Monday, August 10, 2009
The "Taming" of the Shrew?
Shakespeare's play, The Taming of the Shrew, was more like brutal personality changing the shrew. Shakespeare wrote about how this girl, Katherina, had to get married first before his younger daughter could get married. Since the younger one was apparently more beautiful and easier to be with, people tried to go after her instead of Katherina. Katherina might have been bitter, but being hooked up with an abusive man was plain cruel. The man starved her, lacked her of her basic necessities until she would compromise to doing what he asked. He rewarded her like a dog and treated her as such. At the end, the younger sister seems to be the more wild one and Katherina is whipped into acting like the perfect wife; the sisters changed into what their sister used to be. The cruelty of changing someone to please society that Shakespeare wrote about was disturbing. I did like the play up until the point that Katherina became whipped and polite and wifey. She was so bold, so overpowering, so in charge and the character of her was just so strong already, but it all was broken at the end without warning. The ending wasn't favorable to me.
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This too goes back to my new appreciation for Shakespeare. TJ, as you mentioned, one of the major themes of this play is the importance to society of conforming to society (if that makes sense). It simply amazes me how Shakespeare knew about all of these things that we are facing in the present time, which was his future. Back in his day, I feel as though there wasn't as much push to conform to a single mold because it was a time in which social classes were so dominant. There was no single mold because it all just depended on which class you came from, and it was actually safer for a person to stay in his class than it was to try to "mold" to another one. In the present day however, the caste system is less dominant, but the idea of conforming is more dominant. For example, and the most cliché of examples, the idea of girls needing to fit the mold of the most beautiful women from TV and magazines.
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