[In the essay that follows, Perret is concerned with the methods by which Petruchio “tames” Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew, demonstrating that Petruchio teaches by example how a wife should behave by taking on the work traditionally assigned to women.]

The focus of recent critics of The Taming of the Shrew on Kate's role-playing¹ is too limiting. On the one hand, the theatrical vocabulary encourages them to speak of Kate's transformation as though it were nothing more than an act;² on the other, the narrow focus keeps them from recognizing the structural subtlety of the latter half of the play, the importance of Kate's seemingly redundant second capitulation, and the comic point of her famous lecture (V.ii.136-78),³ which is possible precisely because she takes the lecture's content seriously. We discover the complexity of this play when we shift our attention, correctively, from the playing of the shrew to the playing of the tamer and to the role he asks her to undertake. We find that Petruchio shows his imagination not only in the way he uses the time-tested persuasions of stick and carrot, but also in a daring new technique that would have been apparent to an audience familiar with the Elizabethan distribution of household duties: the shrew tamer attempts to school the shrew who assumes his privileges by assuming her responsibilities, teaching her through his own example just how a wife should behave. From the moment Petruchio brings Kate home to the moment she capitulates, almost every action he takes is, according to the conduct books, woman's work.

The relationship and duties of husband and wife are copiously discussed in Elizabethan sermons and books on domestic conduct.⁴ The playwright need not have had one of these works beside him as he wrote: the standards set forth in them were widely enough known that he could assume, for instance, that playgoers would understand why Desdemona should come and go at her husband's command even after he has unjustly struck her—the onstage audience shows shock at Othello's action, but no surprise at Desdemona's obedience. Whether the guidelines for behavior expounded in sermons and conduct books were actually followed in the home⁵ is irrelevant to whether Shakespeare could assume that theatergoers would recognize Petruchio's shifting of domestic responsibilities: the audience's awareness of conventional standards, not the audience's adherence to them, is what enables Shakespeare to play with the reversal of roles.

The basic assumption of any shrew play is that the man should rule both his wife and his home. The fact that much of the comedy springs from the shrew's mistreatment of her mate encourages us to forget that the wife is indeed supposed to govern the home, though as second in command to her husband. The prevailing view was that “the office of the husbande is, to bee Lorde of all, of the wife, to giue account of all. … The office of the husbande is, to maintayne well hys liuelyhoode, and the office of the woman is, to gouerne well the household.”⁶

But though managing the house was considered primarily the wife's business, because a few matters were deemed more properly the husband's concern, authors of domestic conduct books carefully specify the duties belonging to each. “There are certayne thynges in the house that onely do pertaine to the authoritie of the husbande, wherewith it were a reprofe for the wife without the consent of her husbande to medle withal: as to receyue straungers, or to marry her doughter. There are other thinges in the which the husband geueth ouer his ryght vnto the woman, as to rule & gouerne her maydens, to see to those thinges y^t belong vnto y^e kitchen, & to y^e most part of y^e houshold stuffe.”⁷ For a man to deal with most details of running a house seemed to the sixteenth century unnatural, if not quite unthinkable; after all, “Who wold take vpon him the office and charges of a house? or the office of a cooke? … What a torment were it for a man to do those thinges? A man wold rather leaue all & dwel in a desert, then to dwel in such misery and bondage.”⁸ Xenophon hints darkly that more than scorn awaits the man who meddles in huswifery: “Parauenture god … wyll punishe hym … bycause he taketh vpon hym that that belongeth to the wyfe.”⁹ The Elizabethans considered the man who unnecessarily takes up woman's work to be acting most unreasonably: “Those men are to be laughed at, who hauing … a sufficient Wife to doe all the worke within dores, which belongs to a Woman to doe, yet the Husband will set Hens abrood, season the Pot, & dresse the Meat, or any the like worke, which belongeth not to the Man: such husbands many times offend their Wiues greatly, and they wrong themselues.”¹⁰ Indeed, Hortensio in The Taming of the Shrew observes that it “will make a man mad, to make a woman of him” (IV.v.35). But though his method may seem mad, Petruchio knows what he is doing when he takes up woman's work.

