Oxford, 6/20/08
Don June 20th, 2008
Our revels now are ended.
This was our last day of class, and the students are dispersing across the British Isles and the Continent for Grand Tours before heading home. I more modestly will hang around Oxford for a few more days before “going down,” as Oxonians call the trip back home. But there are a few more items to report first.
“The Taming of the Shrew” at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford last night was the best performance technically, and the worst in interpretation, that I have ever seen. All the irony and ambiguity in Petruchio’s character was lost: he was just a male chauvinist jerk who broke Katherine’s spirit with unrelenting cruelty. The audience was not left to make out the meaning of Kate’s final speach. The formerly spunky and fiery lady delivered it in a flat, lifeless manner as one who feared for her life if she didn’t say it. Petruchio’s “There’s a wench! Come, kiss me, Kate” led to her hanging limply in his arms and “submitting” to his embrace in a manner most chilling. Then in a surreal sequel added to the text, it turned out that Petruchio is really Christofero Sly raping the servant who had played his wife in the introduction when they were trying to convince the derelict wino that he was a lord. He is caught in the act, stipped naked, and
turned back out humiliated into the street.
We did some debriefing this morning in class, as the students found the production, not surprisingly, quite disturbing. What genre is “Shrew” supposed to be? I asked them. It is supposed to be a comedy. Every editor for 400 years has thought so. A comedy is a play with a happy ending. But what we saw was a tragedy. Kate and Petruchio both end up being destroyed and humiliated, and no good of any kind comes to anyone.
So the evidence of genre is that Shakespeare thought Kate’s submission was a happy ending and really did bode peace and love and quiet life. And even most secular–even most feminist–directors have not seen her losing her spunkiness at the end of the play, but rather redirecting it: she realizes that playing Petruchio’s game, letting him lead in the dance, can be a lot of fun. Some see her truly submitting, while others see irony in the last speech as if she has merely learned that a different set of techniques work better for manipulating Petruchio than other men. Either of these interpretations is legitimate in the sense that you can make a case for it and it preserves the play as a comedy. What we saw on the other hand was not an interpretation of Shakespeare’ s play but a rejection of it, a substitution of a different vision altogether. You may not like Shakespeare’ s vision, or what you think it is, but at least the audience deserve a chance to evaluate it and make up their own minds. Students who had not read or seen the play before were astonished (but releaved) to learn that the last scene was not part of the original play and that there were more positive ways of playing it–that it really could be a comedy! Let the reader and theatre goer beware.
Then I finished up Tolkien by talking about the way the themes of Providence and “Not by might” come to their climax at Sammath Naur, and how Peter Jackson’s scene, in which Frodo actually pushes Gollum off the cliff instead of his falling by accident, obscures what Tolkien was trying to say. Not by might, and not even by Frodo’s goodness, which also proves insufficient, is the Quest acheived, but ironically by Gollum’s treachery and by chance–if chance you call it. Tolkien’s habit of adding that last phrase speaks volumes.
Finally, Dr. Bauman summarized Lewis’s “‘Til we Have Faces” and then led a discussion on what kind of faces we are developing: Have we realized with Orual that we are Ungit? Are we becoming more like Ungit/Orual, one who demands the sacrifice of others, or like Psyche, one who is ready to sacrifice herself? On that note, the first Summit Summer Oxford Program came to an end. I had the last word: “And so we come to our final parting on the shores of Middle Earth. I will not say, ‘Do not weep,’ for not all tears are an evil.”
From the Dreaming Spires,
Don
Donald T. Williams, PhD, Co-Director
Summit Oxford Summer Studies Program