SHAW’S CHALLENGE: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF
TAMING OF THE SHREW AND PYGMALION
by
Guo Xinyu
A Thesis
Submitted to the Graduate School and College of English
in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for
the Degree of Master of Arts
Under the Supervision of Professor Shi Zhikang
Shanghai International Studies University
December 2008
THE
Acknowledgements
This thesis would have been impossible without the help from my supervisor
Professor Shi Zhikang, who gave me encouragement and inspiration at the very
beginning of my thesis writing and continuously provided me with his illuminating
instructions and suggestions all through the writing process.
My thanks are also due to all my teachers during my 7-year-long study in
Shanghai International Studies University, from whose courses, lectures and generous
help I benefited a great deal. Meanwhile, I want to express my gratitude to all the
people who once offered help and convenience to me when I studied and wrote this
thesis in the graduate school of SISU.
Finally, my heartfelt thanks go to my parents, whose love and concern have
helped me overcome all the difficulties I encountered.
Abstract
It is generally acknowledged that William Shakespeare and George Bernard
Shaw are two of the most famous playwrights in the British literary history. He has
left us a great wealth of 154 sonnets, 37 plays, as well as two long poems.
Shakespeare, as Ben Johnson commented, “was not of an age, but for all time.”
George Bernard Shaw is considered to be the greatest playwright in England since
Shakespeare and was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1925. He wrote 51
well-known plays, and his drama has been generally acknowledged as the mainstream
in the 20th century English theater.
Despite the fact that they are both held in high esteem by literary critics, and are
admired by their contemporaries and later generations, their literary opinions,
especially when it comes to social moral standards and women’s social status, are
worlds apart. As a champion of women’s liberation who was strongly against the
Victorian stereotype of submissive and docile women, Shaw believed that by writing
a play a good writer should make his audience reconsider the morals of their society,
yet Shakespeare was only content with dramatizing the existing morality of the
society.
Shaw not only criticized Shakespeare on the purpose of drama, but also set up
similar plots in his own works to challenge Shakespeare’s treatment in similar stories.
The two works Pygmalion and The Taming of the Shrew are a good case in point.
Although they are similar to each other in many aspects, yet by taking a closer look
one can still find how amazingly different the two female protagonists and their
transformations are. Through the study of this thesis, the author tries to discover how
the two plays, one of which is set in the Elizabethan age and the other of which in the
Victorian age, are similar to each other, and more importantly, how they are different
from each other under the two great writers’ pens.
Key words: Shakespeare; Shaw; The Taming of the Shrew; Pygmalion; female status
中文摘要
莎士比亚与萧伯纳是英国文学史上最著名的两位剧作家。莎士比亚被公认
为英国最伟大的作家。作为一名诗人和剧作家，他留给后人 154 首十四行诗，37
部剧作，以及两首长诗。正如与他同一时代的另一位大剧作家、诗人本·琼森所说，
“他不属于一个时代，而属于所有世纪”。萧伯纳是继莎士比亚之后最伟大的剧
作家，于 1925 年被授予诺贝尔文学奖。他一生创作了 51 部剧作，而且它的戏剧
被认为是 20 世纪英国戏剧的主流。
虽然两位作家都在文学界享有盛望，其作品都被时人和后世所传诵，两人
在文学作品中的道德观，尤其是在涉及女性地位的问题上的观点大相径庭。实际
上，萧伯纳文学评论的一大部分都是关于莎士比亚及其作品的批评。他常常将莎
士比亚和自己作比较。众所周知，作为女性解放的倡导者，萧伯纳强烈反对维多
利亚时代所倡导的顺从软弱的女性形象，他认为一个剧作家应该通过其作品使
观众反思社会上的道德观并提供创新的、更合理的道德规范，而莎士比亚在戏剧
创作中只满足于表现当世的道德观。
萧伯纳不仅在文学评论中批评莎士比亚，而且在自己的戏剧中通过设立相
似的故事情节和人物形象，通过不同的创作手法和结局来反驳莎士比亚的作品。
两人的作品《驯悍记》和《卖花女》就是一个很好的例证。虽然两部作品在很多的方
面都惊人地相似，但是从人物、社会背景、情节发展等角度出发，并借助女性主
义视角，可以发现两位女主角和她们各自的转变有着天壤之别。在莎士比亚的笔
下，凯瑟琳娜从一个个性十足的女性沦为百依百顺的主妇，而萧伯纳却把伊莱
莎这样一个伦敦东区的卖花姑娘提升为一名高贵而独立的现代女性。通过本文的
分析，作者旨在探索这两部以英国不同历史时期为背景的戏剧如何通过各种相
同之处互相联系在一起，而更重要的是，从各个方面观察二者如何又是在两位
文豪的笔下变得如此不同。
关键词：莎士比亚；萧伯纳；《驯悍记》;《卖花女》; 女性地位
Contents
Acknowledgements.............................................................................................................................i
Abstract..............................................................................................................................................ii
中文摘要............................................................................................................................................iii
