The Taming of the Shrew (Vol. 55) - Stephen Bretzius (essay date 1997)
Stephen Bretzius (essay date 1997)
SOURCE: “Feminism and Theater in The Taming of the Shrew,” in Shakespeare in Theory: The Postmodern Academy and the Early Modern Theater, The University of Michigan Press, 1997, pp. 51-62.
[In the excerpt below, Bretzius surveys the reactions of postwar feminist critics to The Taming of the Shrew.]
Whether Kate's final lord-of-creation moral in The Taming of the Shrew is tongue-in-cheek (the so-called revisionist school) or foot-in-mouth (the corresponding antirevisionist school) depends in part on the half-framed, and even half-tamed, nature of her story. For the play that Christopher Sly watches from the vantage of his unfinished Induction, The Taming of the Shrew, already represents a version, a gigantic “suppose,” of the parallel play he acts both out and in, from Petruchio's triumphant “Come, Kate, we’ll to bed” (5.2.184) and Sly's benighted “Madam, undress you,...
[The entire page is 6113 words long]
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