April's last Catch: Brush up your Shakespeare
Episode 3: Simple women, simple people

From Shakespeare to more Shakespeare, by way of Broadway. "I Hate Men!" a ferocious Kelli O'Hara announced, in the first of three excerpts from the 2019 revival of Cole Porter's Kiss Me, Kate! Next up: Will Chase followed with the tempestuous yearning of "Were Thine That Special Face," and finally Kate's quiet bombshell moment, "I Am Ashamed That People Are So Simple."

Say again?! In The Taming of the Shrew, Porter's Shakespearean source, wasn't it women who were so simple? And didn't Porter follow Shakespeare's lead?

Yes, but as Porter observed in Anything Goes (1934), "Times have changed!" In some quarters, Shrew stands condemned for sexism, alongside the nominally antisemitic The Merchant of Venice, racist Othello, and colonialist The Tempest.

Love the best you can while you are here. Kelli O'Hara and Will Chase share a moment.

Attempts to rehabilate, whitewash, or subvert Shrew have taken many forms. At the Yale Rep, Mark Lamos staged an all-male Latino version, bristling with attitude. For Shakespeare in the Park, Phyllidia Lloyd fielded an all-female cast led by the Petruchio of Janet McTeer, who could tame lions. In Stratford-upon-Avon, Justin Audibert preserved the Elizabethan ambiance but switched male characters to female and vice versa, peopling the Padua of the play with mothers (rather than fathers) in charge of their households and cooped-up sons (not daughters) who bounce off the walls until married off. Against this backdrop of what-if role reversals that leave the power dynamics of the play untouched, the director Scott Ellis's apparent surrender to political correctness in the 2019 Broadway revival of Kiss Me, Kate! may have been the most daring intervention of all.

Let's take a moment to see how. Shakespeare's scandalous set piece for Katherine, upbraiding other wives who refuse to do their husbands' bidding, consists of a 44-line apologia for men's supremacy over women. "Such duty as the subject owes the prince," she declares at midpoint, in language to make the Church Fathers purr, "Even such a woman oweth to her husband."

Porter blue-penciled those lines and a whole lot more. His lyric drops in a little further down, at Shakespeare 26^th line, tossing seven of the lines that remain and touching up the last four for clarity (tweaks in italics). Here's the finished product:

I am ashamed that women are so simple

To offer war where they should kneel for peace;

Or seek for rule, supremacy and sway,

When they are bound to serve, love and obey.

Why are our bodies soft and weak and smooth,

Unapt to toil and trouble in the world,

But that our soft conditions and our hearts

Should well agree with our external parts?

So, wife, hold your temper and meekly put

Your hand 'neath the sole of your husband's foot,

In token of which duty, if he please,

My hand is ready; may it do him ease.[1]

Instead, Kelli O'Hara sings it as transcribed below; deviations from Porter (by whom, I have been unable to trace) appear in bold italics.

I am ashamed that people are so simple

To offer war when we should kneel for peace;

Or seek for rule, supremacy and sway,

When everything but love must die away.

Why are our bodies finite, bound for dust,

The time we share so brief and yet so dear,

If not to teach our proud and stubborn hearts

To love the best we can while we are here?

So mates, hold your temper, and humbly put

Your hand 'neath the sole of your lover's foot:

In token of which duty, if he please,

My hand is ready; may it do him ease.

Many who know their classic plays and musicals rolled their eyes at the switch to "people," smelling the rate of directorial nerve pure and simple. In fact, this marks the spot where Kate, like a second Alice, steps boldly through the looking glass into another world. She's not debating stale sexual politics any more. She's facing up to the human condition and choosing how to live.

With that in mind, we may wonder what message Shakespeare meant to send in Katherine's homily. Was it—horrors!—to be taken at face value? Was she paying lip service? Joking? Winding Petruchio around her little finger? We will never know. What I think we may know is that the honeymoon for Kate and Petruchio is beginning at last, and maybe even their happily ever after.

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[1] Is Porter bowlderizing the Bard here? Not really. Just sparing us a footnote.

Then vail your stomachs, for it is no boot,

And place your hands below your husband's foot:

In token of which duty, if he please.

My hand is ready; may it do him ease.