Introduction.......................................................................................................................................1
Chapter One A General Review of Two Playwrights and Their Plays......................................4
1.1 Life and literary career of William Shakespeare..................................................................4
1.2 Life and literary career of George Bernard Shaw.................................................................5
1.3 A General Review of The Taming of the Shrew...................................................................7
1.4 A General Review of Pygmalion...........................................................................................9
Chapter Two An Analysis of the Similarities between the Two Plays.......................................12
2.1 Similarities between the Developments of the Basic Plots ...............................................13
2.2 Similarities between the Characters....................................................................................14
2.3 Similarities between the Origins and the Use of Imagery..................................................19
Chapter Three An Analysis of the Social Backgrounds of the Two Plays in Feministic
Perspective.......................................................................................................................................22
3.1 A Comparison of the Social Backgrounds of the Two Stories and the Influences on
Women.......................................................................................................................................22
3.2 Feminism and the Feminist Shaw.......................................................................................24
Chapter Four A Comprehensive Study of Katharina and Eliza and Their Differences.........29
4.1 A Study of Katharina’s Transformation to a Tamed Woman..............................................29
4.2 A Study of Eliza’s Transformation to an Independent Woman...........................................36
4.3 Other Major Differences between The Taming of the Shrew and Pygmalion...................42
Conclusion........................................................................................................................................49
Bibliography....................................................................................................................................52
Introduction
William Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw are two of the most famous
playwrights Britain has ever produced. Shakespeare holds, by general acclamation,
the foremost place in English literature. As a great poet and dramatist, he has left us a
great wealth of 154 sonnets, 37 plays, as well as two long poems. He is so prominent
that nobody can avoid talking about him when mentioning English literature. George
Bernard Shaw is widely considered to be the greatest playwright in England since
Shakespeare and was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1925. He wrote 51
famous plays, and his drama has been universally considered as the mainstream in the
20th century English theatre.
Shaw, as is generally known, is a champion of women’s liberation. He was
strongly against the Victorian stereotype of submissive and docile women. In his
literary career, he refused to be bound by conventional approaches to the role of
women in society. He created a galaxy of strong and independent female protagonists.
Indeed, in depicting the various women characters, Shaw departs from the nineteenthcentury stereotype of the demure, docile, and fragile “womanly” women by creating a
lot of domineering, clever, sensible, good-humored, and aggressive “unwomanly”
women.1
Despite Shakespeare’s well-established fame and success in English literary
history, Shaw didn’t always agree with Shakespeare’s views which are expressed
through his works. In fact, he frequently made comparisons between Shakespeare and
himself. And a fairly large part of Shaw’s literary criticism is about Shakespeare and
his works.
1
C.f. Elsie Adams, “Feminism and Female Stereotypes in Shaw”, in Rodelle Weintraub, ed. Fabian Feminist:
Bernard Shaw and Woman, p.156.
1
One of Shaw’s most important disagreements with Shakespeare is the purpose of
drama. Shaw strongly believed that drama should urge the theatre-goers to reconsider
the morals of their society to challenge them and create new and advanced ones.
