• 1 Juliet Stevenson, “Manifesto,” in The Times of London, January 16, 2022, n.p., accessible online at (...)

1“Some of Shakespeare’s plays, where history has overtaken them, should just be buried.” So opined the renowned Shakespearean actor Juliet Stevenson in The Times of London on January 16^th 2022 in a piece entitled: “Juliet Stevenson’s manifesto to keep Shakespeare alive –let’s cancel The Merchant of Venice: The actress gives her five rules for successful revivals of the Bard – and the two plays that should never be performed again.”1 Stevenson argued that along with The Merchant of Venice, on grounds of its alleged anti-Semitism, The Taming of the Shrew should be barred from the stage and no longer staged because of its ostensible misogyny. Taking this circumstance as its context, this essay is not about silence as such, but rather about being silenced and especially about two of Shakespeare’s characters, the loquacious Kate in The Taming of the Shrew and that modest yet proficient female rhetorician, Lucrece, in The Rape of Lucrece. Female silence, or more accurately the stifling of women’s speech that, paradoxically, gives rise to significant instances of an urgent female vocality in these texts, merits urgent revisitation in light of the energies of our own cancel-culture moment.

• 2 Stevenson, op. cit.

2Although she professes no desire to remove Shrew from libraries and bookstores, Juliet Stevenson wants to see the play cancelled in performance: “You can’t do The Taming of the Shrew now – the spine of its so-called comedy is that a man marries a woman he doesn’t love and enjoys using his patriarchal authority to crush her. I’ve seen several directors try to negotiate it, but you can’t make it acceptable.”2 The view that in modern performance Shrew fails to become morally acceptable surely invites disagreement. Certainly, there are likely as many productions showing Petruchio defeated and outwitted by his wife as there are those depicting him as a victorious brute. Attempts to stage the knotty issues presented by the play by the Royal Shakespeare Company have included Gregory Doran’s 2004 production, which Paul Taylor writing in The Independent, declared:

• 4 “In Focus: Lucy Bailey 2012”, Lucy Bailey in conversation with Professor Carol Rutter, Royal Shakes (...)
• 5 “In Focus: Michael Bogdanov 1978”, Royal Shakespeare Company, accessible online at: https://www.rsc (...)
• 6 “Conall Morrison 2008 Production”, Royal Shakespeare Company, accessible online at: https://www.rsc (...)

3Similarly in 2012, Lucy Bailey understood the play to be “really affirmative at the end […]. And once Petruchio says ‘Come, Kate, we’ll to bed’, I think you have to imagine that they’re going have the best sex ever. Life is going to be turbulent, but compared to the small-minded people around them, in finding each other they’ve found freedom.”4 On the other side of the issue, Michael Bogdanov’s Katherina (played by Paola Dionisotti) in his 1978 production “delivered her speech of wifely duty in a toneless, lifeless voice,”5 while Conall Morrison’s 2008 production saw that infamous final speech delivered “in a submissive and robotic way, leaving no doubt that the play’s misogyny is no longer palatable to modern audiences” (my emphasis).6 The Royal Shakespeare Company is now, it would seem, unshakably committed to the idea that Shrew does not just represent misogyny but is misogynist, and this despite the history of performances and appropriations by its own actors and directors that would seem to challenge such a view because they have variously explored the play’s ambiguity about patriarchal domination or simply exposed its starkest delineations. Elsewhere and on screen, the rom-com Ten Things I Hate About You starring Julia Stiles and Heath Ledger in 1999, for instance, and the BBC’s delightful Shakespeare Retold Taming of the Shew of 2005 with Rufus Sewell as Petruchio and Shirley Henderson in the title role, took the positive view of the play as a comedy with a happy ending. Of course, these productions inhabited an era prior to the outcry from the movements #Me Too and #Balance ton Porc against the male sexual abuse of women. However, it is too ironic that speaking up and speaking out rightly urged by these movements should incite demands such as Stevenson’s to shut down Shrew.

• 7 John Fletcher, The Tamer Tamed or The Woman’s Prize, ed. Celia Daileader and Gary Taylor, Mancheste (...)

