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, and come now to bed” (Ind.2.117) to the page boy's “My husband and my lord, my lord and husband” (Ind.2.106) and Kate's “Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper” (5.2.146).¹ Whether such echoes add to the play's patriarchal merriment or undercut that moral is less clear, even if other such parallels are drawn—for example, Sly's “do I dream? Or have I dreamed till now” (Ind.2.69) and Kate “as one new risen from a dream” (4.1.186); the horses, hawks, hounds, hunt, help, horns, and herds bestowed on Sly (Ind.2.41-96) and the “carts” (1.1.55), “kites” (4.1.195), “cats” (2.1.278), “cates” (2.1.189), “cut” (4.3.121), “chat” (2.1.268), and “chattels” (3.2.230) to which Kate is compared (Gremio's “Our cake's dough” [1.1.108-9]); the debate over which of the three hounds, Silver, Belman, or Echo, is best (Ind.1.19-27) and the final wager over which of the three wives will come first, Bianca (Silver), the Widow (Belman), or Kate (Echo); the Lord's “I would not lose the dog for twenty pound” (Ind.1.21) and Petruchio's “Twenty crowns? / I’ll venture so much of my hawk or hound” (5.2.71-72); the opening hunt generally and Tranio's “’Tis thought your deer does hold you at a bay” (5.2.26); Sly's acquaintance “Peter Turph” (Ind.2.94) and both Petruchio and his servant Peter; the Christ-bearer in “Christopher” (“score me up for the lyingest knave in Christendom” [Ind.2.24], “is not a comonty a Christmas gambold or a tumbling-trick” [138-39]) and the more elaborate conversion narrative of the larger taming story—“Then God be blest, it is the blessèd sun” (4.5.18)—that carries the Christ-bearing Lucentio, Bianca, and Petruchio to “St. Luke's church” (4.4.88); the autobiographical subtext introduced by the actor in Shakespeare's own company Will Sly (“we came in with Richard Conqueror” [Ind.1.4-5]) and Petruchio's “will you, nill you, I will marry you” (2.1.271); and so on.² In each case, the play that Christopher Sly watches from the vantage of his unfinished Induction variously replays the story of his own Kate-like subjection by the Petruchio-like Lord, so that the moral is always less, and the lesson is always more, than meets the eye.

Whether, again, such echoes underscore or undermine the play's patriarchal merriment is further complicated because, however earnest the moral, the play already tells the story of its own Kate-like reception by the Petruchio-like spectator, recasting Petruchio's “taming-school” (4.2.54) as the taming, first, of “Xantippe” by “Socrates” (1.2.126) but also of “harmony” by “philosophy” (3.1.13-14), “Ovid” by “Aristotle” (1.1.32-33), “rhetoric” by “logic” (34-35), “music” by “mathematics” (36), “poesy” by “metaphysics” (37), “rhymes” by “Rheims” (2.1.80), and so on. From Sly's “by transmutation a bearherd” (Ind.2.19-20) to Petruchio's powerfully gendered “Another way I have to man my haggard” (4.1.193), the play traditionally codes the literary feminine and the rational or philosophic masculine, but it also obsessively situates its own reception within the very disruption of sexual difference that it performs, as if the university were the bankside, brothel-bound theater tamed, disembodied (alma mater) or masculinized (ivory tower)—“To suck the sweets of sweet philosophy” (1.1.28). Whereas Kate's Bianca-like taming entails the wholesale repression of sexual difference, Bianca's Kate-like subversion of pedagogy coincides with its bawdy return:

I am no breeching scholar in the schools,
I’ll not be tied to hours, and pointed times,
But learn my lessons as I please myself.
And to cut off all strife. …

(3.1.18-21)³

So the difference between the theater and the university, from its earliest formulation in Plato to the present, is sexual difference. When falling under the power of music and meter, Socrates warns in Ion, poets are “like Bacchic maidens who draw milk and honey from the rivers when they are under the influence of Dionysus” (534b). Poems in the ideal Republic, in turn, must be strictly regulated, since “there is a danger that our guardians may be rendered too excitable and effeminate by them” (Republic 387b). Not surprisingly, then, Socrates' suggestion that “the doings of Kronos … had better be buried in silence” begins his epochal case for philosophy's difference from (and with) literature, leaving out what Hesiod's Theogony begins by leaving in—the difference, sexual difference, separating literature from philosophy.

