Projection in Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew
[Trivia: how many of the 3 dietary monosaccharides can you name? Hint: all 3 of them end in “-ose.”]
I’ve written a couple times about projection, i.e. tacitly assuming (often without even realizing you’re doing it) that others are operating the way you operate because you don’t think they would be any different. I think the best real-world example of this I’ve come across is when Vladimir Putin, meeting in person with George W. Bush after his re-election, made a comment about W having “fired” Dan Rather. That remarks tells us a lot more about how things work in Putin’s Russia than how Dan Rather’s network fired him for running an unvetted hoax story slandering Bush.
I realized recently that there’s another solid example, albeit from fiction, in Shakespeare’s early comedy The Taming of the Shrew (the inspiration for Kiss Me Kate and also 10 Things I Hate About You).
(I love this movie.)
In the final scene, at a dinner party straight out of Seinfeld, Petruchio remarks that his friend Hortensio is afraid of his (Hortensio’s) new wife. (The new wife is a character never named and only referred to as “Widow,” her previous status.) The Widow responds, “He that is giddy thinks the world turns round.”
The subtext is that Petruchio—himself having just married the titular Shrew, Katharina—must be afraid of his own wife and therefore suspecting Hortensio of that behavior. The Widow’s accusing him of projecting. She doubles down on that explanation when pressed (by Kate) to explain:
Your husband, being troubled with a shrew,
Measures my husband's sorrow by his woe:
And now you know my meaning.
In the context of the play, there’s a couple different facets packed into this brief moment, in a way that does redound to Shakespeare’s credit as a student of human psychology and detailed, high-resolution playwright. The Widow is, as her label suggests, an experienced person who’s acquainted enough with the way that people behave to understand projection (it took me a long time myself to understand not just the catch-all accusation of “projection” but how it is that it’s such regular behavior). She even has a solid quip explaining it. But also, that’s not the same thing as wisdom—she misapplies this, as Petruchio’s relationship with Katharina is actually predicated on a deep and mutual understanding and trust, as the play shows us.
Then again, in the context of the story, maybe we’re asking the wrong question. Maybe she’s motivated to defend the public image of her own marriage and so throws out an adage that, whether true or not, very plausibly shifts the suspicion of marriage troubles to Petruchio and Kate. Or maybe it’s her understanding of her own marriage that fear isn’t the status quo and therefore concludes that projection must be afoot. (Personally, I only really ask myself if projection is at work if someone’s accusations of another party, usually media or Dem accusations of those on the Right, just make no sense in light of the fact pattern and so something else must be going on.) Now, the world of the play does something to corroborate this idea with the results of the wager that the three husbands present subsequently make of their wives—but even so, it might not be the Widow’s sincere understanding of her own marriage that her own husband is afraid of her.
All of these considerations are attendant on the fact that we’re looking at a character in a story, and a well-crafted one at that. At all events, I think this provides a pretty good one-liner encapsulating what projection looks like—although penned in our century, it definitely would have turned out “He that is dizzy thinks the world turns round.”
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Even Wiktionary notes that the use of “giddy” to mean “dizzy” is “rare.” Normally, the word meant “crazed” or even “demon-possessed,” as evinced by its etymology, coming as it does from the word “god,” as in “a god” or “spirit.” “Dizzy” comes from an entirely different root (a Proto-Germanic one meaning “stupid”).
Weird Wikipedia
I came across the following bit in Wikipedia’s entry for actress Angela Bassett, which, as written, is quite non-linear. (Pay attention to the years.)
Bassett had her breakthrough portraying singer Tina Turner in the biopic What's Love Got to Do with It (1993), which won her a Golden Globe Award and a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress. This led to starring roles as Betty Shabazz in Malcolm X (1992), as the mother of The Notorious B.I.G. in Notorious (2009), and as Amanda Waller in Green Lantern (2011).
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Answer: Fructose (“fruit sugar”), Glucose (AKA dextrose, named after the Greek for “sweet”), and Galactose (from Greek for “milk”). If you thought of lactose, that’s a disaccharide from glucose and galactose—and if you’re wondering why they all end in “-ose,” it’s because they named glucose (discovered in 1747) glucose, and then decided it would work nicely as a suffix for sugars.