“What's That to You?” or, Facing Facts

“To know the conditions of a work,” Pierre Macherey once argued, “is to define the real process of its constitution, to show how it is composed from a real diversity of elements which give it substance,” a diversity exemplified for Macherey (1978) in Verne's The Mysterious Island, which “speaks with several voices at once, exhibiting the contrast between them even if it fails to express and account for this contrast” (49–50). At a glance, Macherey's antiorganicist admonition would seem of little relevance to a study of The Taming of the Shrew, critical debate over which has, quite naturally, sought generally to wrest a univocal reading from the eponymous struggle of Petruchio and Katherina. Yet as the growing attention paid in recent years to the induction of the play would suggest, there is profit in listening to The Taming of the Shrew with an ear for its polyphony, a polyphony created by the dissident sounds produced by the comic collisions that occur, not simply in the thematic foreground, but in what common sense, the exigencies of plot, and interpretative tradition have deemed the margins of the play, collisions which from the very opening lines of the induction, and with percussive insistence and at times concussive force, give dramatic life to contemporary anxieties, not simply about the relations of husband and wife, but about pervasive transgressions of the social hierarchy that would elide prescribed distinctions between commoner and lord, servant and master, and disrupt the proper relations between fathers and sons, and sons-in-law and newly begotten fathersin-law. ¹ It is to the latter, and to the vein of generational discord and anti-paternalist reference in the play, that I will pay especial attention in this essay, less to note its presence and prevalence than to explore the ways in which it competes with and complicates our response to the “main event.” By way of preface, however, I would like to offer a sketch of what I take to be the peculiar texture of the complex negotiation the play transacts with the society it represents. And here, of course, we might recall as a well-worn axiom Louis Montrose's (1980) observation that the “heterodoxy of Shakespearean drama” is but a sign of its mimetic fidelity, “merely the consequence of its success at holding up the mirror to nature” (66; see also 32–39, 122). With particular regard to the distinctions to be drawn between The Taming of the Shrew as we have taken it from the First Folio—and which hereafter I will follow the prac tice of calling The Shrew—and its theatrical doppelganger, the Quarto play The Taming of a Shrew—hereafter A Shrew ² —and with an ear for how the strains of social dissidence in the margins of the play interact with its center, I would like to explore the possibility that The Shrew echoes the contending voices of its society in its own ultimate equivocations, leaving the patriarchalist fantasy it inscribes unaffirmed, and leaving the subversive dissonances it evokes in counterpoint at once unendorsed but unrepudiated.