The Taming of the Shrew (Vol. 31) | Lynda E. Boose (essay date 1994)
Lynda E. Boose (essay date 1994)
SOURCE: "The Taming of the Shrew, Good Husbandry, and Enclosure," in Shakespeare Reread: The Texts in New Contexts, edited by Russ McDonald, Cornell, 1994, pp. 193-225.
[In the following essay, Boose relates the play's treatment of social and sexual hierarchy to socioeconomic changes and class conflict in early modern England.]
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, what Shrew revisions have characteristically desired is not so much a way of undoing Kate's ventriloquization of male...
[The entire page is 11349 words long]
Navigate
