The Shakespeare Project, Pt. I

Of all the big gaps in my reading knowledge, and there are many, none seems bigger than my ignorance of Shakespeare. Sure, I read Romeo & Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear in high school, but I do not think I had the capacity nor the inclination to appreciate them at the time. As Fadiman and Major's The New Lifetime Reading Plan recommends Shakespeare's complete works, I have my work cut out for me. Fortunately, I have a copy of The Complete Pelican Shakespeare (which I highly recommend), and have begun working my way down the list. They have the plays arranged in the traditional distinction between comedies, histories, and tragedies, and then chronologically (their estimates) within each:

The Two Gentleman of Verona
The Taming of the Shrew
The Comedy of Errors
Love's Labor's Lost
A Midsummer Night's Dream
The Merchant of Venice
The Merry Wives of Windsor
Much Ado About Nothing
As You Like It
Twelfth Night
Troilus and Cressida
Measure for Measure
All's Well That Ends Well
Pericles
Cymbeline
The Winter's Tale
The Tempest

Henry VI, Part I
Henry VI, Part II
Henry VI, Part III
Richard III
Richard II
King John
Henry IV, Part I
Henry IV, Part II
Henry V
Henry VIII

Titus Andronicus
Romeo and Juliet
Julius Caesar
Hamlet
Othello
Timon of Athens
King Lear
Macbeth
Antony and Cleopatra
Coriolanus

The plan is to read four plays a week for the next nine weeks. At the end of each week I'll give an update on my progress, including anything noteworthy about the plays I read that week or my overall sense of Shakespeare and his works.

This week I read The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Taming of the Shrew, two of Shakespeare's earliest comedies. Thematically, the plays both seem to reflect a skepticism about the power of romantic love. In the former, the gentleman who advocates for romantic love turns out to be an unfaithful dog, able to switch the object of his desires instantly, and then switch back. And his friend, who seemingly does find true love, is willing to give his sweetheart away to save the friendship.

True love gets scarcely better treatment in The Taming, as in the final scene it is not Lucentio whose relationship seems secure and well-founded, but Petruccio, who has tortured and humiliated his shrew into submission, much to the consternation of modern sensibilities about gender equality. Not to mention the fact it is mere luck that Lucentio is sufficiently wealthy that Bianca's father will consent to the marriage (and approve of it after the fact). If Bianca had attempted to marry a servant, for example, even an elopement would scarcely have secured their happiness. Even in the Bianca subplot, finance has as much role as love.

I have quite mixed feelings about what happens to Kate in the play. In one sense, it might be best to understand both of these plays as being firmly rooted in their contemporary mores, with male friendship exalted above romantic love in The Two Gentleman, and the realities of women's role in 16th-century marriage sustained in The Taming.

Yet the urge is strong to either give Shakespeare more credit than that, or less. Perhaps we are meant to be disturbed by the almost total submission that Kate undergoes, thus leading us to question the societal norms and structures which have necessitated this change. Or perhaps Kate has tricked us all, realizing that she could attain wealth and power simply by feigning submission. Or perhaps this is simply what Shakespeare thinks true love looks like between two masters of wit, that they are engaged in a grand performance in which everyone else in the play is a mere spectator.

Still, there is the disconcerting feeling that Shakespeare, particularly at this early stage in his career, might just have been expressing the views of a sixteenth-century man: women should be submissive, subservient, and docile. Any break from this pattern must be suppressed, and bad traits purged. The Kate of the early pages represents all that is wrong in women, while the Kate of the final scene represents the ideal. If we give Shakespeare so little credit, there is not much to like in this chain of events.

In the end, I think my view is that Shakespeare was somewhere in the middle. Whether he approved of the narrow limits placed on wives or not, he recognized that a woman who refuses to play by those rules is likely to be quite unhappy, and remain alone for life. This is the Kate we see from the start. Crafty, witty, vivacious, but quite sad, angry and lonely. Shakespeare was no dreamy idealist, he was not about to write a play in which Kate can ride roughshod over society and still be loved and accepted. But at least he does not let Kate be tamed by one of the ordinary ignoramuses that woo her sister. Instead she finally meets her match, and takes her proper place in that society. Not the most satisfying of outcomes, but perhaps the best amongst the poor choices offered to a woman like Kate at the end of the sixteenth-century.