[In the following essay, Heffernan analyzes the play's portrayal of the values of the emergent middle class critique of the materialistic nature of Elizabethan marriage arrangements.]

Besides the much discussed romantic wooing of Bianca and rough taming of Kate in The Taming of the Shrew, there is a less noted but steady undercurrent of suggestion that calls attention to the fact that in the society of Padua marriage is a business and that, in general, this world is one where social position and wealth count for much. The play's concern with marrying well and with social status helps create the atmosphere of the bourgeois world of substantial citizens; The Taming of the Shrew shows Shakespeare's interest in the process of choosing mates in the middle class of his day. Comparison to the contemporary The Taming of A Shrew (possibly the source play), other related literary works, and manuals of domestic relations suggests that Shakespeare has purposely broadened the burgher aspects of the play to expose a real element of Elizabethan middle class life. There is much talk of contracts, dowries, property, clothes, and the things that money can buy. While Shakespeare does not ridicule bourgeois attitudes and values as Ben Jonson would, they are, nonetheless, one of the objects of his attention. Kate and Petruchio are shown to rise above them—at least, temporarily—and to a lesser degree so are Lucentio and Bianca.

Shakespeare fully establishes Petruchio and Lucentio, suitors for the hands of Baptista's daughters, as upper middle class citizens. There are indications of the wealth of their counterparts in The Taming of A Shrew, but Shakespeare in his play gives the matter of high middle class station more prominence than does the anonymous playwright of the parallel play. When in Act I Lucentio first appears, newly arrived in Padua to begin his studies, Shakespeare has him talk about his background.

Pisa, renowned for grave citizens,
Gave me my being and my father first,
A merchant of great traffic through the
 world,
Vincentio, come of the Bentivolii. (I.i.10-13)

Shakespeare makes clear that to be a merchant's son entailed considerable social and business responsibilities, for as Tranio points out, if Lucentio pretends to be a teacher in order to gain access to Bianca, many duties will go undone:

… who shall bear your part
And be in Padua here Vincentio's son,
Keep house, and ply his book, welcome his
 friends,
Visit his countrymen and banquet them?
                                  (I.i.194-97)

Evidently Lucentio plays an important part in keeping his father's account books as well as in "public relations." That role is assumed by Tranio when he enters the intrigue for winning Bianca by pretending to be his master. When Tranio, as Lucentio, goes to seek permission of Baptista to woo Bianca, his "father's" merchant reputation serves him well, as may be seen in the following interchange:

Baptista. Lucentio is your name, of whence, I pray?

Tranio. Of Pisa, sir, son to Vincentio.

Baptista. A mighty man of Pisa; by report
I know him well. You are very welcome, sir.
                                 (II.i.102-5)

Lucentio's actual merchant background stands in contrast to the pretended merchant identity of his counter-part, Aurelius, in The Taming of A Shrew. Ostensibly to test the sincerity of the love of Kate's sister (here, Philena, one of two), Aurelius sheds his princely status, gives it to his man, Valeria, and announces,

… when we come into hir fathers house,
Tell him I am a Merchants sonne of Cestus,
That comes for trafficke unto Athens heere,
And heere sirha, I will change with you.…
                            (Scene IV.11.57-61)

But in the world of A Shrew, as in Shakespeare's play, to be a "merchant prince" is prince enough. Introduced as "a wealthie Merchants sonne of Cestus" (Scene V.1.165), Aurelius is welcomed by Philena's father, Alfonso (/Baptista), who is himself a merchant: "Your welcom sir and if my house aforde / You anything that may content your mind, / I pray you sir make bold with me" (Scene V.11.167-69).

Shakespeare is much more detailed about Petruchio's social position than the author of A Shrew is about Ferando's. Ferando has already arranged to woo Kate when A Shrew begins, so we have only an indirect report to start with, this the report of Polidor, a suitor for the hand of one of Kate's two younger sisters. Now knowing that Ferando has already arranged to court Kate, he puts him forth as one who by winning the older sister might free the younger ones to marry. He is clearly rich enough to be taken seriously: " … he is a man of wealth sufficient / And for his person worth as good as she" (Scene IV.11.48-9). That's all we are told about Ferando's social position until Alfonso publicly announces his bethrothal to Kate, "Give me thy hand, Ferando loves thee well, / And will with wealth and ease maintaine thy state. / Here Ferando, take her for thy wife" (Scene V.11.43-5).