Socrates thus tames literature into philosophy much as The Taming of the Shrew stages its own Neoplatonic untaming of the university (Petruchio) by the theater (Kate), beginning rather than ending with Lucentio's “Here let us breathe, and haply institute / A course of learning and ingenious studies” (1.1.8-9). So in Cervantes's equally representative Don Quixote, the illiterate Sancho Panza's allegiance to the over-read Quixote recapitulates, in reverse, Plato's faithful recording of the unwritten Socrates. On the one hand, Quixote's madness lives beyond the same veil of appearances as Socrates' transcendent vision, and somehow attains to a similar truth; on the other, the novel's Platonic inversion, like the play's, depends on the return or the untaming of a repressed sexual difference, as can be seen from the very first, and most famous, of Quixote's adventures, that of the windmills. Here the mock-epic backdrop explicitly recalls the Homeric literature ultimately condemned by Socrates, and the giant machines are likened to “Briareus.” The magnification, too, is oedipal, the son's struggle with the father (the windmill) for possession of the peerless Dulcinea del Toboso, his lance broken by the intervening superego (the wind). For, if the difference between rational philosophy (Petruchio) and irrational rhapsody (Kate) is sexual difference (if literature, as Socrates asserts, effeminizes), then every adventure undergone by Quixote negotiates the same sexual impasse, since each entails the passage from one realm to the other. When Quixote and Sancho leave the windmills, for example, only the oedipal backdrop links this episode to the one just following, in which the knight confronts a group of travelers taking a Basque woman to her husband. Believing the woman a charmed and disguised Dulcinea, Quixote challenges the group. A Basque man appears, and he and Quixote fiercely join battle at full gallop as the first part of the first book of Don Quixote ends, colliding with a force that splits the narrative. When the dust settles, and the second part begins, Cervantes writes:

In the first part of this history we left the valiant Basque and the famous Don Quixote with naked swords aloft [con las espadas altas y desnudas], on the point of dealing two such furious downward strokes as, had they struck true, would have cleft both knights asunder from head to foot, and split them like pomegranates. At this critical point our delightful history stopped short and remained mutilated [destroncada], our author failing to inform us where to find the missing part.⁴

What Socrates represses in the name of an ideal Republic, Cervantes brings to the surface with all the force necessary to make a difference in, and for, the narrative, as well as the Republic; in “split them like pomegranates [abrírían como una granada],” a play on the last Arab stronghold at Granada further refigures one founding violence in the other. Like the absent frame in Shakespeare's play, the effeminizing difference suppressed by Socrates is, quite literally, “missing,” even miss-ing, as in Donalbain's “What is amiss?” and, fresh from Duncan's “unsexing,” Macbeth's “You are, and do not know it” (2.3.97). At the same time Cervantes directs his prologue to part 1 not just against “the swarm [caterva] of vain books of chivalry” (30) but, several pages earlier, against “Aristotle, Plato and the whole herd [caterva] of philosophers” (26)—one caterva, one Cervantes, reborn in the other. Ten years later, in the prologue to part 2, he answers the author of a slanderous preface to a pirated Don Quixote in similar terms, who had gone so far as to condemn Cervantes for the wound he received in the famous naval battle of Lepanto:

What I cannot help resenting is that he upbraids me for being old and crippled, as if it were in my power to stop the passage of time, or as if the loss of my hand had taken place in some tavern, and not on the greatest occasion which any age, past, present, or future, ever saw or can ever hope to see. (467)

The mutilated text is now a maimed hand, a violent style; the hyperbole, “the greatest occasion which any age, past, present, or future, ever saw or can ever hope to see,” is Quixote's.

