(posted 7688 days ago)The antidote to Shakespeare
Even the Jacobeans had a problem with The Taming of the Shrew. So one of them wrote a fiery sequel - in which the women bite back. Gregory Doran on John FletcherGregory Doran
Wednesday April 2, 2003The Guardian
What is it about The Taming of the Shrew that excites such contradictory reactions? It is widely regarded as a deeply problematic play, yet it is very popular. It is what they called in Shakespeare's day a "get penny": a sure-fire box office earner. Indeed, according to a recent Royal Shakespeare Company survey of the past 16 years in Stratford, The Taming of the Shrew is the second most popular play in the canon, even though it hasn't been produced on the main stage in eight years.The trouble centres on Katherine's final speech, in which she outlines the role of the wife in relation to her husband. Germaine Greer famously argued in The Female Eunuch that Kate's speech is "the greatest defence of Christian monogamy ever written". On the other hand, as far back as 1897, George Bernard Shaw described the last scene as "altogether disgusting to modern sentiments", and requiring some apology.
I had assumed the play expressed sentiments that were commonly held in Shakespeare's day, and that it was only in recent times that people have begun to question its sexual politics. But then I came across a play by one of Shakespeare's contemporaries that changed my mind.
The first Shakespeare I was asked to direct for the RSC was All Is True (at the Swan in 1996), a play about Henry VIII, on which he collaborated with John Fletcher. Sitting in on rehearsals was a Fletcher expert, Gordon McMullan, and I challenged him to come up with any plays by Shakespeare's collaborator that were any good. He gave me two: The Island Princess and A Woman's Prize. The first I directed last year as part of the Jacobean season, which has just completed its West End run. The second took my breath away.
For its current production of A Woman's Prize, the RSC has gone with the play's much better subtitle: The Tamer Tamed. It is a sequel (some might call it an "antidote") to The Taming of the Shrew, in which Petruchio is married for a second time and is tamed by his second wife, Maria. Katherine has died (of what, we never learn) and her sister Bianca turns up at the wedding to warn Petruchio's gentle new bride that she must put her foot down now, or "never look for quiet hour more". What follows is a very funny play in which Maria twists the befuddled Petruchio around her little finger. It ends with an epilogue that sets out the play's purpose: "To teach both sexes due equality/And as they stand bound to love mutually." Which was pretty radical for the time.
Fletcher wrote The Tamer Tamed in 1611, less than 20 years after Shakespeare's original. Clearly Shrew was still in the repertoire of the King's Men, and was popular and familiar enough for audiences to enjoy the cross-references. But why did he write it? Shakespeare was perfectly capable of writing his own sequels. He wrote two for Falstaff. Perhaps Fletcher felt that Shrew needed updating, or answering, even then.
The role of women in society was certainly changing. You need only read the huge number of pamphlets and broadsheets railing at the way women were asserting themselves to grasp the intensity of the debate. It reached its climax in Joseph Swetnam's fiercely misogynistic 1615 diatribe, The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward and Inconstant Women. The very title reveals its essential male paranoia.
What did Shakespeare think of The Tamer Tamed? We don't know for sure, but I think he must have approved, for within a year or so he came out of his virtual retirement in Stratford-upon-Avon, returned to London and collaborated with Fletcher on three plays: The Two Noble Kinsmen, All Is True, and Cardenio which has since been lost.
This season I am directing Shrew and Tamer for the RSC at Stratford. As far as we know, it is the first time the two plays have been brought together in full productions since they were presented for Charles I and Henrietta Maria in 1633. So why, people ask me suspiciously, has the play been so neglected until now? Is it perhaps not worth reviving?
Only public and critical reaction will tell. But the reason for the neglect of Fletcher and his fellow playwrights is more complicated. There are roughly 600 scripts available, which were written during Shakespeare's lifetime; of those we are familiar with only a fraction. They are not all worth doing. But many are. The way Shakespeare dominates the repertoire is part of the reason for their neglect.
Take Fletcher. The very fact that he collaborated with Shakespeare has, I would argue, tarnished his reputation rather than enhanced it. Far from recommending him to our attention, it alerts us to his inferiority, when his talent is set beside the titanic genius of the man described as "not of an age but for all time".
The way Shakespeare has pushed all others aside is aptly demonstrated to me when I go in search of Fletcher's grave one morning after rehearsals. He is buried in Southwark Cathedral, a few steps from where the Globe once stood; Fletcher, like half the actors listed at the front of the First Folio, was a member of this parish.
Inside the church there is, of course, a monument to Shakespeare (his body rests in Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon). It is a rather silly Edwardian affair portraying the bard reclining uncomfortably in a Bankside meadow. Above it is a stained-glass window showing characters from his plays, which was unveiled in 1954. Apparently, all the windows in the south aisle used to depict Shakespeare and his contemporaries, but a bomb that fell in Borough Market blew them all out in 1940 and only Shakespeare made it back. It is a telling physical manifestation of how his genius has overshadowed the reputation and talent of the other playwrights of his day.
There is no mention of Fletcher's tomb in the cathedral's welcoming pamphlet, but the guide points me towards the chancel: "I think you'll find him in front of the choir stalls with that other dramatist fellow." I suppose she means Francis Beaumont, with whom Fletcher wrote some dozen plays and with whom he is most often associated. The foreword to their collected works, published in 1647, records: "Since they were never parted while they lived, I conceive it not equitable to separate their ashes." This indissoluble couple, we are told, shared not only a house in Bankside, the same cloak and clothes, but a bed - and not, I think, in the Eric and Ernie sense. So I am surprised to discover that "the other dramatist fellow" buried in Fletcher's tomb is not Beaumont but Philip Massinger, author of The Roman Actor.
When Fletcher died of the plague in 1625, Massinger succeeded him as chief dramatist of the King's Men. And when Massinger died, he had himself buried in his friend's tomb, even though he was not a member of the parish. A poem written at the time, and allegedly intended for an epitaph, reads: "So whom on earth, nothing did part, beneath/Here in their fames, they lie in spite of death." Perhaps "never parted" was the Jacobean equivalent of the old obituary cliche "never married".
But perhaps I am falsely appropriating Fletcher. Perhaps I see in his perspective on male- female relationships and bully-boy chauvinism in The Tamer Tamed, for example, an outsider's objectivity, which I assign to his sexuality because I am myself gay. Perhaps I want to counter what Katherine Duncan-Jones, writing about Shakespeare's sonnets, describes as a "determination to heterosexualise". I wonder: if I do claim Fletcher's place among the pantheon of writers who share my sexuality, will it alter the audience's perception of his work one jot?
I leave Fletcher's tomb with a sense of having come closer to the playwright. But when I arrive home, a parcel is waiting for me. It is a mid-Victorian edition of Massinger's plays, which I have ordered, over the internet, from somewhere in Ohio. (The other reason these plays aren't produced very often is their unavailability.) In the introduction I discover that in the 1830s the Southwark church had become so damp and derelict that there was a vote to demolish it, a vote that was ultimately reversed. Repairs were begun, during which the floor was levelled. Apparently, the dust of Fletcher and Massinger was removed when 3ft of surface earth was shifted from the church, and their remains now lie under the kitchen floor of a house in Doddington Grove, Kennington.
In the end, as Jonson said of Shakespeare, Fletcher's monument must be his work. He lives on in the performance of his plays - plays that are certainly worth reviving.
· The Tamer Tamed is in rep at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-Upon-Avon, until November 3. The Taming of the Shrew is in rep at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-Upon-Avon, until November 8. Box office: 0870 609 1110.
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