Shakespeare, on the other hand, directly reveals details about Petruchio's station in life and financial worth; he makes the audience a witness to Petruchio's acceptance as Kate's wooer and to his contracting arrangements with Baptista. First, like Bianca's main suitor, Lucentio, he gains admission to the house by establishing his pedigree: "Petruchio is my name, Antonio's son, / A man well known throughout all Italy" (II.i.68-9). And the almost formulaic invitation to court his daughter comes—"I know him well; You are welcome for his sake" (1.70). Furthermore, while the financial arrangements are struck between Petruchio and Baptista, we gain additional information about Kate's suitor. He is one of the landed gentry:

Petruchio. Signior Baptista, my business
 asketh haste,
And every day I cannot come to woo.
You knew my father well, and in him me,
Left soly heir to all his lands and goods,
Which I have bettered rather than decreas'd.
                                  (II.i.l14-18)

There is something about the explicit obsessiveness with property and the fact of having "bettered" the land's worth through attention to "business" that suggests that Petruchio may be one of the new gentry. Petruchio's busyness hints at what Louis Wright [in Middle Class Culture in Elizabethan England, 1935] describes as the "acquisitive habits of the middle class," which in Shakespeare's day "brought much aristocratic property into their possession" as well as titles of gentility. Later in the same scene Kate's witty play with Petruchio over coats of armor may be seen as Shakespeare's glance at the controversy surrounding the right of the mercantile classes to claim coats of armor:

Petruchio: I swear I'll cuff you, if you strike again.

Katharina: So may you lose your arms.
If you strike me, you are no gentleman,
And if no gentleman, why then no arms.

Petruchio: A herald, Kate? (II.i.220-24)

The very mention of arms in this punning passage suggests that Petruchio is one of the new landed gentry who has acquired something he would not wish to lose.

The actual courtships of Kate and Bianca reveal much about middle class domestic relations. Nevill Coghill [in Essays and Studies 3, 1950] is fairly representative of critical opinion in characterizing Petruchio as "a brute fortune-hunter." The characterization is Shakespeare's invention, though a glance at related literature on the shrew theme and at contemporary marriage manuals is enough to indicate that Shakespeare is merely exaggerating a type found in middle class Elizabethan life. Petruchio comes on the scene in Act I a declared adventurer, out to find a rich wife:

… wealth is burthen of my wooing dance
                                      (I.ii.68)

I come to wive it wealthily in Padua;
If wealthily, then happily in Padua. (I.ii.75-6)

Even after Hortensio, one of Bianca's suitors, explains that Kate "is intolerable curst / And shrewd and froward" (I.ii.89-90), Petruchio is determined to have her:

… thou know'st not gold's effect. Tell me her father's name, and 'tis enough;
For I will board her, though she chide as loud
As thunder when the clouds in autumn crack.
 (I.ii.93-6)

And when Petruchio comes to settle the financial arrangements with Kate's father, Baptista, he comes right to the point: "Then tell me, if I get your daughter's love, / What dowry shall I have with her to wife?" (II.i.119-20). Baptista's answer being sufficient, Petruchio closes the deal with his offer that

… I'll assure her of
Her widowhood, be it that she survive me,
In all my lands and leases whatsoever.
Let specialties be therefore drawn between us,
That covenants may be kept on either hand.
 (II.i.123-27)

The cut-and-dried tone of these transactions bears out Maurice Ashley's observation [in The Stuarts in Love: With Some Reflections on Love and Marriage in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 1963] that "most marriages among the landed gentry were unquestionably matter-of-fact property deals.… They were the result of hard bargaining, ending with the engrossing of deeds in a lawyer's office." Lucrative money arrangements were clearly a necessary prelude to Ferando's wooing Kate in A Shrew, though we do not witness the actual negotiations and they are, therefore, given less prominence. It is with obvious satisfaction that Ferando, on his way to court Kate, reports to his friend Polidor that her father "hath promisde me six thousand crownes / If I can win her once to be my wife" (Scene IV.11.88-9). A similar note of monetary contentment is struck by the bridegroom on his wedding day in A Merry Jest of a Shrewd and Curst Wife Lapped in Morel's Skin, a ballad frequently mentioned in connection with both The Shrew and A Shrew: "Now shall I receyve an heape of golde, / Of poundes many one, and much goodys besyde."

