The addition of the induction introduces us to a frame story with no narrator, where the story within the story is the main attraction hence the intentional title The Taming of the Shrew. As with his other comedies, Shakespeare uses the same comedic formula: a ruse, role changes in status and possibly gender, and a dupe. These characteristics would not be complete without the mess of a twist we all call irony which keeps the audience amused, and ties the comedic attributes together. Furthermore, the awareness of a trickery only strengthens the point of the irony as Grumio says, “to beguile the old folks, how the young folks lay their heads together!” Young or old, the characters are being made a fool by someone who is being fooled by someone else. It appears that by the end of this charade the characters will be none the wiser. The irony of it all keeps the story moving forward.
-
Recent Posts
Recent Comments
- Macbeth, the victim or the villain? – Arron's Blog on Macbeth: Victim of Fate?
- Professor Berggren on The Curse of Macbeth aka The Scottish Play
- Ronie Sharma on Scene Study-Troilus and Cressida Act 3 Scene 1
- Ronie Sharma on Does the end justify the means?
- Ronie Sharma on “The poison of that lies in you to temper.”
Archives
Categories
Meta
Historical sources
Imagery
Links
Macbeth
Pastoral themes
The Taming of the Shrew
Tags
- Achilles
- agamemnon
- appearance
- Beatrice
- Chorus
- Claudio
- Cressida
- deceit
- disguise
- disguises
- dogberry
- dupe
- fair
- foul
- free will
- group 5
- Helen
- Helen-Paris
- Henry V
- Hero
- induction
- irony
- lies
- love
- Lucentio
- Lust
- Macbeth
- Margaret
- Much Ado About Nothing
- music
- Paris
- predestination
- prejudice
- reality
- scene study
- Shakepeare
- shakespeare
- shrew
- taming
- The Winter's Tale
- the witches
- Troilus
- Troilus and Cressida
- Troy
- Ulysses
It’s clear that Christopher Sly is a dupe, to pick up on your terms, but I’m not sure whether this formula works for the play as a whole. I wonder if there isn’t a more therapeutic set of actions here, so that Katherine (like Sly) is afforded an alternate vision of her potential rather than simply being the butt of a joke.
I agree very much with Djenane here and to add my opinion about it I don’t think it’s very realistic to analyze plays from a realistic point of view.
After all they were works of fiction (with possibly some based elements of reality) in a very much similar way as we have entertainment today – just of different time faucets.
To understand more we must step back and really and see these works for what they are – theatrical works. They are great works but theatrical and meant for entertainment purposes. The audience should not over-read into them very much and analyze it from a real life point of view for more than it is because it really throws off things towards an unrealistically point-of-view tangent.
Although many are not keen to realize the effect of what is essentially art and its relationship with the audience. The artist creates an impressionable piece upon the audience and perhaps what the audience does in their life, the artist draws inspiration from. So the process may be never-ending through the self-feeding of human nature to create these “products” – as to say in broad terms.
It is interesting to see that age-old formulas are even used in today’s entertainment (be it films or books) that stem and seem to have similar content, outcomes and plot strings as these old works had.
I really prefer the old literature because it was way more original, perhaps today that everyone knows what everyone else is doing, they “inspire” from each other too much and originality is lost – thus books, movies etc.. end up being too alike.
Isolation back in the old days certainly did help originality since fewer were less aware of what other artists, writers etc. were doing, thus they were less influenced by others and more focused upon themselves to come up with original content.
Nevertheless, Shakespeare is one of the originals, brilliant and very smart concocter that the majority of academic educator population seems to like as it has been continually re-introduced and studied – although there were many others in literature which are very interesting as well and should not be overlooked – so an open mind is needed for everything, which even then would make Shakespeare easier to understand within a timeless worldly concept.
Thanks for the interesting discussion. =)
It’s good to be reminded of the role of fiction and sheer invention in literature, and all the other arts. The nature of Shakespeare’s originality is complicated, because he is also a great manipulator of source materials. Like most writers, he read deeply in order to write.