Cervantes's novel thus subverts the language of philosophy with the language of literature through a return of this repressed sexual difference, just as, in The Taming of the Shrew, the language of the theater disrupts the language of the university. At either institutional extreme, traditional ascriptions of shrewishness to Socrates' wife, Xanthippe, correspond to equally speculative references to the shrewish behavior of Shakespeare's wife, Anne Hathaway.⁵ So the closely related early comedy Love's Labour's Lost begins with the king of Navarre's “Our court shall be a little academe, / Still and contemplative in living art” (1.1.13-14), emplotting Plato's suppression of the effeminizing dangers of literature (“on pain of losing her tongue” [1.1.124]) and their return as theater, in this case as Love's Labour's Lost. From the play's hyper-alliterative title to Holofernes's “Of one sore I an hundred make by adding but one more L” (4.2.61), the more “more L,” Herbert A. Ellis suggests, the more moral—“by adding but one moral” (“the king he is hunting the deer” [4.1.1]).⁶ For the more verbal pyrotechnics, the more signifier-works, the more the constative language of the Neoplatonic academy gives institutional rise to the radically performative discourse of the early modern theater, “in reason nothing,” as Dumaine remarks of Berowne's non sequitur “The spring is near when green geese are a-breeding” (1.1.97-99), “something then in rhyme,” as C. L. Barber draws the moral for Love's Labour's Lost and all of Shakespeare's green-world comedies: “The spring is near when green geese are a-breeding” (Navarre's “Vouchsafe to show the sunshine of your face, / That we (like savages) may worship it” [5.2.201-2]). So Armado's “l’envoy,” “The fox, the ape, and the humble-bee / Were still at odds, being but three” (2.1.88-89), points the moral (“There’s the moral” [86]) of the three sonneteers and Berowne's “Now step I forth to whip hypocrisy” (4.3.149)—Moth's “Until the goose came out of door, / Staying the odds by adding four” (90-91). For the more “more L,” Armado's l’envoy affirms, the more “elle” (Costard's “I was taken with none, sir, I was taken with a damsel” [1.1.289-90]), and the more elle, finally, the more Elizabeth, from Boyet's “Queen Guinover of Britain” (4.1.123) and Nathaniel's “a title to Phoebe, to Luna, to the moon” (4.2.38) to Petruchio's hyper-ironic “Did ever Dian so become a grove / As Kate this chamber with her princely gait? / O be thou Dian and let her be Kate” (2.1.258-60).⁷ Hence the opening “Let fame, that all hunt after in their lives,” which carries the obsessive alliteration of the title into the play, but hence, too, the closing songs of Winter and Spring ushered in by Don Armado's final “Holla! approach” (5.2.890), which points the play's moral by way of the same repeating L, and, following this medieval conflictus of the cuckoo and the owl, “the words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo.”

