The taming of the shrew garden
Video guide transcript
[Shakespeare]: This is the Garden for The Taming of the Shrew.
[Interlocutor]: Which plants, Will Shakespeare, do you mention in this play?
[Shakespeare]: The trees are Apple and Crab, Chestnut, Cypress, Hazel, Walnut. The other plants are Rushes, and Sedge, Mustard, Oats, Onion, Parsley, Love-in-Idleness (our Pansy), and Rose.
[Interlocutor]: Roses and love-in-idleness? It seems they would better fit a love story.
[Shakespeare]: This play is a love story, the love story of Petruchio and Katherine.
[Interlocutor]: Many people today find it hard to agree with that. Both women and men accuse you of being mysogynistic in this play. They object to the very idea of a man - Petruchio - TAMING a woman.
[Shakespeare]: It grieves me that you have lost the knowledge of training hawks whereby you should understand what Petruchio is doing, and why. Playgoers wise in the ways of hawking found the play pleasing and witty. Training a falcon to the glove is a task that everyone understood in my day. The aim was not to “break” the hawk. Indeed, if the bird’s spirit was broken, the hawk was worthless. Even today, the few who still practice this art will tell you that a good hawk is forever free. Each time it flies, the falconer cannot be sure it will return.
There are two sisters, the younger seemingly meek and the elder shrewish. Their father refuses to allow anyone to woo the younger until there is a husband for the elder sister, Katherine. So the lovers of the meek daughter seek such a husband, and find him in Petruchio. Another man does seek to “break” Katherine, just before Petruchio meets her, and fails miserably. The lovers warn him of her shrewishness, but he shrugs it off: “do not tell me of a woman’s tongue,” he asks,
That gives not half so great a blow to hear
As will a chestnut in a farmer’s fire.
Yet, although he is undaunted, he knows he must work carefully. Petruchio looks forward to meeting her, but he also takes good care to plan how to deal with her.
Upon hearing his plans, the people of my time quickly saw that he understands the art of bringing a wild thing into alliance. There was no need to name the play The Taming of a Hawk. To them it was immediately evident that every step Petruchio takes is a hawk’s lesson: how to work to the lure, how to be honorable partners, how to catch the prize.
Training falcons requires keeping them puzzled until they learn the new skills. Petruchio knows this.
“Say that she frown,” he muses. “I’ll say she looks as clear
”As morning roses newly washed with dew.”
Here he plans to confuse her by comparing her to sweet, fragile roses, such as blossom in this Garden. When she comes, he confuses her to another key. He praises her graceful upright carriage as she stumbles and limps:
Kate like the hazel twig
Is straight and slender, as brown in hue
As hazelnuts and sweeter than the kernels.
But now he speaks of her not as a flower, but as a nut – first the chestnut and now the hazel: richly sweet indeed, but cased in a shell which she must shed to reach the full power of their alliance.
A meek, fragile, blindly obedient woman would not suit someone like Petruchio at all. He needs a quick-witted partner who brings her own strengths to the alliance. Katherine has that wit. In their first meeting he calls upon her to show him a kindly face, but she has her retort ready. She compares him to a crab, which to us was not a scrambling, hard-shelled creature of the sandy shore, but a crab-apple.
PETRUCHIO: Nay, come, Kate, come; you must not look so sour.
KATE: It is my fashion, when I see a crab.
PETRUCHIO: Why, here's no crab; and therefore look not sour.
KATE: There is, there is.
PETRUCHIO: Then show it me.
KATE: Had I a glass, I would.
PETRUCHIO: What, you mean my face?
A hawk is a quick-striking opponent; that is why she is prized. With the falconer, she learns to exercise her skills not against her partner but on his behalf as well as her own, to come to the lure for the rewards of the hunt. Katherine’s first lure, like a hawk’s, is food; the greater lure is her sister’s wedding. As she and Petruchio travel to the wedding, Petruchio tests her alliance with her ever greater challenges. Can she keep pace with the sudden and several changes? He makes abrupt and seemingly absurd changes to what he asks of her, even misnaming the very sun and the moon; but now she is equal to the challenge.
Be it moon or sun, or what you please,
And if you please to call it a rush-candle
Henceforth I vow it shall be so for me.
A rush-candle is a candle whose wick is the pith of a rush stalk. In my time, common folk used this plant not only for light. They also cut bundles of whole rushes, such as you see in this Garden, and spread them on the floor for comfort and warmth. Like the chestnuts bursting on the farmer’s fire, and indeed all the other plants in this play, the rush-candle calls forth the domestic world of hearth and home. Katherine and Petruchio are ready to be comfortable partners at home, as well as to hunt together in the greater world – as they do in their sister’s wedding, where they prey triumphantly upon the wealth foolishly staked by husbands who have not achieved true alliance with their wives.