The Taming of the Shrew (Vol. 31) | Margaret Loftus Ranald (essay date 1974)
Margaret Loftus Ranald (essay date 1974)
SOURCE: "The Manning of the Haggard: or The Taming of the Shrew," in Essays in Literature, Vol. 1, No. 2, Fall, 1974, pp. 149-65.
[In the following essay, Ranald traces Shakespeare's use of imagery drawn from falconry in The Taming of the Shrew to argue that the relationship between Katherine and Petruchio provides a picture of marriage as a "compact between … two mutually inter-dependent personalities working together as they hunt through life. "]
The Taming of the Shrew is, in George Hibbard's phrase [in Tennessee Studies in Language and Literature 2, 1946], "a play about marriage in Elizabethan England," and also unique in the Shakespearean comic canon in dealing with the behavior of husband and wife after the marriage ceremony. At the same time it also offers a distinctly subversive approach to an antifeminist genre, that of the wifebeating farce. In this...
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