I

Petruchio's first words upon crossing his threshold—“Where be these knaves?” (IV.i.123)—reflect his position as the ultimate authority in his house, in accord with the accepted Elizabethan belief that the husband “without any exception, is master ouer all the house, and hath as touching his familie, more authoritie then a king in his kingdome.”¹¹ Kate, however, almost immediately forgets that though “the wife is ruler of all other things,” she is “yet ynder her husband,”¹² for to correct the male servants is the master's prerogative: the domestic conduct books all agree that a wife should “neither rebuke and correcte the men, but leaue that for her housbād to do.”¹³ In excusing the man who drops the water—“Patience, I pray you; 'twas a fault unwilling” (IV.i.159)—Kate rebukes her master as well as the servant's. Petruchio reacts to her violation of domestic order with an indirect reproof: “Will you give thanks, sweet Kate; or else shall I?” (IV.i.162). Since in an Elizabethan household it is the husband who is to offer “before meales, and after meales, prayers and thankes,”¹⁴ in asking whether she will say grace Petruchio ironically asks Kate if she will presume further upon her husband's authority.

Their relationship, like their meal, remains graceless, for when Kate declares that the supposed fault with the meat lies in the supposer rather than the meat, Petruchio asserts that they must not eat “burnt food,”

For it engenders choler, planteth anger;
And better 'twere that both of us did fast,
Since, of ourselves, ourselves are choleric,
Than feed it with such over-roasted flesh.

(IV.i.175-78)

The role of dietician and physician that Petruchio adopts properly belongs to the wife, who, Tilney advises, should have the qualities of a cook, a physician, and a surgeon;¹⁵ Vives, in fact, specifies that the wife should know “what maner dyet is good or bad, what meates are holsome to take, what to eschewe, and howe longe, and of what fassion.”¹⁶ In his carefully calculated denial of food Petruchio encroaches upon his wife's authority, for it is her responsibility to “giue the portion of food vnto her family, or cause it to be giuen in due season.”¹⁷ In controlling their diet Petruchio does Kate's duty as a good wife should, “under name of perfect love” (IV.iii.12).

Perfect love—or at least spiritual rather than physical union—was doubtless one of the topics of Petruchio's “sermon on continency.” The origin of this “curtain lecture” (the husband) is as surprising as its timing (the wedding night): bedtime lectures were so commonly given by wives that women were sometimes referred to as “night-Crowes.”¹⁸ Indeed, bed was thought the one appropriate place for a woman to reprove her husband.¹⁹ Domestic conduct books, which insist that a wife be censured only in private, never even consider that the husband might reprove his wife in bed. Petruchio's “curtain lecture” is thus thoroughly unconventional.

By the end of IV.iii Petruchio has taken on several tasks usually performed by the wife. His masculinity, however, is never called into question, partly because it has been firmly established before this scene, partly because of the falcon image of his soliloquy.

My falcon now is sharp and passing empty;
And till she stoop she must not be full-gorged,
For then she never looks upon her lure.
Another way I have to man my haggard,
To make her come and know her keeper's call,
That is, to watch her, as we watch these kites
That bate and beat and will not be obedient.
She eat no meat to-day, nor none shall eat;
Last night she slept not, nor to-night she shall not.

(IV.i.193-201)

That the trainers of hawks were men, not women, encourages us to view as man's work the woman's work Petruchio refers to here.

Though Petruchio's soliloquy about his method of shrew-taming explains his negative approach through denying food and sleep rather than his positive approach through giving an example of good housekeeping, Petruchio both shows and tells Kate what a wife should do.²⁰ After their sleepless night of fasting, Petruchio, who has apparently risen to prepare Kate's food, brightly urges her to “pluck up” her spirits, reminding her that a wife's mood should match her husband's²¹ and that a lack of consideration for others will bring a lack of consideration from others.

