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Transcript

The Taming of the Shrew (1623)

A Prezi Presentation by Christina Katopodis @nemersonian

for ENG 220 @Hunter_College, CUNY

Gender: It's a Trap!

Themes to Look For

Performance & Print

Puns on Puns on Puns

  • Gender Roles & Reversals
  • Patriarchy & Male Authority
  • Performance & Performativity
  • Man vs. Nature
  • Marriage & Domesticity
  • Abuse: Terror or Deception?
  • Erotic Desire & Puns on Puns!

In Gender Trouble (1990), Judith Butler argues that gender isn't inherent or fixed. Rather, it's a performance, socially constructed and assumed. Butler argues for breaking away from the male-female binary and imagining other possibilities. In Undoing Gender (2004), she argues for a wider recognition of personhood. In other words, one must be recognized as a man/woman/person to become such.

Sign > Sign > Sign

A pun is a form of word play that operates on double/multiple meanings of words. One might call the meaning of a word a Sign or Signifier. Puns lead to other meanings, which looks like this:

But there is no stable, signified meaning. The meaning isn't fixed or centered; rather, it slips and shifts, generating ambiguity, and humor or anxiety. See "Shakespearean Wordplay" (xxii-xxiii) in your Folger edition.

  • One of Shakespeare's early comedies
  • First performed between 1591-1592
  • First printed in 1623, in the First Folio about seven years after Shakespeare's death.
  • No clearly discernible literary source, unlike many of Shakespeare's plays that draw from previously written texts and tales.

The Taming of the Shrew

Historical Context

Play within a Play

{Close Reading}

In the Induction, the lord plays a trick on the drunken Christopher Sly at a local alehouse in an unknown land (the allusion to William the Conqueror suggests the location is England). The lord orders his servants to take Sly to luxurious chambers and treat him like a lord who has long been out of his mind A troupe of traveling actors stage a play for Sly. See page 6 of your Folger edition.

Allusion

  • Shakespeare (1564-1616)
  • Elizabeth I & "The Golden Age" (1558-1603)
  • James I (1603-1625)
  • "Kings Men" and the Globe Theater
  • Elizabethan concern about resolving marital issues after Henry VIII's separation from the Catholic Church
  • Anxiety about "shrews" that challenged male authority and the institution of marriage: what is parody and what is misogynist?

{Framework}

An expression designed to call

something to mind without

mentioning it explicitly; an indirect or passing reference.

Synonyms: reference to, mention of, suggestion of, hint to, comment on,

remark on

Baptista Minola, the father of Katherine and Bianca, insists that Kate must marry before Bianca, the youngest, can be courted. Bianca is obedient, sweet and desireable, while Kate is unruly and outspoken. Petruchio, a wealthy gent from Verona, is eccentric and quick-witted, come to Padua to marry rich. Katherine has a large dowry and he sets out to tame her. Meanwhile, Lucentio disguises

himself to woo Bianca as her tutor.

In sum...

Adapted from the Folger Shakespeare

Library Edition of The Taming of the Shrew,

ed. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine

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