4The issues inherent in Shrew around the battle of the sexes, known in the early modern period as the querelle des femmes, have been long-enduring features of both elite and popular culture. Most importantly, of course, John Fletcher’s The Tamer Tamed or The Woman’s Prize (1611)7 also utilized the inversion of the power hierarchy of Shakespeare’s play. That Fletcher’s version of the shrew story was written and performed in Shakespeare’s lifetime as a riposte and sequel to its Shakespearean predecessor suggests the degree to which the gender dynamic was a topic of social interest and cultural controversy. In The Woman’s Prize, Kate has died, and the widower Petruchio is now remarried. His second wife, Maria, is far from docile, and this time around, she succeeds in taming him. At the other end of the temporal spectrum, in Éléonore Pourriat’s 2018 Netflix movie, Je ne suis pas un homme facile, “I am not an Easy Man” (2018), the male protagonist wakes up in the street after an accident to find himself in a world where women are in charge and offers a recent instance from popular cinema of the cultural game of reorganizing and reimagining gender roles and dynamics.

• 8 All references to the English translation of the Metamorphoses are to Ovid’s Metamorphoses: The Art (...)

6More importantly, dispensing with the Induction scenes served to erase the Ovidian context of Shakespeare’s play, and while many directors before Audibert have taken the same tack, the omission becomes much more significant and impactful in a production whose foundation is gender inversion. Ovid is the poet to whom Shakespeare makes most recourse in his career, and the stories contained in the Metamorphoses8 all concern transformations that are nearly always connected to gender and sexuality. Like Shrew, Ovid’s tales consider whether and to what degree change is initiated from without or within, or from some complex interaction between internal drives and external forces. Ovidian stories of metamorphoses also question whether and to what extent human beings can assert their will or exert control over themselves, their desires, or their circumstances.

• 9 All quotations from this play refer to William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, ed. Dympna Cal (...)
• 10 Ovid, Heroides, Amores, trans. Grant Showerman, revised. G. P. Goold, Loeb Classical Library, Ovid (...)
• 11 Christopher Marlowe, “All Ovid’s Elegies,” in Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Poems and Translati (...)

7In relation to the everyday power dynamics of gender in the familiar world of a Warwickshire village, the Induction scenes depict the hostess’s exercise of power over the drunken Sly when she summons the constable: “I know my remedy: I must go fetch the thirdborough” (Induction 1.9).9 Further, these opening two scenes represent both powerful and powerless women from Ovidian mythology. Among those mentioned, Io, a rape victim, as we shall see in due course, is of particular significance. She appears repeatedly in Ovid’s works: in the Metamorphoses, the Heroides, and the Amores. Io is juxtaposed with the powerful and sensual Assyrian queen, Semiramis who is mentioned in both Ovid’s original text (Amores 1.5.11),10 and in Christopher Marlowe’s translation titled “Elegia 5,” in All Ovid’s Elegies:11 “We’ll have thee to a couch, / Softer and sweeter than the lustful bed / On purpose trimmed up for Semiramis” (Induction 2. 35-7). Without any sense of the contrast between Io and Semiramis, in Audibert’s rendering, all “women” are the same, so that gender identities have less texture and dimension once stripped of their mythological depth.

• 12 “Justin Audibert 2019 Production”, Royal Shakespeare Company, accessible online at: https://www.rsc (...)
• 13 Ella Hawkins, Review of The Taming of the Shrew, dir. by Justin Audibert, Shakespeare Bulletin, 38. (...)
• 14 Hawkins, op. cit., p. 159.

8The production also changed nouns, names, and pronouns so that they conformed to the play’s topsy-turvy representation of gender while still rendering the plot coherent. Audibert’s production, the RSC website claims, “turns Shakespeare’s fierce, energetic comedy of gender and materialism on its head to offer a fresh perspective on its portrayal of hierarchy and power.”12 Ella Hawkins in her astute review for the Shakespeare Bulletin, noted that “Shrew has arguably become Shakespeare’s most unpalatable text due to its troubling combination of domestic abuse, gaslighting, and comedy”13 (my emphasis). Hawkins felt that Audibert’s gender reversal was effective in so far as “The sheer absurdity of a network of women negotiating for ownership of men highlighted how strange it is that the opposite practice is generally not presented as being correspondingly outrageous.”14 For her, however, this could not fully remedy the play’s unpalatability:

• 16 Alexander Thom, “Review of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew (directed by Justin Audibert for t (...)

