1 00:00:00,910 --> 00:00:05,860 So The Taming of the Shrew is a comedy from the early part of Shakespeare's career. 2 00:00:05,860 --> 00:00:16,300 It probably dates from fifteen ninety two to three and it's just published in the Folio in sixteen twenty three. 3 00:00:16,300 --> 00:00:21,740 Sorting out the order of Shakespeare's earliest plays is really critically still quite a moot point. 4 00:00:21,740 --> 00:00:28,600 But if you look at in addition, like the Oxford Edition Complete Oxford, which puts the players in chronological order, 5 00:00:28,600 --> 00:00:33,680 you'll see that the time of the shrew comes second, second in all of Shakespeare's works. 6 00:00:33,680 --> 00:00:40,060 After two gentlemen of Verona. And just before the play, we now call the second part of Henry the Sixth. 7 00:00:40,060 --> 00:00:47,770 So that suggests that the most recent scholarship is putting it right at the beginning of of Shakespeare's work. 8 00:00:47,770 --> 00:00:55,660 I talked a bit when I thought about comedy of errors, about what earliness tends to allow us to think about Shakespeare's plays, 9 00:00:55,660 --> 00:00:59,850 how it allows us to excuse certain things or to to see things as as immature 10 00:00:59,850 --> 00:01:05,780 and lechon comedy that as I suggested that that might be slightly unhelpful. 11 00:01:05,780 --> 00:01:15,100 OK. So it's an early comedy. And there's the question I want to try and use to vocalise our discussion of the play is probably the most obvious one. 12 00:01:15,100 --> 00:01:22,070 Is the show tamed? Is Katharina Tamed? And so, you know what happens next? 13 00:01:22,070 --> 00:01:28,430 If you've been and if you have the lecture. So what happens now is I give a short synopsis of the play in order that even if you haven't read it, 14 00:01:28,430 --> 00:01:32,900 you can get a sense of what I'm talking about through the rest of the lecture. 15 00:01:32,900 --> 00:01:38,030 I think uniquely in this lecture series and possibly uniquely in Shakespeare with the Shrew, 16 00:01:38,030 --> 00:01:46,100 it isn't really possible to give an account of what happens in the play that precedes the kind of interpretation we might want to perform on it. 17 00:01:46,100 --> 00:01:49,460 So there isn't any such thing as a neutral plot summary of the play. 18 00:01:49,460 --> 00:01:58,130 But that's the crux of what I'm talking about. That plot summary is already a contested part of critical interpretation. 19 00:01:58,130 --> 00:02:03,700 And it's just going to try and outline how that is. 20 00:02:03,700 --> 00:02:14,770 So The Taming of the Shrew is about to courtships, the daughters of the Paduan merchant, Baptista, Katharyn and Bianca. 21 00:02:14,770 --> 00:02:25,990 Katherine is the shrew. So a shrew is a source goldish woman who's teaching an American summer school where they had been Googling pictures of shrews. 22 00:02:25,990 --> 00:02:31,390 And we're in a terrible anxiety about how big they were thinking that they might be like bears or something. 23 00:02:31,390 --> 00:02:39,100 Of course, shrews are tiny, tiny things and quite why that the association is more likely to be with kind 24 00:02:39,100 --> 00:02:44,050 of shrewd and those kinds of things rather than that mouse with a long nose. 25 00:02:44,050 --> 00:02:55,980 So Katherine, is the shrew, a woman who, depending how you look at it, is feisty and independent, lonely and misunderstood, strident and anti-social. 26 00:02:55,980 --> 00:03:03,210 Her father, who, depending on how you look at it, is either a worried, a widower or a patriarchal tyrant, 27 00:03:03,210 --> 00:03:08,430 has decreed that Bianca, who has numerous suitors because depending on how you look at it, 28 00:03:08,430 --> 00:03:13,170 she is beautiful, gentle and agreeable, or she is exactly the kind of annoying, 29 00:03:13,170 --> 00:03:17,880 insipid, simpering arm candy who would have a lot of suitors in Elizabethan comedy. 30 00:03:17,880 --> 00:03:25,080 And to you, too, would want to tie up and beat her. Bianca cannot marry until her older sister is also married. 31 00:03:25,080 --> 00:03:29,760 The stage is set at the entrance of Petruchio, who, depending on how you look at it, 32 00:03:29,760 --> 00:03:34,110 is a quirky and an unorthodox guy who knows his own mind and wants a woman who knows 33 00:03:34,110 --> 00:03:41,220 hers or a psychopathic bounty hunter with sadistic and misogynistic tendencies. 34 00:03:41,220 --> 00:03:48,240 So Catherine and Petruchio are paid off in a relationship which, depending on how you look at it, it's crackling with sexual tension, 35 00:03:48,240 --> 00:03:56,220 along with a touch of domination, fantasy or a cynical, loveless and enforced by patriarchal society. 36 00:03:56,220 --> 00:04:03,210 He treats her in a way which, depending on how you look at it, uses distinctly unfunny tap techniques from torture, including sleep deprivation, 37 00:04:03,210 --> 00:04:08,550 brainwashing and starvation to bend her to his will or performs a zany, 38 00:04:08,550 --> 00:04:16,590 unorthodox courtship which shows their mutual determination not to yield as the underlying equivalence and equality beneath their union. 39 00:04:16,590 --> 00:04:20,250 So at the end of the play, Catherine is depending on how you look at it. 40 00:04:20,250 --> 00:04:25,350 Broken, spirited, parroting, patriarchal ideology and utterly submissive, 41 00:04:25,350 --> 00:04:30,840 offering to put her hand under her husband's foot or ironically and unabashedly vocal, 42 00:04:30,840 --> 00:04:39,060 preaching the interdependence of husband and wife to earn herself half of a of a fact wager placed by her husband. 43 00:04:39,060 --> 00:04:42,900 And did I mention that the whole story is set up as a play within a play? 44 00:04:42,900 --> 00:04:48,540 The play's induction sets up the Pachuco and Katherine plot as a play performed for the drunken Tinka. 45 00:04:48,540 --> 00:04:50,010 Christopher Sligh, 46 00:04:50,010 --> 00:04:59,670 who is being made to believe he is a Lord and that a page dressed up as a woman is his wife by some Bullingdon Club types who so having a bit of fun, 47 00:04:59,670 --> 00:05:06,380 meaning the whole story is framed as to be obviously implausible and fictional. 48 00:05:06,380 --> 00:05:12,050 Even the names are contentious. We used to call the female lead in this play Kate. 49 00:05:12,050 --> 00:05:16,640 But feminist editors have pointed out that this is not neutral either. 