The Taming of the Shrew (06/29/1954)

William Shatner is often introduced or referred to as being a “classically trained” actor, referring to those actors who have had formal training in Shakespearean theater. Indeed, when Shatner was hired for Star Trek, one of the (many, many) selling points was that he came from just such a classical training background. And when people criticize his acting for being a bit too broad, defenders (and critics alike) point to his classical background as being the main culprit for that style. But there is one person who makes a point of never referring to William Shatner as being classically trained, and that person is William Shatner himself.

As I covered in a previous post, Shatner graduated with a degree in Commerce from McGill University in Montreal. During his four years at college, his main extracurricular pursuit was acting; from radio productions to stage plays to even appearing in a movie, he diligently found outlets to work on his true passion. But he never once took any formal acting classes, at McGill or elsewhere. All of his learning he picked up himself.

After college he began working at a regional summer theater and soon at the Ottawa Repertory Theatre. Once again, he learned by doing, and had no formal instruction whatsoever at those two theaters. When he arrived at Stratford, he came with armed with his experience only, and not with any fancy degrees, background or pedigree.

At Stratford, he and the other actors were understandably excited to work for the legendary British director, Tyrone Guthrie. And although it was a fantastic experience to work in a Guthrie production, Shatner did elaborate a bit on Guthrie’s working style in Up Till Now:

Tyrone Guthrie wasn’t much of a teacher. He didn’t offer a lot of instruction; to read a line or interpret the meaning of that line, you had to work on and discover by yourself. But he was a master at the grand design, at producing extraordinary theater, at creating memorable events on stage.

Stratford did offer classes to the actors, but as Shatner noted, they “were working much too hard as actors to find the time to take classes to learn how to act.” So when people refer to Shatner as being classically trained, they are not quite accurate. From college, to regional theater to the prestige of Stratford, Shatner never took a single acting class, course or lesson. Which isn’t to say he didn’t learn anything. Again, from his autobiography:

But at Stratford I did work with classically trained actors, among them James Mason and Anthony Quayle. We worked with experienced actors every day, we rehearsed with them, we played small roles, we understudied, and when we weren’t onstage we watched them. I learned to act by watching other actors, reading about acting, and living with actors. I studied my craft, but I learned acting by acting.

So Shatner’s experience on the stage leading up to Stratford mostly came from the summer and repertory theater that he had been doing for several years. The plays done at those theaters were often plays that originally had been Broadway or Off-Broadway productions with minimal sets (to keep costs down.) As Shatner writes in his autobiography, “Generally those plays were light comedies featuring a young guy…with an innocent smile big enough to reach the back rows.”

His first two roles at Stratford pretty much fit that description. In Measure for Measure (which debuted the night before The Taming of the Shrew), Shatner played a “young lord” with no lines whatsoever, so all of his experience using just his face to reach the back rows certainly came in handy there. And for The Taming of the Shrew, a light comedy heavily featuring a young guy with a (fairly) innocent smile, it is hard to imagine a more perfect actor for the role of Lucentio.

For those of you unfamiliar with The Taming of the Shrew, let me briefly summarize the plot: a lord in Padua, Italy, Baptista, has two daughters that he wishes to marry off: Katherina and Bianca. The younger sister, sweet Bianca, has many suitors…one of them being young Lucentio (Shatner) who truly falls in love with her the moment he hears her speak. The older sister is Katherina, or Kate, a rather mean, stubborn, obnoxious shrew that no man wants to get near.

The problem is that Baptista will not allow Bianca to marry until her older sister marries first. Enter Petruchio, a man who decides that he wants to marry Katherina for her money, and for the challenge of “taming” her. Petruchio basically takes a page out of George W. Bush’s Abu Ghraib playbook and, through a combination of sleep and food deprivation and general meanness (by giving her a taste of her own medicine), breaks Kate’s will so thoroughly that by the end of the play she is willing to say the sun is the moon and do whatever her dear husband wants her to do. Bianca is now free to marry, and of course she has fallen in love with Lucentio because he is played by William Shatner and we are all in love with him and want to marry him, amirite?

