"Look not big, nor stamp, nor stare": Acting Up in The Taming of the Shrew and the Coventry Herod Plays

Comparative Drama, Winter, 2000 by Jonathan Gil Harris

In his 1945 study of Shakespeare's use of humoral psychology, John W. Draper noted that the supposedly choleric Petruchio's strategy for subduing the equally volatile Katherine "is to out-Herod Herod." (1) Though Draper doubtless intended his remark to be no more than metaphorical, I propose to take it literally. Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, I shall argue, is subtly informed by a metatheatrical awareness of Herod and, more specifically, of the styles of acting that distinguished his character on the early English stage.

That Shakespeare knew of the conventions and characters of Corpus Christi cycle drama is beyond question. What remains unclear is whether his knowledge was derived, either wholly or at least in part, from first-hand childhood experience as an audience member. Although the young Shakespeare may have developed a taste for live theater in Stratford itself, which frequently played host to licensed traveling players from 1569, (2) his home town had no tradition of Corpus Christi drama. But as many scholars have speculated, Shakespeare may have witnessed one or more performances of the biblical cycle play staged during the week-long Great Fair of Corpus Christi at nearby Coventry. He certainly had ample opportunity to do so. Although no longer the regular annual event it had been before the Reformation--it was not performed during the plague years of 1564 and 1575, for example--the city's cycle play was staged on numerous occasions during Shakespeare's childhood prior to its discontinuation in 1580, when he was sixteen. The Coventry Fair was evidently a large tourist draw, attracting thousands of visitors and their purses. One seventeenth-century antiquary noted that "the confluence of people from farr and neare to see that Shew was extraordinary great, and yielded noe small advantage to this Cittye." (3) As the son of one of Stratford's leading local politicians in the 1560s and 1570s, whose official administrative business took him to Coventry on several occasions, it is hard to imagine Shakespeare and his father not attending a nearby event invested with considerable civic and even national significance. In the absence of any incontrovertible evidence that Shakespeare was an audience member at a performance of the Coventry cycle, however, potentially illuminating points of contact between the mystery drama and his own have been for the most part neglected. (4)

A passage in the wedding scene of The Taming of the Shrew--a play that contains more references to Warwickshire locations than any other by Shakespeare (5)--hints that he did see the Coventry cycle, and that one of its episodes may have made a lasting impression on him. The specific connection I shall sketch between the Coventry play and The Taming of the Shrew differs from the type of strictly intertextual relation conventionally adduced by scholars of source studies. I am proposing instead a relation of intertheatricality. This different relation, I shall argue, consists less in textual transmission--although there may be elements of that too--than in critical reproduction of a style of performance most notable for the actor's over-the-top self-presentation, including exaggerated gestural techniques, dazzling costumes, and deafening verbal delivery. I shall term this style "acting up." The phrase not only suggests the hyperbolic tendencies of the style, which required the actor's volume knob to be decisively turned up (loud delivery! loud body language! loud apparel!); it also captures something of the socially transgressive behavior tyranny, shrewishness--that the style was frequently employed to represent on the early English stage. The phrase additionally hints at the potentially transgressive status gap that so frequently obtained between the player and his character; to impersonate a middle eastern tyrant or even a young woman from a rich Paduan mercantile family, the player of the provincial Corpus Christi stage and the London commercial theater alike had to act "up" in a class as much as a histrionic sense.

Shakespeare's reproduction of cycle-drama performance styles in The Taming of the Shrew bespeaks not only a personal history of dramatic influence, however, but also an institutional history of theatrical rivalry and transformation. For I wish to argue that if the play contains echoes of the Coventry cycle drama--and I believe it does--it is because Shakespeare and his company were engaged in a project of theatrical and cultural redefinition that entailed a critical relation to not only the artisanal Corpus Christi drama of the provinces, but also the acting up demanded by the most popular plays from the London commercial stage of the late 1580s and early 1590s. It is not just shrews that Shakespeare's play endeavors to tame, I shall argue, but also those contemporary London players who perpetuate the histrionic bodily techniques of the artisans who performed the Coventry Herod.

I

After Petruchio has peremptorily announced in the bizarre wedding scene of The Taming of the Shrew that he and Katherine will forgo their banquet and return immediately to his country house, he tells his surprised guests to "look not big, nor stamp, nor stare" (3.2.230). The line stands out for the explicit attention it draws to players' facial gestures and body language. In doing so, it foregrounds the hyperbolic style of performance demanded less of the actors who play the wedding guests than of those who play the larger-than-life Katherine and Petruchio themselves. Katherine has in all likelihood just exhibited the kind of body language from which Petruchio enjoins the wedding guests to refrain: she may very well look big, stamp, and stare as she delivers the lines preceding Petruchio's, for example, in which she exclaims that "I will be angry ... Father, be quiet: he shall stay my leisure" (3.2.218-9). And Petruchio, giving Katherine a taste of her own melodramatic medicine, doubtless resorts to some serious stamping and staring himself. We are told that he "stamp'd and swore" during the wedding ceremony (3.2.169), an over-the-top (albeit unseen) technique of acting up that erupts onto the stage during his honeymoon, when he physically abuses his servants and throws his dinner at them in feigned disgust (4.1.136).