Pluck up thy spirits; look cheerfully upon me.
Here, love; thou see'st how diligent I am
To dress thy meat myself and bring it thee;
I am sure, sweet Kate, this kindness merits thanks.
What, not a word? …
.....The poorest service is repaid with thanks;
And so shall mine, before you touch the meat.

(IV.iii.38-46)

In dressing Kate's meat Petruchio diligently and cheerfully performs the task that reflects a wife's intermediate position as servant to her husband and as mistress of his household, for in the kitchen the wife “in a maner doeth reygne all alone, but yet in such wise & maner, that she put to her hande to dresse her husbādes meate, and not to comaunde it to be drest being absent.”²² Though it is normally the wife's responsibility to be the example for the servants,²³ Petruchio offers his wife an example upon which to model her own behavior.

Dressing Kate's meat is the last example of Petruchio's serving as a model for Kate to imitate. In the only other instance of his doing woman's work, he serves as a bad example: through an exchange with the tailor in which he plays the wife's role as well as his own, Petruchio shows Kate what not to do when dealing with those above and beneath her. The Elizabethan wife was supposed to choose clothes that her husband would approve,²⁴ but Petruchio (in the role of the wife) has ordered through Grumio clothes that he now (in the role of the husband) does not approve.

TAI.
You bid me make it orderly and well,
According to the fashion and the time.
PET.
Marry, and did; but if you be remember'd,
I did not bid you mar it to the time.

.....

I'll none of it: hence! make your best of it.
KATH.
I never saw a better-fashion'd gown,
More quaint, more pleasing, nor more commendable.

(IV.iii.93-103)

Petruchio here puts Kate in his position—a position she has previously usurped—in order that she may taste the frustration of having what is both pleasing and proper unreasonably denied, seemingly out of sheer contrariness. Though it galls Kate, this treatment is potentially more instructive than the earlier examples of “kill[ing] her in her own humour” (IV.i.183), in that it gives her the opportunity not only to understand how her husband feels when she contradicts his wishes, but also to realize that good domestic order requires a concern for others, because the wife's insistence on having her own way affects more than whoever is involved in giving her what she wants: her not being a source of general order makes her a source of general disorder in which the haberdasher and the tailor are discomfited. Petruchio's refusal to consider Kate's conflicting opinion and his shifting of responsibility for instructions wrongly given, wrongly interpreted, or wrongly followed are designed to remind Kate that her behavior effectively denies both the vow of obedience she made at marriage and the wife's duty of seeing that household matters are handled correctly. Kate, however, seems unable to recognize her ultimate responsibility for the comic confusion that results when Grumio imitates (as a servant and a wife should) the “humour” of his master, who imitates (as a husband should not) the “humour” of his wife by going back on his word and blaming another for the failure of their agreement.

Although in his “taming school” (IV.ii.54) he tries to teach by example, Petruchio finds Kate so self-centered that she can learn only from her own doing, not his, just as she can sense only her own frustration, not his. As a pupil, in fact, Kate seems to be regressing rather than progressing: in IV.i we find that she tries to keep Petruchio from unfairly beating Grumio and we hear her excuse a servant's “fault unwilling,” but in IV.iii she speaks for herself rather than for another and does not seem to care whether Petruchio, the haberdasher, or the tailor is right or wronged; her sole concern is whether she will get what she wants. Petruchio, appropriately enough,²⁵ has not been able to bring domestic order by acting as a model wife, for that is the woman's job. He thus resumes his proper role as ultimate authority in the home, flatly insisting on the absolute obedience owed the head of the family. He now treats Kate less like a partner, who can learn from the precept and example of one who has tried her tasks, than like a puppet, who must respond to commands even if they are unreasonable (IV.iii.194-97). Only through the experience of obeying, which Petruchio forces upon her, does Kate discover that what her husband wants is not servile acquiescence, which would confine her, but co-operation, which will free them both.