50 00:05:16,640 --> 00:05:20,510 When Petruchio meets her for the first time, he greets her. 51 00:05:20,510 --> 00:05:25,490 Good morrow, Kate, for that's your name, I hear. The reply is clear. 52 00:05:25,490 --> 00:05:30,850 Well, have you heard? But something hard of hearing. They call me Catherine. They do talk of me. 53 00:05:30,850 --> 00:05:38,090 The folio text begins by calling her Catarina in stage directions, although it does move to call her Kate. 54 00:05:38,090 --> 00:05:41,780 It's quite an interesting way in which you might want to think of the text itself. 55 00:05:41,780 --> 00:05:50,570 The apparatus of the text trying to tame her, changing her name in stage directions and speech prefixes from Catherine or Catarina, 56 00:05:50,570 --> 00:05:57,730 which she herself says she prefers towards Kate. The name Petruchio gives her. 57 00:05:57,730 --> 00:06:00,790 George Bernard Shaw, who was not a fan of the play, 58 00:06:00,790 --> 00:06:07,330 felt it was all just about bearable until Catherine's final speech at which he at which he baulked, 59 00:06:07,330 --> 00:06:16,990 Shaw wrote a letter to the Palomar Gazette in 1888 in the guise of a woman urging both men and women to boycott the play. 60 00:06:16,990 --> 00:06:25,510 This is sure no man with any feeling of decency can sit it out in the company of a woman without being extremely ashamed of the Lord of Creation, 61 00:06:25,510 --> 00:06:31,700 moral implied in the wager and the speech put into the woman's own mouth. 62 00:06:31,700 --> 00:06:39,830 But perhaps unexpectedly, Germaine Greer writing in the feminist classic The Female Eunuch, first published in 1971, 63 00:06:39,830 --> 00:06:47,660 writes that Kate has the uncommon good fortune to find a husband who is man enough to know what he wants and how to get it. 64 00:06:47,660 --> 00:06:58,280 The submission of a woman like Kate is genuine and exciting because she has something to lay down her virgin pride and individuality. 65 00:06:58,280 --> 00:07:04,430 That's certainly the view of the play we get at the end of Zeffirelli's film version of 1967, 66 00:07:04,430 --> 00:07:12,680 which by casting offstage on our lovers tempestuous lovers Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton as Catherine and Petrochem 67 00:07:12,680 --> 00:07:20,300 consolidates the sense that this is a passionate relationship in which both pots and pans but also underway I would fly. 68 00:07:20,300 --> 00:07:28,880 The 2005 BBC Shakespeare retold film of the play also helps this kind of interpretation by casting Rufus Sewell as a Petruchio, 69 00:07:28,880 --> 00:07:34,170 already constructed by Sewall's own acting persona as a highly desirable batboy. 70 00:07:34,170 --> 00:07:37,490 So it's worth thinking about Howcast. Casting makes a difference here. 71 00:07:37,490 --> 00:07:45,200 The play tries to set up Petruchio as a kind of embarrassment to Catherine, doesn't it, in the description of how he behaves at the wedding? 72 00:07:45,200 --> 00:07:46,940 It that has a different connotation. 73 00:07:46,940 --> 00:07:55,820 If if the if the casting choice makes Petruchio look a suitable or even a desirable husband, as in that BBC version. 74 00:07:55,820 --> 00:08:03,020 So the question then of whether Catherine is tamed or not is one that the play itself produces. 75 00:08:03,020 --> 00:08:07,700 And it's a question that the play itself does not answer. 76 00:08:07,700 --> 00:08:15,080 Therefore, it's been the work of criticism and especially of performance to try to produce an answer. 77 00:08:15,080 --> 00:08:18,360 Is Kate tamed or not? 78 00:08:18,360 --> 00:08:26,750 But I think what I want to stress in this lecture is the importance of the question, the ongoing importance of the question rather than an answer. 79 00:08:26,750 --> 00:08:30,980 This is a deeply ambiguous play on its own terms. 80 00:08:30,980 --> 00:08:36,860 And in terms of the history and its intersection with things we still feel strongly about jete. 81 00:08:36,860 --> 00:08:47,090 Gender relations is still highly topical. Subject is a play which has had a very, very active life in 20th and 21st century performance, 82 00:08:47,090 --> 00:08:55,310 almost always in some kind of dialogue with modern or topical views about women and their roles. 83 00:08:55,310 --> 00:09:00,470 So in some ways, the answer to the question about whether Catherine is tamed is a sharper version 84 00:09:00,470 --> 00:09:09,540 version of something which I think is true of everything we say about Shakespeare. We tend to make this play mean what we want it to mean. 85 00:09:09,540 --> 00:09:17,720 Let me try and put some detail on that. And like George Bernard Shaw and like many other readers and performers of this play, 86 00:09:17,720 --> 00:09:23,660 I'm going to put the main locus of the question about Katherine's timing on her final speech. 87 00:09:23,660 --> 00:09:29,410 I'm going to read that speech out. It's a it's a really long speech and it's partly its length that's important. 88 00:09:29,410 --> 00:09:35,410 Anyway, we can get sensitised to read the whole thing. This is much the longest speech in the whole play. 89 00:09:35,410 --> 00:09:38,950 Phi Phi, a nit that threatening unkind brow. 90 00:09:38,950 --> 00:09:47,020 She's talking there to the other women and not scornful glances from those eyes to wound thy Lord King by governor. 91 00:09:47,020 --> 00:09:57,640 It blotz thy beauty as frost to bite the Medes, confound thy fame as whirlwinds, shake fair buds and in no sense is meat or amiable. 92 00:09:57,640 --> 00:10:04,420 A woman moved is like a fountain, troubled, muddy, ill seeming thick, bereft of beauty. 93 00:10:04,420 --> 00:10:10,650 And while it is so none so dry or thirsty will deign to sip or touch one drop of it. 94 00:10:10,650 --> 00:10:18,940 Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper. I had by sovereign one that cares for the and for thy maintenance, 95 00:10:18,940 --> 00:10:25,530 commits his body to painful labour both by sea and land to watch the night in storms, the day in cold. 96 00:10:25,530 --> 00:10:32,170 While thou lightest warm at home, secure and safe, and craves no other tributed by hand. 97 00:10:32,170 --> 00:10:40,180 But love fail looks and true obedience to little payment for so great debt. 98 00:10:40,180 --> 00:10:45,740 Such duty is the subject owes the prince even such a woman oath to her husband. 