[In the following essay, Downs-Gamble makes use of parallels between Petruchio's "taming" methods and the educational methods promoted by Renaissance humanists to analyze the meaning of Kate's submission.]

Ay, mistress, and Petruchio is the master,
That teacheth tricks eleven and twenty long,
To Tame a shrew and charm her chattering
 tongue.
                                 4.2.56-58

knowledge of the oppressor
this is the oppressor's language
Yet I need it to talk to you
        Adrienne Rich, "The Burning of Paper
                         Instead of Children"

A Pleasant Conceited Historie, called The Taming of a Shrew (1594), like the more familiar Shakespearean The Taming of the Shrew (1623), relates a battle between the sexes. In both plays, a father burdened with unmarried daughters will not allow the numerous suitors to woo the younger and milder daughter until the older and forward Katherine (Kate/Katherina) has been suitably wed. The suitors to the younger are relieved to find Ferando/Petruchio capable of taming the shrewish Kate, who eventually displays her submission in an argument for "natural" order which demands a woman's hand be placed beneath her husband's foot.

More striking than the plays' similarities, however, are their disparities, most apparent at those points when their plots correspond. Reading The Shrew alongside A Shrew reveals the extent to which the "taming" techniques in Shakespeare's play parallel the educational programs advocated by Renaissance humanists. Ferando's coercion of his willful wife Kate in A Shrew contrasts sharply with Petruchio's "education" of Kate in The Shrew. While both husbands tame their wives, Petruchio, rhetor and orator in The Shrew, "educates" Katherine, simultaneously refiguring unruly woman, humanist pupil, and uncontrolled language. The other suitors in The Shrew disguise themselves as masters of various liberal arts to gain proximity to Bianca but, proving their ineptitude as humanist scholars, determine their subsequent failure as lords, while Petruchio, orator-extraordinaire, teaches Kate, in a series of violent lessons, the value of a humanist education. Desiring control over her own words, Kate rails against Petruchio's education: "I will be free, / Even to the uttermost, as I please, in words." (IV.iii.77-80) To be "free … in words," quite distinct from free as words, was, in a very real sense, the promise of Renaissance humanism. But because a substantive philosophical transformation supposedly accompanies rhetorical mastery, Katherine is trapped within a gendered paradox. Kate can only be free "in words" if she is educated, but to be educated is to be tamed.

Cicero's focus on the transformation of the pupil into vir eloquentissimus, literally "most eloquent man" but normally translated as "orator," shaped the educational schemes of Rudolph Agricola and Desiderius Erasmus, who subsequently influenced the pedagogy and ideology of English educators such as Roger Ascham and Thomas Elyot. Eloquence, oratorical skill, was regarded as the single most important attribute for a civil servant: "Alas you will be ungentle gentlemen, if you be no scholars: you will do your prince but simple service, you will stand your country but in slender stead, you will bring yourselves but small preferment, if you be no scholars."

Though Thomas Elyot, in The Govenour (1531), emphasizes the importance of educating the boy for his place in public life, Roger Ascham, in The Schoolmaster (1570), includes women among his pupils. Since Ascham uses the noble figures of Lady Jane Grey and Elizabeth I as examples of female students, he may not have meant to include generic Woman. However, the classical model that descended through Erasmus to English educators implicitly connected eloquence and moral superiority. As moral inferiors, women were targeted by numerous pedagogists for refiguration under humanism.

But the union of eloquence, specifically public eloquence, with Pauline Christianity complicated the position of female pupils at yet another ideological level.

Though women were not entirely excluded from humanist education, at least the rationale of Erasmus in promoting study for women focuses on the power of education to control "the whole soul," to impress rules, and to dispatch idleness:

The distaff and spindle are in truth the tools of all women and suitable for avoiding idleness.… Even people of wealth and birth train their daughters to weave tapestries or silken cloths.… It would be better if they taught them to study, for study busies the whole soul.… It is not only a weapon against idleness but also a means of impressing the best precepts upon a girl's mind and of leading her to virtue.