9Another reviewer, Alexander Thom, in the journal Shakespeare, confessed a “personal contempt for Shrew” but nonetheless judged the production successful: “I felt I glimpsed Petruchio and his dramatic appeal for the first time, without feeling the production was complicit in the misogynistic tradition within which he emerged.”16 The clips available online suggest that the production was lively and immensely engaging in terms of performance. However, it was not clear to me that a male Katherine was in fact defeated by Petruchia, in part because the cultural weight and depth accorded to the male voice did not seem to be – and perhaps could not be – reversed by the shift in roles. While Audibert’s attempted gender inversions were commendably innovative, reversal in this instance merely confined misogyny within the limits of the same patriarchal problematic.

• 17 William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, ed. Barbara Hodgdon, Arden Shakespeare, London, Methu (...)
• 18 Frances E. Dolan, “Household Chastisements: Gender, Authority, and Domestic Violence,” in Renaissan (...)
• 19 Juliet Dusinberre, “The Taming of the Shrew: Women, Acting, and Power,” in Studies in the Literary (...)
• 20 Alison Findlay, “Shakespeare, Ceremony, and the Public Sphere of Performance,” Shakespeare, 14.1, 2 (...)

11Despite all the arguments that canceling Shrew is a way of resisting and denouncing misogyny, those like Stevens who advocate it also succeed in ignoring and even dismissing that substantive body of women’s theatrical and scholarly work that has engaged with Shakespeare’s writings. As Barbara Hodgdon, the editor of the Arden 3 text observes: “Although there is little or no sense of women’s community within the play, a wide-ranging network of present-day ‘shrews’ talk shrewdly about the play amongst themselves, with their students and in print.”17 Importantly, this scholarship, does not toe any feminist-party line and offers considerable diversity of interpretation, often subtle and nuanced. Frances E. Dolan, for example, argues that what is at issue in the play is not simply misogyny but the violence women were authorized to commit against their servants.18 In “The Taming of the Shrew: Women, Acting and Power,” Juliet Dusinberre attends to the hierarchy and subordination in the theatre itself where a master actor played the male roles, and his apprentice played the female ones. This historical fact about the division of labor in the theatre, Dusinberre argues, renders Kate’s long final speech as his master’s comeuppance because this is the moment when the boy actress gets the starring role.19 Alison Findlay examines the role of public ritual in performance, specifically betrothal and wedding, in shaping and managing audience reaction to the hierarchical structures depicted in the play.20 Further in her Women in Shakespeare: A Dictionary, Findlay points out that:

• 22 Patricia Parker, “Construing Gender: Mastering Bianca in The Taming of the Shrew,” in The Impact of (...)
• 23 Urvashi Chakravarty, Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern Engl (...)

12Patricia Parker examines Bianca’s subversiveness and capacity for mastery in her Latin lessons,22 while most recently Urvashi Chakravarty’s feminist-anti-racist reading addresses the gender-inflected hierarchy of the master-slave dynamic inherited from ancient drama and reenacted with a twist in the relationship between Tranio and Lucentio.23 The range of interpretive and performance possibilities available in Shakespeare’s Shrew suggests that the play is less amenable to the type of tub-thumping pronouncements and rote denunciations currently demanded of art in a world of cancel culture.

• 24 William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, ed. Brian Morris, Arden Shakespeare, London, Methuen, (...)
• 25 Thomas Newton’s Seneca’s Tragedies, trans. John Studely (1581), STC 22221, sig. K1^v.

14Editors typically remark here only that Kate’s speech is proverbial. “Grief pent up will break the heart” is indeed, as Brian Morris notes, “one of the great commonplaces of the age” and appears often in early modern drama.24 In Macbeth, for example, mourning the state of his country, Malcolm says: “The grief that does not speak / Whispers the o’erfraught heart and bids it break” (4.3.246). This derives from Seneca’s Hippolytus, 2.3.607: “Curae leves loquuntur, ingentes stupent”, translated by John Studely in Thomas Newton’s Seneca’s Tragedies (1581) as “Light cares have wordes at will. But great doe make us sore agast.”25 “Grief pent up will break the heart” and its adjacent proverbial sentiments are, however, a very pale shadow of Kate’s explosive line: “My tongue will tell the anger of my heart.” Indeed, while grief can refer to troubles in general, in Macbeth, grief is specifically about mourning, and grief and anger are very different sentiments. Further, none of the proverbs enjoin any social superiors, “betters,” who might silence the aggrieved to go plug their ears. There is, then, a resistance inherent in these lines that may faintly echo proverbial wisdom but which cannot be comprehensively enveloped by it.