II

The exchange of male and female duties and roles we see on the wedding night and the following morning is carefully prepared for immediately after the wedding. At marriage the Elizabethan woman moved from obedience to her father to obedience to her husband, but the newly married Kate initiates the reversal of domestic roles by asserting her dominance over both father and husband: “Father, be quiet: he [Petruchio] shall stay my leisure” (III.ii.219). Kate shows herself disobedient in deed as well as word, for though inviting guests is the man's prerogative,²⁶ her first act as a bride is to invite guests to join her at supper in her father's house, contrary to her husband's wishes. In effect, this is a declaration of superiority to her husband, who takes it as such.

Petruchio reacts forcefully to this challenging of his authority by putting Kate firmly in her place, which may be over others but is still under him.

They shall go forward, Kate, at thy command.
Obey the bride, you that attend on her.

(III.ii.224-25)

Saving her face by shifting the sense of “attend” from “accompany” to “wait upon,” Petruchio concurs that Kate's servants owe her obedience and reinforces her order by his. Nevertheless, he makes clear that he is master of this mistress.

I will be master of what is mine own.
She is my goods, my chattels; she is my house,
My household stuff, my field, my barn,
My horse, my ox, my ass, my any thing.

(III.ii.231-34)

Such legalism is scarcely romantic, but Petruchio at once pretends to defend his bride against attack. Since protecting his wife is a man's duty,²⁷ this exaggeratedly masculine role, uncalled for by the immediate situation, acts as a public declaration that Petruchio will do his duty as a husband.

Fear not, sweet wench, they shall not touch thee, Kate:
I'll buckler thee against a million.

(III.ii.240-41)

This imaginative pose is a brilliant stroke: it forces Kate into the traditional feminine role and at the same time responds to her “Now, if you love me, stay” (III.ii.206) by suggesting that Petruchio denies her request precisely because he does love her.

The shrew tamer's behavior in III.ii gives us a foretaste of most of the methods he will use in Acts IV and V. When Petruchio busses his bride with “such a clamorous smack / That at the parting all the church did echo” (III.ii.180-81), he proclaims Kate's desirability as publicly as when he demands that she kiss him “in the midst of the street” (V.i.149). He shows the shrew her violent and willful unreasonableness by striking the priest. Anticipating his falconer's method of discipline by deprivation, he keeps Kate from what he will deny her until she is tamed—food, sleep, and a visit to her father's house—by summarily carrying her off supperless, although the first few weeks of marriage were usually spent with the girl's family.²⁸ The only one of Petruchio's later methods not shown at their wedding is his providing a positive role model for Kate. This Petruchio cannot do here, for in public he must demonstrate his control over his wife. He wisely shifts domestic roles only when he and Kate are where his contradictory reaction to her negative behavior can become part of a consistent program in which not only his words but also his actions provide a positive pattern for his wife to imitate.

On the way to his house Petruchio responds to Kate's challenging of a masculine prerogative differently, though no less imaginatively, than he did at their wedding. Kate's objection to her husband's disciplining of a manservant paradoxically reflects a new, albeit temporary, humility—“she prayed, that never prayed before” (IV.i.82)—and a new concern for those beneath her—“she waded through the dirt to pluck [Petruchio] off [Grumio]” (IV.i.79-80). This shift in attitude beneath a surface of continued contrariness seems to suggest to Petruchio that a role model might help Kate learn a better way to express her solicitude, because he literally adopts the woman's position, riding behind his wife despite the fact that when an Elizabethan man and woman shared a horse, the woman, not the man, rode pillion.²⁹ After Kate presumes to usurp his authority outdoors, Petruchio takes over hers indoors, demonstrating various feminine duties until it becomes apparent to him that Kate cannot understand what he is doing.