In all four wanton instances—Holofernes's “sorel [sore elle],” Berowne's “geese” (prostitutes), Moth's “goose,” and Armado's “owl” and “cuckoo” (cuckold)—patriarchy is confirmed but from Kate's anti-rational perspective, as if Berowne's “Light, seeking light, doth light of light beguile” (1.1.77) were the true moral, or “more elle” (“light in the light” [2.1.198]), of Love's Labour's Lost. For the more “more L,” more elle, and more Elizabeth, the more Will (“a sharp wit matched with too blunt a will, / Whose edge hath power to cut, whose will still wills” [2.1.49-50])—the Shakespeare/Shrew alliteration, the “Shre W.,” whose elaborate signature-effect signs off, too, on the play's own “taming” by the state apparatus (the “academe”) it ironically affirms. So Petruchio's “tailor,” who is also Petruchio's “taler”—“Saving your tale, Petruchio …, Backare, you are marvelous forward” (2.1.71-73); “What, with my tongue in your tail?” (218); “Out of their saddles and into the dirt, and thereby hangs a tale” (3.2.57-58); “My widow says, thus she conceives her tale” (5.2.24)—discomfits both genders alike with the phallic cap (“Fie, fie, ’tis lewd and filthy. / Why, ’tis a cockle or a walnut-shell … / Away with it! come let me have a bigger” [4.3.66-68]) and bawdy gown (“Take up my mistress' gown to his master's use! / O fie, fie, fie!” [162-63]) that he has fashioned for Kate (“Error i’ th’ bill, sir, error i’ th’ bill!” [145]). In Troilus and Cressida, a play whose obvious affinities with The Taming of the Shrew go far beyond Petruchio's spaniel “Troilus” (4.1.150) or Lucentio's “Hic ibat Simois; hic est Sigeia tellus” (3.1.28), the autobiographical moral is only more explicit: the play is Cressida (“This is, and is not, Cressid!” [5.2.146]), the spectator Troilus, and the playwright Pandarus, who concludes the action by bringing just this self-authoring allegory to the surface: “Till then I’ll sweat and seek about for eases, / And at that time bequeath you my diseases” (5.10.55-56).⁸ In one of these later bequests, Imogen's midnight reading of “The Rape of Philomel” in Cymbeline—“I have read three hours then” (2.2.3)—similarly figures not just her plight but her play and its own three-hour “noting” by the Jachimo-like spectator: “One, two, three, time, time!” (51). For the play not only generates plot by untaming and taming female sexuality, as in The Taming of the Shrew and Troilus and Cressida, but duly records its own effeminized status as the Imogen-like object of the very patriarchal noting it celebrates. Across a corresponding sixteen year “gap” in time (Kronos), the bawdy ballads that the wandering rogue Autolycus sells his audience in the pastoral second half of The Winter's Tale (“Pins and poking-sticks of steel, / What maids lack from head to heel” [4.4.226-27]) Shakespeare sells his, miraculously transforming the Othello-like jealousy of Leontes and Mamillius for Hermione into the shared affection of Hermione and Perdita for Leontes (“Why, this is a passing merry one and goes to the tune of ‘Two maids wooing a man’” [288-89]).

Sexual difference, in these ways, centers the plays—the difference, again, between Rome and Egypt, England and France, Montague and Capulet, Venice and Belmont, the court and the forest, the tragedies, finally, and the comedies—because it represents the difference, inside out, between the play and its audience, the stage and its reception. For it is across this difference, sexual difference, that the experience of attending the theater and returning home recapitulates the gendered movement from court to imaginary forest to court (and courtship) in comedies like The Winter's Tale (“Come on then, / And give’t me in mine ear” [2.1.31-32]), The Merchant of Venice (“I am a tainted wether of the flock” [4.1.114]), and A Midsummer Night's Dream (“Marry, if he that writ it had played Pyramus, and hanged himself in Thisby's garter, it would have been a fine tragedy” [5.1.357-60]). In The Taming of the Shrew Shakespeare's revisionist-antirevisionist perspective, his perpetual upping of the “anti,” closely resembles a pair of engravings reproduced in Barbara Freedman's book Staging the Gaze: Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis, and Shakespearean Comedy: Albrecht Dürer's woodcut from Unterweisung der Messung (1525) and M. C. Escher's Print Gallery (1956). … In Dürer's woodcut the taming of an effeminized nature by a patriarchal gaze corresponds to a literal, antirevisionist reading of Kate's conversion. From left to right the two hills in the window above the woman unironically yield to the potted plant in the window to the artist/spectator's right. In Escher's lithograph, by contrast, the lack of a closing frame on the right side of the canvas, like the lack of a closing frame for the Induction in the play, draws the viewer squarely into the picture, even as the onlooker's head literally rises into the frame. From this revisionist perspective the woman to the left of the engraver in Dürer's etching is now the diminutive woman in the window to the observer's right.

