Page 28 - Shakespeare in the Movie From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love

An Auspicious Opening I 17

A roughhewn shrew play, the text long lost and precise title
unknown, had proved successful shortly before Shakespeare began
writing. Simultaneous with Will's work, a similar play, The Taming
of a Shrew, was in performance with Lord Pembroke's competing
company. In his own unique and superior version, however, Shake-
speare combined, for the first time, his despised wife with the
beloved queen, resulting in his first great female character, Katha-
rina.
Shakespeare was also expanding his range by devising more com-
plex plots. Onto the straightforward story line he grafted a different
fable. From George Gascoigne's Supposes, he lifted the tale of an
appealing young nobleman (called Lucentio in Shakespeare) who
changes places with his servant to woo and win a lovely lady,
Bianca. To properly fuse the preexisting stories, Shakespeare devised
an inspired concept: Bianca would be Katharina's demure younger
sister; the sweet thing's romance would be blocked by Baptista,
father to both girls, insisting the shrewish Kate be married before
her much-desired sibling could.
Also hinting at his budding genius was Shakespeare's decision to
add a prologue, lifted from "The Sleeper Awakened," a tale he'd
found in the Arabian Nights anthology. Christopher Sly, a humble
tinker, is discovered drunk and asleep in an alehouse by a Lord. This
nobleman plays a mean trick, changing places with the lout, allow-
ing Sly to wake and believe he's an aristocrat and that Sly's entire
life as a tinker is nothing more than a single night's bad dream. The
play proper is presented as an entertainment for this gullible soul,
with the Elizabethan audience watching The Taming of the Shrew
over Sly's shoulder, utilizing the theatrical device of a play within a
play.
The sequence includes an early incarnation of the recurring warn-
ing against overindulgence in drink that runs through later plays,
culminating in the character of Falstaff. Sophisticated ideas, fully
developed during the next fifteen years, have their germination in
this "induction" to The Taming of the Shrew. The very nature of
the theatrical experience (a play within a play) as a fitting subject for
popular theater presages Marshall McLuhan's notion that "the
medium is the message," and various theories of deconstruction, by
some four hundred years. A pre-Freudian psychological notion of
interpreting dreams as reality distilled is hinted at here.
The framing device serves as perfect appetizer for the play proper.
Scholar Hardin Craig summarized Shakespeare's intent: "There is