Though Petruchio's method proves ineffective, it has a peculiar fitness: the domestic conduct books caution the husband to “take heed, that he himselfe bee not tainted with the same vice, which hee reproueth in his wife, least shee stop his mouth, with the reproach of the same fault: but rather by giuing her example by the contrary vertue: let her be induced and led to follow him.”³⁰ What Petruchio tries for a time is an inversion of the Renaissance adage that a good wife becomes a looking glass for her husband, reflecting his every mood.³¹ When Kate fails to realize that her husband acts as a model for her good conduct as well as a mirror for her bad behavior, Petruchio resumes his rightful domestic role, flatly demanding that his wife assume hers and that she demonstrate her compliance by patterning her humor upon his. In testing Kate's compliance in IV.v, Petruchio appropriately requires her to act as if a man were a woman; this forces Kate to realize how unrealistic has been her assumption that one sex can arbitrarily take on the other's role.

III

Awareness of the reversal of male and female domestic roles in Act IV increases our understanding, hence our enjoyment, of Kate's behavior in Act V. In V.i, in an exchange that critics have found difficult to justify, Petruchio demands a second proof of his wife's obedience. For the last time Kate crosses his will—for the first time correctly,³² since she is now thinking of what behavior is proper for her, and according to conventional morality Petruchio is wrong in demanding a kiss immodestly “in the midst of the street.” Behavior acceptable in private is not necessarily proper in public. As Gouge puts it, “Much greater liberty is granted to man and wife when they are alone, then in company.”³³ Swetnam, for example, admonishes the husband that “thou must neither chide nor play with thy wife before company; those that play and dally with them before company, they doe thereby set other Mens teeth on edge and make their Wiues the lesse shamefast.”³⁴ In short, the married Elizabethan man must take care not to show himself, in Vives' phrase, “rather to be a louer then a husbande.”³⁵

Why should Petruchio now open himself to the charge of uxoriousness and poor household government? The answer seems to be that this shrew tamer wants his wife to grasp the spirit as well as the letter of domestic law. Petruchio's demand for an unconventional acknowledgment of the husband's traditional dominance shows Kate that obedience to him will not enslave her to dull conventionality. Putting his pride as a man into her hands, Petruchio asks his wife to show publicly her right relationship, loving obedience, by obediently showing love. In giving Kate the opportunity to refuse him before others, Petruchio offers her momentary mastery over him; here, as in the final scene, Kate by not taking it shows her mastery over her former self and her understanding of their right relationship.

When Kate in III.ii publicly asks her husband to give way to her, he refuses, disguising her disobedience with the romantic pose of rescuing her from attack; when Petruchio in V.i publicly asks his wife to give way to him, disguising her obedience as an act of love, she acquiesces. Kate's emotional growth can be seen in the difference between her “Now, if you love me, stay” of III.ii.206 and her “Now pray thee, love, stay” of V.i.153. Her intellectual growth can be seen in how she understands Petruchio's two threats to take her home if she does not obey him. In IV.v Petruchio's threat of turning back is to Kate only another denial of what she wants; in V.i, where the contest has become one of principles rather than wills, Petruchio's threat is to Kate a reminder that in good household government obedience takes precedence over decorum. That Kate gives evidence of her capitulation in V.i as well as in IV.v shows the shrew tamer's imagination rather than the dramatist's lack of it.

The change in Kate can be seen most clearly in V.ii, where she and Petruchio appear as champions of conventional domestic order yet transcend the limitations of traditional male and female propriety. At the wedding banquet Kate, in one last reversal of roles, defends her husband's honor, though usually it is the husband who protects the wife's. She does this, however, wisely, defending Petruchio as he defended her, by putting the woman in the traditionally proper feminine role: Kate proves Petruchio a shrew tamer by proving herself no shrew. Without contesting his authority over her, Kate “bucklers” Petruchio from the charge of the other wedding guests as wittily as she played with the sun and moon when she first capitulated. The exaggeration in her lecture to the other wives suggests, not the hypocrisy she explicitly condemns in insisting that women's “hearts / Should well agree with their external parts” (V.ii.167-68), but the exaggeration of Petruchio's imagined defense of her at their wedding. Where in III.ii the shrew tamer to enforce her obedience ostentatiously demonstrates the husband's duty, in V.ii the tamed shrew to offer her obedience ostentatiously demonstrates the wife's duty—and in doing so protects not only Petruchio from the accusation that he is ruled by his wife, but also the other husbands from attack by their wives. Kate shows herself as good at Petruchio's game as he; she has become sure enough of her domestic role to demonstrate, as he did, the opposite sex's duty “under name of perfect love.”³⁶ Their techniques are now complementary, as their spirits are matched.

