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Even before the recent burgeoning of performance theory, The Taming of the Shrew was of great interest to critics interested in role-playing, identity, and theatricality. And because Kate's "taming" and her performative speech both take place in a play-within-a-play, Taming fostered a critical interest in the intersection between performance and gender long before the phrase "gender trouble" became commonplace. The recent debates about performance, culture, and theater sparked in part by Judith Butler suggest, however, that it is time to revisit our analysis of gender and performance in this play. Although there are a number of readings that have already investigated connections between patriarchy and performance in The Taming of the Shrew, critics can largely be grouped into two opposing camps: revisionist and antirevisionist. (1) First there are those who, reading the play as Kate's taming, see her role as reflective or constructive of early modern patriarchal hierarchies that contend that women must be subject to their husbands. (2) Because such readings argue that Kate's speech implies a straightforward acceptance of submission, they deny the play's ability to foster critiques of wifely subordination. Second, there are those who read Kate's final speech ironically, as an act or game. (3) The emphasis on play in these revisionist readings sometimes results in the near avoidance of the uncomfortable taming aspects of the play: Kate's game frees her from them. While the outcomes of these readings are very different, both seem to pretend that early modern patriarchal ideologies are unified and static: Kate submits or escapes subjection to them. And either way, these arguments implicitly suggest that the marriages performed in The Taming of the Shrew do not question or complicate gender hierarchies; rather, they applaud or escape them.
In contrast, I suggest that the wooings, weddings, and banquets performed in The Taming of the Shrew do not merely enact an acceptance or rejection of the subjection of wives to their husbands. Rather, they dramatize a marriage that leaves Kate and Petruchio negotiating not only gender hierarchies but also love, sexuality, and parental demands. The Taming's particular reiteration of marriage enacts a series of negotiations for power, none of which results in a marriage based on simple domination and submission or perfect egalitarianism. By exaggerating husbandly dominance, for example, Petruchio's performance draws our attention not to the power inherent in such dominance but rather to its inefficacy. Thereby a conception of marriage that expects hierarchy and mutuality to coincide effortlessly is questioned. Kate emphasizes the room marriage leaves for maneuverability by enacting one that incorporates her wit and sexuality into her very performances of submission. Thus by thinking of marriage (and the female subjection it requires) as performative, we can read Kate's agency through her reiteration of the role of wife--a reiteration that stresses her reshaping of Petruchio and their marriage.
By using performance theory to contend that gendered institutions such as marriage can and do change, I suggest that the very institutions which some critics suggest Kate is forced either to accept or to escape are instead critiqued--and perhaps even shaped--by her. (4) Indeed, one of the reasons that the field of performance studies is so prevalent today and has so much to offer our readings of this play is its contention that performance has the potential to "provide a site for social and cultural resistance and the exploration of alternative possibilities." (5) The notion of performativity recently theorized by Judith Butler proposes a theoretical framework which allows that subjects can work from within the very power structures that bring them into being. For Butler it is the repetition required by all "ritual social dramas" that makes agency and even cultural change possible. To call gender performative, then, means that "the action of gender requires a performance that is repeated. This repetition is at once a reenactment and reexperiencing of a set of meanings already socially established." (6) Butler's theory thus provides for alterations by arguing that because performed categories require repetition, they make room for change. Thus gender is at once a "'thing done'--a pre-existing oppressive category and a 'doing'--a performance that puts conventional attributes into possibly disruptive play." (7) Each performance, each repetition, can serve as a possible impetus for a critical reworking of gender norms.
While I use Butler's formulation of agency through repetition as a starting point, my work considers the historical and material contexts and receptions of specific performances that Butler's abstract theorizing neglects. By contextualizing agency and focusing on the specific cultural meanings and critiques revealed by close examination of a performance, (8) this essay explores the possibility that the performances of marrying subjects might challenge the institution of early modern marriage in a variety of ways. Each couple's marriage is a doing as well as a thing done, and as such each couple's marriage opens patriarchal gender hierarchies to resignification by the couple and re-examination by audiences, including twentieth-century scholars. From the removal of the bride from her father's house, through the vows of obedience, to the consummation that completes the ceremony, these rituals enact a husband's power over his wife, a daughter's transition into a wife, and the creation of a new family. But because early modern couples performed these ceremonies with a difference, not all women were identically or neatly interpellated into patriarchy. Thus the very repetition which sustains the institution of marriage also allows for a critical reworking of it.
