Texts for Translation 2011:
  Claire Cameron

‘That man that hath a tongue I say is no man /If with his tongue he cannot win a woman’ (Two Gentlemen of Verona 3.1. 104-105). 

An analysis of the relationship between speech and sexual potency in Shakespearean drama. 

The act of speech in Shakespearean drama functions not only as pure dialogue. Each character has a specific speech mode that helps construct their identity within a play. Speech, and ways in which and at what times a character speaks, is integral to the representation. This essay will examine the relationship between speech and sexual potency in The Taming of the Shrew and Romeo and Juliet. Both are romances of very different kinds featuring powerful female characters. I intend to analyse these female protagonists and the instances of their speech and the implications upon their characterisation and the wider representation. I will argue that the characters of Katherine and Juliet utilise speech to undermine the patriarchal systems that they are located within and to give themselves agency over their sexuality. The effect of this agency results in a wider social crisis, resulting in the destruction of both women as individuals; for Katherine: the loss of her freedom of speech and the ability to determine herself; for Juliet: the rejection of her identity as a Capulet and death. It is the perceived lack of control of their sexuality that makes these women such a disruptive force, and it is only by removing that which gives them the capability for sexual potency (their outspokenness) can the patriarchal authority re-establish it’s hegemonic control. In the first section of my essay I will briefly consider some key criticism in order to form a basis for my own analysis. 

In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler questions the ‘naturalness’ of gender boundaries and their imposition upon the body. She argues that gender is a “cultural performance” – the body imitates, and is regulated by, a “specific codes of cultural coherence” that function as a mode of control (2492). What is considered to be ‘female’ is a product of regulations within a society that are relied upon to sustain hegemonies. This creates a set of constructed ‘norms’ that a body must adhere to in order to exist inside the mainstream. These take the form of performance – accepted as ‘real’ in the interests of preserving the dominant male hierarchy that requires women to remain inferior. People achieve the performance through “acts and gestures, articulated and enacted desires” to “create the illusion of an interior and organizing gender core discursively maintained for the purposes of the regulation of sexuality within the obligatory frame of reproductive heterosexuality.” (2497). If a person refuses to perform as pre-subscribed then the illusion becomes subverted. Butler comments: “If the body is synecdochal for the social system per se…then any kind of unregulated permeability constitutes a site of pollution and endangerment.” (2493). Challenging a ‘given’ sexuality through acting the opposing gender problematizes the foundations of the contemporary heterosexual culture. This corresponds to Lisa Jardine’s study of the concept of the ‘shrew’ in Shakespeare in Still Harping on Daughters. She defines the issue of the speaking woman thus: “Discordant, disruptive, unruly, she threatens to sabotage the domestic harmony which depends upon her general submissiveness.” (106). Jardine argues that within the domestic sphere, the woman’s tongue could provide “a semblance of power” with which to threaten the patriarch (107). She highlights the connection between the literatures of the ‘challenging’ woman and that of the “sexually predatory…woman.” (123). For both these critics the woman who objects to her ‘position’ by reclaiming masculine traits, ie. the active tongue, becomes a delinquent and, due to the intertwining of gender denomination and sexuality, a sexually unpredictable force. Jardine surmises that the woman can then be negatively recognised in terms of “the sensuality which in imperfect woman overwhelms reason” (128).

