"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

Lastly, Petruchio's invocation and censure of Herod-like gesture is paralleled throughout the play by another, similar dramaturgical gambit: reproduction and criticism of Herod-like displays of apparel. The boastful nature of the Shearmen and Taylors' Herod is most forcefully realized on stage by the latter's vain commands to the audience to behold his "gorgis araye" (511). While The Taming of the Shrew might not replicate specific details of Herod's attire (tempting though it might be to see a parodic doubling of the latter's gown in the blue livery of Petruchio's servants [4.1.93]), Shakespeare's play follows the example of the Shearmen and Taylors' pageant by repeatedly focusing attention on its spectacular apparel, some of it garish, some of it fashionable. Petruchio's ostentatiously ill-matched "accoutrements" (3.2.121) for his wedding, the Tailor's and Haberdasher's magnificent garments that "fit the time" (4.3.69), and Tranio's "Silken doublet, ... velvet hose, ... scarlet cloak, and ... copintank hat" (5.1.55-6) are all in their very different ways over-the-top costumes that, like the apparel of the Shearmen and Taylors' Herod, occasion extended onstage discussion. But The Taming of the Shrew is a play that ridicules even as it flaunts its costumes. "To me she's married, not unto my clothes," observes Petruchio at the wedding (3.2.119); he derides the fashionable garments that Katherine covets as ridiculous "masquing stuff' (4.3.87); and, in a final display of costumes that "fit the time," he commands her to trample her cap before the other wives (5.2.125). Like its reproduction of Herod-like volume and gesture, then, the play's displays of extravagant costume possess a sustainedly metatheatrical and critical dimension. (37) Shakespeare calls for acting up, in other words, to discredit it.

But why would Shakespeare have had occasion in The Taming of the Shrew to remember and subject to sustained critique a style of performance that in his other plays he seems to have simply shunned? One contributing factor may have been a contemporary theatrical event--or, perhaps more accurately, trend. It is not inconceivable that Herod's acting up would have sprung to Shakespeare's mind as he witnessed the performance of what was one of the Tudor London commercial stage's most successful and influential plays, whose popularity reached its apogee in the years immediately before he wrote The Taming of the Shrew.

IV

As a simply textual artifact, Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great owes far less to any native English theatrical tradition than to the model of Seneca. To those members of early modern London audiences familiar with provincial cycle drama, however, Tamburlaine on stage may well have seemed like Herod resurrected. Indeed, despite Marlowe's undoubted ignorance of Corpus Christi drama and his manifest debt to the Senecan Hercules in fashioning his larger-than-life action hero, (38) Harry Levin and others have regarded the cycle-drama Herod as Tamburlaine's dramatic prototype: like Herod, Tamburlaine orders a slaughter of innocents, swears oaths by Mahomet, and makes claims of world domination and of superhuman powers. (39) But it is just as much details of staging as of character or plot that lend weight to the comparison. Some of these Herod-like details are discernible in the published playscript alone (from which, interestingly, the publisher Richard Jones claims to have excised "fond and frivolous gestures"--an ambiguous phrase that might refer not simply to Marlowe's verse, but also to stage directions concerning the actors' facial expressions and actions). (40) With its opening lines, Tamburlaine underscores the inadequacy of anything less than "great and thund'ring speech" in a king (I.1.1.3); it constantly refers to Tamburlaine's fierce "looks" and body language (I.1.2.56, 3.2.66-75, II.1.4.76-8, 4.1.173-5, etc.); and its spare stage directions require Tamburlaine to parade a sequence of striking costumes--full armor (I. 1.2.41), suits of white, red and black (I.4.2., 4.4, 5.2)--which were evidently supplemented in performance by other sumptuous garments listed in Henslowe's inventory of costumes, such as Tamburlaine's "cotte with coper lace." (41)