Affective Resistance: Performing Passivity and Playing A-Part in The Taming of the Shrew

The stage history of Taming of the Shrew speaks to the near impossibility of representing submissive femininity. From John Lacy's popular adaptation Sauny the Scott (1698) to David Garrick's long-running Catharine and Petruchio (1754), the problem of staging masculine empowerment through the reformation of feminine intransigence suggests that feminine tractability is a hard act to authenticate. Petruchio's challenge, in all versions of the story, is to animate a legitimate subject whose identity is comprehensible in relation to his own character but whose virtue is believable outside the context in which he presents her. ¹ The display of Katharine's obedience provides empirical evidence of Petruchio's ability to reaffirm a cultural ideal, in that her final speech performs the rhetorical figuration of desirable femininity current in early modern discourse. Her passive affect, however, also satisfies twentieth-century standards for "normal" femininity, meeting Freud's criteria for distinguishing genders by their social and sexual functions: "One might consider characterizing femininity psychologically as giving preference to passive aims. This is not, of course, the same thing as passivity; to achieve a passive aim may call for a large amount of activity." ² Katharine must learn to act in a passive manner to separate her identity from that of the shrew, a process that is apparently neither as comforting nor as simple as Freud imagines. Or so later transformations of Shakespeare's text would indicate: Lacy and Garrick illustrate that taming a shrew is one thing but that a shrew tamed is quite a different matter altogether.

Later responses to and interpretations of Katharine's altered behavior reveal that her final speech is more transgressive than transformative. Lacy's revision of the Shakespearean plot suggests that it is the extremity of its taming that really demonstrates Petruchio's power. ³ That Margaret resists more aggressively supposedly justifies his more vicious methods. After Margaret attacks Petruchio, and fends off his attempt to have one of her teeth removed by the barber, Petruchio claims her sullen silence must indicate that she is dead and makes preparations to have his wife buried alive. ⁴ Margaret yields to this pressure, promising to be a good wife, without the accompanying speech of submission:

Hold, hold my dear Petruchio; you have overcome me, and I beg your pardon. Henceforth I will not dare to think a thought shall cross your pleasure. Set me at liberty, and on my knees I'll make my recantation. ⁵

Lacy's Petruchio manages Margaret through physical violence, and feminine agency, even one directed toward passive aims, is eliminated. Garrick's revision of Shakespeare is also concerned with Petruchio's power, and though Garrick does not subject Catharine to taming rituals more extreme than those in the Shakespeare play, he wishes to show Petruchio's autonomy. Garrick's play is especially careful in its presentation of Catharine's speech of obedience; Petruchio guides Catharine's words, and Bianca's resistance validates the truth of Catharine's speech. Her metaphor of a muddied fountain is interrupted by Bianca's "Sister, be quiet." ⁶ Petruchio shows his mastery over Catharine but also over categories of femininity when he bids Bianca to be silent and Catharine to continue: "Nay, learn you that lesson. On, on, I say." ⁷ Garrick is attentive to Petruchio's performance of agency, perhaps sensing the need for his continued policing of Catharine's apparent transformation.

I mention these versions of the shrew-taming story before turning to Shakespeare because they demonstrate a basic premise of this essay. Both Lacy and Garrick assume that female agency, in any form, is threatening to male power. If a woman is allowed to enact passivity without masculine intervention, then she threatens to upset the precarious balance of power that hierarchizes idealized gender relations. Furthermore, masculine agency needs feminine resistance in order to warrant its affect...