Carla Kelly/Touring Shakespeare
![Carla Kelly's Miss Billings treads the Boards](images/kelly.jpg)
In Carla Kelly's Miss Billings Treads the Boards, the actress
novel takes a tour in the provinces as Kate Billings joins a
travelling theatrical troupe after missing her stop on the stage.
Rather than go to work for a lecherous employer, she agrees to play
the widow in the troupe's production of The Taming of the Shrew. Her
adventures with the troupe and the Earl whom they adopt take up most
of the novel; although The Taming of the Shrew is one of the plays in
which she participates, Kelly bucks the trend of insisting on
Shakespeare and in fact has a character write a play entitled
Well-Married which takes up the final and most important production
that the troupe stages. Kelly's references to Shakespeare provide
context rather than plot, even though Kate seems at first to be
connected by name to The Taming of the Shrew, she is occasionally
called "my super dainty Kate" (63), and one characters
announces that "'we performed to The Taming of the Shrew last
night in that village. The natives are receptive to Shakespeare, my
good man'" (88). The historical aspects of this particular novel
are tied up in the life of the touring theatrical group and its
alternative reliance on Shakespeare and on newer fare. However, the
plot and its disguises have little if anything to do with character
or narrative development.
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