From (ideological) right to left it is therefore not surprising that postwar feminism should find in The Taming of the Shrew, which thematically recalls Dürer's engraving but structurally resembles Escher's Print Gallery, not just the patriarchal story to end all patriarchal stories but its most concentrated and overdetermined subversion—The Shaming of the True.⁹ Though ironic readings of Kate's final speech reach back to comments by Constance O’Brien in 1886 and Margaret Webster in 1942, Nevill Coghill establishes the play's postwar revisionist tradition in 1950 by suggesting that the play's moral is “generously and charmingly asserted by Katerina at the end,” adding: “it is a total misconception to suppose that she has been bludgeoned into it” (O’Brien's “it is all nonsense to talk as if this bit of merry comedy expresses Shakespeare's serious ideas of the proper relations between husband and wife”).¹⁰ A year after Coghill's remarks (and sixty-five years after O’Brien's) Harold Goddard argues still more forcefully that “The Taming of the Shrew … is possibly the most striking example among [Shakespeare's] early works of his love for so contriving a play that it should mean, to those who might choose to take it so, the precise opposite of what he knew it would mean to the multitude.” According to Goddard, “why explain what is as clear, when you see it, as was Poe's Purloined Letter, which was skillfully concealed precisely because it was in such plain sight all the time” (68). Figuring the play's too obvious revisionism, “The Purloined Letter” here takes up the alliterating L of Love's Labour's Lost (the prefect's “it was all labor lost” [213]) while linking its own signifying desire to that of woman, even as Dupin's “the letter had been turned, as a glove, inside out” bawdily revisits Festes' “A sentence is but a chev’ril glove to a good wit. How quickly the wrong side may be turned outward!” (Twelfth Night [3.1.11-13]).¹¹

Since Goddard's remarks, an increasingly vocal appeal to the play's apparent “irony” characterizes the series of so-called revisionist readings, from Richard Hosley's “Kate's speech … was probably, without denial of the basic validity of its doctrine, as susceptible to an ironic interpretation in Shakespeare's day as in our own” (1964) to Coppélia Kahn's “[the play's] greatest irony [is that it] … satisfies not woman herself in the person of the shrew, but male attitudes toward women” (1975) and Roger L. Cox's “to call Kate's final speech ‘exaggerated and ironic’ is … like calling Falstaff ‘obese,’ as if the casual observer might not have noticed that he tended to be rather plump” (1991).¹² For revisionist readers Kate's final speech simply humors Petruchio, but for antirevisionist readers, by sharp contrast, Kate's final speech simply “humors” Petruchio (i.e., amuses or pleases him), as Robert B. Heilman first counters in “The Taming Untamed, or, The Return of the Shrew” (1966): “we have domesticated a free-swinging farce and made it into a brittlely ironic closet drama, the voice of a woman's world in which apron strings, while proclaiming themselves the gentle badge of duty, snap like an overseer's lash.”¹³ Following Heilman's “untaming” of Kate's controversial “mating,” antirevisionist appeals to the play's literalness (and criticism's performativity) include Richard Levin's “the many ironic readings of [Henry V] and The Taming of the Shrew and The Merchant of Venice can also be explained in this way. … To remain worthy of our worship, the idol's meaning must be changed, like that of our other sacred texts, to conform with current beliefs” (1979); Peter Saccio's “I cannot agree with the common modern view that seeks to revise the plain doctrine of Kate's last speech under the all-saving name of irony. … [Such readings] ignore the difference between local verbal ironies and the massive irony of intent extending through forty-four lines” (1984); and Camille Wells Slights's “Petruchio certainly demands that Kate submit to his will, but we know, as she does, that he won’t step on her hand. Shakespeare, then, does not ironically subvert the patriarchal power structure portrayed in The Taming of the Shrew” (1993).¹⁴ From one ironic extreme (Kate) to the other (Petruchio) The Taming of the Shrew, still more ironically, serves no longer as a pretext but a prototype for the critical debate it engenders, one that alternately tames and untames, from Petruchio to Kate, the play—hence the more recent “beyond-revisionist” readings for which even the play's irony, in the final analysis, proves ironic, as in Jonathan Hall's “when I refer to [Kate's] flight from determination through ‘inward dialogism’ as ironic, I certainly do not mean the kind of stabilized irony which supports a definitely satirical kind of feminist reading” (1995) or Natasha Korda's “I do not mean to suggest (following the play's so-called revisionist readers) that Kate's speech should be read ironically, as evidence of her deceit, any more than (with its anti-revisionist readers) as evidence of her ‘true’ submission” (1996).¹⁵

