ENGLISH & DRAMA: Flattery and love in The Taming of the Shrew and King Lear
By Rusty Thorne
Say that she rail, why, then I'll tell her plain
She sings as sweetly as a nightingale.
Say that she frown, I'll say she looks as clear
As morning roses newly washed with dew.
(Taming of the Shrew, 1.2.170-74)
Examine the relationship between flattery and love in at least two of the plays studied.
Considering the definition of ‘flattery’ as “false or insincere praise” or “delusion”, it is easily interpreted as antithetical to love and synonymous with deception, seeming to denote false love.[1] However, in the tragedy of King Lear, and The Taming of the Shrew, flattery acts beyond an antonym for love, actively destroying it. The titular King Lear, reflecting upon the suffering he has endured, realises “They told me I was everything; ’tis a lie, I am not ague-proof”.[2] While Lear’s daughters’ flattery was indeed ‘a lie’, this flattery has left him vulnerable – despite having believed himself ‘ague-proof’, he is susceptible to hardship. Having begun with flattery, the play culminates in mass death, leaving no family intact. As such, flattery brings about the end of familial love entirely. In The Taming of the Shrew, flattery is the first element of psychological warfare Petruccio wages against Katherina to ‘tame’ her. Although considered comic, this manipulation escalates to blatant abuse, as Petruccio sees Katherina as a mere object, not an object of affection. In both plays, flattery instigates the protagonists’ downfall and the elimination of love. Whether employed in a tragedy or a comedy, Shakespeare uses flattery as a tragic plot device, facilitating the removal of love.
Both plays begin with flattery, and as their plots develop, this flattery is proven false. Early on, then, love is undermined but not yet removed. At the opening of The Taming of the Shrew, Katherina is endlessly slandered, deemed a ‘fiend’ a ‘devil’ and a ‘shrew’ by everyone in Padua, including her family. In Act Two, Scene One, Katherina is suddenly showered with compliments by Petruccio, in stark contrast to her earlier vilification. Given her maligned status, this flattery should be a source of genuine comfort to her, yet his intentions are to bewilder, rather than praise, her. In a soliloquy, Petruccio pledges to tell her “she sings as sweetly as a nightingale” if she “rail[s]”, and if she “[frowns]”, he will compare her to “morning roses newly washed with dew.[3] Petruccio employs cliché romantic images of ‘nightingales’ and ‘roses’ to create a hyperbolic caricature of romance, while the simple action verbs ‘rail’ and ‘frown’ convey reality. As such, Shakespeare builds a comic contrast between Katherina’s violent and mercurial behaviour and Petruccio’s melodramatic courtship. Shakespeare establishes a conflict between simple and complex language through Petruccio’s similes – his insincere flattery is highlighted by figurative language. This juxtaposition alerts the audience to the emptiness behind Petruccio’s flattery. Bates concurs that Petruccio is cold and calculated, as “while Kate’s madness is presented as emotional, subjective, and involved, Petruchio’s, by contrast, is ironic, objective, and detached.”[4] In complimenting Katherina, then, Petruccio is more than simply insincere: he employs Machiavellian techniques, making his falsehoods obvious to confuse and disconcert her. Despite her protestations that “they call me Katherine”, Petruccio calls her ‘Kate’ ten times in lines 184-89 alone, and his resolute claim that she is gentle (“my super-dainty Kate”) disregards the tough façade Katherina puts up.[5] In this manner, he strips Katherina of her identity, disorienting her to make her vulnerable. Petruccio’s nicknaming of Katherina sets the precedent for his continuing manipulation, or ‘taming’, of her. Not only does he gaslight her into vulnerability, but in disregarding her identity he already begins to take ownership of her. Since no other character uses the nickname ‘Kate’, it is as if even Katherina’s name belongs to him. This subtle hint at ownership is brought to the fore when Petruccio reveals that “your father hath consented That you shall be my wife, your dowry ‘greed on”.[6] By immediately conflating ‘wife’ with ‘dowry’, Petruccio reveals that he perceives Katherina as his property. Katherina is powerless against Petruccio’s advances as her father had already blessed the match – her resistance to him serves only to exhaust her. Thus, Petruccio employs flattery as a tool in his tirade against Katherina’s psyche and feels no affection for her, as Bates attests. Dramatic irony further eliminates any sense of genuine romance in Petruccio’s character, as the audience are already conscious that he had “come to wive it wealthily in Padua” and is solely pursuing Katherina for her large dowry.[7] Images of wealth and gold pervade Act One, Scene Two, reducing marriage to an economic transaction. By placing these two scenes consecutively, Shakespeare underscores Petruccio’s cold-blooded avarice – dramatic irony alerts the audience to his financial, rather than romantic, motivations. As such, romance is usurped by material ambitions, reflecting an absence of love.
