1. Lynda Boose, "TS, Good Husbandry and Enclosure"
2. Introduction
1. Problem: "Gendered experience" as "fulfillment of comic desire."
2. reading from "inside" vs "outside" of the text; contextualizing and historicizing--tendency of new critics, even feminists to discover resistance to its surface meaning within the text
1. Boose herself finally does this
3. method: historicize and explore relation of Induction to play
4. show relation of class and gender issues; subordinating gender to class--Marxist cultural materialism
3. the gesture of placing hand below foot
1. used to be part of wedding ceremony but outlawed in 1549
2. suggests the play's "obsessive investment in reinstatement of hierarchically gendered order."
1. [problem: the essay suggests a historical movement away from feminine rights, but this datum suggests the opposite]
4. the era's "obsession" with taming unruly women 196.["obsession" overused]
1. fixation on scolds and their punishment; increase of male anxiety; gender crisis, female king
5. find the source in the enclosure movement and capital/class formation
1. back to More's utopia
2. community to exclusive ownership; peasants become vagabonds; tenancy to wage laborers or relief recipients
3. few families control all manors and "half to three quarters" of peasantry were, by 1640 or so, left landless."
4. shift from small tillage to large scale pasture: cattle and sheep for wool industry; hedges and fences
5. ancestry no longer provided "copyhold" tenancy rights
6. enclosures and riots
7. Shakespeare and his father part of this move in land speculation; friend of Shakespeare killed in course of rebelling 202
8. "obsessed" with vagrancy 201.--poor laws
9. accompanied rise in mysogyny [no mention of witchcraft?]
6. "vast cultural circulation of anxieties" leads to displacement of enclosure onto women; "collocation, reciruclation and ...displacement" [Greenblatt]
1. equation of land and female body: imperialism as rape--O My America
2. change in meaning of word "common"--used to be rallying cry for principles of fairness and community [communist?]: leads to Jonson's Doll Common. [interesting but farfetched linkages]; calls for "common" deflected as calls for "common ownership of wives."
1. Mundus Alter et Idem: Amazonian dystopia in which wives ruled
3. "fear of being ...deprived of the status of 'husband'" redefines "husandry 208.
7. The Induction
1. Sly is one of vagrant class newly created; has old ties to land; forced into wage slavery and roguery [he's also a rogue]
2. Hostess: stock character of female independence; Alehouses scenes of sedition
3. Sly on floor; lord enters: paradigm of class; parks enclosed public woodlands; poaching
1. ostentatious privileges of nobility vs. "swine"--wanton picutres of classical rapes
4. Sly resists at first, but finally comes around through the agency of the supposed wife
1. transposition effected in which the independent woman becomes his antagonist, and the lord provides him with a wife that raises him to a lord: an allegory of displacement
2. class is being made invisible by gender; the lady elevates him
3. this all depends on the ability of the man to tame her and make himself master of what is his own; lord and husband paired--like Petruchio in the play
4. men of all classes bonded by common enemy: shrewish female
1. acting out shrew-taming makes bridal into masculine arena of wager and competitive husbandry--like betting on the bitch 215.
2. shrew taming is the test of success
8. Petruchio and Kate
1. "middle and lower class male viewer's fused fantasies of erotic reward, financial success, and upward social mobility."
2. Petruchio's quest to wive it wealthily; he is land poor; needs operating cash
3. success of deeds; of action and risk vs. Lucentio's aristocratic restraint; deeds and land title; Shakespeare's own involvement as doer
4. Kate and Petruchio battle with epithets of class: Kate, plain Kate; you're a movable; he treats her like barnyard wench; Gremio sees him dressed as vagabond; he's marrying up; she down
5. Petruchio's manipulation of the epithet gentle; switches it from signifying birth to signifying submission; "power to manipulate the signifiers that define Kate's social status." 219
6. Kate's submission to hierarchy of gender is prediated on her retention of her social position in the heirarchy of class....trade-off.
1. "every time she resists submission in the arena of gender, she is punished by degradation in the arena of class...
1. servants in his house
2. she sells out to...consumerist, middile-class bourgeois desires..." 220
3. "to be female is constructed as the fine art of thinking one's actions from the position of otgherness while simultaneously always seeing oneself as the other."
4. Katharina likely to prove herself a soldeir becomes model of physical helplessness...born to shop
5. her position close to that of beggar
9. Overall strategies
1. for male, the play provides fantasy of class hostilities onto gender; for women, displacement of gender hostilities onto class
2. linguistic parallels: derogatroy class language shifts to derogatory gender language: harlot, shrew, hoyden, scold, baggage, bawd
10. The Shrew and A Shrew
1. The Shrew leaves the class issues hanging and devolves into fantasy
2. A Shrew returns Sly at several occasions and at the end to estrange the fantasy; its dreamer finally wakes and takes the lesson of Kate and Petruchio; he goes home to lord it over his wife, collapsing the romanticized patriarchal fiction, revealing the power of this displacement [propaganda]
3. The Shrew as Shakespeare's self-censored revision
11. Bartholomew incident--[brilliant ending of essay]
1. "beneath every assured dominance is inevitably an unacknowledge, uncredited, and usually unpaid dependency of the higher on the lower."224
2. Petruchio is raised by his wife, and other wives are enjoined to do same.
3. Bartholomew unwillingly impersonates the woman who transforms Sly--he is servant and female: "speaking right at the juncture between frame and inner play,...solemnly rejects all these farcical categories...'No, my good lord...it is a kind of history.'" 225