However, judged from this standard, Shakespeare rarely made any attempt to fulfill
this purpose. In fact, in most of his plays Shakespeare is only content to dramatize a
conventional, “reach-me-down,” or “readymade” morality. More often than not,
instead of working out an original, more reasonable morality, he only described a
story on the basis of existent social mores, which is not what Shaw believed any
writer of the “first order in literature” should do2.
Two plays that demonstrate this basic difference in the approaches of the two
playwrights to a similar situation are The Taming of the Shrew and Pygmalion. In the
two plays one can clearly see the different approaches the two writers adopt to deal
with similar situations. In fact, Shaw set up a central plot in Pygmalion that is so
similar with yet so different from that of The Taming of the Shrew that anyone who
has read both of them would suspect that Shaw purposely designed the play to
challenge Shakespeare and repudiate his opinions in the play.
In championing the concept that women are subordinate in the male-dominated
society in The Taming of the Shrew Shakespeare was supporting the conventional
morality of his own day, and in negating the same concept in Pygmalion Shaw was
rejecting the conventional morality of his own day and substituting for it an original
view of morality. Thus Shaw clearly used his play not only to repudiate the male
chauvinism of his day and Shakespeare’s and to support women’s liberation, a cause
for which he was a pioneer, but also to dramatize a criticism which was fundamental
to all Shaw’s complaints about Shakespeare and which Shaw had often expressed in
very explicit terms in his critical writings—that Shakespeare failed to create and
espouse an original morality in opposition to the conventional morality of his time.
Therefore, the objective of this thesis is to analyze the relation between these two
similar yet different works. Through a thorough analysis on the plots, characters,
2
Shaw on Shakespeare: An Anthology of Bernard Shaw’s Writings on the Plays and Production of Shakespeare, ed.
Edwin Wilson, pp. 229-30.
2
social backgrounds, and approaches, this thesis aims to find out how the two plays,
despite the long time span from Elizabethan age to Victorian age, are linked to each
other and more importantly, how the two playwrights treat similar themes with
different approaches and create different endings. A contrast between The Taming of
the Shrew and Pygmalion will go a long way to illuminating Shaw’s discordant critic
opinions regarding Shakespeare’s works.
This thesis is divided into six parts. The first part, as we are now dealing with, is
an introduction in which the writer introduces the reasons and objectives why he
chooses the topic of this thesis firstly and then he talks about the study methodology.
At the end of this part, the writer gives a detailed description of the organizations of
the whole thesis. The second part is a general review of the literary careers of the two
playwrights and a summary of The Taming of the Shrew and Pygmalion. Firstly, the
writer gives an account of the life and literary career of William Shakespeare and
George Bernard Shaw respectively, with the focus on their status in and contribution
to the English literature. Then the writer reviews the plots of the two plays and
introduces relative comments on them. Chapter Two is an analysis on how the two
works parallel with each other in such aspects as plots, characters, origins and usage
of images. By doing so the writer aims to prove that Shaw establishes his work on
Shakespeare’s play to overthrow the latter’s treatment of the plot and introduce a
brand-new moral standard in a society which is as hostile to women as in Elizabethan
times when The Taming of the Shrew was written. In Chapter Three, the author first
reviews how the general social and historical backgrounds influenced the writers’
treatment of the plots and fates of the two female protagonists in the two plays, and
thus introduces feminism. What follows is a brief introduction of Shaw as an early
male feminist and his feministic opinions. In the following chapter, the writer
analyzes the transformations of the two protagonists, one from an unyielding girl to a
submissive wife, the other from a poor cockney girl to an elegant and independent
modern woman. The writer shall analyze the different purposes, natures, and methods
of the transformation and the final attitudes between men and women in the two
3
plays. In the concluding part, the writer summarizes the basic points in the thesis,
points out the defects of the study, and then suggests topics for future study.
