The Taming of the Shrew

As one of Shakespeare’s best-known comedies, Shrew has an ending that’s hard for modern audiences to accept. The titular ‘shrew’ is Katherina, one of Shakespeare’s strongest and most deservedly famous female characters. She is rude, contrary, willful, sharp-tongued, and impatient – in short, like a real person. Imagine, as David Mamet puts it, ‘True Stories of Bitches’ you may know – flawed and difficult, yes, but equally likeable and utterly comfortable with who they are. The baffling thing about the end of the play is that Katherina seems to happily submit to Petruchio, whom she has married partly in jest and who has employed every form of mind game and physical domination at his disposal to break her will. One summer I ran lights for an outdoor production of Shrew. After four weeks of watching it, I still couldn’t figure out the ending. Nor, it seemed, could the company performing it. The actress playing Katherina gave the impression of a bright candle snuffed out, hence the photo on the obverse. On a more uplifting note, one of my other jobs at the same theatre was Assistant Animal Wrangler. During my tenure as AAW, I was bitten by a monkey and pissed on by a ferret. The monkey, I couldn’t really blame since I had to tie a small purple cape around her neck every night. That ferret though – what a dick.