Coventry Shearmen and Taylors. Likewise, Shakespeare's rendition of the phrase cannot stand by itself as proof of his familiarity with the Coventry cycle.
Petruchio's "look not big, nor stamp, nor stare" certainly parallels the Coventry Herod's line much more closely than does Pilia-Borzia's: I have been unable to locate any other instances, dramatic or otherwise, in which the three verbs "stamp," "stare" and "look" are freighted as they are in both the Shearmen and Taylors' pageant and The Taming of the Shrew. But fifteen or so years separate the Coventry cycle drama's last performance from The Taming of the Shrew's first; how likely is it that Shakespeare could have remembered the exact content of the utterances of the Shearmen and Taylor's Herod? Moreover, if we admit such a verbal "echo" as evidence of Shakespeare's familiarity with the Coventry cycle, what are we to do with those equally suggestive parallels between the language of The Taming of the Shrew and the Herod plays of other cities and towns that Shakespeare surely did not see? Christopher Sly's swearing by St. Anne after the first scene of the play-within-a-play staged for him (1.1.255), for example, invokes the saint to whom the Digby play of Herod, Candlemas Day and the Killing of the Children of Israel, is dedicated. (10) And the very title of Shakespeare's play finds numerous parallels in the language of those surviving mysteries that treat the theme of the Slaughter of the Innocents. The Towneley Herod announces that he will "tame" the intolerable "talkyng" of his subjects; (11) in the York Girdlers and Nailers' play of the Massacre of the Innocents, Herod tells his soldiers to kill "that schorwe ... pat menes to maistir me" (12); and the Chester Goldsmiths' play on the same theme employs "shrew" as Herod's and his men's favored derogatory epithet for Jesus, resorting to it no less than seven times in less than one hundred and seventy lines. (13)
I do not propose to draw any conclusions about Shakespeare's pre-London theater experiences on the basis of verbal parallels alone, of course; otherwise I would be forced to make the implausible case that the youthful Shakespeare was not only a decidedly mobile tourist, but also a precocious theater-going infant with an even more precocious memory (the York pageants were last performed in 1579; the Chester cycle in 1575). Nor am I interested in fleshing out suggestive thematic links between the Herod plays and The Taming of the Shrew, such as the topoi of shrewtaming and festive gender inversion enacted in the Shearmen and Taylors' pageant, which like other medieval plays of the Slaughter of the Innocents depicts the rebellion of mothers and wives against Herod and his soldiers. (14) Rather, it is the style of spectacular, hyperbolic performance distinguishing The Taming of the Shrew, one glimpsed in Petruchio's order to "look not big, nor stamp, nor stare," that strikes me as redolent of the Coventry Herod. And this connection presumes...
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