Making the Woman of Him: Shakespeare's Man Right Fair as Sonnet Lady

Hort. A will make the man mad to make the woman of him.
Kate. Yong budding Virgin, faire, and fresh, & sweet,
Whether away, or whether is thy aboade?
Happy the Parents of so faire a childe;
Happier the man whom fauourable stars
A lots thee for his louely bedfellow.
Petr. Why how now Kate, I hope thou art not mad,
This is a man old, wrickled, faded withered,
And not a Maiden as thou saist he is.

(The Taming of the Shrew 4.5.35-44; 2333-41)¹

As part of his program of subordination, Petruchio assigns the exhausted Katherine yet another ridiculous task. He commands her to address the aged Vincentio as if he were a beautiful young woman fit for ecstatic poetical praise. She complies immediately, instantaneously constructing the feminine with the bland, cliché terms of address that sonneteers reserve for their subjects: "faire," "sweet," "lovely." Having skewed his bride's gender coordinates, Petruchio realigns them to their rightful places. Men are not women and should not be addressed in this fashion. To make a man into a woman will make him mad, as Hortensio, better than a chorus, declares. The passage suggests that male and female represented separate and discrete entities to Shakespeare's audience and to the boys and men playing women's roles. So Hic Mulier explains with some heat to Haec Vir (her epithet for him, "my dear Feminine-Masculine," no compliment): "even by the Laws of Nature, by the rules of Religion, and the Customs of all civil Nations, it is necessary that there be a distinct and special difference between Man and Woman."²

Yet as Catherine Belsey and countless others have noted over the last two decades, Shakespeare "disrupts" this sexual difference in his plays with an almost peevish insistence, again and again.³ As these critics often remind us, his playhouse audience enjoyed comedies in which boys played girls who pretend to be boys because they secretly love other boys and want, quite desperately in some cases, to be loved as girls: Viola (Twelfth Night), Rosalind (As You Like It), Imogen (Cymbeline), and, to a lesser extent, Portia (The Merchant of Venice). This viewership may have been troubled by such spectacles and might have regarded the proceedings as a form of child abuse. Or, since such concepts have recently been judged anachronistic for analyzing same-sex relations in Shakespeare's time, one could also argue that this audience may not have read the dynamic as homoerotic or pedophilic, suspended its disbelief and accepted the boys as girls. Criticism on the topic will probably never exhaust itself. It will certainly never reach a consensus.⁴

The scrum of competing genders and sexualities in the playhouse has naturally spilled over into discussions of Shake-speares Sonnets (1609). I cite the above passage from The Taming of the Shrew as a key for reading parts of his controversial lyric sequence, since it shares some of the play's dynamics, albeit in reversed form. In the Sonnets, a poet creates an older speaker, "Will," who repeats blandishments to a younger male person, the Man Right Fair (so described in Sonnet 144).⁵ In Shrew, Petruchio is in effect a puppeteer who compels a younger female speaker, Katherine, to woo an older man. Her compulsory speech-act of linguistic seduction humiliates Vincentio because she "transgenders" him by misdescribing him as female. That Petruchio compels Katherine to exhibit this poetical behavior as part of his program of mind-control and spirit breaking suggests that such encomiastic exercises contain an element of masochism for the person who praises. That he so violently hypercorrects his bride after her compliance with his fatuous demand suggests just how wrongheaded such overt gender-bending might have seemed to early modern people. Perhaps these...