Marriage handbooks, prized sources of advice on questions of domestic relationships, were found in many middle class Elizabethan libraries. Part of their appeal to the middle class citizen, no doubt, was the attention they gave to the problems of the family unit, the stability of which "made his goods safe and gave his accumulated possessions continuity." Among the matters addressed by these manuals is the question of arranging marriage contracts. In connection with Petruchio's dealings with Baptista it is interesting to note several representative comments which consider the arrangement of profitable marriage alliances. For example, the preacher Charles Gibbon, in a marriage manual titled A Work Worth Reading (1591), complains that in his day the aim of marriages is to match a rich man with a rich woman, whereas "The time was when rich men would have taken poore women to their wiues, and yet never made any respect of their portions, as Boaz did Ruth. He was a man of great authoritie and riches (Ruth 2.1.) as some thinke iudge of Israel (Judg. 12.8), she a poore woman, that gleaned vpon his land for her liuing." That there was a need to make the point indicates how typical Petruchio's greedy motives were of the prospective middle class husbands of the time. Striking a similar note, Thomas Becon complains, " … in these our dayes fewe mary in the feare and loue of god, while they all hunt and seke after mony, riches, welth.… If mony be present, nothing is absent." The greed of parents, eager to secure the most profitable marriage alliances for their children was equally a target of the marriage manuals. In Tell-Trothes New-Yeares Gift (1593), a work of great interest so far as the family life of the middle class is concerned, Robin Goodfellow, just back from hell, relates to TellTroth the devil's boast that jealousy is one of the chief means of bringing people to his domain. There follows an account of the causes of jealousy and of unhappy marital relations, first of which is marriage for money:

The first cause (quoth he) is a constrained love, when as parents do by compulsion coople two bodies, neither respecting the ioyning of their hartes, nor hauinge any care of the continuance of their wellfare, but more regardinge the linkinge of wealth and money together then of loue with honesty.…

While Baptista negotiates with Petruchio without having consulted Kate, he does make a gesture towards making Kate's love the final condition of the marriage, for he tells Petruchio that the legal papers cannot be drawn up until "the special thing is well obtain'ed, / That is, her love …" (II.i.128-29). But Baptista is not truly interested in whether Kate's love has been won or not. When Petruchio lies, asserting that Kate has fallen in love with him at first sight, Baptista grabs at the match even though he doubts the unlikely claim—"I know not what to say" (II.i.318). Furthermore, Baptista actually doesn't seem too concerned with the financial details of Kate's marriage either. Relieved to have a reasonable suitor for the shrew, he doesn't haggle at all. Gremio, in fact, an elderly suitor for Bianca's hand who has witnessed the negotiations, observes, "Was ever match clapp'd up so suddenly?" (II.i.325).

Quite otherwise are Baptista's negotiations on behalf of his younger daughter, Bianca. Indeed, he signals that he has turned his attention to the marriage of his other daughter by referring to his altered stance. Now he will really get down to business. Comparing himself to a merchant venturer, he turns to Bianca's two suitors, old Gremio and Tranio (as Lucentio): "Faith, gentlemen, now I play a merchant's part / And venture madly on a desperate mart" (II.i.326-27). Baptista creates a contest of bidding between Tranio and Gemio by stating: "'Tis deeds must win the prize, and he of both / That can assure my daughter greatest dower / Shall have Bianca's love" (II.i.342-44). Gremio enters into the competition by evoking the picture of a house, which Shakespeare must have intended as the quintessence of the new luxuries, new comforts, and new pleasures that the middle classes had come to enjoy in his day:

First, as you know, my house within the city
Is richly furnished with plate and gold,
Basins and ewers to lave her dainty hands;
My hangings all of Tyrian tapestry;
In ivory coffers I have stuff d my crowns;
In cypress chests my arras counterpoints,
Costly apparel, tents, and canopies,
Fine linen, Turkey cushions boss'd with pearl,
Valens of Venice gold in needle-work.
                                 (II.i.346-53)

The passage resembles the Marlovian catalogue found in A Shrew wherein the supposed father of a suitor for Kate's sister tries to impress the girl's father with his worth:

If unto Cestus you do send your ships,
Myselfe will fraught them with Arabian silkes,
Rich affrick spices, Arras counterpoines,
Muske, Cassia, sweet smelling Ambergreece,
Pearle, currol, christall, jilt, ivorie
To gratulate the favors of my son.
                           (Scene XVI.11.12-18)

Both passages reflect a real burgher interest in living grandly and heighten the two plays' pictures of middle class milieus. The same aspect of contemporary taste is similarly captured in a prose work by William Harrison, The Description of England (1577): "Great provision of tapestrie, Turkie worke, pewter, brasse, fine linen, and thereto costlie cupboards of plate" filled the houses of "knights, gentlemen, merchantmen, and some other wealthie citizens."