Kate's elaborate lecture on the basis of good domestic government wins Petruchio's enthusiastic “Why, there's a wench! Come on, and kiss me, Kate” (V.ii.180)—a breaking of decorum that is an outwardly improper sign of delight in their relationship's inward propriety. The situation recalls that of the previous scene, where Petruchio also demands a kiss that defies convention. But in V.i he asks Kate for a sign of her love as a sign of her obedience; in V.ii he rewards a display of her obedience with a display of his love. The “madly mated” pair unconventionally express and are ruled by the spirit, if not always the letter, of domestic law.³⁷ They have discovered that “when the husband hath obtained that his wife doth trulie and hartily loue him, there shall then need neither precepts, nor lawes: for loue shall teach her moe things, and more effectually, then all the precepts of all the Philosophers.”³⁸

Knowledge of the domestic duties assigned the Elizabethan man and woman helps us see a new subtlety to this comedy. Where shrew plays invite us not to respect a woman who, figuratively, “wears the pants,” this play invites us to respect a man who, figuratively, “wears the skirts” for a while to teach his wife a lesson. That Petruchio attempts to tame his shrew through this unconventional method does not make him shamefully womanish; as the homily on matrimony regularly reminded Elizabethan churchgoers, who knew that dissemble can have the sense of simulate, “a man may be a man … although hee should dissemble some things in his wives manners. And this is the part of a Christian man, which both pleaseth God, and serueth also in good vse to the comfort of their mariage state.”³⁹

Petruchio is not the first male in The Taming of the Shrew to take on a woman's role: in the Induction the page Bartholomew presents himself as a wife to induce Sly to accept his new identity and the social behavior it requires. Yet where Bartholomew wants Sly to respond to his womanly ways rather than to imitate them, Petruchio wants Kate to respond to the man he is but to imitate his ways of imitating a woman. When Kate finally understands what her husband wants of her, she naturally excels Petruchio in the role of model wife.

Notes

1. See Richard Henze, “Role-Playing in The Taming of the Shrew,” Southern Humanities Review 4 (Summer 1970):231-40; J. Dennis Huston, “‘To Make a Puppet’: Play and Play-making in The Taming of the Shrew,” Shakespeare Studies 9 (1976): 73-88.

2. Critics of this play need to be wary of linguistic absurdity or Procrustianism such as “One tends to forget that it is the shrew who is playing the obedient wife at the end … exactly because the part is so naturally performed that the shrew is the obedient wife” (Henze, p. 233). If a shrew is, by definition, one who behaves shrewishly, then one who does not behave shrewishly is not a shrew—not even a shrew pretending not to be a shrew!

3. All quotations from the play are from The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. Hardin Craig (Chicago: Scott, Foresman, 1961).

4. Though the scholar will of course explore further in the original works, the easiest introduction to the content of the Elizabethan sermons and conduct books is through works such as Chilton Latham Powell, English Domestic Relations 1487-1753 (New York: Russell & Russell, 1917); Carroll Camden, The Elizabethan Woman (New York: Elsevier Press, 1952); Ruth Kelso, Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1956). Louis B. Wright, Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England (1935; rpt. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1963), p. 226 notes that there is “a strange sameness in point of view and treatment in the books read by the burgher of 1558 and by his grandson in 1640.” Lu Emily Pearson, Elizabethans at Home (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1957), p. 79 observes how much from the early conduct books, many of which went through several editions, reappears in the later ones: “Each writer, then, set forth much of what had been said before, adding what he insisted he had learned from observation or experience.” For instance, the analogy between breaking a horse and taming a wife which Johannes Ludovicus Vives makes in The office and duetie of an husband, trans. Thomas Paynell (London, 1553), sigs. N7^v-N8 is repeated almost verbatim nearly half a century later in Robert Cleaver, A godlie forme of householde government: for the ordering of private families, according to the direction of Gods word (London, 1598), pp. 173-74. The ideas recorded in a domestic conduct book written much before or after Shakespeare's play are thus relevant.

5. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (1977; abr. edn. New York: Harper, 1979) notes that although “there are plenty of examples of Elizabethan women who dominated their husbands,” many women, particularly of the upper and upper-middle classes, accepted the “theoretical and legal doctrines of the time”: “The evidence suggests … that married and unmarried women were as submissive and dependent as the conduct books suggested that they ought to be” (pp. 139, 141).

6. Edmunde Tilney, A briefe and pleasant discourse of duties in Mariage, called the Flower of Friendshippe (London, 1568), sig. C5^v. Cleaver is uncommon in following the conventional division of duties (pp. 170-71) with the acknowledgment that “the dutie of the wife, or of the husband, doth not so exempt either of them, but that she also according to her ability and power, must helpe her husband to get it, and hee likewise in his discretion, direct her in the dispensation thereof,” yet even he follows this exception to the rule with the caveat that “order consisteth in this, that the husband [is to] follow his businesse … [and] is not to deale, but soberly and in great discretion with affaires, that are proper to the wife” (p. 186).

7. Vives, Office, sig. U1; Cleaver, p. 176.

8. Vives, Office, sigs. E6^v-E7. Cleaver emphasizes the unnaturalness of exchanging domestic roles: “a mankind woman is a mōster: that is, halfe a woman, and halfe a man. It beseemeth not the mistresse to be a master, no more then it becommeth the master to be mistresse” (p. 223).

9. Xenophons treatise of hovsholde, trans. Gentian Hervet (London, 1544), fol. 24^v.

10. Joseph Swetnam, The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward, and vnconstant Women: Or, the Vanitie of them; chuse you whether (London, 1622), p. 56.

11. Cleaver, p. 176.

12. Ibid.

13. Johannes Ludovicus Vives, A very frvtefvl and pleasant boke callyd the instrvction of a Christen woman, trans. Richard Hyrde (London, 1541?), fols. 106-106^v. See also Xenophon, fol. 41^v; Henrie Smith, A Preparatiue to Mariage (London, 1591), p. 97; [Heinrich Bullinger], The Christian state of Matrimony, wherein husbandes & wyues may learne to keepe house together wyth Loue, trans. Myles Couerdale (London, 1575), fol. 76^v.

14. Cleaver, p. 43. William Perkins, Christian Oeconomie: or A Short Svrvey of the Right Manner of Erecting and Ordering a Family, according to the Scriptures, trans. Thomas Pickering (London, 1618), p. 698 notes that the husband is “to be the principall agent, directer, and furtherer of the worship of God within his family.”

15. Tilney, sig. E4^v; Vives, Instruction, fol. 108^v.

16. Vives, Instruction, fol. 108^v; Robert Snawsel, A looking glasse for Maried Folkes (London, 1610), sig. E5^v.

17. Perkins, p. 700.

18. Swetnam, pp. 11-12. See also Tilney, sig. E4^v; Thomas Nashe, Christs Teares Over Iervsalem, in The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow, 5 vols. (London, 1910), 2:144; Antoine de La Sale, The fyftene Joyes of maryage (London, 1509), sig. A8^v.

19. Tilney, sig. E6^v.

20. In this Petruchio departs from standard Elizabethan procedure. Xenophon allows a husband to instruct his wife how to put things in good order, but he does not suggest that the husband illustrate the lecture by doing her work (fols. 29^v-32).

21. Tilney admonishes the wife to make her husband's face “hir daylie looking glasse, wherein she ought to be alwayes prying, to see whē he is merie, when sad … wherto she must alwayes frame hir owne countenance” (sig. E4^v).