Eramus wants to turn women from textile to textual study, from the spinning of wool to the spinning of words—a metaphorical conflation to deflect "idleness." But the control of the female "soul", and the "impression" of "virtue" upon the traditionally uncontrollable female are themselves metaphors for the capacities of rhetorical training; the master orator controlled and impressed passionate language with "virtue." The conflation of Woman and language embedded in the masculine rhetorical tradition of Renaissance humanism imposed upon female scholars a nonnegotiable position as subject, object, and medium of study.

The literary model, The Taming of the Shrew, is a Renaissance artifact that promotes humanism as a device for taming the woman-language dyad; but as un-controlled language and passionate woman, Kate exposes the paradox of vir eloquentissimus. As humanist pupil, Katherine's inability to re-gender herself, how-ever she may refigure herself, determines her eventual submission to masculine authority, Petruchio, the orator-philosopher. No such rhetorical justification for female suppression exists in the earlier play, but its absence in A Shrew elucidates its presence in The Shrew.

In the opening scene, we listen as Lucentio explains to his servant Tranio the reason for their journey to Padua. He has come to the "nursery of arts." (I.i.2)

Here let us breathe, and haply institute
A course of learning and ingenious studies

And therefore, Tranio, for the time I study,
Virtue and that part of philosophy
Will I apply that treats of happiness
By virtue specially to be achiev'd.
                                (I.i.8-9, 17-20)

According to the humanist tradition, an arduous training in grammar was followed by instruction in formal rhetoric. As Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton have pointed out [in From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe, 1986], "in theory this was a rounded education in philosophy as well as expression." Lucentio has completed his grammatical instruction, and even the initial instruction in rhetoric, but he clearly seeks the training classically supplied by the rhetor.

Tranio's answer to Lucentio firmly unites the methodology of humanism with the appearance of his master, while urging him toward lighter entertainment:

Mi perdonato, gentle master mine;
I am, in all affected as yourself,
Glad that you thus continue your resolve
To suck the sweets of sweet philosophy.
Only, good master, while we do admire
This virtue and this moral discipline,
Lets be no Stoics nor no stocks, I pray,
Or so devote to Aristotle's checks
As Ovid be an outcast quite abjur'd.
Balk logic with acquaintance that you have,
And practice rhetoric in your common talk,
Music and poesy use to quicken you,
The mathematics, and the metaphysics,
Fall to them as you find your stomach serves
 you:
No profit grows where is no pleasure ta'en.
In brief, sir study what you most affect.
                  (I.i.25-40, emphasis added)

Though the Riverside editors gloss "study what you most affect" as meaning study that is "most pleasing" (114, n. 40), I would argue that what Lucentio most "affects" is his study, the outward manifestation of a humanist male. Lucentio is a living example of the success of his education, but that education is incomplete. This becomes increasingly important as the play progresses. Lucentio's education, because of its incompleteness, denies him moral wisdom and causes lapses in his judgment. Lucentio's, and surprisingly also Tranio's, goodly speech is only the external appearance of a lord, not as is the case with Petruchio, the state itself.

Lucentio's failure to instruct his own pupil, Bianca, is the final indication that Lucentio is still a student rather than a master of moral philosophy. Bianca's failure to attend to her husband when he calls her at the end of the play displays her own incorrect understanding of her place, but also emphasizes his inadequate preparation to instruct her in her duties. Both Gremio—"she's too rough for me" (I.i.55)—and Hortensio—"No mates for you / Unless you were of gentler, milder mould" (I.i.59-60)—acknowledge themselves inadequate to the task of instructing Katherine. But Lucentio, the product of humanism, should recognize that Kate is in fact the superior pupil. His failure to do so reflects, in part, his incomplete education, also amply displayed as he shifts so quickly from philosopher to lover at the sight of Bianca. Tranio questions the too rapid transition: "I pray, sir, tell me, is it possible / That love should of a sudden take such hold?" (I.i.146-47) In case the audience misses the reason for Lucentio's sudden change, Shakespeare notes it twice: "while idly I stood looking on / I found the effect of love in idleness." (I.i.150-51, emphasis mine) Ascham, Elyot, and as noted above, Erasmus, consider idleness a danger to the state. In idleness Lucentio is drawn from philosophy to carnal desire, from, it might appear, matters of state to the domestic sphere. Idleness also manifests itself in lapses in judgment. Lucentio makes the mistake, again warned of by both Ascham and Elyot in reference to the Italianate scholars who go abroad accompanied only by their servants, of asking his man Tranio for advice: "Counsel me, Tranio, for I know thou canst / Assist me, Tranio, for I know thou wilt." (I.i. 157-58) In Italy, in the company of an inferior person, Lucentio is doomed to marry the shrew instead of the sheep, having mistaken sheep for shrew.

