Chapter 10

"All right, now we've read Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew and, I hope, you have enjoyed some of it for it's a heck of story and much of is very funny - dirty in places, of course, but funny."

He looked around, saw some smiles and a few nods. Not bad, he'd seen a lot worse. He recalled the time he spent a solid month slogging through MacBeth with a reluctant bunch of sophomores, they seldom were ready to read their assigned part or knew what anything meant, and in the end, did not know what had happened to anybody. The head of the English department had not liked it at all and told him so. She had gotten complaints.

"Now, suppose this was a contest, as it was, that's how the Taylor-Burton moviemaker saw it, right, a long fight, although perhaps a pillow fight. I don't like what he does with the marriage, but that's his take, not Shakespeare's. We have some winners and some losers.

"Who wins? Bianca? Hortenseo, Petruchio, ah yes, he surely looks like the winner. He gets the girl and the money, just what he's come to Padua for - to marry wealthily. How about Lucentio? Eh, he did get Bianca after all, the girl he sought, the beauty. Baptista who marries off his daughters, especially Kate, he's a winner isn't he? Gets her out of his house. Who's the big winner?" He looked around and saw a hand. One out of thirty, not bad.

"Missy, who won?"

She licked her lips. "Bianca, the pretty blonde always wins, right? She gets a doting husband, a handsome dolt who adores her." She looked around. "That's winning isn't it?"

"Anybody else - Mike? Come on, you always have an opinion."

"Petruchio, obviously. He tames the shrew, weds her and beds her." He extended both arms and smiled broadly. "The end. Curtain."

"Hard to argue about that, but let me suggest another way to look at it. When the play begins, who is the unhappiest person, the angriest? It isn't Petruchio, he just wants a rich woman. Michele, who was it?"

"Kate I suppose, who says she hates men and throws things around."

"I showed you the 'I Hate Men" song, which is very funny and very loud. Did you get it? Does Kate have reason to hate men? What sort of men does she hate? Cole Porter made a list. How does she feel about her pretty sister?"

It was quiet and he hoped they were thinking. "Have you seen My Fair Lady? It was very popular a few years ago? Remember Eliza Doolittle?"

There was some nodding.

"What's it about?"

Steve, a sometimes showoff, smiled and said, "There's this professor guy who changes a poor girl into a, I don't know, a princess."

"Like Petruchio changes Kate?"

"Maybe," he said. "Maybe."

"By the way, Shaw let the movie makers change the ending. Taming has been a popular play for a long time." This was going nowhere, he decided.

Silence. Then one of the boys in the back asked, "What do you think?"

"Thanks, Bobby. You're a good man." He smiled and pretended to make a mark in his grade book. "Let's look again at our hero, Petruchio, who acts foolishly, dresses crazily and treats women dreadfully, lies, cheats, steals, abuses girls including his wife. He says he'll marry anybody if she's rich, doesn't care what she looks like. When we started, I asked you if a man could be a shrew. And you said, no, that all the synonyms were female, scold and nag and so forth. Right?