The Immersion Library

This is a way to kill a wife with kindness:
And thus I’ll curb her mad and headstrong humour.
He that knows better how to tame a shrew,
Now let him speak; ’tis charity to show.

Imagine yourself at a party, perhaps sitting around a table with friends old and new. They discuss frivolous matters, make lude jokes, laugh boisterously; while you watch, perhaps snicker politely from time to time, thinking more about the inherent paradox in their social behavior, their misguided desires, their humor and joy at their own self-debasement. Luckily, the Induction can help you do so! You find yourself convinced of your lordship and adorned with the crown of judge!

I imagine Shakespeare standing in the stage wings, out of the audience’s sight, behaving in the same way as you around the table, watching the audience laugh and his actors play out a tragedy disguised in comedy. The playwright laughing along with them, perpetuating the joke only to wake them from their crass, thoughtless debauchery at the end.

As I cherish in his other plays, Shakespeare makes such clean use of juxtaposition and deception. The audience engages in comparisons and contrasts; continuously weighing factors to identify the hero and villain, looking for themselves on stage to deposit their sympathies. The play, as a vehicle, drives the audience through each act molding and shifting their laments at each stop.

Do we condemn the honest “shrewdness” of Petruchio and Kate? Do we commend Lucretio’s perseverance despite his deceptive cunning? Do we stop to empathize with the characters by considering the nurturing that molded their dispositions? Though Petruchio and Kate both share a shrewd anger, under this surface similarity one might consider Petruchio’s motives – like that of a spoiled child – and Kate’s muzzled voice under the social constructs of marriage and desirability of her younger sister Bianca. Do those same social constructs forgive Lucretio’s pursuit of Bianca at the cost of his honesty?

And finally, when this comedy rears its ugly, tragic head, do these men consider how “taming the shrew” transforms the very objects of their affection into property – voiding them of the spirit that makes them human, that attracted them? Do they take responsibility for their part in backing a man who would “kill a wife with kindness” with no consideration of his own shrewdness? Do Bianca and the widow realize how they might have admired Kate and wished to keep a bit of shrewdness for themselves?

The audience, those friends around the party table, now pity Kate when earlier they might have chastised her. They miss her and wish they hadn’t lost a beacon of something they take for granted in themselves. They stop laughing and admit to themselves that the villain wins and they all lose.

“But Mr. Shakespeare – what of the Induction? Shouldn’t you conclude the play by returning to those people?” He says nothing knowing full well that Christopher Sly will carry home all his deliberations as one in the crowd leaving the playhouse.