What I'm Reading #5: William Shakespeare, P.D. James, and Robert Letham

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Every few weeks, I’ll share a few books I’m reading, some brief observations, and a good quote from each work. My interests lie in theology, Christian living, philosophy, history, and literature. This week, I’m publishing a day early because Thursday is Thanksgiving and there’s pie afoot.

The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare

I’ve been more deeply interested in the great works of literature of late, and said interest cannot ignore Shakespeare. There is no avoiding him or dodging his influence. As has oft been said, phrases and idioms we still use were popularized or taken directly from his work: “wear my heart upon my sleeve,” “wild-goose chase,” “all that glitters is not gold,” and on and on. I’m reading from The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 2nd Edition, edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen. I like the extensive staging notes; they give context. I am divided about the opening essays before each work; they give good context and plot summary but also the way to interpret the work. I wonder if I would have reached the same conclusions alone. It’s not exhaustive, but it does steer. It reminds me of reading a commentary before reading a section of the Bible.

I thought I’d ease into it with The Taming of the Shrew. I have vague, sweet memories of the film 10 Things I Hate About You and figured that might help me get some bearings in reading the play. It did not. But I still enjoyed it immensely. I thought about it after finishing a lot more than I assumed I would.

Three things struck me about Shrew. First, the opening of the play is a trick played on a drunk named Sly. Those around him wake him and pretend he’s a lord; they give him fancy clothes and invite him to watch a play (the very same play we’re reading/watching in Shrew). Sly adopts the persona and believes that he must be suffering from short-term memory loss and that he is indeed a lord. It’s funny, but Shakespeare doesn’t return to the “play within a play” framing device. This bugged me. Why not? He did it on purpose; what is it there for? I concluded that it’s there to tell us that human beings are often playing the roles the society around them expects them to play. People told Sly he was a noble, so he acted like a noble. And the opening is there for something more subtle: since we are readers/watchers of the play, we are in the same position as Sly. So we should be asking, what roles are we playing that society expects us to play? And we should be asking what social roles are about to be skewered, played with, or mocked in the comedy we’re about to watch or read.

The plot is straightforward (spoilers for a 430 year old play). There are two sisters. The elder, Katerina (Kate), is, uh, how do I put this—kind of mean, or at the very least uninterested in being who everyone expects her to be. Bianca is much more conventional. No one wants to woo Kate; everyone wants to woo Bianca.

Enter Petruchio, an eccentric treasure-seeker who wants to marry Kate for the money. He says she loves him and agrees to marry him when she definitely does not. He claims she’s sweet, kind, all the good things, when she isn’t. The wordplay is funny; the banter is superb. It steps up a notch when they marry and Petruchio takes her home. He continues to be absurd, and she responds at first with her trademark cutting remarks, then moves to nonplussed, and finally joins him in the absurdity. The moment comes here:

PETRUCHIO: I say it is the moon.
KATE: I know it is the moon.
PETRUCHIO: Nay, then you lie. It is the blessèd sun.
KATE: Then, God be blessed, it is the blessèd sun. But sun it is not, when you say it is not.
—Shakespeare, William. William Shakespeare Complete Works, Second Edition, p. 517 (Kindle Edition).

Kate changes on a dime; she’s in on the joke. She’ll follow whatever nonsense Petruchio spits out because it’s fun and it’s to their advantage.

The play ends with a wager between Petruchio, Lucentio (who wins the Bianca sweepstakes), and Hortensio, who marries the Widow. They bet on which wife will come first when called. Petruchio wins the bet when Kate arrives—the opposite of what the characters expect, but not the audience.

There’s irony here: no one expects Kate to be obedient, but she is. She’s obedient not because she’s been broken but because she understands the game Petruchio’s playing. They can use these cultural expectations for their own benefit. They are partners, not a master and a slave. It’s a real marriage. Bianca, on the other hand, chooses Lucentio to marry because she wants actual love and some measure of equality. Once married, the previously conventional woman is no longer. She was playing a part.

