Учебное пособие 4 unit I. The renaissance 1485-1649

THE TAMING OF THE SHREW
The Taming of the Shrew
(1593?) was first published in the First Folio in
1623. This comedy contrasts the prim and conventional Bianca, who grows
willful and disobedient over the course of the play, with the shrewish
Katherine, who is finally tamed by Petruchio, her suitor and, finally,
husband. Yet Katherine and Petruchio are clearly well matched in style and
temperament, and Katherine’s speech at the end on the importance of
obedience may be delivered with an obvious sense of how far this is from
what she believes or even from what Petruchio really wants. Kiss Me Kate
(1948), a musical based on The Taming of the Shrew, proved popular on
stage, as did a motion-picture version of Shakespeare’s play in 1953 with
actors Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. However, unless the action is
played with its possible ironies clearly apparent, audiences today will likely
find the play’s ostensible values difficult to take, especially the belief in the
need to tame a wife.

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LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST
King Ferdinand of Navarre and his companions, the lords Berowne,
Longaville, and Dumaine, have sworn a vow, at the king’s suggestion, that
they will forego the society of women and the pleasures of love for three
years, in order to devote themselves to study. A pre-arranged state visit from
the Princess of France and her ladies, forgotten by the king, forces them to
revise the terms of their vow to allow for the necessity of meeting with the
women, and soon all four men are in love. As befits the courtly setting and
the scholarly aims of the young men, the language and wit of
Love’s
Labour’s Lost
are sophisticated and refined, but despite the literary
atmosphere of the play, the comic possibilities of the stage are not neglected.
In Act I V, Scene 3, Berowne—the only one of the lords to have protested at
the impossibility of maintaining the vow—is attempting to write a sonnet to
his beloved, when he is disturbed by the arrival of the king and forced to
hide. From his vantage point he spies on the other men, as one by one they
enter to reveal—to both the on- and off-stage audiences—their own
lovestruck attempts at poetry. Through the style of the young men’s verses
Shakespeare parodies the poetic fashions of the day for images of hunting
and melancholy, but it is the structure of the scene that provides the greatest
humour. The multiple eavesdropping is exquisitely executed, and as each
man emerges to berate the others for breaking their vow, the audience has the
pleasure of knowing that Berowne, too, is forsworn, and likely soon to be
discovered. While Berowne is in the middle of a self-confident assault on his
companions’ treacherous promise-breaking, Costard and Jaquenetta make a
perfectly timed entrance with an incriminating letter.
Love’s Labour’s Lost
was first published in 1598 and was the first published
play to have “By W. Shakespeare” on its title page. The play’s slight action
serves as a peg on which to hang a glittering robe of wit and poetry. It
satirizes the loves of its main male characters as well as their fashionable
devotion to studious pursuits. The noblemen in the play have sought to avoid
romantic and worldly entanglements by devoting themselves in their studies,
and they voice their pretensions in an artificially ornate style, until love
forces them to recognize their own self-deceptions. The play’s title
anticipates its unconventional ending: The women refuse to marry at the end,
demanding a waiting period of 12 months for the men to demonstrate their
reformation. “Our wooing does not end like an old play,” says Berowne;
“Jack hath not Jill.”

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