"A spirit to resist" Women's Non-Traditional Casting and/as Feminist Intervention in The Taming of the Shrew

Abstract

As Shakespeare director and scholar Sara Reimers puts it, the “very idea of a feminist Shrew is arguably an oxymoron.”¹ For anyone familiar with the play, it is not difficult to understand how such an argument could be made. While Shakespeare’s later comedies are often lauded for the liberating journeys undertaken by their heroines, The Taming of the Shrew can be read as a shockingly misogynistic mirror image. Although at first glance it is extremely troubling, it remains one of Shakespeare’s most frequently performed plays.² Certainly, there have been modern productions that uncritically restage Shrew’s early modern sexism for laughs, but thankfully most modern producers realize that Petruchio’s beliefs and behaviors cannot fly as straightly-played comedy. As a result, modern Shakespeare practice has developed several strategies for staging feminist interpretations of the play that are more tolerable and useful to modern audiences, including both traditional and non-traditional casting approaches.