The Taming of the Shrew (Vol. 31) | Peter Berek (essay date 1988)
Peter Berek (essay date 1988)
SOURCE: "Text, Gender, and Genre in The Taming of the Shrew," in "Bad" Shakespeare: Revaluations of the Shakespeare Canon, edited by Maurice Charney, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1988, pp. 91-104.
[In the following essay, Berek argues against an ironic reading of the play's enactment of female submission, but also suggests that Shakespeare's choice of farce as the genre of the play "reveals his fundamental uneasiness about such roles early in his theatrical career. "]
Whether or not The Taming of the Shrew is Shakespeare's worst play, it surely leads the canon in bad qualities. The Shrew has the badness of earliness—believing in artistic development, we use its faults as a foil for the accomplishments of later plays. It has a bad genre—though Frye and Barber have made comedy respectable, farce is an inferior mode. As its very title flamboyantly demonstrates, The Taming of...
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