While Petruccio sacrifices romance to pursue Katherina’s dowry money, love and greed become concerningly entangled in King Lear. In the play’s opening scene, Lear promises his “largest bounty” to the daughter who loves him most.[8] Consequently, Goneril and Regan bestow extravagant praise upon Lear. In her speech, Goneril claims to love him “more than word can wield the matter”.[9] Shakespeare builds a contradiction between the form of Goneril’s speech and its content, as she uses words to cajole him whilst claiming that they are insufficient. This tension, like the inconsistency in Petruccio’s rhetoric, proves her insincerity. Nevertheless, Lear trusts her, expecting that “your large speeches may your deeds approve, That good effects may spring from words of love”.[10] Shakespeare invokes a double meaning here, as Lear implies that Goneril and Regan’s actions should reflect their declarations of loyalty, yet ‘deeds’ and ‘effects’ are also legal jargon surrounding property ownership. This double meaning parallels Goneril and Regan’s duplicity, as their ‘love’ is contractual, only existing whilst Lear has his wealth. There is an ironic discrepancy between Goneril and Regan’s ‘words’ and ‘deeds’, as they flatter Lear yet estrange him from their homes. The unreliability of language foreshadows Goneril and Regan’s betrayal of Lear, as if through a legal loophole. Shakespeare amalgamates language surrounding love and law throughout the scene, creating a transactional tone. As such, Lear undermines familial love by commodifying it, but Goneril and Regan's disloyalty eventually destroys it, intrinsically linking flattery to greed.
The tension between love and flattery is epitomised by Cordelia, who exudes daughterly love. Schalkwyk asserts that “whereas Goneril and Regan are prepared to indulge in the King’s charade, Cordelia feels that the expression of filial love requires a different language game”.[11] The audience witnesses Cordelia’s adulation for her father via her asides, as she is “sure my love’s More ponderous than my tongue” but cannot express this love directly to him, instead saying “nothing”.[12] Schalkwyk evidences Cordelia’s silence, stating “if Cordelia quite literally speaks ‘nothing’, her silence is itself a form of action, a performative that rejects the language game that the King insists on playing as inappropriate. Cordelia consequently resolves to say nothing, but also to carry on doing what she has always done: to ‘love and be silent’ (1.1.62).”[13] In contrast to Goneril’s false claims, Cordelia’s love is genuinely more profound than her speech, as she states that “what I well intend, I’ll do’t before I speak”.[14] Reiterating the dichotomy between deeds and words, Cordelia acts as a dramatic foil to her sisters’ flattery. If Goneril and Regan represent flattery and perpetuate the loss of love, then Cordelia serves to restore it – she is the embodiment of honesty, daughterly duty and love, as Schalkwyk testifies. Since Shakespeare constructs the sisters as counterparts, they parallel the primary conflict between love and greed. Cordelia’s death in Act Five (at the hands of Edmund, allied with Goneril and Regan), therefore, signifies the permanent removal of love from the play.
In both plays, flattery serves as the precursor to the protagonists’ downfall; in King Lear, Goneril and Regan’s betrayal of Lear renders him weak and insane, initiating the war that kills them all, and in The Taming of the Shrew, Petruccio’s subtle manipulation of Katherina becomes explicit coercion. In both cases, it is as if the flattery is being undone, revealing the flatterers’ true malevolent motivations. After Petruccio has bewildered Katherina with flattery, he unleashes abuse and humiliation upon her throughout their marriage. He deprives her of food and sleep, saying “She ate no meat today, nor none shall eat; Last night she slept not, nor tonight she shall not.”[15] The repeated syntax in these lines conveys the endlessness of Petruccio’s abuse, with no respite. He consciously debilitates her, aiming “to kill a wife with kindness”, or “to tame a shrew”, dehumanising Katherina through his conflation of ‘wife’ and ‘shrew’.[16] This ongoing degradation of her, beginning with subtle flattery and gaslighting, intensifies as the play progresses. At its pinnacle, Petruccio forces Katherina to call the sun the moon, insisting that it “shall be moon or star or what I list”, enforcing her conformity to his every whim.[17] At this moment, she submits to his authority, agreeing “And so it shall be so for Katherine”, accepting her subservience to him.[18] Petruccio’s initial flattery of Katherina gives way to psychological warfare, conditioning her into obedience. As such, Katherina is trapped in a patriarchal, loveless marriage, instigated by flattery.
