"As I please, in words."

This is part of a line belonging to Katharina from Shakespeare's "The Taming of the Shrew."  The full excerpt is typed out in the "About Me" on the side of this page.  I've been saying these lines to myself, to my director, and to my fellow actors for a couple of months now, and I've had a while to think about them.  Theatre is an interesting thing; it's an art form collaborated upon by both a writer and a performer, and the writer might have done his part in the endeavor hundreds of years before the performer even exists.  I have to wonder what Shakespeare was thinking when he wrote these words.  "The Taming of the Shrew" is a fairly controversial play nowadays, and is often seen as antifeminist.  The text certainly seems to point to that, but then why would Katharina, or Kate, have so much potential to be such a rich character?  The people around her dismiss her as a shrew, but is that all there is to the play and the character?  She is outspoken and brash and quick-witted, doesn't let anyone keep her down, at least until Petruchio enters the scene.  There are a few ways to play out this character arc.  One: Petruchio succeeds in "taming" her, and she is forever obedient.  Two: He holds no sway over her by the end of the play, and her entire ending monologue (with lines like "A woman moved is like a fountain troubled/ Muddy, ill-seeming, thick, bereft of beauty" and "And place your hand below your husband's foot") is delivered with palpable sarcasm.  Three: She truly loves her husband by the end, but she hasn't necessarily been "tamed" and is still her own person.  This last one especially may be just a modern construct sewn up with wishful thinking, but the potential is there.  Whether or not Shakespeare meant Kate to be tamed by the end of the play, whether or not he was "that sexist" (as I've heard someone say), the potential is there for her to keep her strength and fire.  The words are the frame, but the performer and director don't have to mind the edges.  An individual performance can fill the space provided in countless subtle ways and even twine around the framework itself.  Thus, theatre is a true collaboration, though one of the collaborators doesn't always know where it ends up.