Thus it is also not surprising, in connection with the return of a parallel repressed in The Taming of the Shrew, that postwar critiques of the play should ultimately move beyond the binarisms of revisionist/antirevisionist to find in Kate's final moral not just the taming story to end all taming stories but, as Kahn is among the first to propose, a surprisingly sophisticated staging ground for feminism's own elaborate cross-dressings of literature, gender, and power, as in the following remarks by Karen Newman:

The theatrically constructed frame in which Sly exercises patriarchal power and the dream in which Kate is tamed undermine the seemingly eternal nature of those structures by calling attention to the constructed character of the representation rather than veiling it through mimesis. The foregrounded female protagonist of the action and her powerful annexation of traditionally male discursive domains distances us from that system by exposing and displaying its contradictions.¹⁶

So in postwar feminism, Newman contends,

we need a different kind of textual intercourse, a promiscuous conversation of many texts, early modern elite and non-elite, historical records and ideological discourses, contemporary theory and popular culture, that puts into play the “literary,” the “historical,” “gender,” as relations and positions rather than static categories. … (146)

Shakespeare is immediately essential to this “textual intercourse” because, as Valerie Traub observes, “the homoeroticism of Shakespearean comedy transverses ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ sites, challenging the binary language of identity by which we normalize erotic desire.”¹⁷ Regarding the corresponding fate of postwar feminism in the literary academy, Freedman notes in Staging the Gaze how “psychoanalytic and deconstructive approaches that demonstrate that we cannot escape the text, the symbolic, or ideology remind us of the means by which Kate is encouraged to believe that she can never escape the theater of difference in which she exists”—Gremio's “My cake is dough” (5.1.140).¹⁸ Outside the academy feminism occasions a resistance strikingly akin to the antitheatrical prejudice of the early 1580s and beyond, as Jean Howard remarks of representative tracts by Stephen Gosson (1579), Anthony Munday (1580), and Phillip Stubbes (1583): “the social change which the antitheatrical rhetoric was struggling to manage produced fear and anger and incomprehension in many quarters, not only among the powerful who felt they had something to lose if servants wore velvet or women asserted independence from masculine control of their dress and speech.”¹⁹ Within the university, as both Freedman and Newman affirm, Kate's subversion of gender initiates a “domestic and domesticating quarrel,” as Fineman remarks in “The Turn of the Shrew,” that literally refigures the university in the theater and the theater in the university (Heilman's “we have domesticated a free-swinging farce and made it into a brittlely ironic closet drama”).²⁰ For if sexual difference is “a linchpin,” as Foucault contends, “an especially dense transfer point for relations of power … endowed with the greatest instrumentality,” feminism and theater in The Taming of the Shrew mark an equally dense “transfer point” whose corresponding eclipse of patriarchal sun by Elizabethan moon (“Now by my mother's son, and that’s myself, / It shall be moon, or sun, or what I list” [4.6.6-7]) literally transforms the early modern university of Lucentio's opening speech into social and political theater.²¹