This play, especially to our more modern ears, comes across as pretty sexist, no? A man basically torturing a woman until she embraces wholeheartedly everything her torturer wants…and all because Petruchio wants her money and title. Yuck. But there are two things that mitigate, at least to a small degree, the ickiness of the play. Three really, if you also consider that this was written about 400 years ago. Damn your modern sensibilities, sirrah!

The first mitigating factor is that the play, The Taming of the Shrew, is actually a play within a play. The framing device of Shakespeare’s production is of a lord who finds a drunken beggar by the name of Christopher Sly at his doorstep and decides to play an elaborate practical joke on him. He takes him inside, cleans him up and tells his staff to pretend that the beggar is the lord and explain that he has been delusional for many years. The lord even dresses up one of his young pages as a woman to pose as the beggar’s saintly wife.

Sly wakes up and, after a bit of disbelief, is convinced that he really is a lord married to this beautiful woman (young boy) and wants to celebrate with some wine and sex (which, to be fair, is exactly how I wake up every day as well.) But, unknown to him, the real lord has hired a troop of traveling actors to perform a farcical play for him, The Taming of the Shrew. The beggar’s “wife” tells him no sex until after the play, and they adjourn to the great hall to watch the comedy unfold.

The odd thing about this framing device is that it is abandoned about 1/3 of the way through the play. Scholars have debated whether that was intentional on Shakespeare’s part, or whether the conclusion of this framing story was lost at some point. Because we never get to see the conclusion of the trick it is never quite clear what the point of it is, or what effect the play The Taming of the Shrew might have had on that framing story. The point is that the absurdity of the play within the play, The Taming of the Shrew, may have been heightened to make some kind of larger tie in or point with the framing device…we we will never know. Anyway, it seems clear early on that the play performed by the troop of actors for Christopher Sly is meant to be part of or to enhance the trick being played against him.

The second mitigating factor against Petruchio’s cruelty and sexism in the play is that Kate is a straight up, stone cold BEYOTCH. One of her very first scenes has her tying up her sister and slapping the shit out of her for basically no reason other than that her sister seems actually kind and sincere. She does nothing but scream at people, slap them, talk back to her father, etc. Some of these things are fine, of course, people should be free to marry whom they choose of course (watch out, though, for those modern sensibilities again!) but Kate is clearly shown as being just a terrible, terrible person at the start of the play, to the point where even liberal old me was cheering for her capitulation by the end of it.

Really, in this play no one can be considered truly “good”, with the exception of Lucentio and Bianca, two young, handsome and kind people who really do fall in love with each other (without coercion or thought of money). Everyone else is in it for some selfish or shallow reason, whether they want to marry Bianca just because she is beautiful or to marry Kate just because she is rich. So Shatner is pegged to play the young guy in the light comedy again, and Lucentio is actually a pretty meaty role for him to shine in.

Guthrie’s production of The Taming of the Shrew had the characters in more modern dress, as seen in some of the pictures here in this post. I read somewhere that one of the scenes near the end actually has someone in a cowboy outfit (I assume Petruchio) pick up Kate and ride off with her. I’m not sure exactly what the modern dress did for the play, or if it worked for or against some of its problematically sexist issues, but it does look like a fun and interesting production to say the least. Like Measure for Measure, which debuted one night prior, The Taming of the Shrew would run the length of the Festival, from June 29th to August 28th.

And Shatner had a starring role in it, his first really big exposure and introduction to the theater world at large.

Shatnerweb’s Rating:
Unknown – Not Viewed

Shat Level: Unknown – Not Viewed

Shatner’s Web

It’s time to detail all of the connections between The Taming of the Shrew and other Shatner appearances! Because the group of actors working at Stratford worked on so many other things together, there is a fair bit of cutting and pasting from my previous post(s), but there are a few new things here discovered recently. Many of these actors spent the time away from Stratford working in various productions for the fledgling CBC television network in nearby Toronto, so there are a lot of connections to be found.

Pretty much the entire company would appear in both of the other 1954 Stratford Festival plays, as well as in subsequent Stratford productions with Shatner over the next few years. Indeed, many of them would also appear in the Tyrone Guthrie directed Broadway production of Tamburlaine the Great in early 1956, and the Guthrie directed film version of Oedipus Rex in 1957. Rather than list all of those actors here, and name each and every production they appeared with Shatner in, I’m going to cherry-pick some of the more interesting connections.