To present flattery as an evil force, Shakespeare associates it with witchcraft. Lear condemns his treacherous daughters as “unnatural hags”, suggesting that their evil is profound to a supernatural extent.[19] Goneril enhances this comparison through another of her speeches: “Old fools are babes again and must be used With checks as flatteries, when they are seen abused.”[20] Here, Goneril speaks in a rhyming couplet, evocative of the witches’ cant in Macbeth. Additionally, the oxymoron of “old fools are babes again” mirrors their paradoxical “fair is foul, and foul is fair” chant, indicating both an innate evil and the disruption of the natural order.[21] Laghi argues that Shakespeare exploited the widespread fear of witchcraft in the Jacobean period, an “alarm… shared by James VI of Scotland, whose treatise Daemonologie appeared in 1597”, to convey the malice of the sisters.[22] She evidences Lear’s mock trial of Goneril and Regan in Act Three, stating that “in Lear's mind, Goneril and Regan's refusal to play host to him denotes a kind of wickedness that must be prosecuted before a court of justice”, outlining Lear’s accusation “of having 'kicked the poor King her father' (3.6.47-48), [which is] a very vague one.”[23] She also believes that this conflict “had nothing to do with the devil… the accusation was a means of avenging oneself on someone”, which I would argue somewhat trivialises Lear’s grievance.[24] Admittedly, Goneril and Regan have not committed witchcraft, but Shakespeare deliberately draws this comparison to highlight the damage they have done. This mock trial simultaneously expresses Lear’s psychological decline and his daughters’ role in this downfall. In this manner, Shakespeare presents flattery as destructive, causing the world to descend into chaos.
If flattery is a destructive force, then it must be regarded as a tragic plot device. Following this argument, Draper posits that in Jacobean society, “flattery, both in moral and political theory and in apparent fact about the court, was a recognized subject for complaint and an accepted cause for the evils of the time”, due to the favouritism demonstrated by King James I in his court.[25] As such, Shakespeare reflects Jacobean public opinion to present flattery as harmful – this is particularly evident in King Lear, where “the persons flattered and also the flatterers come to an evil end”.[26] This evil, Draper argues, intertwines flattery with tragedy in Shakespeare’s late plays (such as King Lear) as “a dramatic motive dangerous to the state or even to individuals”, yet “in the early comedies, [flattery] appears as the venial sin of the lover” and is “a mere matter of etiquette”.[27] However, Draper overlooks The Taming of the Shrew in his argument, forgetting the psychological impact of Petruccio’s ‘flattery’. Far from a ‘venial sin’, Petruccio causes Katherina to mentally deteriorate until she becomes something he can control, and the play’s genre is less straightforward than Draper would have us believe. The Taming of the Shrew is not recognised as one of Shakespeare’s ‘problem plays’, however, I would petition for its inclusion in the category. The ‘problem play’ is a modern term for a theatrical work that is not easily defined as comedy or tragedy, with “significant consequences… for the portrayal of gender and gender relations in the plays.”[28] They also “subject romantic elements to a fundamentally disjunctive, sometimes jarring, realistic treatment”, akin to the patriarchal control which dominates the play and results in Katherina’s ‘taming’. The Taming of the Shrew transgresses the genre of comedy by including tragic elements: Katherina’s storyline includes a ‘peripeteia’, defined as “A sudden reversal of the protagonist's fortunes within a dramatic plot, usually that of a tragedy.”[29] Katherina’s mental degradation over the course of the play, a turn of fate that began at her wedding, fulfils this tragic convention – one very similar to the prolonged decline of Lear. Despite Draper’s assertions that flattery is a tragic, political evil, King Lear appears more focused on the domestic sphere. The tragedy begins with the insertion of politics, and subsequently flattery, into the home, and more closely follows the characters’ relationships than the state. Therefore, flattery generates a domestic tragic downfall. Since The Taming of the Shrew and King Lear make use of tragic conventions, flattery must be regarded as a tragic plot device.