Chapter One A General Review of Two Playwrights and
Their Plays
1.1 Life and literary career of William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare (1564-1616) is widely regarded as the greatest writer
Britain has ever produced and the world’s pre-eminent dramatist whose works have
made a lasting impression on later theatre and literature. As the foremost literary
talent of the Elizabethan Age, his creative achievement has never been surpassed
since. Shakespeare is often called England’s national poet and the “Bard of Avon”.
His surviving works consist of 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and
several other poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language,
and are performed more often than those of any other playwright.
Shakespeare was born and raised in the picturesque Tudor market town of
Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18 he married Anne Hathaway, who bore him
three children: Susanne, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592 he
began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part owner of the playing
company the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, later known as the King’s Men. He retired to
Stratford around 1613, where he died three years later.
Shakespeare produced most of his known works between 1590 and 1613. His
early plays were mainly comedies and historical plays, genres he raised to the peak of
sophistication and artistry by the end of the sixteenth century. Next he wrote mainly
tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered
4
some of the finest examples in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote
tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights.
Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during
his lifetime, and in 1623 two of his former theatrical colleagues published the First
Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that include all but two of the plays
now recognized as Shakespeare’s.
Shakespeare was a respected poet and playwright in his own days, but it was not
until the nineteenth century that his reputation rose to its present heights. The
Romantics, in particular, acclaimed Shakespeare with a reverence that George
Bernard Shaw called “bardolatry”. In the twentieth century, his work was repeatedly
adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His
plays remain highly popular today and are consistently performed and reinterpreted in
diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. Indeed, for more than
four centuries, Shakespeare and his works have been the focus of attraction of the
world’s literature. They have exerted a profound influence on the culture of the
Western countries.
1.2 Life and literary career of George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) is an outstanding realistic Irish dramatist,
literary critic, a socialist spokesman, and a leading figure in the 20th century theatre.
Born in Dublin, Ireland, he finished his formal education at the Dublin English
Scientific and Commercial Day School. At the age of 14, he started to work as a
junior clerk. When he was 20 years old, he went to London and remained there
jobless for 9 years, living in his mother’s house and devoting much time to selfeducation at the British Museum. In 1898 Shaw married a wealthy upper-class Irish
woman and fellow Fabian Socialist, Charlotte Payne Townshend. Henceforth Shaw’s
domestic existence provided a stable, peaceful and orderly background to his career as
a writer.
5
In the early period of his literary career, Shaw wrote some novels, bitterly
criticizing the stupidity, snobbishness and petty tyranny of the middle class. In the
1890s Shaw turned to the theatre, first working as a dramatic critic, and then writing
plays for the stage.
It was Ibsen who diverted Shaw’s attention to drama. In 1890 he delivered a
number of lectures on the plays of Ibsen, and in 1891 published his famous essay The
Quintessence of Ibsenism, a commentary on Ibsen’s dramatic works, as the author’s
own program of dramatic creation. Shaw argues in the essay that, society, to conceal
from itself unpleasant realities, covers them with masks, or “ideals”, such as the
notion of the beauty and holiness of love and family life to mask the brutality of
sexual appetite and the necessities of social obligation. Shaw hails Ibsen as a true
pioneer, the “realist” such as Shelley or Ibsen, dares to discard current pieties, to
struggle for a new and genuine ideal, and to face being reviled as a cynic and
immoralist. Shaw leveled his attack on the plays with well-constructed plots but very
meager contents which then fills the theatres. For him, the dramatist should not look
to odd accidents for the success of the play, and the content of the play should be
realistic. Shaw’s dramatic creation can be divided into four periods, with the
demarcation line of 1900, 1914 and 1929.
In 1892-1900, Shaw produced three series of plays which won him world
reputation:
Plays
Unpleasant,
including
Widowers’
Houses(1892),
The
Philanderer(1893) and Mrs. Warren’s Profession(1893); Plays Pleasant, including
Candida(1894), Arms and the Man(1894), The Man of Destiny(1895) and You Never
Can Tell(1896); Three Plays for Puritans, including The Devil’s Disciples(1897),
Caesar and Cleopatra(1898) and Captain Brassbound’s Conversion(1899).
