The Induction to "The Taming of the Shrew": The Taming and Transformation of Christopher Sly

Both social status and tension between the sexes come into play the moment Christopher Sly appears on stage. He is named as a “beggar” in the stage directions, but we could guess that he is a low character both by his predicament and by the way he talks. He tells the Hostess of the Inn from which he has just been ejected that he’ll “feeze” her. According toThe Oxford English Dictionary, he’s threatening to “frighten,” “beat,” or “do” for her. He also calls her a “baggage.” OED quotes this very line to illustrate the sense of “baggage” as a “worthless good-for nothing woman; a woman of disreputable or immoral life, a strumpet.” In other words, Sly isn’t a gentleman and isn’t behaving like one.

Nonetheless, Sly makes the comic assertion that his family, “the Slys,” are an ancient one who came in with “Richard the Conquerer.” This is multiply comic. Some old aristocratic English families could trace their ancestry back to the nobles who accompanied William the Conqueror in his invasion of 1066. Not only does Sly get the name wrong (“Richard the Conqueror”), he doesn’t seem a likely member of any old noble family!

When the “Lord” then immediately enters and finds Sly asleep, presumably drunk, the absurdity of Sly’s comic pretensions are intensified by the contrast. Here is a ‘real’ Lord who talks and acts like on. He has just come from the favourite aristocratic pursuit of hunting, and he uses the characteristic language of that pursuit, naming and praising his hounds and giving instruction for their care: “Breathe Merriman – the poor cur is embossed.” He also addresses his huntsman as “boy,” which sounds almost as rude as “baggage.” Here, however, it indicates that the Lord’s status is much higher than that of his servant the huntsman, who is certainly an adult male but in an inferior social station.

Real vs. illusory aristocratic identity of course drives the main action of the Induction scenes, where the Lord and his servants work hard to convince Sly to “forget himself” and believe that is “a lord, and nothing but a lord.” They change Sly’s sense of himself by supplying him with the props and even the language of aristocratic identity – from “wanton pictures” to models of speech in iambic pentameter, which Sly begins to speak for himself when he wonders, “Am I a lord, and have I such a lady?”

It’s significant for the coming action between prospective husbands and wives that this dubious “Lord Sly” now modifies his relations with the opposite sex. He is much more respectful of his “Madam wife” and even agrees to practice restraint in order to complete his “amendment:” “I would be loath to fall into my dreams again. I will therefore tarry in despite of the flesh and blood.”

The unrestrained and beggarly Sly has been transformed and tamed! This looks forward to other tamings and transformations in the play proper.

Kate as Griselda

After his verbal tussle with Kate in 2.1., Petruchio remakes her with words, claiming the "she's not froward, but modest as the dove" etc. He also makes some ominous predictions about her, including the prediction that she will prove a "second Grissel" (l. 292).

The story of patient Grissel or Griselda was well-known in the early modern period --retold by Chaucer as well as glanced at by Shakespeare (not only in this play but also in The Winter's Tale ... so keep an eye open for it). It's not a pretty story. It goes something like this:

A nobleman named Walter chooses to marry a peasant girl called Griselda, effecting her change in social status by stripping her naked and reclothing her in fine robes. Griselda bears two children, a boy and a girl, and Walter 'tests' her by taking both away, pretending to kill them, giving her low origins and unfitness to be a mother as reason. He further 'tests' by sending her back to her father, stripped to her 'smock' (i.e. her underwear). As a final humiliation, years later, Walter announces he is marrying a younger, aristocratic woman. Griselda bears all of this with super-human obedience and patience! For this, she is finally 'rewarded': the new young wife turns out to be her daughter, and Griselda is reinstated as Walter's proper wife by being re-clothed in fine clothes.

In her essay "Controlling Clothes, Manipulating Mates: Petruchio’s Griselda" Margaret Rose Jaster argues that the old tale of Griselda underlies the play, Petruchio's taming of Kate in particular. On this reading, the stripping of Kate in the "tailor scene" (4.3) is not innocuous fun, but rather a brutal deconstruction of Kate designed to elicit total Grissel-like obedience.

The question for us to consider now is whether this deconstruction is successful.

Full reference for the link:
Margaret Rose Jaster, “Controlling Clothes, Manipulating Mates: Petruchio’s Griselda,” 29 Shakespeare Studies (2001): 93-108.

"The apparel oft proclaims the man ..."

So says Polonius, giving his son good advice in Hamlet. If we want to understand the assumptions of the ordinary playgoer in Shakespeare's theatre, we should pay attention to Polonius, the spouter of clichés. In this case, Polonius draws our attention to the close relationship between what one wears and who one is in Shakespeare's England.

On Tuesday, we started to think about how social status is not just proclaimed but even determined by clothes. When the tinker Christopher Sly is "wrapped in sweet clothes," he becomes a convincing member of the aristocracy. (At least he is able to convince himself.) Similarly, when Tranio swaps outfits with his master Lucentio, no one is able to distinguish master from man -- to great comic effect.

One could even say that early modern people fetishized dress in the sense of attributing magical signficance to it in its power to impart identity. This anxiety over the relationship between dress and social status even realized itself in law. The Elizabethan "Sumptuary Laws" were enacted to prevent wasteful economic extravagance and to make sure that the signs of status in costume corresponded to 'the reality'. Certain rich fabrics, for instance, were restricted to people of high status, so that no one could wear "cloth of gold" or "fur of sables" except "duchesses, marquises, and countesses". "Velvet in gowns, furs of leopards, embroidery of silk" were also restricted (although you could get away with these if you were the wife of a baron's son or of a knight).

Of course, the existence of such laws suggests that there was a lot of dressing up -- above one's station!

So, when the real Vincentio comes upon his son's servant Tranio in "silken doublet" and "velvet hose" (5.1.61-62), he knows that things are seriously disordered.

My next blog entry will be about clothes proclaiming the woman -- particularly the wife.