99 00:10:45,740 --> 00:10:51,790 And when she is froward peevish, sullen, sour and not obedient to his honest will, what is she. 100 00:10:51,790 --> 00:10:58,310 But a foul contending rebel and the graceless traitor to her loving Lord. 101 00:10:58,310 --> 00:11:01,570 I am ashamed that women are so simple to offer war where they should kneel 102 00:11:01,570 --> 00:11:07,810 for peace or seek for rules to primacy and sway when they are bound to serve, 103 00:11:07,810 --> 00:11:15,310 love and obey. Why are our bodies soft and we can smooth, unmap to toil and trouble in the world, 104 00:11:15,310 --> 00:11:20,230 but that our soft conditions and our heart should well agree with our external parts. 105 00:11:20,230 --> 00:11:25,210 Come, come your froward and unable worms. My mind has been as big as one of yours. 106 00:11:25,210 --> 00:11:31,360 My heart is great. My reason haply more to bandy word for word and frown for frown. 107 00:11:31,360 --> 00:11:35,740 But now I see our land, says Arbat straws. Our strength is weak. 108 00:11:35,740 --> 00:11:42,790 Our weakness past. Compare that seeming to be most which we indeed least are then value of stomachs. 109 00:11:42,790 --> 00:11:47,200 It is no boot and place your hands below your husband's foot. 110 00:11:47,200 --> 00:11:54,250 In token of which duty, if you please. My hand is ready. May do him ease. 111 00:11:54,250 --> 00:12:01,440 Now, the interpretation of this final speech of Catherines is crucial to the overall interpretation of the play. 112 00:12:01,440 --> 00:12:09,780 Are we to read this as an expression of her being cowed, brought low reduced or broken spirited? 113 00:12:09,780 --> 00:12:15,660 Is she sarcastically rehearsing a preprepared patriarchal conduct piece? 114 00:12:15,660 --> 00:12:20,160 Is this a plot between her and Petruchio to win the bet? 115 00:12:20,160 --> 00:12:28,970 How she'd been brought to proper wifely conduct and educated away from the antisocial behaviour of her earlier life. 116 00:12:28,970 --> 00:12:35,840 These large scale interpretations of the whole speech are made up of the details of particular points in performance. 117 00:12:35,840 --> 00:12:42,050 What are the rest of the cast doing while this goes on? This is this is the source lowest point in the play. 118 00:12:42,050 --> 00:12:46,150 Comedies tend to be about back and forth and dialogue doesn't. 119 00:12:46,150 --> 00:12:49,210 They seem to move quite quickly. They don't have big set piece speeches. 120 00:12:49,210 --> 00:12:56,000 That's something we associate with genres like tragedy and that stuff that gives us a different pace to these plays. 121 00:12:56,000 --> 00:13:01,220 This is a this is a play which slows down into this long speech right at the end. 122 00:13:01,220 --> 00:13:05,960 So what are the rest of the cast doing? Are they attentive? Are they amused? 123 00:13:05,960 --> 00:13:10,330 Are they uncomfortable? What about Petru Kiyo? 124 00:13:10,330 --> 00:13:18,220 When Catherine states that her hand is ready to be placed under her husband's foot, it's a quite different declaration with quite different meaning. 125 00:13:18,220 --> 00:13:22,150 If, for example, she kneels down in front of him and puts her foot her, 126 00:13:22,150 --> 00:13:30,020 puts her hand down under his foot, or if she's standing up, daring him to ask her to do it. 127 00:13:30,020 --> 00:13:37,800 Clearly, the questions don't stop here. Petru Kirs response is a single line following on from Katharine's 43. 128 00:13:37,800 --> 00:13:44,780 Why there's a Wenche. Come on and kiss me, Kate. Is that a kind of adequate response? 129 00:13:44,780 --> 00:13:49,640 It is. Is that just delighted? Is that anything you could say? 130 00:13:49,640 --> 00:13:58,010 Is it meant to register a kind of inadequacy or incommensurate ability, as is quite usual in the folio? 131 00:13:58,010 --> 00:14:02,360 There is no following stage direction. Have to come and kiss me, Kate. We might think that kiss me. 132 00:14:02,360 --> 00:14:07,400 Kate is an internal stage direction which doesn't need the editor to write. 133 00:14:07,400 --> 00:14:12,860 They kiss or he kisses her to say your actions, which actually is slightly different in connotation. 134 00:14:12,860 --> 00:14:19,400 But most editors do insert the obliging mutual and even romantic they kiss. 135 00:14:19,400 --> 00:14:26,270 But it's possible, quite possible that they don't. Or, you know, there are any number of things could happen at that moment. 136 00:14:26,270 --> 00:14:33,790 There are other possibilities, an unwritten unreciprocated or an unwelcome kiss or no kiss at all. 137 00:14:33,790 --> 00:14:39,950 Elizabeth Shafe has excellent stage history of the play in the Cambridge University Press Shakespearean production series is the place, 138 00:14:39,950 --> 00:14:48,960 I think, to look up some of these possibilities. We'll talk more about them in some specific cases a bit later in the lecture. 139 00:14:48,960 --> 00:14:54,740 Now, certainly some of these possibilities are more available to particular cultural moments than others. 140 00:14:54,740 --> 00:15:02,200 And one of the things we tend to assume about the timing of the shoe is that the problem it presents to modern audiences is a new one. 141 00:15:02,200 --> 00:15:10,930 It is. It is in some sense about a gap between what we think the Elizabethans accepted and thought was fine and what we now accept and think is fine. 142 00:15:10,930 --> 00:15:16,150 So that this is a play, therefore we construct as unproblematic in its own time. 143 00:15:16,150 --> 00:15:21,490 But which games kind of problems through historical circumstance? 144 00:15:21,490 --> 00:15:25,630 I think lots of things that isn't true about The Taming of the Shrew. 145 00:15:25,630 --> 00:15:35,020 I think he always was an ambiguous and problematic play. Interestingly and unusually, in the case of The Taming of the Shrew, we can see some way, 146 00:15:35,020 --> 00:15:38,860 some of the ways in which the play impacted on its earliest audiences because 147 00:15:38,860 --> 00:15:46,690 of the evidence of a sequel written by John Fletcher in around sixteen eleven. 148 00:15:46,690 --> 00:15:54,510 Fletcher was a playwright with the men, probably the house playwright after Shakespeare. 