In 1901-1914, with a deeper understanding of social problems and exploration in
dramatic art, Shaw impressed both his audiences and readers by his numerous
successful plays, mainly Man and Superman(1903), John Bull’s Other Island(1904),
Major Barbara(1905), The Doctor’s Dilemma(1911), Androcles and the Lion(1912)
and Pygmalion(1913).
6
In 1915-1929, three important plays marked Shaw’s third period of playwriting,
with the looming thunderous World War I, namely, Heartbreak House (1913-1916),
Back to Methuselah (1921) and Saint Joan (1923). After 1929, Shaw shifted his
attention from the economic and social problems to current political events, with The
Apple Cart (1929), On the Rocks (1933), Geneva (1938) and In Good King Charles’s
Golden Days (1939) as his representatives. Shaw created 51 plays in his lifetime and
his fruitful writing ended until 1950 when he died at 94.
Shaw was a member of the Fabian society, established as a group to study and
promote socialism, and remained active until 1911. Fabianism, unlike Marxism or
communism, believed in piecemeal reform of gradual change instead of revolution.
Shaw supported the forces of revolution and democracy in their struggle against
imperialism and reaction. During World War I Shaw raised his voice against the
imperialist war policy of the European governments. He hailed the October
Revolution in Russia by a pamphlet entitled The Dictator of the Proletariat.
Shaw lived the rest of his life as an international celebrity, traveling around the
world, continually involved in local and international politics. On the world tour made
in 1931, Shaw visited China and was warmly received by the revolutionary people
represented by Lu Xun and others.
1.3 A General Review of The Taming of the Shrew
The Taming of the Shrew is a fine farce in an immemorial tradition of male
supremacy. Produced in the year 1623, it has been popular onstage ever since. The
play opens as the drunkard Christopher Sly is thrown out of a tavern. A wealthy Lord
returns from hunting and finds Sly passed out on the street. He dresses him up as a
Lord and has his servants and players convince him that he is a lord who has been
asleep for nearly fifteen years. He also tells his players to put on a show for this man.
The show they perform is about the taming of a shrew.
7
The play within the play begins as the young noble scholar Lucentio enters a
street in Padua with his servant, Tranio. He overhears Hortensio and Gremio discuss
their affections for the youngest daughter of nobleman Baptista of Padua. When
Lucentio sees the young daughter, Bianca, he also falls in love with her. The problem
remains that Bianca is not allowed to marry until her older sister, Kate the Shrew, is
first married. Finding the task almost impossible, Lucentio and Hortensio both devise
plans to woo Bianca. Lucentio changes clothing with Tranio and disguises himself as
a schoolteacher named Cambio, so that he may live in Baptista's house and woo
Bianca. Tranio will impersonate Lucentio and win her affection from Baptista.
Likewise, Hortensio devises a plan that enables him to live in the house as a
schoolteacher named Litio.
Petruchio of Verona comes to Padua to visit his old friend, Hortensio, as well as
to seek a wife. Hortensio tells Petruchio of Kate, the shrew with a large dowry, and
convinces him to tame and marry her. Petruchio introduces himself to Baptista as a
suitor to Kate and offers Hortensio (dressed as Litio) as a teacher. Tranio (dressed as
Lucentio) does the same to Baptista for Bianca's affections, and offers Lucentio
(dressed as Cambio) as a teacher. Baptista accepts these teachers and gifts and
welcomes the men into his home. He also agrees to give Petruchio Kate's hand in
marriage and generous dowry.
Petruchio quickly marries Kate and takes her away to his country home. He is
cruel, shrewish, and arrogant toward her and treats her worse than an unnecessary
object. He also strikes her, yells at his servants, and strikes them. Because of his
unruly behavior, everyone near Petruchio fears for his or her life. Meanwhile,
Lucentio has revealed his true identity to Bianca and successfully won her affections.
Tranio has made arrangements with Baptista for Lucentio to marry Bianca. Tranio
also meets a Pendant on the streets of Padua and convinces him to impersonate
Vincentio of Pisa (Lucentio's father) so that the deal of marriage may be completed.
