Janus: Shakespeare's Playful Dual Nature in the Taming of the Shrew

Trent Dahlin

Jessica Tvordi

English 2010

Janus: Shakespeare's Playful Dual Nature in The Taming of the Shrew

John Dryden said, regarding Shakespeare, "He is the very Janus of poets; he wears almost everywhere two faces; and you have scarce begun to admire the one, ere you despise the other." One reason Shakespeare's work is so remarkably enduring is that his plays, even his farces, don't have immediate or easy answers; audience members can never be totally comfortable taking any one character's side. In the Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare gives us a whole slew of complications: Leading men who are nowhere near heroic; leading ladies who are either shrewish or dishonest; a "tyrannical" pantaloon of a father who is the most giving person in the play, and -to top it all off--a final message that seems to be challenged by much of the rest of the text. It seems that Shakespeare puts on as many disguises in this play as his characters do: in the course of 5 acts, he takes the side of a misogynist and a feminist, a servant and a father, a hopeless romantic and what you might call a "practical" wooer. This flip-flopping of position is the keystone to this play: it turns it from what could have been a one-sided, moralistic fable about societal roles into a visceral, thought-provoking discussion about them.

Shakespeare opens the post-induction Taming of the Shrew by discussing the societal roles of master and servant, a discussion that continues beyond the end of the play because Shakespeare provides a wealth of possible messages to take from his treatment of these positions. The questions he seems to raise with each servant-master relationship are: Is it important for masters and servants to be stuck in their respective roles? Do the terms "master" and "servant" mean anything in the long run? He introduces Lucentio, an eager young man of the merchant class, and his sensible servant, Tranio. Even though Lucentio refers to Tranio as his "trusty servant," (1.1.7) he also seems willing to be on equal planes with Tranio; Tranio implies that he would be free to chide Lucentio on any occasion, despite his position of servitude, when he says, "Master, it is no time to chide you now." (1.1.151) The relationship is similar between Petruchio and his servant Grumio, in that Grumio is free to "chide" Petruchio as well, although Petruchio expressly exercises his authority over Grumio in a much more masterly way: after Petruchio announces his intent to marry Kate for her money despite her reputation, Grumio openly points out the questionability of Petruchio's behavior: "Why, give him gold enough and marry him to a puppet or an aglet-baby" (1.2.73). It seems that although these servants are in a lower position of authority, they are made equals in many ways through familiarity. Shakespeare starts to blur the line between master and servant even further when Lucentio asks Tranio to take over all his affairs in Padua in his stead, while Lucentio assumes the role of a lower-class tutor (1.1.194-199). Shakespeare seems to be asking, "If Tranio can handle all of the responsibilities that Lucentio can, and Lucentio can successfully play a member of a lower class, then why is there such a wide class divide between them?" But the beautiful thing about this play is that Shakespeare doesn't provide a single answer to this question; rather, he starts a discussion on the subject by raising it. Later in the play, problems arise because of this abandoning of societal roles: Vincentio (Lucentio's father) is made to look like a madman when he tries to address Lucentio and Tranio by their true identities, and Baptista is upset by Lucentio marrying Bianca without his good will, so as the play resolves, servants become servants and masters become masters once more. This would seem to imply that everything is better when things are in their proper societal order, but Shakespeare again does not give any easy answers, because the audience can't forget that it was the upset of the societal order that allowed for this happy ending in the first place. The discussion that Shakespeare opens with the masters and servants in this play is enduring because he points out the pros and cons to both options - a strict social order and the blurring of class lines - and he leaves us to make decisions on the subject ourselves.

The major discussion in this play is on the societal roles of husbands and wives. Shakespeare raises questions about the practical importance of dowry versus the importance of love, the need for self-sacrifice in a marriage, and sovereignty versus teamwork between spouses. These thought-provoking questions continue to make this play an exciting experience to watch onstage and a topic of discussion today. In the aforementioned example of Petruchio announcing his intentions to marry Kate for her money, Petruchio was chided by each character onstage. It seemed that Shakespeare's intent was for his audience to disagree with such a rash and unromantic pursuit along with those characters. However, later in the play, Baptista decides Bianca's husband-to-be based solely on who has the "greatest dower" (2.1.333-335), which no one in that scene questions, and which actually helps our romantic lead Lucentio to win Bianca in the end. Therefore, it seems that the audience is given mixed messages - dower should be a priority, and it shouldn't - which are only further clarified by the discussion of the importance of love that occurs in those two relationships. When Petruchio sees that Kate has broken a lute upon Hortensio's head in Act II Scene i, he immediately finds himself emotionally attracted to her: "Now, by the world," he says, "it is a lusty wench!/I love her ten times more than e'er I did./O, how I long to have some chat with her!" When he finally does have "some chat with her" later in the scene, he finds a woman that can challenge him; even though their banter is caustic, it is undeniably romantic because of their shared stubborn need to top the other's wit. In a similar way, the Lucentio and Bianca relationship, though made business-like by Baptista, has a great deal of romance and love in it as well. As a foil to Petruchio, Lucentio falls in love with Bianca without any express thought of her money in Act 1 Scene i, and their relationship is almost unbearably cute once they finally start courting under the pretense of a tutor-pupil relationship. In this way, Shakespeare starts a discussion by giving us two possible options: Caring about solely dowry and then discovering the importance of love, or simply falling in love and then