The Taming of the Shrew and Vinegar Girl

The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare 

and Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler

According to this Washington Post article, Anne Tyler loathes Shakespeare so she decided to rewrite one of his plays.

Anne Tyler was asked by the Hogarth Shakespeare people to pick one of Shakespeare’s plays and write a modern version. (This is part of a series where Hogarth asked different authors to write a modern retelling of a classic Shakespeare play.) She was asked first so she got to choose any play, and her choice was The Taming of the Shrew.

Now, an author can acquit themselves adequately, even admirably, in such a venture, but it isn’t going to be something that sprang from their creative well with a feeling of “I must write this story!”

Most writers try to spend their time on the stories that they love, that they are inspired by, even if a large part of the time is nitty gritty, chain yourself to the desk and write work. For example, Neil Gaiman said that he spent nearly twenty years with the idea for a book. Each year, he would take the idea out, write a page, re-read it and think, “Nope, I’m not a good enough writer yet.” After twenty years, he said, he realized he wasn’t getting any better, and he wrote The Graveyard Book -  which went on to win several awards including a Newbery Medal, a Carnegie Medal and a Hugo Award for best novel.

So, The Taming of the Shrew. There have been many productions of this play over the years and a whole lot of conjecture about what it means. If you’re not familiar with it, check out this synopsis on Youtube. I don’t agree with all of her conclusions but the synopsis is good and a very funny retelling.

Should you wish to skip the video, the main gist of the story revolves around two sisters, Bianca and Katherine. Bianca is generally considered a sweet and beautiful young woman with many suitors but their father, Baptista, won’t allow her to marry until her angry, but still beautiful, older sister Katherine is married. The time in the play is divided between the comedy of Bianca’s various suitors pretending to be her tutor, in disguise, in order to woo her, and Petruchio trying to break Katherine to the yoke of marriage, through sleep deprivation and starvation etc., because he wants her dowry.

Now, the creator of the Youtube video does mention that it has been suggested that Shakespeare wrote this as a mirror to show people how awful women were treated. She denies this saying, most people would say it was perfectly normal up until a few decades ago. What? I mean, slavery was considered “normal” at one time in the U.S. but you still had large numbers of people working against it, right? And Shakespeare was not most men - he was the bard. Shakespeare accorded women in his plays with as much ability as men. There are weak women and strong women, and those of each gender who use their strength of will for good . . .  or not so good.

A couple key points in understanding Taming of the Shrew, to my mind, are that Katherine is kept from sleeping and starved by Petruchio but she still argues with him into Act 4, Scene 5 until Hortensio says in an aside to Katherine, “Say as he says, or we shall never go.” It suddenly clicks with Katherine, I have to play the game to get what I want. So she agrees with Petruchio that the sun is the moon and then that she was mistaken and it is the sun.

Skip to the last two lines.

Hortensio: “Now, go thy ways, thou hast tamed a curst shrew.”

(He KNOWS that’s not true! He’s the one who told her to play along!)

Lucentio: “’Tis a wonder, by your leave, she will be tamed so.”

(Huh, yeah, it’s strange that. Even Lucentio’s suspicious!)

She isn’t tamed! She’s just playing the game. Petruchio better straighten up or there may be some deadly nightshade in his food one of these days. (That did happen back then, you know.)

Now Tyler says of Taming of the Shrew, that it’s a crazy story and she wanted to figure out what happened. But she doesn’t. She doesn’t take the characters and delve into what might have made them act the way they did in Shakespeare’s play. Instead she changes the characters immensely and then looks at their motivations. They are no longer remotely the same people. The relationship between the play and this book is tenuous at best.

As with many productions and retellings, the story centers on Katherine, though in the play just as much time is given to the comedy of the various suitors for Bianca. Tyler all but leaves that out, giving Bunny only one “suitor” and a brief mention that she had many others.

Tyler herself calls Vinegar Girl a “meringue.” A meringue consists of egg whites and some sugar whipped until they are light and fluffy then baked so they maintain their shape, but there’s very little substance. I think “a meringue” perfectly captures this book.

This is still Anne Tyler, a master writer and Pulitzer Prize winner, so there are some very witty, and poignant, scenes in the book, but I had trouble getting started. I didn’t really begin enjoying the book until some third of the way in.

There are some correlating characters. Katherine becomes Kate, Baptista becomes Dr. Battista, her father. Bianca becomes Bunny. Petruchio becomes Pyotr and, well, Lucentio becomes Edward, sort of.

Vinegar Girl opens with Kate gardening, which is her kind of happy place, and being called by her father who asks her to bring his lunch to the lab. She replies grumpily but he assumes she will follow through, because she always does.

Her father has come up with a scheme to have Kate marry his lab assistant Pyotr Cherbakov, so he can stay in the country, because “All would be lost” without Pyotr and his work visa is about to run out. (Drama much?)

“To put it mildly, it had never been Kate’s plan to work in a preschool. However, during her sophomore year in college she had told her botany professor that his explanation of photosynthesis was ‘half-assed.’ One thing had led to another, and eventually she was invited to leave.”

