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På Fretex i dag gjorde jeg et kupp: Shakespeare. The Invention of the Human av Harold Bloom - 745 sider kommentarer Shakespeares samlede skuespill til kun kr. 60,-!

Og på trikken hjem fordypet jeg meg i Blooms analyse av The Taming of the Shrew. Og oppdaget at jeg gikk fem på da jeg leste stykket i forrige uke - og takk og pris for dét, og for Harold Bloom som gjenopprettet Shakespeares ære... Hør bare hva han (Bloom!) skriver:

(Kate's and Petruchio's) final shared reality is a kind of conspiracy against the rest of us: Petruchio gets to swagger, and Kate will rule him and the household, perpetually acting her role as the reformed shrew. Several feminist critics have asserted that Kate marries Petruchio against her will, which is simply untrue. Though you have to read carefully to see it, Petruchio is accurate when he insists that Kate fell in love with him at first sight. How could she not? Badgered into violence and vehemence by her dreadful father Baptista, who vastly prefers the authentic shrew, his insipid younger daughter Bianca, the high-spirited Kate desperately needs rescue. The swaggering Petruchio provokes a double reaction in her: outwardly furious, inwardly smitten. he perpetual popularity of the Shrew does not derive from male sadism in the audience but from the sexual excitation of women and men alike.

Og, apropos Kates lange tale avslutningsvis i stykket:

(---)one would have to be very literal-minded indeed not to hear the delicious irony that is Kate's undersong, centered on the great line *I am asham'd that women are so simple." It requires a very good actress to deliver this set piece properly, and a better director than we tend to have now, if the actress is to be given her full chance, for she is advising women how to rule absolutely, while feigning obedience.

(---)

"True obedience" here is considerably less sincere than it purports to be, or even if sexual politics are to be invoked, it is as immemorial as the Garden of Eden. "Strength" and "weakness" interchange their meanings, as Kate teaches not ostensible subservience but the art of her own will, a will considerably more refined than it was at the play's start. The speech's meaning explodes into Petruchio's delighted (and overdetermined) response: Why, there's a wench! Come on, and kiss me, Kate. If you want to hear this line as the culmination of a "problem play", then perhaps you yourself are the problem. Kate does not need to be schooled in "consiousness raising". Shakespeare, who clearly preferred his women characters to his men (always excepting Falstaff and Hamlet), enlarges the human, from the start, by subtly suggesting that women have the truer sense of reality.

Tøft! Hadde hørt om denne boka, og nå ser det ut som at den havner på ønskelista også.

Så bra at du kom over denne boka! Det var godt med en avklaring; jeg sukker lettet ut ;) Takk og pris at Kate virkelig viser seg å være den tøffe dama vi håpte hun var. Og; artig å lese at Shakespare i stor grad foretrakk kvinneskikkelsene; det har ofte vært kvinnene som har fasinert meg mest i hans skuespill.