The corresponding scene in A Shrew runs quite differently. While conversing with Polidor, Aurelius (Lucentio) sees three daughters walking with their father; the master/servant exchange is replaced by an exchange between "two yoong Gentlemen." (6) The individual object of desire (Bianca) is replaced by Aurelius' collective "delight in these faire dames," and only made specific by Polidor's information that the oldest daughter (Kate) is a shrew, and the youngest, Emelia (a third sister, corresponding to the widow in The Shrew), has promised herself to Polidor. (7) By default, rather than by allure, Aurelius chooses to woo Philema (var. Phylema). The women are passively chosen rather than actively seductive in A Shrew; though the men are the source of activity in both plays, here the women are not responsible for male action, nor are they blamed for distracting men from the more important matters of their education and service to the state.

In The Shrew, Lucentio's and Tranio's "inventions meet and jump in one." (I.i.190) Lucentio "will be school-master / And undertake the teaching of the maid." (I.i.192-93) For Lucentio to refigure himself as "schoolmaster," Tranio must play Lucentio, and he disguises himself as a lord. This is but one of an evolving series of pretenses in which outward appearance is transformed. The Renaissance conflict between "being and seeming" is central to the pedagogical writings of Ascham and Elyot, as it is to the practical expression of this conflict within The Shrew. Even education and eloquence, especially when turned away from their rightful duty to the state and used instead to gain the object of carnal desire, are not in themselves assurance that a scholar has achieved a position of moral superiority.

While Lucentio operates in concert with his inferiors, Petruchio and Grumio are polarized characters. There is no mistaking master and servant in this instance. Both verbal and intellectual disparities highlight their first appearance on the stage. Petruchio's rhetorical abilities are clear even before Grumio praises his master for his "rope-tricks":

She may perhaps call him half a score knaves or so. Why, that's nothing; and he begin once, he'll rail in his rope-tricks. I'll tell you what, sir, and she stand him but a little, he will throw a figure in her face, and so disfigure her with it, that she shall have no more eyes to see withal than a cat. You know him not, sir.

(I.ii.110-16, emphasis added)

Petruchio's rhetorical skill, at least from the viewpoint of a servant, is something very like magic, with the power to "dis-figure" language. Though surely Petruchio's skill will confound and transform "Katherine the curst" from shrewish woman to sheepish wife, from witty, aggressive pupil to scholar, when he "disfigure[s]" the "face" of language with a rhetorical "figure," Katherine is the feminized language whose features will be disfigured.

Hortensio, who might be listening and learning about Petruchio's powers, is instead concerned with his own disguise as "a schoolmaster / Well seen in music, to instruct Bianca." (I.ii.133-134) Among an ever-escalating number of suitors disguised as instructors and servants disguised as lords, Petruchio stands alone as the only adept philosopher. When the schoolmasters are presented to Baptista for his daughters, Petruchio alone, and without need of disguise, successfully manipulates circumstances to his will. Accused of being "blunt" and "[dis]-orderly" (II.i.45), Petruchio nevertheless proceeds to gift Baptista with the disguised Hortensio, to praise his host's daughter, Katherine, and to identify his geographical and familial associations before anyone has the opportunity to intervene. In this scene, only one suitor has the skill to actually instruct. Once alone, Petruchio considers Katherine's potential responses to prepare himself for his pupil, understanding that the student will determine his approach to her instruction:

Say that she rail, why then I'll tell her plain
She sings sweetly as a nightengale;
Say that she frown, I'll say she looks as clear
As morning roses newly washed with dew;
Say she be mute, and will not speak a word,
Then I'll commend her volubility,
And say she uttereth piercing eloquence
                                (II.i.170-176)

As master rhetor, Petruchio considers the various approaches and figures which he might employ to persuade the pupil, silence the woman, and control female language. Petruchio's "plain" speech controls chaotic feminine language, and Katherine's railing, by transforming her words into the sweet song of Philomela. He will ignore her own expression, reconstructing it as traditional female topos, "morning roses newly washed with dew." But most pointedly here, he will translate female silence into "piercing eloquence"—his own. There is, significantly, no corresponding scene for this one in A Shrew, no overt plotting to manipulate pupil, woman, and words.

