Teatro San Genesio     via Podgora, 1

Reviewed by Farley Clinton

    I was startled, consulting the program at the end of the evening, to learn that the agreeable leads in the Taming of the Shrew were the very same pair who made a fine success some weeks ago in Blithe Spirit.  They must be good actors.

    “Petruchio, a gentleman of Verona , suitor to Katherine,” remained Petruchio, in Padua , all evening, and never reminded me of charles Condimine, and Kate was simply Kate, never Elvira.

     The other parts in this play can hardly be called parts at all, and I don’t think it necessary, nor even fair, to offer comment as to which of the presences glimpsed on the stage seemed most, or least, successful at the thankless task of spinning a bit of gold, or something like gold, out of the horrible heaps of straw which are all that the text supplies.

     The worst performance of the evening was the one contributed by William Shakespeare.

      Still, I was delighted to see the piece for the first time ever.  And since I found out I was not the only one in the house who was a perfect stranger to the play, it is not outside the range of possibility that my curiosity, and pleasure in its satisfaction, were not unique.

      In view of Shakespeare’s admitted supremacy, the fresh discovery in every generation of his unlikely and quite unrivalled power, it would be quite a good thing to perform now and again the earliest and the worst, the flattest and the least interesting of his works.

       The world has long been tired of some of his early dramatic works, but it will never be tired of him, and they have things to tell us that we can learn in no other way – things we could never imagine.

      Shakespeare is like the astonishing and inexhaustible French novelist Balzac.  With the one as with the other, you can read a lot without being able to see why anybody ever cared about any of it.  Like Balzac, Shakespeare could be said to have written nothing but trash until he was 30, and thereafter wrote only masterpieces.

       He is very encouraging to a writer – to any writer.  If you have done nothing, said nothing, scribbled constantly and produced nothing at all that deserves to be called with, much less wisdom, you are at  just the same point as William Shakespeare when he set down to devote 20 or 30 minutes, I suppose, to writing The Taming of the Shrew.

     There is not a single line of poetry in the play, no single memorable image, or use of words.  And no one is ever left on stages for three minutes, or six minutes, to muse alone about life, death, or destiny, about the fear of death, or even about Juliet’s beauty, and the stars.

    The other early stuff, Henry VI for example, fifteen acts there – a trilogy of plays devoted to an English saint, a legendary hero of a sort, as much as Henry V was, -  is forgettable and forgotten.  The lines have no melody, and the sentiment moves nobody. 

    Henry V was fortunate in that Shakespeare only took him up after he had learned a great deal and matured a great deal:  he matured, T. S. Eliot somewhere suggests, more than anybody else ever did.  Something happened, undoubtedly.

     Perhaps it was just finding that he liked writing 150 sonnets, and saying things no one ever said before - just for himself, and for people who liked sonnets.  In some way he discovered the soliloquy, and of course it is just because there are no soliloquies, - are there?  - certainly none of any interest in the Taming of the Shrew, that its style and content are not like Shakespeare at all.

     Of course Voltaire,  conceivably the supreme French critic, observed that what you find in Shakespeare is genius uninhibited by any presence of good taste.

     There were two things he  knew when he write of Kate and Petruchio. He knew how to pull a lot of actors on and off stage rapidly, so they were glimpsed and gone, giving the audience the constant motion that kept them fairly still and reasonably satisfied, and curious to see and hear more.

      And he knew girls - he made girls come alive in his plays, as had hardly ever happened before, anywhere, and would not happen very often in future.  And here, in Katherina, is one of them.  I don’t think any other English writer in his day made women seem entirely female, and alive.

    I thought Gabrielle Chiararo was pretty terrific as Elvira in Blithe Spirit, and though I did not look at the program or recognize her (quite different) face, walk, characterization, I felt the same about what she made of Katharina.