"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

   Think you a little din can daunt mine ears? Have I not in time heard lions
   roar? Have I not heard the sea puff'd up with winds Rage like an angry boar
   chafed with sweat? Have I not heard great ordnance in the field, And
   heaven's artillery thunder in the skies? Have I not in a pitched battle
   heard Loud 'larums, neighing steeds, and trumpets' clang?

   (1.2.200-207)

Given the volume that the speech demands of the player, John Draper may have been far closer to the mark than he realized in claiming that Petruchio's "method is to out-Herod Herod." But this is no simple, uncritical reproduction of cycle-drama loudness. If Shakespeare directs the actor playing Petruchio to emulate the ranting bluster of Herod, it is not because his character is angry; for all the speech's hyperbolic excess, this is a controlled demonstration of noise--a soundcheck of sorts, in which the actor can test his levels of amplification. Shakespeare calls for histrionic loudness, in other words, to draw metatheatrical attention to the actor's vocal technique, not the character's emotion.

In other plays, Shakespeare seems likewise to have recalled by signaling his critical distance from a second distinctive dramaturgical detail of the Shearmen and Taylor's pageant: Herod's melodramatic stamping. Shakespeare's references to stamping appear almost exclusively in his early plays. (36) In King John, Constance berates the Duke of Austria by calling him "A ramping fool, to brag and stamp, and swear/Upon my party" (3.1.48-9); in 3 Henry V/, Margaret commands York to "Stamp, rave, and fret" in response to Rutland's death (1.4.92). Both remarks hint at a lexicon of theatrical body language appropriate to stage tyrants, one that in its ensemble of stamping, bragging, and raving seems pointedly to derive from Herod's antics. Constance's and Margaret's remarks are just as notable, however, for not mandating any actual stamping on stage. Only once in the two plays is the performance of the gesture explicitly called for: Prince Edward notes in 3 Henry V/how King Louis "stamps as he were nettled" upon hearing of the marriage of King Edward IV to Lady Gray (3.3.169). By comparison, The Taming of the Shrew is chockful with histrionic stamping. The two explicit references to the gesture in the wedding scene probably represent a small fraction of the stamping required in performances of a play that repeatedly "planteth anger" in its title character (4.1.75). Indeed, Katherine's imperious displays of larger-than-life rage in the first acts of the play can conceivably be construed as a sustained parody of a stamping stage tyrant: threatening violence with a "three-legg'd stool" (1.1.64) in order to massacre the "innocent" Hortensio; driving Bianca onstage with her hands bound (2.1.4); "fuming" at Hortensio's "frets" and crowning him with his lute (2.1.153). There is no end of exaggerated, knockabout violence in those other theatrical traditions to which The Taming of the Shrew is more obviously indebted, such as the commedia dell'arte or skimmington. But Katherine's bodily comportment reproduces that of Herod in one particularly crucial respect. As both her first appearance and the wedding scene indicate, Katherine's performances of anger spill out into the streets of Padua, exceeding the bounds of Baptista's house just as the Coventry Herod's rage catapaults him off the pageant wagon and into the street. Stamping serves as graphic bodily shorthand for this violent irruption into the public sphere; it emblematizes Katherine's as much as Herod's disregard for emotional, social, and theatrical containment alike. Hence Petruchio's command to "look not big, nor stamp, nor stare" recalls the Shearmen and Taylors' entertainment less because of its verbal echo of the latter, than because of its metatheatrical reference to (and disparagement of) a Herod-like style of melodramatic acting up that refuses confinement and teeters noisily on the platea at the threshold between stage and audience.