Tranio more than matches Gremio's extravagant offers and to his triumphant advancement of an argosy—"What have I choked you with an argosy?" (II.i.378)—Tranio retorts with his winning bluff, "Gremio, 'tis known my father hath no less / Than three great argosies, besides two galliasses / And twelve tight galleys. These I will assure her" (II.i.377-79), adding to himself, "And twice as much what e'er thou off rest next" (II.i.380). The extent to which Tranio has entered into the auction spirit Baptista initiated is best captured in the gambling language of his final comment on Gremio, "I have fac'd it with a card of ten" (II.i.405).

The business of vying for the beloved is a farcical underscoring of the crass materialism at the heart of middle class marriage arrangements. There is no scene of contending suitors in A Shrew; the episode is entirely Shakespeare's invention. Shakespeare may have found the seed of this scene, however, in a competition that appears in one of his sources for the underplot, George Gascoigne's The Supposes. In this play there is a competition between an old doctor, Cleander, and Erastrato for the hand of the heroine, Polinesia. Cleander needs constant reassurance from the parasite, Pasiphilo, that Polinesia's father will favor his suit: "whose welth? whose virtue? whose skill? or whose estimation can be compared to yours in this Citie?" He is, however, as unsuccessful as Gremio in Shakespeare's play. But Shakespeare makes the possibility of marriage to the amans senex very real. Baptista, convinced that Tranio can offer Bianca the most, settles on him, but not without stipulating that a binding legal contract be settled. Otherwise Bianca is to go "to Signior Gremio" (II.i.397). Thus Gremio is kept in reserve lest the "supposed Lucentio" not make good his bargain. Bianca could well be married to an old man without her consent.

A father like Baptista who stands ready to sell his daughter to the highest bidder illustrates the auctioneer tactics of parents who are criticized in Elizabethan marriage manuals. For example, we come upon the following passage in The Passionate Morrice, the sequel to Tell-Trothes New-Yeares Gift: "Fie, fie! marriages for the most part, are at this day so made, as looke how the butcher bies his cattle, so wil men sel their children. He that bids most, shal speed soonest.…" And we find Thomas Becon using the same cattle imagery in his Boke of Matrymony, Part two: "many parents at this day … do so handle their children as the Grasier doth his oxen and shepe, for as the one maketh sale of his beastes to such as wyl geue moste, so likewise do the othere of theyr children. Who offereth moste, he beareth awaye the ringe.…"

Since "old Gremio" is kept in reserve in case "supposed Lucentio" default on his generous offer, it is clear that Baptista gives no thought to the compatibility of the marriage partners. This compounds the callousness of selling Bianca to the highest bidder. Both arranging marriages for lucre's sake and indifference to matching the natures of the couple are subjects addressed in books of matrimonial conduct. Turning again to Thomas Becon's Boke of Matrymony, we find the following observation: "Too much wretched are those parentes, which enforce theyr children for lucres sake vnto suche maryages, as they from the verye hearte abhore." Charles Gibbon strikes a similar note when, in a debate between the characters Philogus and Tychicus, he has the former say, against the argument that children cannot match without their parents' consent, "Alas, you doo not consider the innumerable inconveniences that bee incident to those parties which bee brought together more for lucre than loue, more for goods than good will, more by constraint than consent, nay more than that, you doe little way the inequalitee of yeares, the contrarietie of natures between age and youth.…"

Lucentio and Bianca are made to triumph over the commercial machinations surrounding the arrangements for Bianca's wedding. Baptista, having made the final financial negotiations with a man he supposes to be Vincentio, Lucentio's father, sends a messenger to Bianca to inform her that "Lucentio's father is arriv'd in Padua, / And how she's like to be Lucentio's wife" (IV.iv.65-6). But at the very moment the arranging of an assurance takes place between Baptista and the supposed Vincentio, the real Lucentio leaves to elope with Bianca before "the priest, clerk, and some sufficient honest witnesses" (IV.iv.94-5). Ready to evade ordinary bourgeois expectations, he says,

'Twere good methinks to steal our marriage,
Which once perform'd, let all the world say
 no,
I'll keep mine own, despite of all the world.
  (III.ii.140-42)

