I finished Taming of the Shrew of Shakespeare guide to taming an unruly wife is to:
>starve her
>don't let her sleep for two days and beat and rape her all night
>gaslight her and if she doesn't believe your obviously lies keep starving until she believes you
This guy is the good guy. How does he do it?
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Because nobody reads The Taming of the Shrew anymore, they just watch 10 Things I Hate About You.
He's still too big to fail because English language theatre would just fall to Broadway levels without him.
They also compensate by making up strange theories about how he was having man-on-man fistings.
because they don't read.
*crack* *sip* yeah there is still a big belief he was gay. The gays absolutely love him. Having a gay trump card is the ultimate way to avoid cancelation.
>How does he do it?
With the five magic words: "It was a different time."
That doesn’t matter to the mob anymore.
The mob is placated when every modern performance ends with the woman turning to the audience and winking.
The beauty of theatre is how easy it is to make the production suit ones political goals. A feminist Shrew, like a Merchant which condemns antisemitism, is very easy to produce
I don't think it's theatre in general but Shakespeare himself. There's something inherent in Shakespeare that has allowed him to survive shifting political landscapes: maybe a near-perfect balance, sense of universal empathy and eschewing of anything simply didactic. The difference between Marlowe's Barabas in israelite of Malta and Shylock illustrates this. As much as I dislike the excesses of identity politics, one has to admit that Shakespeare was particularly fruitful ground for these kinds of readings and probably a large part of why Shakespeare's popularity has increased rather than diminished in the last couple of decades. And I think it's something more than Shakespeare's art remaining relevant in shifting political landscapes because it simply "transcends" politics, because in a sense it doesn't, it actually engages with issues that remain deeply important to people. Rather he's so good because he does both, both transcendent and immanent, seeing both sides to questions while not resolving their conflict. Is Shylock a villain? Yes and no. Is Petruchio a villain? Yes and no. Is Katherine a shrew? Yes and no. No simple answers in Shakespeare.
>beat and rape her all night
I think that was your invention.
He destroys the bed - it's a euphemism but it's very obvious why a bed would be in tatters especially considering spousal beating didn't exist.
The broken bed is surely more that he's given her the fricking of her life. Ford stole that interpretation for The Quiet Man
Couldn’t that just mean you frick her good and hard?
This is the first time I've read this interpretation and I couldn't find reference to it anywhere else on the internet. In Zeffirelli's film he literally breaks the bed. I refuse to believe only IQfy was smart enough to understand a euphemism.
People are coy, especially scholars. They'll be all over a stray 'will' but pretend a real deep hard dicking isn't on the table.
IIR in The Quiet Man, he does break the bed by accident, but the neighbors see the broken bed and immediately jump to the conclusion that she's had her brains fricked out, so Ford can have his cake and eat it with the hays code. Like Louis CK with the n word, he's made you think it
This is relatively unsurprising that porn brained me saw this.
Ding ding
Because ‘he’ was actually a black woman
You mean black israeli woman
It was an allegory. Didn't you read the induction?
Unless it changed very recently, which it might have due to the general intellectual decline in lib culture, Taming of the Shrew is still pretty popular and often-performed. Merchant of Venice is far more cancellable, but what historically saved both of them for the libs is that Shakespeare is never one-dimensional. Shylock is the classic evil, hooknosed, scheming israelite villain, but we also get his perspective, and in performance you can emphasize that and try to make it about anti-semitism. Katherine is a "shrew" but she's not the kind of shrew a real misogynist would write, she's sharp and clever and part of the reason she's such a b***h is that her suitors are genuinely unworthy of her. Then the guy who "tames" her is himself a pretty comical stereotype of a sexist, an actor can play that up and make him a total clown. It's a forced interpretation of course, obviously Shakespeare is no feminist, but the basis of it is there in the text.
Taming of the Shrew also has a message that goes beyond gender, that sometimes miserable, self-sabotaging people who refuse to do anything because life isn't perfect just have to be forced to play along, and will thank you for it in the end.
Good post
best post by far
Yep, Shakespeare has basically everything imaginable in his writing so the history of performing his works is endless themes and variations based on the tastes of the day. King Lesr was performed for over a century exclusively with a happy ending. There have been performances of Taming of the Shrew that do everything from original pronunciation, to complaining about misogyny, to making it a hypersexual bdsm thing. The last one I saw played it pretty straight, except Kate was so extreme as to be almost feral, and her taming was presented as someone trying to out crazy her so she'd reign it in a little.
Neat. You're better informed about this than me so glad to hear you don't disagree.
>making it a hypersexual bdsm thing.
lmfao. Somehow this didn't even occur to me, and now I'm wondering if it's the best possible answer to OP's question. Why hasn't Taming of the Shrew been cancelled? Maybe the same reason no one cancelled 50 Shades of Grey.
As much as the different takes range from the interesting to the mindbendingly moronic, it really is how Shakespeare has endured. It's just so malleable. Plus the stupid shit can be hilarious. My fiancée was first introduced to Shakespeare by a high school production of Othello where they race swapped Othello and Desdemona and also everyone was a vampire.
>and also everyone was a vampire.
they terrified children and drank their fear hormone loaded blood to get high?
Think of when vampires were still big in YA stuff. Now do a Shakespeare play, bit everyone is vampires for some reason.
Well the rosacrucians shakespeare was linked with did have some connections
What about the reverse-rosacrucians?
Shakespeare has too much charm to be cancelled. What shrew wouldn't have her panties wet at his Chad verses.
>Then God be blest, it is the blessed sun,
>But sunne it is not, when you say it is not,
>And the Moone changes euen as your minde:
>What you will haue it nam'd, euen that it is,
>And so it shall be so for Katherine.
Beatrice and Benedict are THE archetypal bantering rom com leads. There's so much more to Much Ado of course, but even with just that it'll be around forever. It's just too appealing.
Just so we're all clear on this, for me it's
>gaslight
Go back
because the "people" who'd cancel him can't even read him to find out lmao
>rape her
How can you rape your wife? You can't rape your own property. What next, are you going to rape your couch?
Eh marriage is the only form of consent that's valid but spousal rape is real mainly because most women don't actually have marriages you would define as marriages but basically just guys giving them the, "You are categorically insane and I have no legal power over you" squint.