Thus, whether employed in tragedy or comedy, flattery facilitates the destruction of love. Creating a dichotomy between words and deeds, Shakespeare vilifies flattery in King Lear, rendering it synonymous with greed and evil. Likewise, flattery and deception enable Petruccio to ‘tame’ Katherina, taking ownership of her. As neither protagonist is ‘ague-proof’, they are vulnerable to their fates. Throughout both plays, flattery and love are two warring factions, culminating in the protagonists’ degradation and love’s inevitable end.
[1] ‘Flattery, n.’, OED Online (Oxford University Press) <https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/71233> [accessed 3 January 2023].
[2] William Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. by R. A. Foakes (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2001) 4.6.103-4.
[3] William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, ed. by Barbara Hodgdon (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2010) 2.1.169-73.
[4] Catherine Bates, ‘Love and Courtship’, in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Comedy, ed. by Alexander Leggatt, Cambridge Companions to Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 102–22.
[5] Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, 2.1.83-9.
[6] Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew 2.1.271-2.
[7] Ibid.,1.2.74.
[8] Shakespeare, King Lear, 1.1.50-2.
[9] Ibid., 1.1.55.
[10] Ibid., 1.1.185.
[11] David Schalkwyk, Speech and Performance in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Plays (Cambridge University Press, 2002), p.111.
[12] Shakespeare, King Lear, 1.1.77-8.
[13] Schalkwyk, p.112.
[14] Shakespeare, King Lear, 1.1.227-8.
[15] Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, 4.1.186-7.
[16] Ibid., 1.4.196-9.
[17] Ibid., 4.5.7.
[18] Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, 4.5.23.
[19] Shakespeare, King Lear, 2.2.467.
[20] Ibid., 1.3.20-21.
[21] William Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. by Kenneth Muir (London: Arden Shakespeare, 1997) 1.1.11.
[22] Simona Laghi, ‘Witchcraft, Demonic Possession and Exorcism: The Problem of Evidence in Two Shakespearean Plays’, Journal of Early Modern Studies, 10 (2021), p.104.
[23] Laghi, p.116.
[24] Laghi, p.117.
[25] John W. Draper, ‘Flattery, A Shakespearean Tragic Theme.’, Philological Quarterly, 17 (1938), pp.241-2.
[26] Draper, p.246.
[27] Ibid., p.242.
[28] ‘Introduction’, in William Shakespeare: The Problem Plays, ed. by Richard Hillman, 499 (New York, NY: Twayne Publishers, 1993), p. 7.
[29] ‘Peripeteia’, in The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. by Dinah Birch and Katy Hooper (Oxford University Press, 2013).n five further tracks in alternate forms.
Bibliography
Primary Texts:
Shakespeare, William, King Lear, ed. by R. A. Foakes (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2001)
Shakespeare, William, The Taming of the Shrew, ed. by Barbara Hodgdon (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2010)
Secondary Sources:
Bates, Catherine, ‘Love and Courtship’, in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Comedy, ed. by Alexander Leggatt, Cambridge Companions to Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 102–22
Birch, Dinah, and Katy Hooper, eds., ‘Peripeteia’, in The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature (Oxford University Press, 2013)
Draper, John W., ‘Flattery, A Shakespearean Tragic Theme.’, Philological Quarterly, 17 (1938), 240–50
‘Flattery, n.’, OED Online (Oxford University Press) <https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/71233> [accessed 3 January 2023]
Hillman, Richard, ed., ‘Introduction’, in William Shakespeare: The Problem Plays, 499 (New York, NY: Twayne Publishers, 1993), pp. 1–16
Laghi, Simona, ‘Witchcraft, Demonic Possession and Exorcism: The Problem of Evidence in Two Shakespearean Plays’, Journal of Early Modern Studies, 10 (2021), 103–21
Schalkwyk, David, Speech and Performance in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Plays (Cambridge University Press, 2002)
Shakespeare, William, Macbeth, ed. by Kenneth Muir (London: Arden Shakespeare, 1997)