I am going to look further at the idea “overwhelmed reason” as being a result of an upset in the relationship between female speech and sexual potency in The Taming of the Shrew. I will centre my argument on the characterisation of the ‘shrew’, Katherine. The audience is introduced to Katherine by her father, Baptista, offering her to his friends for marriage. The men pun on the word “court” to become “cart” (1.1 54-55). A woman being carted through town was a popular form of public humiliation designed to punish women for breaching the peace (see Schneider 2002). The other significance of “cart” is agricultural; Katherine is equitable to a beast of burden. Together, the pun defines Katherine as undesirable and disorderly. Katherine is not silent to her father’s pronouncement on her fate. She accuses her father of prostituting her and making her a figure for mockery. It is the lack of silence in the face of male authority that renders Katherine unacceptable. Hortensio’s wordplay on ‘mates’ as meaning both friends and sexual partner (1.1 59), emphasises this recurring theme: Katherine’s disorderliness renders her unfit for a husband, or a stable location in their social sphere. She is suitable only for humiliation, prostitution, or isolation. The male characters cannot conceive a marriage with her, as she is ‘uncontrollable’; manifesting in her freedom of speech and willingness to attack the traditional patriarchal authority. This translates into an unstable sexual status: she is not honourable, and so unavailable for marriage. She cannot be a ‘maid’ as Bianca effects it, therefore she exists in the margins as prostitute or spinster – both of which were considered to be sexually volatile persons as they subvert the terms of a heterosexual society which demands marriage and reproduction (Jardine 127-128).

The description given of Katherine by the men of Verona emphasises her lack of normalcy. She is called a “fiend of hell”, “the devil’s dam” and “curst”, amongst other insults. To the male hegemony of the play, she is defined in terms of the demonic and sub-human.  Her person is synonymous with evil capable of moral corruption and civil unrest. Katherine is also beautiful and rich, two qualities that should make her a perfect match for any man, and yet these very qualities serve to make men even more wary of her as a ‘trap’. The direct association of Katherine’s harsh language with her as a corruptor of men demonstrates the extent to which she acted as a disturbing figure within the contemporary patriarchal culture. As one critic argues: “Katherine has laid claim to masculine behaviours and privileges: … she refuses to take a subordinate role towards the patriarchal authority” (Mangan 64).

Katherine’s lack of femininity is brought to attention in Act II Scene 1, where she appears on stage with a tied up Bianca:

Of all thy suitors here I charge thee tell

Whom though lov’st best. See thou dissemble not…

Minion, thou liest…

If that be jest, then all the rest was so. Strikes her

…

Her silence flouts me, and I’ll be revenged. (8-29).

Katherine has placed Bianca in a subordinate position. By physically restricting a woman, Katherine is imitating a typically masculine action. She is exerting an aggressive dominance over her sister, and taken alongside the information she demands – whom Bianca loves– Katherine can be seen to correlate to a male gender role particularly when considered within the dynamics of the contemporary social order. If she confesses, Bianca may lose her claim to unquestionable chastity: by admitting a sexual appetite that her social position demands she suppress, and through the very act of admittance itself. To utter her sexuality is to confirm it, condemning her to humiliation and marginalisation. The cause of Katherine’s hatred appears to stem from Bianca’s silence in the face of male attention. Katherine is unable to stay silent, and yet her sister manages to ‘hold her tongue’ to such an extent that Katherine thinks it must be a lie. Katherine tries to expose Bianca’s denial of desire as false; a part required by the gender performance expected of her. Further, Katherine’s insistence that Bianca give up her silence, and thereby her chastity, allies Katherine further with a masculine type. Within heterosexual society, it is a man who causes a woman to physically ‘reveal’ herself – but here Katherine is attempting to ‘know’ Bianca’s sexual identity – a further disruption of the acceptable gender boundaries. 