And Lucentio is quite right. Even clandestine espousal, not a secret wedding ceremony, would have been binding, for as William Heale points out [in An Apologie for Women, 1609], if a woman proceeds to espouse herself without her father's consent, she is "vnhonestly espoused," but she is lawfully espoused just the same. Furthermore, had Bianca obeyed her father and married the "supposed Lucentio," two impediments would have stood in the way of a valid marriage which might have served later as grounds for annulment: "error of person (when the one you marry is not the one you thought him to be)" and "forced matrimoney." The elopement is unique to Shakespeare's play, though a minor rebellion against parental authority is found in A Shrew. There Aurelius, Lucentio's counterpart, marries below his station without his father's consent.

Kate and Petruchio rise above the middle class commercialism of their marital arrangements even more dramatically, for the taming process, through which Petruchio gradually wins Kate's love and respect, involves flying in the face of middle class formalities attaching to clothes, the decorum of weddings, and the rules of hospitality. Initially it appears that Petruchio looks forward to a substantial bourgeois wedding: "Sunday comes apace. / We will have rings and things, and fine array" (II.i.322-23). But he turns these expectations on their head. This is Biondello's description of Petruchio as he approaches—late—on his wedding day:

Petruchio is coming in a new hat and an old
jerkin; a pair of old breeches thrice turn'd;
a pair of boots that have been candle-cases,
one buckled, another lac'd; an old rusty sword
ta'en out of the town armory, with a broken
 hilt … (III.ii.43-7)

Even Petruchio's servant is badly set out—"a monster, a very monster in apparel, and not like a Christian footboy or a gentleman's lackey" (III.ii.69-71). Baptista calls the clothes not merely inappropriate for the wedding day but a shame to his station:

First were we sad, fearing you would not
  come,
Now sadder, that you come so unprovided.
Fie, doff this habit, shame to your estate,
An eye-sore to our solemn festival!
                                    (III.ii.100-4)

The matter of proper clothes is serious not only to Baptista but to Tranio who offers more proper attire: "See not your bride in these unreverent robes, / Go to my chamber, put on clothes of mine" (III.ii.112-13). But Petruchio refuses and when Baptista complains about Petruchio's marrying Kate in such unseemly clothes, he speaks up for plainness:

To me she's married, not unto my clothes.
Could I repair what she will wear in me,
As I can change these poor accouterments,
'Twere well for Kate, and better for myself.
                                (III.ii.117-20)

That Petruchio's behavior has not been a mere frolic is clear to Tranio who observes wisely that "He hath some meaning in his mad attire" (III.ii.124). To be sure, the careless dress is part of Petruchio's scheme for taming the shrew, but it is also more than that. When Petruchio stands up for plainness, he reacts against the abuses of the class to which Baptista and Kate belong, and, in the particular instance of the church wedding, he appears to share the attitude of Myles Coverdale who complains [in The Christian State of Matrimony, 1575] that people attending wedding ceremonies enter the church "as it were into a house of marchaundise to lay forth their wares.… And even as they come to the church, so go they from the church again, light, nice, in shamefull pompe.…" Petruchio seems to have followed in part Coverdale's recommendation that the wedding be attended "without pomp … in … honest raiment, without pride."

The travesty of conventional behavior continues with Petruchio's wild manner during the ceremony. Gremio reports that the groom's swearing so shocked the priest that he dropped his prayerbook and that Petruchio "took him such a cuff when the stooped to pick it up, that both it and the priest "down fell" (III.ii.164). While tradition decreed that a cup of muscatel wine with cakes or sops were shared by the bride, groom, and company, Petruchio drank off the wine, threw the sops in the sexton's face, and kissed Kate with such "a clamorous smack" that Gremio left the church "for very shame" (III.ii.178,180). Finally, Petruchio, taking Kate, rudely leaves the ceremony without attending the reception, an especially rude breach of etiquette since earlier in the play, when he left Baptista to make preparations, he told him to arrange a grand affair:

… I will unto Venice
To buy apparel 'gainst the wedding-day.
Provide the feast, father, and bid the guests.
                                   (II.i.314-16)

Petruchio's failure to attend the reception is an abuse of bourgeois convention to which even a Puritan would be sensitive. William Gouge [in Domestical Duties, 1626] declared that the celebrating of marriages with feasting and merrymaking is in the nature of a civil ceremony and "very requisite":