Still, there is ample evidence that each enactment of marriage in early modern England in some ways reiterated wifely submission. The prescriptive ritual of the Church of England, for example, issued a remarkable call for conformity in the words spoken in the early modern wedding ceremony. Indeed every Edwardian and Elizabethan marriage ceremony that took place in the Church of England began with the same script. And the early modern wedding vows--"The Form of Solemnization of Matrimony" from The Book of Common Prayer--made the proper marital hierarchy clear: a vow of subjection was enforced on a woman in the ceremony itself. While the husband's vows included promises to love, comfort, honor, and keep, the wife's vows included the additional promises to obey and serve. Quoting St. Paul, the marriage ceremony places wifely subjection in its larger hierarchical context--as a divinely ordered subjection: "Ye women, submit yourselves unto your own husbands as unto the Lord: for the husband is the wife's head.... Therefore as the church or congregation is subject unto Christ, so likewise let the wives also be in subjection to their own husbands in all things." (9) In the Elizabethan marriage ceremony, then, the relationships between gender and power are figured as natural and divinely ordained, and thus each couple's ceremony reiterates that hierarchical figuration.
Yet even a glance at one description of a particular Renaissance wedding can serve as a reminder that this attempt by the Church neatly to define marital roles through ceremony was not a simple or necessarily successful task. Indeed, there is inevitably some distance between what a script can ordain and the unscripted actions that surround it. In 1572, a minister named Robert Browne of Leyton, Essex, performed a ceremony presumably using the script noted above but was later brought to ecclesiastical court for allowing dancing in his house during service time. (10) It was, he explained, a wedding day, and therefore he "could not rule the youth." (11) Overwhelmed by what David Cressy characterizes as "the permissive licentiousness of social ritual, the household's patriarchal authority was temporarily set aside." (12) Even in this brief description we see that the wedding festivities involved not only an iteration of the relationship between the couple, but also an iteration of the relationship between the patriarchal authority of ministers/parents and the "licentious" authority of the couple and their friends. In fact, two tenets of patriarchy are at issue--and at odds--here: the rule of husbands over wives, and the rule of elders over youths. If the ceremony is to induct the husband into a unified patriarchal world where husbands rule wives and elders rule youths, this performance of a wedding fails, instead placing the husband in opposition to the minister who was unable to rule the couple or their friends. Patriarchy, as is evidenced here, is a complex, interlocking, and sometimes competing set of prescriptive hierarchies--all of which are secured only through iterations and with varying degrees of consistency. This wedding ceremony may have stated the proper marital hierarchy of husband over wife, but the festivities that followed did not secure the minister's rightful place as an elder ruling over the youths.
Nor should the "licentiousness" of the rowdy dancing be ignored: sexuality, it seems, played a part in the youth's permissive wedding-day behavior. This Church court, like many in early modern England, seems concerned about couples and their friends making "a Maie game of marriage [rather] than a holy institution of God" (13)--a May game where the kissing (often between the guests as well as the bride and groom) escalated until the couple was escorted by the rowdy crowd to their marriage bed. Reading this cultural enactment of a wedding in tandem with the script of the ceremony itself reminds us that actual performances often stray from the script. Early modern wedding ceremonies and festivities and the marriages which resulted from them were far more complex than a simple indoctrination to husbandly domination and wifely submission. In the wedding day events described above, for example, the licentious dancing defined this couple's relationship to each other and to their community as much as, if not more than, the standardized church vows they repeated. Sexuality and affection are performed alongside marital hierarchies; to acknowledge the former is not to deny the power of the latter, but rather to argue that such power is not monolithic. Indeed wedding ceremonies could, as this example suggests, allow expressions of sexuality, divide patriarchs, and leave room for a variety of power dynamics. This enactment of a wedding elaborates on the script and thus alters its meaning through performance, as does, I will argue below, The Taming of the Shrew--a comedy with divided patriarchs, overt sexual desire, and shifting power dynamics all its own.
Notably the Church and government of England were concerned about both cultural and theatrical reiterations of the marriage ceremony. Although (as we have already seen) the Church's attempt to promote "marriage as a fulfillment of divine ordinances, and weddings as spiritual and devotional events" was not always successful, it continued to work against age-old customs by demanding that all couples be married in accordance with its set form of service. (14) In fact, the 1559 Act of Uniformity of Common Prayer and Devine Service stipulates the illegality of altering or refusing to use the prescribed ceremony:
If any manner of person, vicar, or other whatsoever member that aught or should sing or say common prayer mentioned in the said book ... refuse to use the said common prayers ... in such order and form as they be mentioned and set forthe in the said book, or shall willfully or obstinately standing in the same use any other rite ceremony, order, form or manner than is mentioned and set forth in the sacred book ... or shall preach declare or speak anything in the derogation or depraving of the said book or anything therein contained ... [that person] shall be therefore lawfully convicted. (15)
That the Church should attempt to control the ceremonies performed by its vicars is perhaps not surprising, although its vehemence may be. But what is of even more importance to my argument about the cultural...
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