Katherine actively refuses to conform to the roles of obedient daughter, and subservient wife. Her existence out-with the established patriarchal schema is a threat to these men’s honour, here noticeably allied to the ability to woo a woman. It is necessary to restore the absolute terms of this schema in order to ensure its continuation, hence why Katherine must be married by coercion so that she may occupy a ‘knowable’ gender identity within the bounds of standard masculine/feminine dynamics. Michael Mangan comments: “If the masculine honour code depended upon sexual control within marriage and the household, this was because the household order was a microcosm of the social and political order” (74). The ‘cure’ suggested for Kate is for a “devil” to “woo her, wed her and bed her” (1.1 138-139). Only once she has been ‘subdued’ will she become controllable and no longer a sexually potent threat. Gremio betrays the anxieties of the destabilising nature of her existence without the norms of the culture to a male sexual hegemony. Katherine must undergo phallic control, or, affirmation of her inferior gender role as woman, mother and sexual object to the male. Lisa Jardine comments: “the constraint upon woman is a most straightforward one…pregnancy was a serious inhibitor of female sex drive.” (130). Katherine must be rendered sexually impotent and physically dependent on a man to provide for her. By losing a sexually independent body, capable of movement outside the domestic sphere, Katherine is confined while also fulfilling her ‘proper’ gender role. Butler comments that the “disciplinary production of gender effects a false stablization of gender in the interests of the heterosexual construction…within the reproductive domain.” (2496). It is only through Petruccio’s violent regulation that Katherine is ‘stabilised’. He is an exaggeration of masculinity: brutal and aggressive. Katheriene’s unstable femininity must be surpassed by the volatile, always superior, masculinity of Pertruccio, allowing both to re-enter the play world at the action’s close as ‘examples’ to their respective gender types.

It is interesting to compare the comedic exaggerations of Petruccio and Katherine with the tragic realism of the lovers in Romeo and Juliet. In this section of the essay I will focus on Romeo and Juliet, and examine the ways in which the play offers a different resolution to the problems of destabilized and dangerous femininity. My analysis will follow two themes: firstly, the use of sexual innuendo to emphasise disorder in the play society; secondly, particular acts of Juliet speaking to Romeo, and the consequences Juliet’s freedom of language about sex and sexuality has within the play’s represented social structures. 

The frequent use of sexual wordplay in violent contexts creates an association of aberrant sexuality with a delinquent social order. Linguistic competition, specifically words that signify sex, becomes a marker for physical as well as political dominance. In Act I Scene 1, rape is synonymous with victory –man’s ‘potency’ in political and social terms, is bound to his rights over women. Critic Gayle Rubin argues that the establishment of a dominant hierarchy relies on the sexual oppression of women, located in the exchange of women from one hierarchy system to another (171). If this formulation is applied to the intent to rape Capulet women, the act becomes a necessary part of the establishment of the Montague family as dominant within this society. There cannot be a coherency to society if there exists a conflict of patriarchal interests, embodied in the warring families of Montague and Capulet. 

Placing Romeo and Juliet’s private conversations within this disturbed environment, I will discuss some of the apparent implications these dialogues have. In Act II Scene 1, Juliet realises that she has unknowingly betrayed her emotions to Romeo:

  Else would a maiden blush bepaint my cheek

  For that which thou hast heard me speak tonight.

  Fain would I dwell of form, fain, fain deny

  What I have spoke; but farewell, compliment.

  …

  …thou mayst think my ‘haviour light…

  I should have been more strange, I must confess,

  But that thou overheard’st, ere I was ware,

  My true love passion. (128-146). 

Juliet feels ashamed that Romeo has heard her speak uninhibited. She says she has a “maiden blush”: highlighting the shame she feels, but also her status as a ‘maiden’ or ‘virgin’. In the act of speaking freely, she has compromised her chastity, leaving her open to accusations of being “light” (flirtatious) or immodest. She explains herself with the word “confess”, acknowledging the ‘sinfulness’ of her actions. These accusations have a wider effect on the ‘honour’ of the male members of her household, particularly it’s patriarch: her father. Through hearing her speak and by becoming involved in her emotions, Romeo has essentially ‘entered’ Juliet’s private self – she is no longer isolated intellectually from him. The content of her speech is passion for him, thereby exposing her sexuality to him. The verbal confession of passion transforms into a physical act by virtue of it being ‘uncontained’ by Juliet’s mind. Her thoughts have been audibly expressed to the man she feels passion for – engaging in a corporeal act that, if discovered by the ruling patriarchy, remove her claim to an identity defined by her purity. Juliet’s voicing of sexuality and her bodily love for Romeo is against all social convention. The ideal mistress, or Petrarchan female, was silent, unknowable and removed from her lovers. To be a honourable woman, you must be submissive towards men without ‘corruption’ of the body. In The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault states that the contemporary culture exercised control of ‘normal’ sexual discourse and practice by subjugating “it at the level of language, control its free circulation in speech, expunge it from the things that were said, and extinguish the words that rendered it too visibly present.”(17). He highlights the “policing of statements” and controlling of enunciations: at what times and in what contexts it would be possible to talk about desire without fear of retribution and punishment (18). Juliet defies a “policing of statements” and cultural conventions that she operates within. As a result, her character is condemned within the world of the play: both her and Romeo must be removed in order for social harmony to be re-established. Her ‘speaking out’ against these conventions cannot be tolerated for ‘happiness’ to prevail. 