But Petruchio, the master, also teaches us as he teaches Kate the internal construction of what it is to be a lord, by teaching "eloquence" through an understanding that he must first commend her eloquence. Petruchio, or rather Shakespeare, has learned from pedagogists like Thomas Elyot—"I wode nat haue them inforced by violence to lerne … [but] to be swetely allured therto with praises and suche praty gyftes as children delite in"—and Roger Ascham—"there is no such whetstone to sharpen a good wit and encourage a will to learning as praise." Both Ascham and Elyot use Quintilian's instructions to the potential tutor, Ascham paraphrasing Quintilian: "[Bad Schoolmasters], when they meet with a hard-witted scholar, they rather break him than bow him, rather mar him than mend him." Kate, though refigured by her instruction, is not broken.

The subsequent, introductory battle between Katherine and Petruchio/Ferando differs considerably from one version to another. In A Shrew Ferando tells her in the space of the sixteen-line scene little more than "I know thou lou'st me well." Kate's questions, "Was euer seene so grosse an asse as this?" and "Why father what do you meane to do with me / To give me thus vnto this brainsick man," though humorous, do not rely on the pretended misunderstandings and punning found in The Shrew.

Though told that she was "rough," Petruchio finds Kate "pleasant, gamesome, passing courteous / But slow in speech," and then asks, "Why does the world report that Kate doth limp?" (II.i.243, 245-6, 252) In the middle of his false critique of her eloquence, this is no shift in subject, but a continuation of it: "O let me see thee walk. Thou dost not halt." (II.i.256) Slower in speech than he, perhaps, Kate's "gait" is yet declared "princely" (II.i.259):

Did ever Dian so become a grove
As Kate this chamber with her princely gait?
O, be thou Dian, and let her be Kate,
And then let Kate be chaste, and Dian
 sportful.
                                 (II.i.258-61)

Katherine's chastity is a matter of some concern to Petruchio. Her verbal skill implies wantonness. Petruchio's pun on Katherine's being both chaste and chased demands at once her closure to the world and her openness to him. The end of this first exchange includes an important moment of revelation for the student, both Kate and the audience:

Kate: Where did you study all this goodly speech?

Pet: It is extempore, from my mother-wit.

(II.i.262-63)

Petruchio's mastery of "extempore," and the Renaissance assumption that extempore was possible if "mother-wit" had been adequately ingrained through imitatio, displays itself in the course of The Shrew. But imitatio was not the goal, only a means toward achieving the goal of a humanist education.

As Petruchio teaches Katherine moral philosophy and eloquence, he denies her food, drink, and sleep, specifically identified by Elyot as potential excesses that hinder scholarship. Though pretending to offer Katherine elegant apparel, Petruchio never intends that she shall "deck [her] body with … ruffling treasure." (IV.iii.60) When he denies her the external trappings of new clothes, both her feminine and verbal ornaments, Petruchio's lesson is philosophical:

Well, come, my Kate, we will unto your
 father's
Even in these honest mean habiliaments;
Our purses shall be proud, our garments poor,
For 'tis the mind that makes the body rich;
And as the sun breaks through the darkest
 clouds,
So honor peereth in the meanest habit.
                                (IV.iii.169-74)

This lesson in substance versus appearance, combined with his test of her skill at imitatio, forces Katherine to rely upon a masculine understanding of her place as woman and language, as well as upon Petruchio's tutelage.

The corresponding scene in A Shrew offers no similar instruction, being little more, as Kate seems to understand, than the means "to make a foole of [her]" (34):

Come Kate we now will go see thy fathers
 house
Euen in these honest meane abilliments,
Our purses shall be rich our garments plaine,
To shrowd our bodies from the winter rage,
And thats inough, what should we care for
 more.
                                         (35)

Though at times startlingly similar, these corresponding moments in The Shrew and A Shrew serve very different purposes. Clothes that "shrowd … bodies from the winter rage" are a form of protection; but "honor peereth" as the sun appears through an opening in the clouds, when the protective covering of ornamentation is removed.

