The Taming of the Shrew, Good Husbandry, and Enclosure - Lynda E. Boose, Dartmouth College
The Taming of the Shrew, Good Husbandry, and Enclosure
Lynda E. Boose, Dartmouth College
Readings of The Taming of the Shrew have always felt compelled to begin at the end, the site where happily-ever-after presumably begins and, in this play, the site/sight where the play produces its theatrical tour de force by offering up a prostrated woman's body to the eye—and the boot—of the stunned viewer. But whereas the play's stage history of repeated revisions clearly marks Kate's final speech as the site of textual excess,1 what Shrew revisions have characteristically desired is not so much a way of undoing Kate's ventriloquization of male superiority as a way of making it more palatable. Kate's subjugation must be endowed with signs of resistance—but a resistance that Petruchio will not recognize. She must embody the illusion of subversiveness—but simultaneously be authorized to submit to whatever self-abnegation is...
[The entire page is 14465 words long]
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