149 00:15:54,510 --> 00:16:05,750 He collaborated with Shakespeare on Two Noble Kinsmen and on all his true or hand with Ace in the early 60s, 16 teams. 150 00:16:05,750 --> 00:16:12,330 His mock sequel to Shakespeare's earlier play can be seen as a further or more distant kind of collaboration. 151 00:16:12,330 --> 00:16:20,630 This is another way in which these two writers are working together. By Fletcher writing a kind of response to The Taming of the Shrew. 152 00:16:20,630 --> 00:16:25,610 The play is called The Woman's Prise or the Tamer Tamed. 153 00:16:25,610 --> 00:16:35,550 And what it does is to reintroduce the taming of the Shrew into the context of well-established literary context of the war between the sexes. 154 00:16:35,550 --> 00:16:41,130 Typically in serial stories like those by Chaucer maybe or Boccaccio, 155 00:16:41,130 --> 00:16:46,080 a story in which a husband outwits or triumphs over his wife is balanced out or 156 00:16:46,080 --> 00:16:51,900 capped by a story in which the wife is off challenges or overcomes the husband. 157 00:16:51,900 --> 00:17:00,960 So these these shrew stories, these gender inequality stories tend to go in pairs that kind of egen each other out. 158 00:17:00,960 --> 00:17:10,320 And what the Fletcher play does to Shakespeare, perhaps, is to provide that answering Paire structuralists who have wanted to change it. 159 00:17:10,320 --> 00:17:15,090 Sorry, structuralist, who've wanted to trace the origins of the circulation of particular story types, 160 00:17:15,090 --> 00:17:20,250 have identified that the shrewd timing plot exists across many cultures. 161 00:17:20,250 --> 00:17:29,100 There is no agreed literary source for Shakespeare's treatment of it here. But as an oral folktale, it has a very wide reach. 162 00:17:29,100 --> 00:17:36,880 At the end of Fletcher's play The Woman's Prise, the epilogue proposes that the result of the two plays should be a truce. 163 00:17:36,880 --> 00:17:41,820 Both to both sexes should be taught to, quote, do equality. 164 00:17:41,820 --> 00:17:49,620 And as they stand bound to love mutually between them and deflectors plan suggests 165 00:17:49,620 --> 00:17:55,890 we ought to get to some kind of a mean of some kind of balance between the sexes. 166 00:17:55,890 --> 00:18:00,600 Now that Fletcher's play is written as a self-conscious riposte to The Taming of the Shrew, 167 00:18:00,600 --> 00:18:09,420 it's clear Shakespeare's Petruchio is now a widower and returns as Fletcher's major protagonist. 168 00:18:09,420 --> 00:18:17,820 Fletcher's play begins with the wedding guests discussing pachucos, second marriage and reminding the audience of his first, 169 00:18:17,820 --> 00:18:27,360 Tanya reveals that yet the bear remembrance of his first wife will make him start in sleep and very often cry out for cudgels, 170 00:18:27,360 --> 00:18:30,870 cold staves, anything hiding his breaches out of fear. 171 00:18:30,870 --> 00:18:40,670 Her ghost should walk. And where I am yet. This time, the two close friends have said he will be in sole charge of breaches wearing his new wife, 172 00:18:40,670 --> 00:18:44,480 Maria is going to be completely controlled by him. 173 00:18:44,480 --> 00:18:49,310 She must say it said the friends do nothing of herself, not eat, drink, say, sir. 174 00:18:49,310 --> 00:18:54,420 How do you make her ready? Unless he paid her. 175 00:18:54,420 --> 00:19:04,410 So Petruchio plans in his second marriage to enforce himself and his husbandly authority over his new wife ismy wife, Maria. 176 00:19:04,410 --> 00:19:12,060 But Petruchio is in for a shock. His seemingly compliant, compliant bride has her own agenda. 177 00:19:12,060 --> 00:19:20,970 She swears till I have made him easy as a child. And tamers fear he shall not win a smile or a pleased look. 178 00:19:20,970 --> 00:19:26,010 To this end, she locks Petruchio out of her bedchamber on their wedding night. 179 00:19:26,010 --> 00:19:33,490 In supplies for a siege and fortifies it against his his invasion. 180 00:19:33,490 --> 00:19:37,990 But Fletcher's interpretation of the gender politics of Shakespeare's play seems already ambiguous, 181 00:19:37,990 --> 00:19:45,370 and this gives us a kind of licence to develop this ambiguity as something intrinsic to the play from its first performances. 182 00:19:45,370 --> 00:19:51,250 In his recollection of The Taming of the Shrew, we can see from what I've just described that Fletcher Hedges the issue about 183 00:19:51,250 --> 00:19:55,810 whether Catherine really is tamed into submission by the end of the play. 184 00:19:55,810 --> 00:20:04,450 This is this uncertainty becomes thoroughly contemporary. Petruchio as friends remember Catherine as a rebel and a tempest. 185 00:20:04,450 --> 00:20:13,120 The threat of her return haunts Petru CEO sleep, suggesting therefore that her independence was not quelled by her husband and that the speech of 186 00:20:13,120 --> 00:20:19,110 apparent submission at the end of Shakespeare's play that we've just heard was only provisional. 187 00:20:19,110 --> 00:20:25,860 On the other hand, Maria Parleying with her new husband from Habari Kadota Chamber, salute him. 188 00:20:25,860 --> 00:20:33,510 You have been famous for a woman Tamer and bear, the feared name of Brave Wife Braker, a woman. 189 00:20:33,510 --> 00:20:38,820 Now she'll take those honours off and tame you. Nay never looked so big. 190 00:20:38,820 --> 00:20:43,850 She showered, believe me. And I am she. What? Think ye. 191 00:20:43,850 --> 00:20:49,610 So Patrique is renowned here as a wife break suggests that he is remembered for taming Katherine, 192 00:20:49,610 --> 00:20:58,270 even though the comments about his ongoing nightmares suggest his hold over her was not as complete as Maria supposes. 193 00:20:58,270 --> 00:21:08,260 Fletcher's interpretation of that final speech then implicitly allows for Petraglia both to have to have tamed and to have not tamed his first bride. 194 00:21:08,260 --> 00:21:14,440 That ambivalence, then the question mark over what kind of resolution we reach at the end of Shakespeare's play is, 195 00:21:14,440 --> 00:21:21,340 we could argue, present in its reception from the earliest point. Fletcher's play asks the same question we are asking. 196 00:21:21,340 --> 00:21:27,490 And like us, can't settle to a single answer. 