The play works on a few levels, and I’m stunned at how well Shakespeare manages a lot of things at once. It’s funny and entertaining, common people of his time would enjoy it. Brief aside, have I mentioned how much of a pervert Billy Shakespeare is? Well, he is. Dozens of double entendres and bawdy humor are sprinkled throughout. I thought to myself, “Surely that word had no connection to parts of the human anatomy as they do today.” Turns out they do. It’s entertaining in a lowbrow way as well as a highbrow way.

It’s also possible to misunderstand the play as straightforwardly about a woman behaving better under a heavy hand. Then there’s the true understanding that this is a play about social convention, expectations, marriage roles, and how all these things can serve us or restrict us. It’s a call to consider the roles we play in marriage and in society and think about whether they are actually any good.

What I kept coming back to is whether Shakespeare wrote this play so that a “literal” or “wooden” understanding of the play offers plausible deniability about the more subversive reading. I think the answer is yes–and that’s wildly subtle and brilliant.

BAPTISTA Nay, let them go, a couple of quiet ones.

GREMIO Went they not quickly, I should die with laughing.

TRANIO Of all mad matches never was the like.

LUCENTIO Mistress, what’s your opinion of your sister?

BIANCA That, being mad herself, she’s madly mated.

GREMIO I warrant him, Petruchio is Kated.”

Shakespeare, William. William Shakespeare Complete Works Second Edition (p. 552). Kindle Edition.

The Children of Men by P.D. James

Another British novel! And another book that has almost no relationship to the film inspired by it. The premise is that the world has lost the ability to reproduce; the last live birth was a generation before, and Great Britain is managing its own decline. This raises the question: How do people live when they believe there is no future? And, relatedly, when there’s no faith in God, no desire for the true and the beautiful? Written in 1980, the book has some spooky, prescient ideas of how people live in such circumstances. It is particularly unsettling when you read that 30% of pregnancies in the UK end in abortion and the birth rate is 1.41, a record low. What happens when societies choose childlessness as opposed to it being imposed by natural disaster? If P.D. James is right, it looks like selfish pleasure-seeking, increased fascism, decreased concern with the plight of our fellow man, and bitter loneliness. The book is deeply concerned with spiritual matters and whether choosing the good, even when it doesn’t seem to make a difference, is important. It is.

“She trusted in the terrible mercy and justice of her God, but what other option had she but to trust? She could no more control her life than she could control or stop the physical forces which even now were stretching and racking her body. If her God existed, how could He be the God of Love? The question had become banal, ubiquitous, but for him it had never been satisfactorily answered.”

James, P. D.. The Children of Men (pp. 259-260). Kindle Edition.

Through Western Eyes: Eastern Orthodoxy: A Reformed Perspective by Robert Letham

There has been a lot of speculation about increasing numbers of Christians turning to Orthodoxy in the U.S. as an answer to evangelical un-weightiness over the past generation. Ryan Burge throws some cold water on this anecdotal trend, but nevertheless, knowing the cleavages between Reformed, evangelical Christianity and Eastern Orthodoxy was worth investigating to me. I assumed, as do many Protestants, that Eastern Orthodoxy has essentially the same theological differences with us that the Roman Catholic Church does. But this is not true. There are crucial and important differences between the two. And there is some surprising common ground between Protestants and Eastern Orthodoxy that is surprising. This book aims to steelman both sides and show differences without being polemical. For that, I think it has value, but as a convinced Protestant, I wish Latham was a little harder on the Orthodox case. It does come through that Orthodoxy puts less weight on the Fall and original sin and more weight on man’s participation in the divine, which raises serious differences on justification. Orthodoxy also generally denies penal substitutionary atonement theories of the crucifixion, whereas this is central to Protestant understandings of Christ’s work on the cross. Letham isn’t writing an apologetic, he’s trying to accurately describe two Christian church traditions on their own terms and then compare and contrast. All in all, a good start, but I wanted more opposition. For instance, is Orthodox theology heterodox or something worse? Lethem shows us the boundaries, but doesn’t really make an argument for which set of boundaries is more compelling.

“The most appropriate place to begin a discussion of Eastern Orthodoxy is with worship and the liturgy, for this is the heart of the Eastern Church.”

Robert Letham, Through Western Eyes, pg. 19