22. Vives, Office, sigs. U3-U3^v. Tilney observes that it is “a great want in a woman, if she be unskilfull in dressing of meate. For it is the chiefest point of a houswife to cherishe hir husbande, who being sicke, will haue the best appetite to the meat of hys wyues dressing” (sig. E4^v). In explaining that “the maried Wife is to haue the rule and ouersight of the household … because the practice thereof is more conuenient and fit for her sexe, then for her Husband,” Guillaume de la Perriere, The Mirrovr of Policie (London, 1598), fol. 115 specifies the “base matters” which are to be left to servants; these do not include dressing her husband's meat.

23. Vives, Instruction, fol. 106^v.

24. Vives, Office, sigs. Xv^v-Xvi; Instruction, fol. 95^v; Camden summarizes: “It is the duty of the husband to provide meat, drink, and clothing for his family. He deputes this duty to his wife by furnishing her with the money with which to buy the necessaries” (p. 120).

25. Vives, Office, sig. E4^v notes that “as it is not in [the husband] to make of a woman no woman, so it is not in him to make of a mā no man.”

26. La Perriere specifies that the wife “suffer not any to come into the house without expresse licence or commandement of her husband” (fol. 116); Vives, Instruction, fol. 108.

27. Perkins, p. 691; Cleaver, pp. 174, 202; William Gouge, Of Domesticall Dvties: Eight Treatises (London, 1622), pp. 408-409.

28. Christina Hole, English Home-Life 1500-1800 (London: B. T. Batsford, 1947), p. 62. Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558-1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 634 notes that “the father of the groom usually undertook to give the pair lodging in his own house for the first few years,” but then mentions several examples where the bridal couple lived at first with the bride's father; Pearson says that the bridal couple “might spend a little time after the wedding with the bride's family, possibly even a few weeks” (p. 356). In any case, Petruchio's carrying Kate off to his own house immediately after the ceremony is not customary.

29. Christina Hole, The English Housewife in the Seventeenth Century (London: Chatto & Windus, 1953) points out that women usually rode “sidesaddle or pillion behind some male relative or servant” (p. 156).

30. Cleaver, p. 206.

31. Pierre Charron, Of Wisdome, trans. Samson Lennard (London, 1612) has a slightly fuller version than Tilney; he speaks of an obedient wife as always “applying and accomodating hir selfe to the maners and humours of hir husband; like a true looking-glasse, which faithfullie representeth the face, hauing no other particular designement, loue, thought, but as the dimensions and accidents which haue no other proper action or motion, and neuer moue but with the bodie, she applieth hir selfe in all things to hir husband” (p. 455).

32. Gouge observes that in “indifferent things” (things not expressly commanded or forbidden by God) which the wife thinks improper she may attempt to persuade her husband, but if she cannot persuade him, she must yield to his authority (pp. 338-39).

33. Of Domestical Dvties, p. 388.

34. Arraignment, p. 53. See also John Lyly, Euphues and His England, in Works, ed. R. W. Bond, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902), 2:225: “Behaue thy self modestly with thy wife before company, remembring the seueritie of Cato, who remoued Manilius frō the Senate, for that he was seene to kisse his wife in presence of his daughter. … Husbands shold scarce iest before their wiues, least want of modestie on their parts, be cause of wantonnes on their wiues part.”

35. Office, sig. R2.

36. The Sermons of Edwin Sandys (1585), ed. John Ayre (Cambridge: 1841), p. 327 notes that “the man is a ‘cover’ of defence unto his wife, and the woman a ‘pillar’ of rest unto her husband.”

37. Huston, in contrast, sees Petruchio as freeing Kate from “a world ruled, not served, by convention” in which man “threatened ultimately by dehumanization … can act [only] either formulaically in cliché or mechanically in obsession” (p. 84).

38. Cleaver, p. 174.

39. “An Homilie of the state of Matrimonie,” Certaine Sermons or Homilies appointed to be read in Chvrches, In the time of the late Queene Elizabeth of famous memory (1623) (Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1968), p. 242.