197 00:21:27,490 --> 00:21:37,310 So this early ambivalence about the play is amplified by evidence from an apparent earlier version of this play. 198 00:21:37,310 --> 00:21:44,210 I've already said that The Taming of the Shrew was first printed in the Folio of sixteen twenty three, 199 00:21:44,210 --> 00:21:53,480 but there is an early play text published under the beguilingly similar titled The Taming of a Shrew, 200 00:21:53,480 --> 00:22:05,160 which is published anonymously in Quarto in fifteen ninety four, said The Taming of a Shrew, published anonymously in fifteen ninety four. 201 00:22:05,160 --> 00:22:13,620 A shrew is a text which is which of which the relation to the Shrew is quite difficult to work out. 202 00:22:13,620 --> 00:22:22,530 The play has a similar plot. The two plays have a similar plot. Both have the central character called Kate, who is a shrew or a scold in a shrew. 203 00:22:22,530 --> 00:22:30,600 She is to be married to Ferrando, the Petruchio character that is called Ferrando, to aid the suitors of her sisters in the earlier version. 204 00:22:30,600 --> 00:22:35,050 There are two other sisters as well as Kate. 205 00:22:35,050 --> 00:22:43,990 The play precedes pretty much as the Shakespeare version we are more familiar with, with scenes of taming, involving deprivation of food and sleep. 206 00:22:43,990 --> 00:22:52,750 But there are two points of comparison between the Shrew and a shrew that I'd like to bring up as particular focuses for discussion. 207 00:22:52,750 --> 00:23:00,000 And the first is to take us back to that final speech that I spoke about. 208 00:23:00,000 --> 00:23:06,180 In The Taming of a Shrew. Kate and Emma call her Kate, because that is what she's called all the way through and the taming of Asia. 209 00:23:06,180 --> 00:23:06,600 Kate, 210 00:23:06,600 --> 00:23:16,410 speech about the reason women should be subservient to their husbands is actually distinctly different from those given by Shakespeare's Catherine. 211 00:23:16,410 --> 00:23:25,050 Kate tells us in a shrew that women's inferiority is part of the biblical order of creation. 212 00:23:25,050 --> 00:23:28,020 The king of kings, the glorious God of heaven, 213 00:23:28,020 --> 00:23:35,280 who in six days did frame his heavenly work and made all things to stand in perfect cause, then to his image. 214 00:23:35,280 --> 00:23:41,580 He did make a man, old Adam, and from his side asleep, a rape was taken of, 215 00:23:41,580 --> 00:23:47,670 which the Lord did make the woe of man, of which so termed by Adam, then woman. 216 00:23:47,670 --> 00:23:55,930 For that by her came sin to us and for her sin was Adam doomed to die. 217 00:23:55,930 --> 00:24:00,370 It's a vision of a kind of divinely ordained misogyny straight from the Garden of Eden, 218 00:24:00,370 --> 00:24:07,960 which Shakespeare's Kate Shakespeare Catherine doesn't give us any glimpse of Shakespeare's speech. 219 00:24:07,960 --> 00:24:15,160 Comparison speech is largely secular and certainly has no touch of this idea that, of course, women are inferior. 220 00:24:15,160 --> 00:24:23,860 They were made out of the rape and then they brought sin into the world. In Shakespeare's play, by contrast, the rhetoric, as we've seen, 221 00:24:23,860 --> 00:24:30,400 is something more approaching post reformation ideas of so-called companionate marriage, 222 00:24:30,400 --> 00:24:41,020 companionate marriage, a marriage which was not between equals, but which proposed mutual responsibilities for husband and wife. 223 00:24:41,020 --> 00:24:47,200 And we can see this in the large number of Protestant conduct books about the household, 224 00:24:47,200 --> 00:24:53,740 a marriage which are produced in the second half of the 16th century and beyond. 225 00:24:53,740 --> 00:25:03,160 This kind of conduct literature tries to set out that just as the wife had responsibilities to the husband, so too he had responsibilities to her. 226 00:25:03,160 --> 00:25:05,830 There's an attempt to establish sort of interlocking, 227 00:25:05,830 --> 00:25:16,230 interdependent bonds of obligation between husband and wife and also between children and parents and masters and servants. 228 00:25:16,230 --> 00:25:23,010 Catherine's speech draws on this understanding of marital reciprocity, arguing that the husband is, quote, 229 00:25:23,010 --> 00:25:32,820 one that cares for the and for time maintenance, commits his body to painful labour both by sea and land to watch the night in storms. 230 00:25:32,820 --> 00:25:40,260 The day in cold, while our lives warm at home, secure and safe and craved no other tribute by hand. 231 00:25:40,260 --> 00:25:45,610 But love, fetlocks and true obedience to little payment for so great a debt. 232 00:25:45,610 --> 00:25:51,450 So payment and debt suggests these are that this is a kind of transactions is a relationship of transactions 233 00:25:51,450 --> 00:26:00,480 where the husband's dangerous work or uncomfortable work bringing home the money deserves from the wife. 234 00:26:00,480 --> 00:26:06,690 Kindness and and slippers and pipe by the fire, that kind of thing. 235 00:26:06,690 --> 00:26:11,100 Now, if we set aside the obvious fallacy in this speech that Petruchio is never likely to 236 00:26:11,100 --> 00:26:16,410 commit his body to painful labour for anything since he has got Catherines diary, 237 00:26:16,410 --> 00:26:22,920 which was the most attractive thing about her to start with, remember? I come to wive it Wellesley in Padua. 238 00:26:22,920 --> 00:26:26,940 Setting that aside, it might not be right to set it aside, but let's do that. 239 00:26:26,940 --> 00:26:33,960 We can we can see that Katherine's speech implies a different relationship from that always wretched Garden of Eden scenario, 240 00:26:33,960 --> 00:26:43,980 which is evoked by Kate in the timing of a shrew. The speech in Asia also ends with a stage direction. 241 00:26:43,980 --> 00:26:47,790 She lays her hand under her husband's feet. 242 00:26:47,790 --> 00:26:55,050 So it does provide the accompanying gesture of subordination that I was pointing out isn't actually signposted in Shakespeare's version. 243 00:26:55,050 --> 00:26:59,790 Therefore, giving a space for different kinds of interpretation, offstage business, 244 00:26:59,790 --> 00:27:07,380 whether Catherine does or doesn't put her hand on the particular foot. 245 00:27:07,380 --> 00:27:16,260 So all this might suggest that, by contrast with Kate in the timing of a shrew, Catherine's taming, if it is really happened, 246 00:27:16,260 --> 00:27:24,480 is her ANCOP cooperation into a more reciprocal version of gender relations than the mediaeval antecedents of the taming plot might suggest. 