At a time when property could increasingly be used to inscribe an individual with a more glorious past, elevating the individual thereby, pedagogues like Thomas Elyot and Roger Ascham urged the fathers of the aristocracy to educate their children, most often sons but also their daughters, to an understanding of their positions in the state, most specifically in service to their prince. This understanding, it was believed, could only be gained through the stripping away of excess and the application of discipline. Petruchio combines the various lessons of moral philosophy, as do Elyot and Ascham, for his advancing scholar. Katherine increasingly understands her attachment to and dependence upon Petruchio, which simultaneously gives her a position in the masculine, humanist tradition. This masculinized locus allows Katherine to extend mere imitatio to include declamatio.

Kate certainly learns by direct imitation, changing not merely her words, but the sense of things, to conform to the wishes of Petruchio; however, Petruchio's control of his pupil/wife's words simultaneously elevates the power of feminine language to name masculine objects:

Pet.… Good Lord, how bright and goodly shines
the moon.

Kath. The moon! the sun—it is not moonlight now.

Pet. I say it is the moon that shines so bright.

Kath. I know it is the sun that shines so bright.

Pet. Now by my mother's son, and that's myself,
It shall be moon, or star, or what I list,
Or ere I journey to your father's house.…

Kath. … And be it moon, or sun, or what you
please;
And if you please to call it rush-candle,
Henceforth I vow it shall be so for me.

Pet. I say it is the moon.

Kath. I know it is the moon.

Pet. Nay then you lie; it is the blessed sun.

Kath. Then God be blest, it … the blessed sun, But sun
it is not, when you say it is not;
And the moon changes even as your mind.
What you will have it nam'd, even that it is,

And so it shall be for Katherine.
                                         (IV.v.2-22)

This interchange must not be mistaken for instruction in pracecepta only. While arguing his superior method of double translation from Latin model to English and back to Latin, Ascham explains, citing Caesar and Cicero that, for training the young scholar, praecepta are not condemned: "[W]e gladly teach rules, and teach them more plainly, sensibly and orderly than they be commonly taught in common schools." While the lessons taught in Petruchio's school are hardly "orderly," Katherine excels Petruchio in eloquence as she follows his lead in distinguishing "moon, or sun, or what you please." As pupil, she does not stop with mastery of rules, or even imitation—impossible in Petruchio's shifting lesson—but transmutes the models of sun and moon to moon and Petruchio's lunatic mind. By aligning Petruchio's mind with the changeable moon, Kate stops the rhetorical double translation.

At this moment in The Shrew, the conflation of action and essence—Katherine's act of naming serving to determine the object named—most clearly presents Kate as simultaneously pupil and language. As pupil, she must follow Petruchio's lead. As language, Katherine has the capacity to determine the object that she names. But she must understand, not merely imitate, her instructor. Petruchio "says" that sun is moon; Kate in superior understanding "knows" it to be otherwise. Petruchio appears to believe that if Kate will imitate him in calling the sun "moon," it will "be" the object named. In frustration, Kate "vows" that it "be so." Trying her, Petruchio then "says" moon, but Kate "knows" moon. Her imperfect translation from declaration to knowledge causes Petruchio to correct her: "you lie; it is the blessed sun." Petruchio recognizes that Kate has misunderstood his lesson.

The verb usage in this scene equates name and essence. Petruchio does not demand belief that the sun is the moon; he desires Kate's verbal imitation. But Kate must understand what she is imitating, and when Kate makes the correction to "it," indicating "the blessed sun / But sun it is not, when you say it is not. / What you will have it nam 'd, even that it is," seems not merely acquiescence on the part of the pupil. Kate does not repeat her mistake to declare again that "it [is] the blessed sun," except via the Riverside editors [who supply "is" at this point in the text]. What has long been considered an omission in the text is instead, I believe, a very carefully structured choice that displays Katherine's mastery of the lesson, declaring it only "not" the sun when Petruchio says it is not. The name determines essence, and though the instructor may have triumphed over the pupil here, language seems to have won the day. Kate, as pupil/ imitator, succumbs to Petruchio's instruction by accepting his verbal model. As language, Kate's naming supplies essential understanding in the masculine game. Kate's action, her naming, is the hermeneutic translation of the thing. Not so the corresponding scene in A Shrew.

