Definition of Performance
Although many people's first (or only) exposure to drama is through written scripts, plays are meant to be performed by actors in front of a live audience. Every PERFORMANCE is different. When you attend a performance, you must contend not only with the playwright's intentions and your interpretation of them, but with the intentions and interpretation of the director. You might not agree with the director's choices, or they might open your eyes to a new way of seeing the work. When analyzing a play, it's always a good idea to research past performances to get a sense of how the play has been produced. You might be surprised to discover, for example, that comic actor John Lithgow has played the part of Rene Gallimard in M. Butterfly, or that at least one director has transferred the setting of Shakespeare's Henry V from Elizabethan England to the battlefields of World War II. The endless possibilities for staging, casting, costuming, pacing of dialogue, even lighting, can profoundly affect the way you interpret a play.
Plays are, in many ways, a voyeuristic experience. Seeing a play performed can bring it to life, and enhance its emotional impact for a viewer. The experience is more visceral when you witness the action in a theater. But reading a play can be just as rewarding as seeing one. You can re-read lines until they make sense to you. You can refer back to an earlier scene to see how it relates to a later one (much like rewinding a videotape). And you can bring your own creativity to bear in imagining how the words and actions would transpire on stage.
Performance Exercise
Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew is perennially one of his most popular plays. Owing in large part to its humor and accessibility, it is frequently produced by both professional and community theater groups. But because its gender politics are so distasteful to modern audiences (essentially, Petruchio - attracted not to stubbornly independent Katharina but to the dowry promised by her father - physically and emotionally torments her until she submits to him and marries him against her will), it also has the distinction of being the foundation for a remarkably wide range of performances: It is the subject of the Cole Porter musical Kiss Me, Kate, originally performed on Broadway in the 1950s, reinterpreted as a movie in 1953, and successfully revived for Broadway in 1999. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton starred in a 1967 film version by Franco Zeffirelli. A 1980 BBC production cast Monty Python's John Cleese in the male lead. Shakespeare's misogynistic comedy was reinterpreted from a feminist perspective in 1986 for the famous "Atomic Shakespeare" episode of Moonlighting (with Bruce Willis as Petruchio and Cybil Shepherd as Katharina) and reinterpreted again for the 1999 high school movie 10 Things I Hate About You (starring Heath Ledger and Julia Stiles as the battling couple). A 2003 production at the Globe Theatre in England attempted to overcome the play's masculine bravado by using an all-female cast: They retained the original language but altered its emphases in performance to imply that Katharina's ultimate submission is a trick to make Petruchio believe she is under his power when it is really she who has learned to master him.
INSTRUCTIONS
Read the following passage from the conclusion of Shakespeare's script, in which Petruchio boasts of his success in taming Katharina and forces her to display her submission to him and then answer the questions below.
PETRUCHIO: Katharina, I charge thee, tell these headstrong women
What duty they do owe their lords and husbands.
WIDOW: Come, come, you're mocking: we will have no telling.
PETRUCHIO: Come on, I say; and first begin with her.
WIDOW: She shall not.
PETRUCHIO: I say she shall: and first begin with her.
KATHARINA: Fie, fie! unknit that threatening unkind brow,
And dart not scornful glances from those eyes,
To wound thy lord, thy king, thy governor:
It blots thy beauty as frosts do bite the meads,
Confounds thy fame as whirlwinds shake fair buds,
And in no sense is meet or amiable.
A woman moved is like a fountain troubled,
Muddy, ill-seeming, thick, bereft of beauty;
And while it is so, none so dry or thirsty
Will deign to sip or touch one drop of it.
Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,
Thy head, thy sovereign; one that cares for thee,
And for thy maintenance commits his body
To painful labour both by sea and land,
To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,
Whilst thou liest warm at home, secure and safe;
And craves no other tribute at thy hands
But love, fair looks and true obedience;
Too little payment for so great a debt.
Such duty as the subject owes the prince
Even such a woman oweth to her husband;
And when she is froward, peevish, sullen, sour,
And not obedient to his honest will,
What is she but a foul contending rebel
And graceless traitor to her loving lord?
I am ashamed that women are so simple
To offer war where they should kneel for peace;
Or seek for rule, supremacy and sway,
When they are bound to serve, love and obey.
Why are our bodies soft and weak and smooth,
Unapt to toil and trouble in the world,
But that our soft conditions and our hearts
Should well agree with our external parts?
Come, come, you froward and unable worms!
My mind hath been as big as one of yours,
My heart as great, my reason haply more,
To bandy word for word and frown for frown;
But now I see our lances are but straws,
Our strength as weak, our weakness past compare,
That seeming to be most which we indeed least are.
Then vail your stomachs, for it is no boot,
And place your hands below your husband's foot:
In token of which duty, if he please,
My hand is ready; may it do him ease.
PETRUCHIO: Why, there's a wench! Come on, and kiss me, Kate.
Do you think Katharina believes what she says? Why or why not?
Actresses in traditional productions of the play usually deliver Katharina's final lines in a tone of humble submission. But imagine how her monologue would sound if delivered in a tone of sarcasm, mockery, defiance, or pent-up anger. How does its meaning change?
How do the implications of Katharina's submission change if Petruchio is played by a woman?