247 00:27:24,480 --> 00:27:30,720 So it's something more like Protestant ideas of companionate marriage than mediaeval, 248 00:27:30,720 --> 00:27:37,080 misogynistic, biblical ideas about how women or the word woman should always be spelt. 249 00:27:37,080 --> 00:27:49,290 W o. E m. A n. Catherine, speech suggests the interconnectedness of husband and wife, although obviously we shouldn't overstate this mutuality, 250 00:27:49,290 --> 00:27:53,640 thy husband is thy lord, thy lifestyle, keep her thy head of a sovereign. 251 00:27:53,640 --> 00:27:58,770 This is not an equity. This is not an equality of any kind. 252 00:27:58,770 --> 00:28:02,070 It's the analogy, the analogical model, 253 00:28:02,070 --> 00:28:09,750 by which wifely obedience to the husband is in Aso's social and ethical continuum with the subject's loyalty to the monarch. 254 00:28:09,750 --> 00:28:18,000 Such duty as the subject owes the prince even such a woman oath eats, or even such a woman oath to her husband. 255 00:28:18,000 --> 00:28:26,040 So the woman owes to the husband what the subject does to the prince. It's important, therefore, that these hierarchies are maintained. 256 00:28:26,040 --> 00:28:32,790 This is the basis of the statue which is on the Elizabethan lawbooks called petty treason. 257 00:28:32,790 --> 00:28:37,230 Petty treason is the murder of a husband by a wife. It's not just murder. 258 00:28:37,230 --> 00:28:48,120 It's a kind of treason because these hierarchical relationships are in a kind of continuum with treason against against the sovereign. 259 00:28:48,120 --> 00:28:58,890 So it's a really good idea, I think, to compare these two two versions of the speech to see what another female character in a very similar situation 260 00:28:58,890 --> 00:29:05,430 might choose to say as part of her rhetoric of subordination compared with what Shakespeare's Catherine does, 261 00:29:05,430 --> 00:29:14,850 the text of a shrew is very widely available. Online archive dot org has a has as a copy of a 19th century edition. 262 00:29:14,850 --> 00:29:21,460 There's also a modern edited version in the quarter series from Cambridge University Press. 263 00:29:21,460 --> 00:29:25,120 One further part of that earlier play is relevant here. 264 00:29:25,120 --> 00:29:34,060 Just after Kate and her new husband, Ferrando, leave the stage for bed, the framing plot with which the play began comes back into focus. 265 00:29:34,060 --> 00:29:39,880 Christopher Sligh and the play in The Taming of a Shrewd. 266 00:29:39,880 --> 00:29:48,760 The stage direction reads, then enter to pairing of Sligh in his own apparel again and leaves him where they found him. 267 00:29:48,760 --> 00:29:57,310 And then goes out. So Sly returns to the stage to be woken by the tap star. 268 00:29:57,310 --> 00:30:01,340 The taps, the this is the tap to speak was going read it to. 269 00:30:01,340 --> 00:30:05,870 Now the dark, some night is over passed and Dorning day appears in Crystal Sky. 270 00:30:05,870 --> 00:30:10,150 Now, Mr. Heyst abroad soft. Who's this? What sly. 271 00:30:10,150 --> 00:30:14,210 A wondrous Horthy lain here all night. I'll wake him. 272 00:30:14,210 --> 00:30:18,140 I think he's starved by this. But that his belly was so stuffed with ale. 273 00:30:18,140 --> 00:30:23,570 What now? Slye awake for shame. Simu gives some more wins or wine. 274 00:30:23,570 --> 00:30:30,170 What's all the players gone? Am I not a Lord? Lord with a murrain come out that drunken still. 275 00:30:30,170 --> 00:30:33,740 Who's this sly trapster. Oh Lord Sarah. 276 00:30:33,740 --> 00:30:40,190 I've had the bravest dream tonight that ever thou hast in all of my life I marry, says the top star. 277 00:30:40,190 --> 00:30:44,200 You best get you home for your wife, or curse you for dreaming here tonight. 278 00:30:44,200 --> 00:30:48,380 Will she? So sly. I know now how to tame a shrew. 279 00:30:48,380 --> 00:30:54,720 I dreamt upon it all this night till now. And thou hast wake me out of the best dream that ever I had in my life. 280 00:30:54,720 --> 00:31:06,720 But out to my wife presently and tame her to if she anger me nay taris life or I'll go home with thee and hear the rest that thou hast trend tonight. 281 00:31:06,720 --> 00:31:10,560 Christopher Slye suggests here at the end of The Taming of a Shrew, 282 00:31:10,560 --> 00:31:18,460 that the take home message from this play is the direct information about how to tame a shrewish wife. 283 00:31:18,460 --> 00:31:22,750 Now, does that mean we should take this seriously as an assessment of the play? 284 00:31:22,750 --> 00:31:36,000 Does Christophers lie, as is sometimes suggested, standing as the kind of on-Stage audience, a kind of proxy or a figure for our own reactions? 285 00:31:36,000 --> 00:31:43,170 Or does it play summary from a drunken tinker? Immediately mark itself as preposterous and deluded. 286 00:31:43,170 --> 00:31:50,000 Should we be thinking? That's what Christopher Sly would think. And therefore, that is not what I myself think. 287 00:31:50,000 --> 00:31:57,260 Does bringing back the frame device at the end of a shrew re-establish the Kate Ferrando plot, a self-conscious fiction, 288 00:31:57,260 --> 00:32:05,150 a play within a play which could only exist in this never, never land of theatricality or dream? 289 00:32:05,150 --> 00:32:08,780 Thinking back to what I was talking about last week from Midsummer Night's Dream. 290 00:32:08,780 --> 00:32:14,240 And in any case, does any of this tell us anything about the shrew in which the ending of the play, 291 00:32:14,240 --> 00:32:21,800 this ending of the play with the frame coming back does not exist after the second scene of the play proper? 292 00:32:21,800 --> 00:32:26,370 The slight plot in The Taming of the Shrew disappears entirely. 293 00:32:26,370 --> 00:32:33,950 And it seems very unlikely. It seems very unlikely to me that the players would waste a kind of chorus 294 00:32:33,950 --> 00:32:37,610 figure or a chorus presence on stage if it weren't actually saying anything. 