"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

Editors tend to gloss Harry's speech with a reference to the pertinent passage concerning the Slaughter of the Innocents in St. Matthew (2:13-18). But the dominant image in Shakespeare's rendition of the episode ---the description of the "howls" of upset mothers that "break the clouds"--arguably derives less from an acquaintance with scripture, which refers in any case only to the single voice of Rachel mourning for her children (2:18), than from a memory of an entertainment such as the Coventry Shearmen and Taylors' pageant. Like other theatrical versions of the episode, the latter directs the actors playing the mothers of the slaughtered children to create a hullaballoo of distress: (34) after the children have been murdered, the first soldier asks "Who hard eyuer soche a cry/ Of wemen that there chyldur haue lost?" (870-71).

As Henry V's reference to the howling mothers of the Innocents suggests, it is parallel details of staging rather than linguistic, narrative, or thematic echoes that offer the most compelling evidence for Shakespeare's having seen the Coventry cycle play. Shakespeare's allusions to Herod and the Slaughter of the Innocents are all distinguished by their sensitivity to larger-than-life performance, whether embodied in the bragging strutter of Merry Wives, the deafening ranter of Hamlet, or the shrieking mothers of Henry V. If the theatrical Herod sprang readily to Shakespeare's mind as an emblem of performative excess when he wrote these three plays, it is only a small leap to assume that the few instances of over-the-top acting up demanded by his other plays were always potentially mediated by a memory of the Coventry Herod, even in the absence of any explicit allusion to the character. Such a memory may well have informed three of The Taming of the Shrew's most distinctive details of staging: thunderously loud delivery; hyperbolic gesture, including stamping; and self-consciously extravagant costuming.

Hamlet foregrounds Shakespeare's particular sensitivity to the auditory dimensions of the theatrical Herod. This was a detail that, for the most part, he does not seem to have been eager to reproduce in his own plays. The enormous volume demanded of the actors in the Herod episode of the Shearmen and Taylors' pageant is matched by few works in the Shakespeare canon: Bottom might bellow in the "lofty" vein of a tyrant (A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1.2.32), and Lear might "rage" and "blow" in competition with the storm on the heath (King Lear, 3.2.1), but these are isolated (and even parodic) moments of loudness within their respective plays. The sustained vociferation of the Shearmen and Taylors' Herod episode is rivaled in the Shakespeare canon only by the opening acts of The Taming of the Shrew. No other work by Shakespeare asks players to attack their audience's eardrums to quite the same extent. (35) The play starts loud, only to get louder: the racket that opens the play as the bellowing Christopher Sly is thrown out of the inn by the Hostess is quickly surpassed by the eclat of Katherine's first appearance, in which she loudly threatens Hortensio with physical violence and impresses herself on Tranio, as "stark mad or wonderful froward"(1.1.69). Petruchio's first scene continues the aural onslaught. Having raised the decibel level already with his verbal and physical abuse of Grumio ("I'll try how you can sol fa, and sing if' [1.2.18], a line that suggests a brisk blow to Grumio's groin and an appropriately piercing, soprano shriek from the latter), he proposes to deal with Katherine's noise by getting noisier still, a strategy underlined by the ranting style of his language in the following passage: