This week in my Shakespeare in a year program had me completing “The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” beginning “The Taming of the Shrew,” and progressing through a bit more of “Venus & Adonis,” together with Sonnets 3 and 4.
The motif of love continues in “Taming.” The basic plot line so far (leaving aside the Induction, which sets up the ‘play within a play’ format) is that a wealthy gentleman, Baptiste, has two daughters, the older of which, Kate, is beautiful but has a very acerbic personality. The younger daughter, Bianca, is also beautiful but mild mannered. While there are many suitors for Bianca, the father lays down the rule that she will not be married until somebody first wins Kate. Not so easy.
Here’s something from the opening of Act I, Scene 1, where Lucentio, who becomes one of Bianca’s suitors, first arrives in Padua with his servant, Tranio. He is at this point interested in studying moral philosophy and virtue, but Tranio recommends that he only do so in a way that combines personal pleasure with his studies. I was amused at the following lines, in light of our upcoming conference on “Law and Virtue”:
Lucentio:
And therefore, Tranio, for the time I studie,
Vertue and that part of Philosophie
Will I applie, that treats of happinesse,
By vertue specially to be atchiev’d…
Tranio:
Mi perdonato, gentle master mine:
I am in all affected as your selfe,
Glad that you thus continue your resolve,
To sucke the sweets of sweete Philosophie.
Onely (good master) while we do admire
This vertue, and this morall discipline,
Let’s be no Stoickes, nor no stockes, I pray,
Or so devote to Aristotles checkes
As Ovid be an out-cast quite abjur’d:
Balke Lodgick with acquaintaince that you have,
And pracitse Rhetoricke in your common talke,
Musick and Poesie use, to quicken you:
No profit growes, where is no pleasure tane:
In briefe sir, studie what you most affect.
Good advice that can be lost in all the reading and study that we do for professional and other like reasons. We study these things because we have to, to be sure, but we should study them also because they give pleasure, because they stimulate our passions as well as our reason. Affection, love, these are also reasons for the study of subjects like philosophy and law, and poets such as Ovid should not be “out-cast,” if only because their work reminds us of this side or aspect of our studying, without which there is no real profit.