Society cannot ‘control’ Juliet. Her love for Romeo is too human to operate within the ruling discourse. Juliet’s admittance of the sensuality of passion endows her with a compelling individuality. She is not like Katherine, who provides an opportunity for a discipline that will ‘rehabilitate’ her to the mainstream. Juliet is located in the centre of the cultural hierarchy: she cannot be disciplined because the cultural system that produced her must also be disciplined – to preserve its hegemony she is removed entirely. In the play, this is translated to the tragedy of her performative death, and then her real suicide. The audience is encouraged to feel a greater sympathy for the horrific end to the lovers, and yet we feel little sympathy for Katherine by the close of the Shrew. Katherine becomes an empty vassal. Juliet is allowed to preserve her powerful feminine presence in death. Katherine’s transformation might make the audience feel uncomfortable; Juliet’s destruction, however, goes further: it is tragic as it is the death of an individual. 

In conclusion, this essay has discussed the relationship between sexual potency and verbal ability and the implications of the relationship on the characterisation of Juliet and Katherine. Both The Taming of the Shrew and Romeo and Juliet portray a social order in disarray, an unlikely romance of two opposites and the eventual re-establishment of order at the expense of the leading female characters’ identities. In The Shrew, Katherine’s unnatural masculinity leaves her isolated and despised by the rest of her social circle. She is unclassifiable within the reigning heterosexual structure, and so is considered a direct threat to the male hegemony. This sense of threat provokes violent reordering by Petruccio – destroying Katherine’s power of free speech and taking both intellectual and physical command of her ‘dangerous’ mouth. This is in contrast to Juliet, who is condemned to die or live in exile because of her defiance of a collective male authority by uttering her love for and allying herself to an aggressor. Juliet does not subvert femininity in the same mode as Katherine – she is not masculine or threatening. As a result, her subversion is the more powerful – she is identifiable as female by her transgressions against ‘good’ gender practice: her realistic passion for Romeo, expressed in her ‘dangerous’ speech. Her refusal to deny her physical being as a woman with desire is a feature that allows the audience to feel a greater empathy and compassion for her silencing. 

Works Cited

Butler, Judith. “Gender Trouble: Preface” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch et al. London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001: 2488 – 2490.

--- “Gender Trouble: Chapter 3. Subversive Bodily Acts” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch et al. London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001: 2490 – 2501.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Random House Inc, 1978.

Jardine, Lisa. Still Harping on Daughters: women and drama in the age of Shakespeare. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1983

Mangan, Michael. Staging Masculinities: History, Gender, Performance. Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003.

Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex.” Toward an Anthropology of Women. Ed. Rayna R. Reiter. London: Monthly Review Press, 1975: 157 – 210. 

Schneider, Gary. “The Public, the Private, and the Shaming of the Shrew.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900. 42.2 (Spring 2002): 235 – 258. 

Shakespeare, William. The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. in The Norton Shakespeare. Second Edition. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008: 897 – 972.

---. The Taming of the Shrew. in The Norton Shakespeare. Second Edition. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008: 159 – 228. 

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