The Taming of the Shrew (Vol. 64) | Shirley Nelson Garner (essay date 1988)
Shirley Nelson Garner (essay date 1988)
SOURCE: “The Taming of the Shrew: Inside or Outside the Joke?” in “Bad” Shakespeare: Revaluations of the Shakespeare Canon, edited by Maurice Charney, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1988, pp. 105-19.
[In the essay that follows, Garner maintains that whether people view The Taming of the Shrew as a “good” or “bad” play depends on where they see themselves in terms of the play's central joke, which Garner describes as one directed against women and written to entertain a misogynist audience.]
If you had grown up hearing that Shakespeare is the greatest writer in the English language (or at least one of the two or three greatest) and that he is a “universal” poet, who speaks across time and national (even cultural) boundaries, you—especially if you were a woman student—would be shocked to study him in a college or university in the 1980s and to read The...
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