Tyrone Guthrie, the director of The Taming of the Shrew, would remain artistic director through 1955 and would continue directing plays at Stratford until 1957 (a year after Shatner left.) He would direct Shatner in Stratford’s Oedipus Rex and King Oedipus (basically the same production staged in 1954 and 1955), and The Merchant of Venice in 1955. He also directed Shatner on Broadway in 1956’s short-lived production of Tamburlaine the Great. Finally, he would direct Shatner in the film version of Oedipus Rex, released in 1957.

Fellow Canadian Lloyd Bochner would go on to have a very prolific career, appearing in a number or films and television programs for next six decades or so. One of my favorite Bochner roles was in The Twilight Zone episode “To Serve Man.” It’s a cookbook, Lloyd!

He also appeared as “Cecil Colby” in the TV series Dynasty in the 1980’s. He is most famous in that role for having a heart attack while fucking Joan Collins, in one of the most hilarious scenes ever filmed.

Bochner performed at Stratford for at least the next two years, both with Shatner, and then would appear again with Bill in Tamburlaine the Great. Bochner also appeared in a 1960 TV movie made for the CBC titled Point of Departure. They would work together again when he appeared on a 1965 episode of Shatner’s first TV series For the People, titled “Seized, Confined and Detained…” Ten years later, he would work with Le Shat in “Jesse Who?”, an episode of Shatner’s only live-action “Lost Years” TV series, Barbary Coast. Finally, they would both appear in the sprawling Canadian film, Riel, in 1979.

Douglas Rain would also appear with Shatner in Tamburlaine the Great on Broadway, as well as in the 1957 film adaption of Oedipus Rex. In 1960, he would play “Cassius” alongside Shatner’s “Marc Antony” in the “Julius Caesar” episode of Festival.

Like Rain, William Hutt also appeared with Shatner in Tamburlaine the Great on Broadway, as well as in the 1957 film adaption of Oedipus Rex. Additionally, he appeared in a 1955 episode of General Motors Theatre, “The Coming Out of Ellie Swan.”

William Needles, who played Petruchio in this production, worked again with Shatner the following year in an episode of General Motors Theatre, “Never Say No” and then again in 1955 on an episode of Scope, “The Verdict Was Treason.”

Bruno Gerussi would be seen with Shatner in “Forever Galatea”, an episode of General Motors Theatre, as well as in the film version of Oedipus Rex and 1960’s Festival production of “Julius Caesar.”

Eric House would also appear in “The Verdict Was Treason”, as well as in the 1960 TV Movie, Point of Departure.

Frances Hyland would also appear in the above mentioned “Julius Caesar.”

Donald Harron, who here plays Lucentio’s trusty servant, would also appear in 1979’s Riel.

Douglas Campbell would appear with Shatner in “Billy Budd”, a 1955 episode of General Motors Theatre as well as playing Oedipus in the 1957 film version of the play directed by Tyrone Guthrie.

Robert Christie worked with Shatner prior to Shatner in CBC Theatre’s “The Man Who Ran Away.” Later he would appear in Scope’s “The Verdict Was Treason” and in the film version of Oedipus Rex.

Neil Vipond would also work with Shatner in the 1958-1960 Broadway play, The World of Suzie Wong.

Robert Goodier appeared with Shatner at Stratford for all three seasons The Shat was there, plus in the 1956 Broadway version of Tamburlaine the Great and the 1957 film version of Oedipus Rex. In addition, he was in an episode of Omnibus with Shatner in 1956, Moliere’s School for Wives.

Finally, Peter Mews would go on to become the host of the Canadian Howdy Doody Show. Shatner would also appear on that program, perhaps multiple times, but it is not clear if they actually ever worked together on it…more on this in a later post.

Further Studies

Read more about Tyrone Guthrie’s life and legacy here.

Some cool pictures of the festival (most with Shatner) can be found here.

More on history of the Stratford Festival, including Guthrie’s involvement and the thrust stage can be found here.