Whereas imitatio appears to extend into declamatio in The Shrew, Ferando in A Shrew does not seek "free composition," but only rote memorization from Kate. For Kate to become a humanist scholar, she must transform the models of her instructor, not merely imitate them. Though the rules are not always clear, either to Katherina or the reader-audience, as we are being instructed in imitatio, the lesson of declamatio is in fact learned.

Katherine's final speech in both versions is addressed to the wives who did not come when called by their husbands; but in The Shrew, it is also her first lesson to wayward female pupils, Bianca and the widow, and the display of her rhetorical skill. Katherine's instruction simultaneously displays her mastery of feminine language (as orator), her position as female in the Renaissance hierarchy (as wife/subject), and her subjugation of all feminized things to masculine mastery (as "masculine" humanist scholar). It is impossible not to recall Samuel Johnson's "Sir, a woman preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all." The only model she transmutes is the model of masculine scholar.

Katherina's lesson is an eloquent rendition of the place of the humanist in Renaissance society. She does not rely on cues from her tutor, and her dependent status is not quantitatively different from the status of any Renaissance citizen, except that her authority is lower than her lord's. Katherina's caveat that female obedience depends upon her lord's "honest will" is the same specified by Renaissance humanists concerning masculine obedience to the prince. As unattractive as is the role Katherine espouses, it is no less attractive than that prescribed by Renaissance humanism to its male adherents. But Katherine is not male. She turns her superior "reason," the superiority of which isolates her from her sisters, her now "disfigure[d]" mother-wit, against them and herself. As a master of language within this public forum, Kate in The Shrew gains status as orator at the expense of all things feminine; but as she cannot, in actuality, be regendered, her action is essential silencing and self-destruction. In A Shrew, however, Kate's final soliloquy moves her sister to suggest the superiority of feminine excess:

Erne. How now Polidor in a dump, what sayst thou man?

Pol. I say thou art a shrew.

Erne. Thats better than a sheepe.

Pol. Well since tis don let it go, come lets in.

(50)

Polidor does not contest Emelia's assertion that a shrewish wife is superior to a sheepish one; neither his estate nor the state is undermined by what appears to be little more than Emelia's, or Philema's, or even Kate's shifting moods. But as Leah Marcus notes in her examination of the divergent ideologies of these Shrew plays [in English Literary Renaissance 22, 1992]:

Kate's rationale for obedience in The Shrew is given a political base: … The machinery of state lying behind th[e] appeal for submission [in The Shrew] is rather more awesome and immediate than the diffuse and generalized appeal for order in A Shrew.

Kate's education, the source of her public power in The Shrew, is the means of her domestic oppression.

Because the humanist tradition conflates female and language, it is almost impossible in a discussion of The Shrew to speak of one in isolation from the other. But the problem which is elucidated by The Shrew exists at the level of all discourse, with Woman, not merely Kate, the tabula rasa for masculine impression. Her display of eloquence and masculine moral superiority in The Shrew silences her sisters, and their inept tutors as well, who, unlike her own rhetor, have been more concerned with their appearance as instructors than with the act of instruction. Because fatti maschii, parole femine ("women are words, men deeds") the inferior tutors indict themselves in the effeminacy of inaction. Kate's education does not make her subservient to the lesser scholars, Lucentio and Hortensio, who fail in the instruction of their pupils and in their responsibilities as "govenour and lord." Their limitations are reflected in the failure of their "pupils," Bianca and the widow, to follow Kate's example and place their own hands beneath their lords' feet. However, Kate's act, her oratory, promotes essential masculine superiority through an infinite series of descending masters and female pupils. In this final, tragic pretense of The Shrew, Kate acts in the guise of vir eloquentissimus—with female language shackled by misogynist education, female hand ground beneath male boot, and female mouth infibulated with the threads of humanist rhetoric.