Christopher Sly and the Page, as His Wife 1821

Robert Smirke created this chalk drawing, titled "Christopher Sly and the Page, as His Wife," sometime between 1752 and 1845. The artwork illustrates a scene from Shakespeare's "The Taming of the Shrew", which invites us to consider how gender and class dynamics are portrayed and perceived. Here, a drunken beggar named Christopher Sly is tricked into believing he is a lord. A young male page is dressed as a woman, presented as Sly’s wife, while servants attend to his needs. The scene plays with the idea of social mobility and the performance of gender. Is Smirke critiquing the rigid social hierarchies of his time, or reinforcing them through humor? The emotional complexity of the page, forced into a performance of femininity, is palpable. The historical context of the play, written in a time when women were often excluded from the stage, adds another layer to the narrative. The drawing encourages us to reflect on the power structures inherent in representation.