“In theory Kate could have applied for readmission to her college the following year, but she somehow didn’t.”

Kate, for her part, is much more wishy washy than Shakespeare’s Katherine was. Katherine seems to hold a great deal of anger, even physically attacking her sister. Tyler’s Kate, just seems to be floating through life, doing what is easiest and not sure what she wants out of life.

Kate seems to be stuck caring for her sister and father, but she doesn’t DO anything to get out of her situation. She isn’t pressured to go back to college. Her father simply doesn’t push her to do so. She has settled into this situation for want of a clear direction in her life.

There are so many scenes that just aren’t that interesting. They advance the cause of the plot but they aren’t funny or poignant. *shrug* Just kind of lackluster for me. Like the meal where her father unexpectedly brings Pyotr home for dinner. It’s just there as a sort of bridge.

Later that evening, her father finally brings up the marriage again. Kate is shocked. “You’ve been throwing him at me all along and I was too dumb to see it. I guess I just couldn’t believe my own father would conceive of such a thing.”

Kate gets angry and brings up Bunny. Her father points out the difference between the two. “Bunny has all those young men chasing after her.”

Kate is terribly hurt.

“If she kept her expression impassive, if she didn’t blink or even open her mouth to say another word, she might be able to stop the tears from spilling over. So she was silent. By degrees she stood up, careful not to bump into anything, and she put down her calculator and turned and walked out of the dining room with her chin raised.

And we feel for her. Her father just told her she is inferior, second tier to Bunny. She thought so before, she might have even suspected he thought so, but she didn’t KNOW until he said it. Ouch.

Kate seems utterly broken by this.

“He must think she was of no value; she was nothing but a bargaining chip in his single-minded quest for a scientific miracle. After all, what real purpose did she have in her life? And she couldn’t possibly find a man who would love her for herself, he must think, so why not just palm her off on someone who would be useful to him?”

Kate tells him he can do his own taxes. It’s a small skirmish, but Bunny applauds her for it, which makes her feel a little better, some solidarity.

Pyotr shows up to apologize for offending Kate. “She felt both gratified and humiliated to know that he comprehended this.”

And they begin to connect, she realizes she underestimated him because of the language barrier.

Now, Pyotr and Petruchio are totally different characters. Petruchio is in it for the money and sets about to break Katherine’s spirit through starvation, sleep deprivation and “killing her with kindness.” Pyotr is not concerned with changing Kate. She is wonderful just the way she is in his eyes and he is only concerned that they should marry and find a way to live peacefully. Kate’s father is MUCH more involved in convincing Kate than Katherine’s father is.

At one point Pyotr says, “You are the only person I know who pronounces my name right.” It’s very wistful statement.

Then her father shows up acting as if everything is mended and thinking Kate is going to marry Pyotr. And FINALLY he really talks to her about it, about how he thought Pyotr would just move in to the extra room and how his work is going and how her mother was when she was a child. He really opens up. That is a poignant scene.

Kate comes around and agrees to the marriage, on paper, to help Pyotr stay.

She goes back to work and the people start treating her with more respect as she is going to be married, like she is suddenly a real legitimate person.

She has a crush of some sort on co-worker, Adam, but she just throws that over to marry Pyotr. Why? That relationship seems to be sprung on us then tossed aside just as quickly. It didn’t work for me.

Kate seems to become interested in marrying Pyotr as a way to build up some momentum in her life, to change the trajectory, though she still doesn’t know what she wants to do. She doesn’t have any goals. Now, there are a lot of people out there like that but I’ve never been one of them so I find it a little hard to relate.

Then Pyotr and Kate get to know each other and he grows on her and it begins to turn into a real marriage. She looks for the good in Pyotr and finds things to like about him. She comes to understand him, the way a woman might in an arranged marriage.

In fact, it reminded me of the story about one of my sets of great grandparents. Theirs was a marriage of convenience. She had been married previously and had two children. Her husband passed away and she became housekeeper for my great great grandparents. Then my great great grandmother passed away. The story goes that my great great grandfather, William Henry, looked at my great grandfather, Fred, and said, “Well, are you going to marry her or do I have to?” It wouldn’t have been proper to stay in the house with two men and no other adult female. So, Fred married Lizzie. They had my grandmother in 1921. A neighbor lady used to tell me that they were two of the kindest people she’d ever known. Perhaps that was why their marriage worked. Romance doesn’t necessarily last in a marriage, it has to be based on something more, and some people just skip that romance stage altogether.

So, Vinegar Girl comes to a strangely logical conclusion, with some more farce about Edward stealing the lab mice.

I would say Vinegar Girl is a book inspired by Taming of the Shrew, more than a re-telling of the play. It doesn’t have the weight of male/female politics that Shakespeare depicted, where men held the power and women had to fly under the radar, because, unlike Katherine, Kate has the right to refuse. In trying to bring this story forward in time, it might have worked better if the author had chosen a culture where Kate would have been more pressured to marrying, such as a traditional culture in the U.S. or even another country.

Vinegar Girl. It’s a meringue – light, fluffy and pleasant but lacking much substance.