• 26 Laetitia Coussement-Boillot and Christine Sukič, ‘Silent Rhetoric,’ ‘Dumb Eloquence:’ The Rhetoric (...)
• 27 Orgel, op. cit., p. 107.

15In the profoundly patriarchal world of early modern England, no matter one’s gender, to be silenced was surely, if problematically, a condition of feminization and disempowerment. While silence was at times understood to be the most perfect form of eloquence, the choice, especially a woman’s choice to exercise silence is very different from being forbidden to speak or prevented from doing so, or conversely, being so traumatized that speech is impossible. As Laetitia Coussement-Boillot and Christine Sukic rightly recognize: “For the Renaissance humanists, silence was [...] sometimes seen as preferable to speech, but the spoken word was still the highest form of human expression.”26 In Ovid’s Amores, the poet, now remorseful, reports that he assaulted his mistress in a rage and how now, with “lingua retenta”, with literally “restrained tongue”, she is unable to speak. This is Christopher Marlowe’s translation in All Ovid’s Elegies: “She nothing said, pale fear her tongue had tied; / But secretly her looks with cheeks did trounce me, / Her tears, she silent, guilty did pronounce me” (I. vii. 20-3).27 Ovid’s mistress is here reduced to silent looks, and they are the consequence of incapacity, not choice. Similarly, when Ovid himself resorts to signs in the fourth elegy of Book 1, it is only because his mistress is at a dinner with her husband so that the poet cannot speak to her openly. He contrives a series of gestures to signal his meaning: “Words without voice shall on my eyebrows sit” (I. iv. 19). Indeed, in the Renaissance “dumb eloquence,” was often the last resort of the incapacitated who had no other means of communicating. It is precisely this “alphabet” that Titus famously hopes to wrest from Lavinia’s gesticulations with her stumps and tongueless mouth in Titus Andronicus (3.2.44).

• 28 Unless otherwise noted, all references to Shakespeare’s works are from Folger Digital Texts, access (...)
• 29 “The Form of Solemnization of Matrimony” from the Book of Common Prayer reads: “Wilt thou obey him (...)
• 30 George Puttenham, The Arte Eng. Poesie (1589) STC 20519, ii. v., p. 64.

16Depending on the interpretive slant in early modern productions, the boy actress playing Kate might “speak between the change of man and boy” with “a reed voice” that Portia declares she will adopt in The Merchant of Venice28 when she goes to court to defend Antonio. A shrill squeak is after all what is associated with the long-nosed domestic pest, the actual animal “shrew.” Petruchio’s dismissal of her protests may be either an accurate assessment of her speech or, conversely, it may be entirely plausible: “Think you a little din can daunt mine ears? / Have I not in my time heard lion’s roar?” (1.2. 196-198). Crucially, that roar speaks precisely to volume and not just volubility. Kate’s final submission speech, as several previous commentators have observed, is the longest in the play and is a recitation of The Book of Common Prayer and the “Second Homily on Marriage.” When Kate urges that women “are bound to serve, love and obey,” she is essentially telling the other women that they must adhere to their wedding vows. “The Form of Solemnization of Matrimony” from the Book of Common Prayer reads: “Wilt thou obey him and serve him, love, honor, and keep him, in sickness, and in health?”29 By the end of the play in this speech, I would argue, Kate opts for volubility, that is for a full and fluent expression, as opposed to a simply amplified one. George Puttenham in The Arte of English Poesie (1589) writes: “Which flowing of wordes with much volubility smoothly proceeding from the mouth is in some sort harmonicall.”30 Kate’s final pronouncement is an inauthentic rehearsal of orthodoxy, no doubt; but then authenticity was not one of the requirements of early modern rhetoric.

• 31 For extended analyses of this poem from a rather different point of view, see Dympna Callaghan, “Sh (...)
• 32 Elena Pellone, The Rape of Lucrece, Verona Shakespeare Fringe Festival, 25 July 2021, accessible on (...)