295 00:32:37,610 --> 00:32:43,450 I think the slide, it must just disappear in performance. So so far, 296 00:32:43,450 --> 00:32:50,860 I've been suggesting then that the ambiguity over whether Katherine is tamed at the end of The Taming of the Shrew is intrinsic to the play. 297 00:32:50,860 --> 00:32:52,840 It isn't, as some critics have suggested, 298 00:32:52,840 --> 00:33:00,740 a problem that arises because we do not now believe the kind of gender ideology that the Elizabethan audiences would have supported. 299 00:33:00,740 --> 00:33:09,310 It's not, I think, the problem of history. In fact, gender relations have always been problematic, uncontested in different ways. 300 00:33:09,310 --> 00:33:12,610 And literary versions of those, perhaps even more so. 301 00:33:12,610 --> 00:33:23,660 I think it's a fallacy to look back and think that the past was believed in more homogenously or more straightforwardly than our own society does now. 302 00:33:23,660 --> 00:33:31,940 The modern the early modern evidence of the taming of Asia, that quarto version of something like this play from 1894 and of the time, 303 00:33:31,940 --> 00:33:36,710 attained the Fletcher play in the Jacobean period, as well as the play's own structure. 304 00:33:36,710 --> 00:33:40,670 And its ambiguities mean that this is a question present in the text itself. 305 00:33:40,670 --> 00:33:49,160 It's not something which we bring from some modern perspective which destabilises the text, which was perfectly straightforward. 306 00:33:49,160 --> 00:33:55,010 For the last section of the lecture, then I want to turn to some late 20th century performance to suggest how some of these 307 00:33:55,010 --> 00:34:00,470 ambiguities have informed and shaped the play's direction on the contemporary stage. 308 00:34:00,470 --> 00:34:09,890 And here I am using material from female actors in the book edited by Carol Rutter called Clamorous Voices. 309 00:34:09,890 --> 00:34:19,100 Shakespeare's Women Today. It's a great account of different, very, very articulate actors talking about playing Catherine, 310 00:34:19,100 --> 00:34:22,520 which is what we're going to use in the ledger today, but also measure for measures. 311 00:34:22,520 --> 00:34:31,070 Isabella, for instance, Lady Macbeth, Rosalind and other other characters are really interesting understandings of 312 00:34:31,070 --> 00:34:38,810 the characters and of the play of productions in which they were performed. So the chapter on the Term With The Shrew brings together Schneid Kuzak, 313 00:34:38,810 --> 00:34:45,440 who played Catherine for the RISC in 1982 under the direction of Michael Bogdanoff and Fiona Shaw, 314 00:34:45,440 --> 00:34:52,560 who was directed by Jonathan Miller in another RLC production in 1987. 315 00:34:52,560 --> 00:35:01,670 So this is what these two actors talk, how they talk about the question of whether Katherine is tamed or was tamed in their productions. 316 00:35:01,670 --> 00:35:10,850 Fiona Shaw argued that Katherine's last speech is a kind of step forward into a new life. 317 00:35:10,850 --> 00:35:20,630 This man, who seemed to be her tormentor, has given her or has allowed her to take the step that will save the rest of her life. 318 00:35:20,630 --> 00:35:24,950 That's why it's wrong. It's the play's about dominance and the broken spirit. 319 00:35:24,950 --> 00:35:31,280 It's about someone on the brink who found a way of saying yes without being compromised. 320 00:35:31,280 --> 00:35:37,820 So the man who seemed to be her tormentor has given her or allowed her to take the step that will save the rest of her life. 321 00:35:37,820 --> 00:35:47,390 Shaw's was a a kind of a kind of interpretation of Katherine, which suggested that Katherine Suresnes was the sign of being out of control, 322 00:35:47,390 --> 00:35:56,330 out of the kind of social norms, unable to enjoy OAP or proceed with personal relationships on any level. 323 00:35:56,330 --> 00:36:04,100 So she brings out the what Katherine the evidence of Katherine shrewish behaviour is actually just bad behaviour. 324 00:36:04,100 --> 00:36:09,200 It's not really anything that you would particularly want to support her in doing. 325 00:36:09,200 --> 00:36:14,930 Katherine is never trying to challenge gender norms in the way that, say, 326 00:36:14,930 --> 00:36:21,770 Portia does when she dresses as an extremely efficient lawyer in Merchant of Venice, for example. 327 00:36:21,770 --> 00:36:28,770 You know, she's not saying I don't want to be married because I'm going to be a doctor or I'm going to do something else. 328 00:36:28,770 --> 00:36:34,700 Is she she's just saying I hate my sister and a bag, a looter over her head and going to beat her. 329 00:36:34,700 --> 00:36:38,840 These are these are low level anti-social pieces of behaviour. 330 00:36:38,840 --> 00:36:46,970 Fiona Shaw felt this is not a Kate whose independence or whose feistiness should be endorsed by the play because it's not worthwhile. 331 00:36:46,970 --> 00:37:01,560 It's not doing anything productive. It's anti-social. It's a sign of a kind of pain or or misalliance mis mis kind of mis fitting into the society. 332 00:37:01,560 --> 00:37:09,630 At the end of the play show, says Kate, when she can say anything now and she's still Kate, she's saying, I acknowledged the system. 333 00:37:09,630 --> 00:37:17,830 I don't think we can change this, but she is able to operate within it. 334 00:37:17,830 --> 00:37:27,100 So sure argues that the speech at the end of the production that she was in was not really an articulation of the gender status quo, 335 00:37:27,100 --> 00:37:31,570 but a kind of challenge to it and suggesting that Kate, 336 00:37:31,570 --> 00:37:40,720 who is within the system in some ways, is more able to operate according to its rules or that kind of push its rules a bit and to be herself, 337 00:37:40,720 --> 00:37:44,680 to be a person, to be it to be to be a comic person. 338 00:37:44,680 --> 00:37:49,840 So I think that's a production which gives the play a comic ending. 339 00:37:49,840 --> 00:37:53,770 That's not to say a funny ending, but the ending that comedy is looking for, 340 00:37:53,770 --> 00:37:59,650 which is the sense that individuality is a rather dangerous quality and comedy is what people need, 341 00:37:59,650 --> 00:38:04,240 is the ability to meld their individuality to someone else. 342 00:38:04,240 --> 00:38:10,690 That's how comedies work. That does that bringing people together and suggesting that a kind of radical autonomy is a dangerous, 343 00:38:10,690 --> 00:38:15,840 anti-social thing to have the people who are on their own in comedies are dangerous. 