And I mean, relations between the sexes? A friend of mine says about class relations (which are also, naturally, at play here, and what is Kate from one perspective but another tinker, an overturner of the social order? A hero?), he says, "of course it's complicated, it's a gas, baby, you dig?" You can play the speech totally straight-but even then, like, what does Shakespeare think about it? Has Kate found strong manlove or been broken by a sadist?-and you can play it ironically, in about a billion permutations.So well done, Shakespeare. It all comes down to that moment at the end: Katherine's gonna come out and deliver her closing speech (and for those who still somehow see this as straight-up misogyny, consider all the past versions that haven't done so, and that the ultimate power of meaningmaking is here in Kate's hands-okay, and those of her director-which is easy enough to see as a definitive repudiation of Petruchio's efforts to take away her reality and signifying power with all the no-no-the-sun-is-the-moon stuff earlier). It sounds like an extreme and ludicrous statement, but I don't actually know that Shakespeare has a more interpretable play. In 5 centuries, will our descendants look back at our reading tastes and wonder why it all seems the same? Read more Which, if you think about it, isn't that different from our generation being obsessed with vampires and paranormal romances.
I guess the Elizabethan theatre-going crowd had a specific niche, and Shakespeare knew how to work within it. I know Shakespeare is considered a master playwright of the English language and I do truly appreciate his work, but isn't he a bit unoriginal at times? There's the whole "borrowing" stories from other authors and then the fact that many of his stories feature the same motifs-funny servants, identity mixups, instalove followed by marriages, rich Italians in search of dowries and hot wives, mean fathers. This plot line, included to set up the whole identity switch storyline, is never resolved in my text. Most interesting was the induction with Christopher Sly, a drunkard who is tricked into believing he is a rich lord.
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