Women of Will

Not too long ago, I saw the Kenneth Branagh version of Much Ado About Nothing. And after swooning over Emma Thompson (or Beatrice... or both actress and character) I realized I was swooning more over the interpretation of Beatrice as a woman who has enormous verbal veracity and could take down any of the dudes with her incredible wit and who doesn't let that sharp-tongue go after she marries the equally quick Benedick.

THEN, I got to thinking about Kate in Taming of the Shrew. (Taming can be wildly and irreverently summed up as the story of Petruchio trying to tame the beastly shrew, Kate, much to the chagrin of families and then there's a subplot with Bianca and some other people. But in the end, Kate ends up with Petruchio.) That last speech... ohhh that last speech. For those who don't know, wikipedia explains the end of the play:

Katherina is the only one of the three who comes, winning the wager for Petruchio. At the end of the play, after the other two wives have been hauled into the room by Katherina, she gives them a hyperbolic speech on the subject of why wives should always obey their husbands, and tells them that their husbands ask only "love, fair looks and true obedience" (5.2.153).

Wikipedia is interpreting that speech! What if the speech was drenched in sarcasm? What if it isn't about women and men's roles at all but about self-sacrificing love? Don't interpret my Shakespeare, Wikipedia.

Anyway, so I was thinking about different ways of interpreting that last speech and how Shakespeare himself would have thought about it and then I found this article! It's a NYTimes review of a two-person production called Women of Will by Shakespeare and Company in Lenox, MA. This production is a project by Tina Packer to prove her thesis, that Ben Brantly has already written so I won't re-write it:

It is her thesis that as Shakespeare developed as a playwright, his women increasingly became his artistic alter egos, marginalized figures who stood to the side of the power makers, observing and interpreting. (She estimates that there are only 177 female characters in the canon, as opposed to 770 male roles.) Through a mixture of acting and annotation, Ms. Packer, assisted by Mr. Gore, chronologically traces this evolution, from the demonized, sorceresslike Joan of Arc in “Henry VI, Part 1” (probably his first play) to the beneficent healer Marina of the late romance “Pericles, Prince of Tyre.

I think this is an example of how modern audiences must interpret Shakespeare. We cannot know what Willy himself thought. We cannot know if he was totally a product of his patriarchal society or if he was a radical or if he could have potentially written his women characters to be his artistic alter-ego. But that doesn't mean we should stop trying to uncover new meanings from these old texts. Even if Packer's thesis is wrong (it can never be proven unless Shakespeare was brought back to life), she lays out a strong argument for a way of interpretation that is suited to our time. She portrays Juliet as a "could-be poet" whose words twist around her thoughts rather than the starry-eyed innocent that is stereotypical. She does Kate's final monologue, that wikipedia described as being about "why wives should always obey their husbands," multiple times with multiple interpretations. Even if she can't prove Shakespeare's intentions, in my mind Packer proves that the Women of Will are not as black and white as they might have been in the past.

In other news, I'm still in my pajamas and here's a panda:

Bye!
SC