344 00:38:15,840 --> 00:38:23,180 A. Comic figures, people like Don Jones, who is talking about when we were thinking about much ado about nothing. 345 00:38:23,180 --> 00:38:29,940 Let's look at then at Schneid Cusack's interpretation of Kate's final speech, which is less, 346 00:38:29,940 --> 00:38:39,390 less, less guarded than shows, is I think she sees the speech as a positive coming together, 347 00:38:39,390 --> 00:38:48,780 the intellectual consummation of a marriage of equals, which is just about to have its physical consummation after the end of the play. 348 00:38:48,780 --> 00:38:56,940 This is Kuzak at the end of the play. I was determined that Kate and PetroChina were rebels and would remain rebels forever. 349 00:38:56,940 --> 00:39:03,840 Her speech was not predictable. This so-called submission speech isn't a submission speech at all. 350 00:39:03,840 --> 00:39:08,340 It's a speech about how her spirit has been allowed to soar free. 351 00:39:08,340 --> 00:39:12,990 She is not attached to him. He hasn't laid down the rules for her. 352 00:39:12,990 --> 00:39:19,680 She has made her own rules. And what he's managed to do is to allow her to have her own vision. 353 00:39:19,680 --> 00:39:29,170 It happens that her vision coincides with his. There is a privately shared joke in the speech and irony and some blackness. 354 00:39:29,170 --> 00:39:34,140 They're going to go on to have a very interesting marriage. Petruchio was on his knees. 355 00:39:34,140 --> 00:39:46,010 I was standing there. So she goes on to talk about how this stage business goes, went towards shaping the interpretation of the scene. 356 00:39:46,010 --> 00:39:52,280 So the question of whether Katherine is tamed becomes in these two accounts a point of contention. 357 00:39:52,280 --> 00:40:00,080 The play text raises but cannot answer while performance tries to find contingent answers. 358 00:40:00,080 --> 00:40:05,330 No matter how hard we look at the text of the shrew, we won't be able to stabilise its meaning. 359 00:40:05,330 --> 00:40:10,660 But we can look to performance to give us some of the possibilities. 360 00:40:10,660 --> 00:40:17,770 What's interesting about these possibilities in performance is that it's extremely rare to see a production of the play, 361 00:40:17,770 --> 00:40:22,360 which argues that Katherine is trained. So that's for us to see that. 362 00:40:22,360 --> 00:40:31,840 Now, that's obviously a kind of too uncomfortable. It's not a thing that we we particularly want to see. 363 00:40:31,840 --> 00:40:38,800 So let's finish with a slightly wider question then. What's at stake for us in this question of whether Katherine is tamed? 364 00:40:38,800 --> 00:40:44,700 Why does this question matter? The examples from modern performance, 365 00:40:44,700 --> 00:40:55,410 both of these two stage productions with Schneid Kuzak and with Fiona Shaw and the films by Zeffirelli and for the BBC that I cited earlier. 366 00:40:55,410 --> 00:41:02,310 All of these productions want a Catherine who, if she is tamed, is better for it. 367 00:41:02,310 --> 00:41:09,600 Case has been brought into a more contented social role, has kept enough of her firing us to be interesting, 368 00:41:09,600 --> 00:41:20,380 has met her match in Petruchio and is going to have a more interesting marriage than Bianca is with whoever it is she ended up marrying. 369 00:41:20,380 --> 00:41:25,090 None of these versions from the later 20th century wants the play to endorse 370 00:41:25,090 --> 00:41:33,880 Katharine's taming as the comic triumph of Petruchio or of male authority. 371 00:41:33,880 --> 00:41:39,490 I think this tells us something about what we want or need Shakespeare to mean. 372 00:41:39,490 --> 00:41:47,170 It probably wouldn't really matter whether Fletcher or Middleton or Johnson wrote a play about gender relations in which male 373 00:41:47,170 --> 00:41:55,270 superiority seemed to be utterly championed because it would be easy for us to identify that as a kind of antique attitude, 374 00:41:55,270 --> 00:42:03,640 the equivalent of doublets and hose a kind of museum piece, which is the way we tend to think about other writers from the past. 375 00:42:03,640 --> 00:42:10,750 It wouldn't really matter to us if we were to say Fletcher was sexist, you know, hold the hold the front page. 376 00:42:10,750 --> 00:42:14,840 Shakespeare's role in modern culture, of course, makes that stance impossible. 377 00:42:14,840 --> 00:42:21,200 We don't value Shakespeare primarily because of the insight he gives us into 16th century culture. 378 00:42:21,200 --> 00:42:30,270 Rather, we burden his works with the requirement that they can somehow anticipate our later concerns and ways of thinking. 379 00:42:30,270 --> 00:42:39,690 Put more simply, a misogynistic Shakespeare would be a very uncomfortable man of the millennium or a compulsory author here or in school. 380 00:42:39,690 --> 00:42:47,280 The school system or a beneficiary of taxpayer subsidy as at the Royal Shakespeare Company. 381 00:42:47,280 --> 00:42:51,180 Criticism has worked extremely hard to make this play acceptable, 382 00:42:51,180 --> 00:42:59,610 and it's worth assessing the lengths to which scholars and directors have gone to reassure us that Katherine is not, after all, tamed. 383 00:42:59,610 --> 00:43:02,840 So I'm arguing that the play itself is ambiguous. 384 00:43:02,840 --> 00:43:12,030 But out of that ambiguity, we have created something like a performance consensus, which suggests, at least for the modern period, 385 00:43:12,030 --> 00:43:24,520 that Katherine is able to retain some kind of independence, some kind of autonomy, even as she speaks at the speech that we've been discussing. 386 00:43:24,520 --> 00:43:24,670 Now, 387 00:43:24,670 --> 00:43:35,140 some of these ideas about how later history shapes our expectations and makes certain kinds of readings possible or impossible will recur next week, 388 00:43:35,140 --> 00:43:40,870 which is my last lecture in this series. The plane going to be talking about is The Merchant of Venice. 389 00:43:40,870 --> 00:43:48,460 And I think the question I'm going to talk about that is, why does Pisania pick the lead casket? 390 00:43:48,460 --> 00:43:53,080 Why just beside you pick the LED casket to help us see your Merchant of Venice next week. 391 00:43:53,080 --> 00:43:56,640 Thank you.