by Jeffrey Knapp
The first speaker in one of Shakespeare’s earliest plays is not a prince, like Hamlet, or a lover, like Juliet, or a warrior, like Macbeth. He’s a drunken beggar. And he’s incensed that the hostess of the tavern where he has been boozing has demanded that he pay for some glasses he has broken there. He threatens her; she calls him a “rogue,” which is to say a vagabond and a thief; and now the beggar, Christopher Sly, takes umbrage at this slight to his pedigree. “The Slys are no rogues,” he protests; “we came in with Richard Conqueror” — with William the Conqueror, he means. More angry words ensue, but Sly is in no shape to hold up his end of the argument: he soon collapses in a drunken stupor.
Not the most auspicious start to a play, let alone to a theatrical career. But Christopher Sly turns out to be only the first of many surprises as The Taming of the Shrew gets underway. The social tone of the comedy rises as soon as Sly slumps to the floor. Horns sound, and an aristocrat walks onto the stage, accompanied by a retinue of servants. Catching sight of the unconscious Sly, this never-named “lord” asks his servants whether the body on the ground is “dead, or drunk,” and when one of them determines that Sly is merely “warmed with ale,” the aristocrat expresses his disgust at the “foul and loathsome” creature before him. The next surprise: for all the repugnance he feels towards Sly, the lord doesn’t leave him where he lies. Having just come from a hunt, he decides instead to extend his “sport” by playing an elaborate trick on this “beast” of a beggar. He commands his servants to carry Sly “gently to my fairest chamber,” and there, once Sly wakens, to “persuade” the drunkard that he himself is “a mighty lord,” who has been suffering “a strange lunacy” for years and is only now coming to his senses. In short order, the focus of the Shrew has shifted from a beggar to an aristocrat to a beggar presented as an aristocrat.
And then another surprise. As the servants depart with Sly, the lord hears a trumpet that he assumes must be announcing the arrival of some other “noble gentleman” who is “traveling” and looking for a place to stay. But it’s not a fellow aristocrat who next appears; instead, it’s a company of traveling players. What exactly is their social status? On the one hand, they resemble the homeless Sly in having no fixed abode; on the other hand, the lord turns out to be on friendly and familiar terms with them. As he converses with them, he remembers enjoying one play of theirs in particular, about a lowly farmer’s son who “wooed” a highborn “gentlewoman” — a tale of social mobility that fits the roving nature of the actors’ life on the road. It then occurs to the lord to enlist them in the game of social elevation he has begun with Sly. Perversely, however, he tricks the actors too, by keeping Sly’s true identity a secret from them: he asks them to entertain another “lord” who has never “heard a play” before and who might therefore exhibit some “odd behavior” as they perform.
The next scene is set in the lord’s home, where the focus shifts once more to the comedy that the actors have been fooled into staging for the beggar — the tale, set in distant Padua, of Katherina the “shrew” and Petruchio her “tamer.” If there is any constant theme throughout this opening to The Taming of the Shrew, it would have to be the instability first of the broken glasses, then of Sly’s unsteadiness on his feet, then of the swerving from one social class to another, then of the actors’ exchanging one identity for another, and finally of Sly’s shaky grasp on his own identity. Awakening in the bedroom of the aristocrat, the dumbfounded beggar asks himself, “Do I dream? Or have I dreamed till now?” At the start of the play, he had boasted unconvincingly of his noble origins; now all it takes is a little cajoling and some lavish furnishings to persuade him that he is “a lord indeed.” And Sly is not the only character in these scenes whose identity seems to have been loosened from its moorings. If the lord finds Sly so repulsive, why does he decide to transport him to his own bed? It’s all in good fun, the lord assures himself after his servants have carried Sly away: he claims that he can’t wait to see “how my men will stay themselves from laughter / When they do homage to this simple peasant.”
Yet how did this strange prank even occur to him? Are we meant to detect beneath the lord’s smug complacency his unspoken fear that his men have all along been barely containing their laughter at him, as if he too were no better than a peasant, for all his money and social status? The lord himself later says as much to Sly, when he exhorts him to “banish hence” the “abject lowly dreams” of his beggary: “O that a mighty man of such descent, / Of such possessions, and so high esteem, / Should be infused with so foul a spirit!”
There is one final surprise for us in these first scenes of the Shrew: their resonance with Shakespeare’s own life story.
About the book
- A critically sophisticated but highly readable analysis of eleven key Shakespeare plays and of Shakespeare’s career overall
- An introduction to Shakespeare that differs from others in showing how Shakespeare regarded his plays as neither high nor low culture but as a potent amalgam of both
- A revival of character study as essential to grasping the broader issues of class, race, gender, sexuality, psychology, politics, philosophy, and religion in Shakespeare’s plays
For many theatergoers and readers, Shakespeare’s lofty reputation as the world’s greatest playwright has turned him into an intimidating, even a forbidding figure. In Shakespeare High and Low, Jeffrey Knapp helps us to understand and enjoy Shakespeare’s plays by restoring Shakespeare’s own sense of them as neither high culture nor low culture, but a potent amalgam of both. Only in recognizing Shakespeare’s determination to connect with every social class in his theater can we begin to grasp how his plays have managed to thrill audiences for so many centuries and across so many cultures.
About the author
Jeffrey Knapp received his Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and taught at Harvard for three years before returning to Berkeley, where he is currently Distinguished Professor of English in the Graduate School. Knapp has published five books on a wide variety of topics: Renaissance literature and drama, the European colonization of America, the Reformation, modern and early modern theories of authorship, mass entertainment, Hollywood film, and Shakespeare. Knapp’s newest book, Shakespeare High and Low, helps readers understand and enjoy Shakespeare by highlighting Shakespeare’s own commitment to entertaining the broadest possible audience.
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