19Shakespeare’s second epyllion, The Rape of Lucrece (1594) is the text which I take as my second example of Shakespeare’s representation of forceful female utterance.31 That the texts I have chosen are from different genres is, of course, significant. It goes without saying that Lucrece is a narrative poem and not a play and, though it has been publicly staged most recently in Elena Pellone’s dramatized recitation at the Venice Festival in 2022,32 it was not written as a theatrical performance. This is especially significant since the nature of the genre of the epyllion means that Lucrece was never ventriloquized by a male actor on the early modern stage, but the poem nonetheless raises similarly vexed questions about the preconditions of female speech. While the focal point of my analysis in Shrew has been Kate’s impassioned plea for free expression, my focus in The Rape of Lucrece will be on the fact that despite all obstacles to doing so, Lucrece succeeds in denouncing Tarquin. Rape may be intended as an act of silencing, figured so gruesomely in Ovid when Tereus cuts out Philomel’s tongue, but it is also an impetus to expression. As a consequence of the oft-cited injunction that women should be chaste, silent, and obedient, (that was the theory at least), persuasion, speaking up and speaking out, which constitute the key cultural functions of rhetoric, were not fully available to a subjugated population. Thus, “Tarquin’s ravishing strides, towards his design” (Macbeth, 2.1.55) remain unimpeded by Lucrece’s eloquence:

• 33 Carla Mazzio, The Inarticulate Renaissance: Language Trouble in an Age of Eloquence, Philadelphia, (...)

20Importantly, Lucrece’s chaste speech is hesitant, her expression at times suspended with emotion, but these pauses serve only to enhance rather than detract from her rhetorical performance. Such broken utterance constitutes an aspect of what, in another context, Carla Mazzio has termed “the inarticulate Renaissance.”33

• 34 Lynn Enterline, The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare, Cambridge, Cambridge University (...)
• 35 Catherine Bates, Masculinity, Gender, and Identity in the Renaissance Lyric, Cambridge, Cambridge U (...)

21Importantly, it is not just Lucrece who is given a voice in this poem. Lynn Enterline reads the central voice of The Rape of Lucrece as that of its male narrator, and she argues that he first identifies with Tarquin so that he, the narrator, can rape Lucrece, after which, through his subsequent identification with Lucrece as a victim, he can have sexual access, not to her, as we might expect but to Tarquin.34 Catherine Bates concurs in this reading: “The shameful but erotic sub-text of this poem [...] whispers a desire for homosexual rape.”35 These ingenious and compelling readings are significant indicators of the degree of latitude Shakespeare’s poem allows in relation to interpretive freedom, and this is not an avenue that I would wish to foreclose in arguing, as I do, for the poem as one of forceful female protestation and resistance to Tarquin’s crime. Contra cancel culture, literary interpretation is, after all, about opening the text up, not closing it down.

• 36 Enterline, op. cit., p.181.
• 37 Enterline, op. cit. p. 233.

24In contrast to Ovid, whose stories of rape tend to show pursued women in motion in the attempt to flee an attacker,36 Shakespeare stresses that virtuous Lucrece is at home, where she serves as a fixed target for her predatory assailant.37 Commentators invariably remark that Tarquin’s incursion on the domestic space suggests sexual penetration. However, the description of his progress, simultaneously conveys a sense also that Lucrece is confined in the farthest reaches of the household behind a series of latched and locked doors. Like the needle, the portals and thresholds also have something to say about Tarquin’s unauthorized entrance:

• 38 William Shakespeare, “A Lover’s Complaint” in ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Ar (...)

25The portals make sounds that are especially associated with women in the verb to “rate.” This is the rasping vocal pitch associated with the animal, the shrew, and the woman who is said to be one, and it makes the harsh, discordant sound that grates the ear just in the same way as the “threshold grates the door” (304). Similarly, shrieking is almost never associated with men and is reminiscent of the “often shrieking undistinguished woe” of the clamorous maiden in A Lover’s Complaint.38 Far from silent acquiescence to Tarquin’s invasion of the female domestic space, the objects he encounters function as performing articles and entities that offer a shrill cacophony of resistance: “[A]s they open they all rate his ill” (304, my emphasis).