by Michael Greaney

Created on: February 21, 2008

"The Taming of the Shrew" was always one of my least-favorite plays. Let's be honest: I hated it. Every production I ever saw, including Cole Porter's musical version, "Kiss Me, Kate," seemed demeaning to women, silly, and combined stupid characterization with an incomprehensible plot and insufficient motivation instilled by the author of "Richard III" and "Hamlet."

"Romeo and Juliet" seemed an overblown, saccharine chronicle of young love contrasted with the stupidity of parents, with idiotic characters killing themselves without a solid reason. I knew this, because that's the way it was always taught to me.

Then I saw John Cleese, of all people, in a production of "The Taming of the Shrew." Before the play aired, the host of the series interviewed Cleese, best known for his insane "Monty Python" skits and even crazier "Fawlty Towers." It was a revelation.

Cleese and the host (whom I cannot recall at the moment), dissected "Shrew" and (for good measure) "Romeo and Juliet," and carefully explained what the heck Shakespeare was doing. Briefly, Kate, Romeo, and Juliet were, in a sense, the villains of the plays. They were going against the established order, and causing immense amounts of trouble in the doing of it.

In Elizabethan times, "Father Knows Best" was not a trite and ridiculous platitude, but a very real belief, the very basis of the social order. Go against the patriarchal order (as Kate did) or rebel against your parents (as did Romeo and Juliet), and you were an enemy of the people, of the whole of society. I got the impression that an Elizabethan audience might have considered that Kate finally learned who was boss, while Romeo and Juliet deserved what they got; the tragedy was all the trouble they caused their families, not their personal deaths.

Suddenly, everything made sense: the odd motivations, the overblown speeches, the peculiar language - all of it. Understanding Shakespeare's own motivation made it much easier to understand his writing as a whole. What initially appeared to be two rather silly plays took on actual meaning within the context of Shakespeare's life, times, and environment. What at first glance (and quite a few subsequent glances) seemed to be extreme cleverness at pitching an extremely dumb story to an audience (Shakespeare could have been the greatest ad man in history, had he not been essentially a propagandist for the Tudor State - which doesn't diminish his accomplishment in the least), turned out to be utter genius in conveying an extremely difficult world view, especially for people a couple of centuries later.

Yes, Shakespeare's writing can at times be difficult to understand. One small example is that we no longer use the second person singular in daily speech; a "thee" and a "thou" sounds strange to us. He also had the habit of inventing words and turns of phrase that are easy to misunderstand after a few centuries of misuse and misquotation (the quote is "All that glisters," not "glitters," for example). To add insult to injury, the fact that the plays are often "required reading" in high school can make the difficult impossible to understand, just as in Italy, making Alessandro Manzoni's brilliant novel "The Betrothed" (Il Promesi Sposi) required reading has almost killed one of the greatest and most entertaining novels ever written.

Shakespeare's writing is not, however, incomprehensible. It may take more effort than reading the pabulum that passes for literature today, but then so does reading the editorial page of the daily paper. There's a reason why Shakespeare was the most popular playwright in his day, and why his plays still hold the stage after four centuries: They are entertaining, and they mean something.

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