"Marriage, the Violent Traverse from Two to One in The Taming of the Shrew and Othello" (original) (raw)

2009, Journal of The Wooden O Symposium

Unlike the romantic comedies which deal with courtship and end in marriage, Shakespeare’s early comedy, The Taming of the Shrew, and his tragedy, Othello, present glimpses into newlyweds undergoing the violent transition from the individual to the joint state of marriage. The marital traverse from two to one of individual to joint being follows the Biblical blueprint of two-in-one. This religious and social model was also sanctioned by law such that the legal personhood of marriage obtained solely in the man. The examination of the traverse from two to one situates itself in the early modern discourses and debates on marital conduct. The two plays, indeed, dramatize the clash between the dominance model premised on male supremacy and the conscience model based on consensual, companionate marriage. The difficult transumption of the marital two-in-one stems from the crucial contradiction within the Biblical injunction: a wife is a spiritual equal yet submissive to the husband as the church is subject unto Christ (Ephesians 22:24). At the surface, the plotlines of both plays—in one, a husband’s taming of his shrewish wife and, in the other, a husband’s murder of his supposedly unfaithful wife—suggest that both works dramatize the dominance model featuring male authority. I argue, however, that, contrary to this expectation, both plays present subtle integrations of the dominance and the conscience models, which emphasize not so much the gender question of who’s on top in the marital hierarchy or whether the woman wields great/greater power despite male headship but rather the richly human, phenomenological experience of early modern subjects/spouses successfully (in comedy) and less successfully (in tragedy) trying to achieve a working love through what Harry Berger calls “the discipline of tempered communion.”