In her book Feminism and Theater Sue-Ellen Case proposes that the theater itself represents the taming site upon which Western culture is significantly founded, particularly in the Oresteia, which “Simone de Beauvoir and Kate Millet characterize … as the mythological rendering of a patriarchal takeover.”²² Overtaking patriarchy, Shakespeare and feminism register a similar return of this repressed, in the theater but also in the university, complicating while placating, like Cleopatra, the patriarchal desire delimited or defined by this struggle over sexual difference—the am, finally, in Petruchio's drive to “tame” (“For I am he am born to tame you, Kate” [2.1.276]). For from the theater to the university the ubiquitous comic play of feminized O and patriarchal thing in the truly self-canceling moral of The Taming of the Shrew, “O this learning, what a thing it is!” (1.2.159), makes the play itself the lesson, and the playwright the Petruchio, of Hortensio's (and the spectator's) “Then hast thou taught Hortensio to be untoward” (4.5.79)—Lucentio's “fair Padua, nursery of arts” (1.1.2). So teaching, the main part of feminist criticism of The Taming of the Shrew works to make Kate's final speech not more but less “domesticated.” For the difference between doing and saying in the theater (dramatic irony) is also the difference, sexual difference, between saying and doing in the university (Socratic irony). In Shakespeare's England the very exclusion of actresses, in sharp contrast to their presence on the Continental stage, partly reflects the powerful shaping influence of the all-male universities of Cambridge and Oxford on the emerging national theater, Petruchio “Kated.” Shakespeare's strong female characters such as Kate thus strike strong blows against the academy, admitting or accepting such women even when, especially when, “tamed.” From the frame to the play, in turn, the irony entails first an irony of form; in The Merchant of Venice the ironic (revisionist) reading of Shylock's trial scene nowhere more compellingly inheres than when, in a wholly other context and on the level of form, Bassanio rejects the gold casket because “In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt / But, being seasoned with a gracious voice, / Obscures the show of evil?” (3.2.75-77), adding: “Look on beauty, / And you shall see ’tis purchased by the weight” (88-89). In The Taming of the Shrew a still more elaborate formal irony extends the play's patriarchal moral to its own Petruchio-like reception in much the way that a certain commercial self-consciousness joins Shakespeare to Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, or Shakespeare to Pandarus in Troilus and Cressida. Hence the final spelling of shrow for shrew in the closing couplet of The Taming of the Shrew, not for the rhyme but for the signature pun on show—as a parting remark, like Puck's “Give me your hands” or Pandarus's “And at that time bequeath you my diseases,” to an audience reaching beyond the thou, Petruchio, who has already grandly exited on “God give you good night!”:

Hortensio: Now go thy ways,
thou hast tamed a curst shrow.
Lucentio: ’Tis a wonder, by
your leave, she will be tamed so.

Notes

1. See Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 65-68.

2. On the Lord's “twenty pound” and Petruchio's “Twenty crowns,” see Dorothea Kehler, “Echoes of the Induction in The Taming of the Shrew,” Renaissance Papers (1986): 36, 39; and Margie Burns, “The Ending of the Shrew,” Shakespeare Studies 18 (1986): 45. According to Kehler, “The precision of this second echo makes unmistakable the significant thematic link between the Induction and the play proper, delineating the action of taming at its most crass” (40). Burns mentions the actor Will Sly and his possible relation to the character Christopher Sly in a note (63 n. 20). On the names Christopher and Katherine, see Laurie E. Maguire, “‘Household Kates’: Chez Petruchio, Percy and Plantagenet,” in Gloriana's Face: Women, Public and Private, in the English Renaissance, ed. S. P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies (Detroit: Wayne State University, 1992), 131-33.

3. As Thomas Moisan observes of Bianca's Latin lesson on old Priam turned gulled Baptista, “the translation scene epitomizes the uses, or misuses, to which education and formal ‘learning’ are put throughout the play, with educational projects and the value of learning invoked only to be genially disregarded, subordinated to other plans, or simply, and just as genially, trashed, the ridicule to which they are subjected personified in the stock figure of the hapless, and perhaps spurious, ‘Pedant’ who fecklessly wanders into the play in time to provide fodder for one of the ‘wily servant’ Tranio's schemes” (“Interlinear Trysting and ‘Household Stuff’: The Latin Lesson and the Domestication of Learning in The Taming of the Shrew,” Shakespeare Studies 23 [1995]: 103-4).

4. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, trans. J. M. Cohen (New York: Penguin, 1950), 75.

5. In Joyce's Ulysses Stephen Dedalus offers an autobiographical reading of The Taming of the Shrew that might be further supported by the Induction's various allusions to Stratford, citizens then living in Stratford, and the environs—the notorious “Ann hath-a-way,” following sonnet 145's “I hate from hate away she threw, / And saved my life saying, ‘not you,’” in “Burton Heath” (Ind.2.18) and “Marian Hacket” (21-22); James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1986), 157; Booth, Shakespeare's Sonnets, 501.

6. Herbert A. Ellis, Shakespeare's Lusty Punning in Love's Labour's Lost (The Hague: Mouton, 1973), 164. Ellis suggests a possible further play on more L, moral, and morall, a phallic mushroom.