He agrees.
As Hortensio, Kate, and Petruchio make their way back to Padua, they come
8
across Vincentio, Lucentio's father. They congratulate him on his son's engagement
and bring him back to Padua with them. When Vincentio seeks Lucentio, he finds the
Pendant and Tranio. The imposters call Vincentio a madman and a liar and ask that
Baptista imprison him. However, when Lucentio appears on the scene, he bows down
to his father and all truth is revealed.
The true Vincentio agrees to his son's marriage to Bianca, while Hortensio
marries a doting and shrew-like widow when he realizes that he has lost Bianca's
affections. Petruchio continues to scold and treat Kate and his servants horrifically.
At the final banquet, celebrating the three nuptials—those of Kate and Petruchio,
Bianca and Lucentio, and the widow and Hortensio—the men decide to make a
wager. They intend to discover who is the most shrewish of the three women. They
ask Biondello to send for each of them. When both Bianca and the widow decline
their husband's requests, Kate appears before them, obedient and tamed. She
proclaims her ultimate loyalty to her husband and intends to live for him forever. As
all three couples exit, Hortensio and Lucentio look at Petruchio in awe. He has truly
tamed the wild shrew.
The Taming of the Shrew has been the subject of much criticism. In particular,
feminists have attacked the play, and in particular the play's final scene, as offensively
misogynistic. George Bernard Shaw condemned the plays in a letter to Pall Mall
Gazette as, “one vile insult to womanhood and manhood from the first word to the
last.”3
With the above review in mind, the writer of this thesis mainly aims to make a
general analysis of the play, first in feminist perspectives and then makes a
comparison between it and Shaw’s Pygmalion.
1.4 A General Review of Pygmalion
3
Pall Mall Gazette (8 June 1888), reprinted in Shaw on Shakespeare, pp. 186-87.
9
Produced in the year 1912, Pygmalion has generally been regarded as one of
Shaw’s most successful and popular plays. The basic plot of this hilarious work is as
follows:
Two middle-aged gentlemen meet in the portico of Saint Paul’s church, Covent
Garden, in a crowd sheltering from a rainstorm after an opera. Professor Higgins is a
scientist of phonetics, and Colonel Pickering is a linguist of Indian dialects. The first
bets the other that he can, with his knowledge of phonetics, transform the cockney
speaking Covent Garden flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, who is there selling flowers, into
a woman as poised and well-spoken as a duchess in a matter of months. The next
morning, Eliza appears at Higgins’s laboratory on Wimpole Street to ask for speech
lessons, offering to pay a shilling for an hour’s study, so that she may speak properly
enough to work in a flower shop. Higgins makes merciless fun of her, but is seduced
by the idea of working his magic on her. Pickering goads him on by agreeing to cover
the costs of the experiment if Higgins can pass Eliza off as a duchess at an
ambassador’s garden party. The challenge is taken, and Higgins starts by having his
housekeeper bathe Eliza and give her new clothes. Then Eliza’s father Alfred
Doolittle comes to demand the return of his daughter, though his real intention is to
hit Higgins up for some money. The professor, amused by Doolittle’s unusual
rhetoric, gives him five pounds. On his way out, the dustman fails to recognize the
now clean, pretty flower girl as his daughter.
For a number of months, Higgins trains Eliza to speak properly. Two trials for
Eliza follow. The first occurs at the house of Higgins’s mother, where Eliza is
introduced to the Eynsford Hills, a trio of mother, daughter, and son. The son Freddy
is very attracted to Eliza, and further taken with what he thinks is her affected “small
talk” when she slips into cockney. Mrs. Higgins worries about that the experiment
will lead to problems once it is ended, but Higgins and Pickering are too absorbed in
their game to take heed. A second trial, which takes place some months later at an
ambassador’s party, is a resounding success. The wager is definitely won, but Higgins
and Pickering are now bored with the project, which causes Eliza to be hurt. She
10