A Husband’s Expectations
The people in William Shakespeare’s England were born into a structured social system that placed rigid expectations on their relationships and behaviors. These expectations influenced how they thought, such as their place in the world, the course of their life, and their relationship to authority. Citizens could not take even a moments’ break from the system being actively played out in their own lives, as all aspects of their society, including theater performances, reflected and encouraged obedience to social conventions. The depiction of authority in The Taming of the Shrew reflects how husbands would have been expected to think about authority, as Elizabethan and Jacobean societies invested in the Great Chain of Being and its hierarchal analogies. …show more content…
These aspects included the theater. Patrons of all classes could enjoy the shows performed by the few acting companies in England. Public, private, and royal performances entertained the masses and the few. Lord Chamberlain’s Men entertained the general masses at The Globe Theater, where the theater itself reflected order in patrons’ social status in seating and mirrored the expectations into the fictitious or historical lives on stage. Performances could challenge the audiences’ thoughts of their society’s expectations. A script, a theme, and a group of actors had the ability to present a new mode of reasoning, generate or alleviate the anxieties about the nature of authority, console those who are under the control of authority, or – in some circumstances – encourage rebellion. In Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, the expectations were ultimately all encouraged in the theme of how following society’s expectations could benefit a
The people in William Shakespeare’s England were born into a structured social system that placed rigid expectations on their relationships and behaviors. These expectations influenced how they thought, such as their place in the world, the course of their life, and their relationship to authority. Citizens could not take even a moments’ break from the system being actively played out in their own lives, as all aspects of their society, including theater performances, reflected and encouraged obedience to social conventions. The depiction of authority in The Taming of the Shrew reflects how husbands would have been expected to think about authority, as Elizabethan and Jacobean societies invested in the Great Chain of Being and its hierarchal analogies. …show more content…
These aspects included the theater. Patrons of all classes could enjoy the shows performed by the few acting companies in England. Public, private, and royal performances entertained the masses and the few. Lord Chamberlain’s Men entertained the general masses at The Globe Theater, where the theater itself reflected order in patrons’ social status in seating and mirrored the expectations into the fictitious or historical lives on stage. Performances could challenge the audiences’ thoughts of their society’s expectations. A script, a theme, and a group of actors had the ability to present a new mode of reasoning, generate or alleviate the anxieties about the nature of authority, console those who are under the control of authority, or – in some circumstances – encourage rebellion. In Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, the expectations were ultimately all encouraged in the theme of how following society’s expectations could benefit a