7. Both Love's Labour's Lost and The Taming of the Shrew, in this regard, are closer still to A Midsummer Night's Dream, which ends rather than begins with the problematic taming of its Amazonian Dian—Grumio's “Katherine the curst [Elizabeth the First]” (1.2.129). The seasonal difference superimposed over the play's battle of the sexes (Kate's “It blots thy beauty, as frosts do bite the meads” [5.2.139]) further underwrites Titania's “And thorough this distemperature, we see / The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts / Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose” (2.1.106-8).

8. The moral Pandarus draws, that the play has now subsumed the sexual difference around which it is written and may therefore end, further recalls, from Full to fail, the more L of Love's Labour's Lost: “What verse for it? What instance for it? Let me see:

   Full merrily the humble-bee doth sing,
   Till he hath lost his honey and his sting;
   And being once subdued in armed tail,
   Sweet honey and sweet notes together fail.”

   (5.10.40-44)

9. An earlier version of this chapter was presented under the title “The Shaming of the True” as part of a seminar organized by Barbara Freedman for the 1992 Shakespeare Association of America convention. My thanks to her and other conference participants for helpful suggestions.

10. Nevill Coghill, “The Basis of Shakespearean Comedy,” Essays and Studies (1950): 11. See Margaret Webster, Shakespeare without Tears (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1942), 142. It was Webster's great-grandfather Ben Webster who in 1844 first restored Shakespeare's original Taming of the Shrew after David Garrick's shorter and simpler version had held the stage for ninety years; see Webster's “Director's Comments” in Tori Haring-Smith, From Farce to Melodrama: A Stage History of The Taming of the Shrew (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985), 44-45.

11. I consider the special place of Poe's “Purloined Letter” in the theater-theory continuum set forth here in “The Figure-Power Dialectic: Poe's ‘Purloined Letter,’” MLN 110 (September 1995): 679-91.

12. Richard Hosley, “Introduction” to the Pelican edition of The Taming of the Shrew (Penguin: Baltimore, 1964), 16. Coppélia Kahn, “The Taming of the Shrew: Shakespeare's Mirror of Marriage,” Modern Language Studies 5 (Spring 1975): 89; reprinted in The Authority of Experience: Essays in Feminist Criticism, ed. Lee Edwards and Arlyn Diamond (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1976). This essay, revised as part of “Coming of Age: Marriage and Manhood in Romeo and Juliet and The Taming of the Shrew,” appears in Kahn, Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981): “in the last scene, Shakespeare finally allows Petruchio that lordship over Kate and superiority to other husbands for which he has striven so mightily. He just makes it clear to us, through the contextual irony of Kate's last speech, that his mastery is an illusion” (114). Roger L. Cox, Shakespeare's Comic Changes: The Time-Lapse Metaphor as Plot Device (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991), 61-62.

13. Robert B. Heilman, “The Taming Untamed, or, The Return of the Shrew,” Modern Language Quarterly 27 (1966): 151.

14. Richard Levin, New Readings vs. Old Plays: Recent Trends in the Reinterpretation of English Renaissance Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 134; Peter Saccio, “Shrewd and Kindly Farce,” Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (1984): 39; Camille Wells Slights, Shakespeare's Comic Commonwealths (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 52.

15. Jonathan Hall, Anxious Pleasures: Shakespearean Comedy and the Nation-State (Madison: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995), 158; Natasha Korda, “Household Kates: Domesticating Commodities in The Taming of the Shrew,” Shakespeare Quarterly 47 (Summer 1996): 130-31.

16. Karen Newman, Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 42.

17. Valerie Traub, Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (New York: Routledge, 1992), 17.

18. Barbara Freedman, Staging the Gaze: Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis, and Shakespearean Comedy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 146.

19. Jean E. Howard, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 1994), 44.

20. Fineman, Shakespeare's Will, 139.

21. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1990), 103.

22. Sue-Ellen Case, Feminism and Theater (New York: Methuen, 1988), 12.