Though vpon the forenamed consecrating of mariage it bee in regard to the substance thereof fully consummate, yet for the greater solemnity of so honourable a thing, it is very requisite that further there be added a ciuill celebration of it: vnder which I comprise all those lawfull customes that are vsed for the setting forth of the outward solemnitie thereof, as meeting friends, accompanying the Bridegroome and Bride both to and from the Church, putting on best appareil, feasting, with other tokens of reioycing.…

Clearly Petruchio's flaunting of conventional behavior is not indicative of a permanent rebellion against the values of his class. Gremio's questions to Curtis on arriving at Petruchio's country estate give some notion of the style in which life ordinarily proceeds there, particularly on festive occasions: "Where's the cook? Is supper ready, the house trimm'd, rushes strew'd, cobwebs swept, the servingmen in their new fustian, [their] white stockings, and every officer his wedding garment on? Be the jacks fair within, the Gills fair without, the carpets laid, and every thing in order?" (IV.i.45-51). And Petruchio's own words to Kate, as she hungrily eats the meat finally given her after being virtually starved, suggest that he retains a clear sense of what his class's standard is:

Kate, eat apace. And now, my honey love,
We will return to thy father's house,
And revel it bravely as the best,
With silken coats and caps and golden rings,
With ruffs and cuffs, and fardingales, and
things. (IV.iii.52-6)

But while the taming proceeds, these dainties are dangled only to be snatched away. When a haberdasher and tailor come on the scene offering caps and elegant gowns, Petruchio finds fault with their wares and, to Kate's chagrin, sends them on their way. Settling on the virtue of plainness as he did in the church scene, Petruchio declares,

… we will unto your father's
Even in these honest mean habiliments;
Our purses shall be proud, our garments poor,
For 'tis the mind that makes the body rich.
                               (IV.iii.169-72)

Ferando's words at this point in the action in A Shrew represent one of the few verbal echoes in the play:

Come Kate, wee now will go see thy fathers
 house
Even in these honest means abilliments,
Our purses shal be rich, our garments plaine.
                           (Scene XIII.11.53-5)

Otherwise the taming scenes in A Shrew contain just the bare outlines of Shakespeare's plot. Ferando comes ill attired to church, but less is made of it and there is no description of his behavior during the wedding ceremony. The hasty retreat from the reception is handled more briefly as is the arrival at Ferando's country house and the scene with the tailor.

It is fitting that Petruchio's taming includes as one of its central elements an attack on certain middle class values and conventions, for as Muriel Bradbrook has stated [in Shakespeare-Jahrbuch 94, 1958], "money helps to set the shrew where she belongs, within the merchant class." Nonetheless, Petruchio remains essentially a man of his class, however sincere his standing up for plainness may sound. In this he is perhaps akin to more virulent social critics, satirists like Shakespeare's Thersites and Ben Jonson's Macilente who, while attacking vice, contain within themselves many of the faults they censure in others. Though it might seem that social criticism would be more effective if the character who delivers it is the moral opposite of what he condemns, the fact is that the satirical tradition is full of "superior," yet defective critics. I do not mean to argue, however, that Petruchio is a satirist, but merely that some confusion may attend the fact that his is a critical voice arising out of a nature which contains contradictions. Marrying well, for example, remains a value he does not give up. Note his announcement to the real Vincentio, met on the return trip to Padua:

Thy son by this hath married. Wonder not,
Nor be grieved; she is of good esteem,
Her dowry wealthy, and of worthy birth;
Beside, so qualified as may beseem
The spouse of any noble gentlemen.
                                 (IV.v.63-7)

The arranged marriage may have been evaded, but the romantic one is as lucrative and brings with it a woman of as high station as any calculating arrangement might. Indeed, Petruchio closes the play as he entered it, joining love and money. He has won the wager: Kate comes obediently at his call while the wives of Hortensio and Lucentio sit talking. Besides, Baptista has given him twenty thousand crowns, "Another dowry to another daughter" (V.ii.114) to honor Kate's new personality. With reason Petruchio can say boldly in an aside to Lucentio: "'Twas I won the wager, though you won the white, / And being a winner, God give you good night!" (V.ii.186-87). One implication of the play is certainly that life in this opulent world of Padua will go on in much the same way as before. But the abuses that Shakespeare exposes in this examination of bourgeois marriage patterns and social values have not been resolved, and are too serious to be dispersed in laughter.