SOURCE: “Petruchio the Sophist and Language as Creation in The Taming of the Shrew,” in Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Vol. 29, No. 2, Spring, 1989, pp. 237-57.

[In the essay that follows, Baumlin views Petruchio as a sophistic rhetorician, and observes that Petruchio uses his rhetorical skill to engender a positive change in Katherina. This, Baumlin argues, supports the view that at this early point in Shakespeare's career, the playwright possessed an optimistic conception of language and its positive, transformational power.]

“Language most shows the man: speak, that I may see thee!”

Ben Jonson, Timber

Properly placed among his earliest dramatic works,¹The Taming of the Shrew displays Shakespeare's most optimistic vision of the positive, creative powers of language. We find here none of the later plays' ambivalence toward the powers and moral complexities of language, for the characterization of Petruchio represents a paradigm of the sophistic rhetorician at a most successful and morally admirable stance: he uses the powerful tools of rhetorical arts to create for his bride a new reality grounded in play, self-respect, and love. His manipulation of Katherina—through outlandish hyperbole, linguistic “disguises,” and outright untruths—need not condemn Petruchio as a sophist in the typically pejorative sense of this term, for his ultimate motive is not acquisitiveness, sexual or financial. Rather, his goal is to create through words a “brave new world” of marital harmony, one to replace Katherina's previous verbal universe and the maladaptive personality that was its consequence. By changing her name from “Katherine the curst” to “just plain Kate,” Petruchio ultimately changes her sense of self, creating for her a new, more functional persona. And this renaming points us toward the playwright's view of his own art at this early level of aesthetic development: the skillful dramatist, like the sophistic word-magician, must properly understand both the world-building, demiurgic power of his medium and the human responsibility which must accompany it.

And moral responsibility is precisely the question raised by critics who find Petruchio to be sexist and morally reprehensible; in fact, some have found the play satiric or downright offensive in the portrayal of a woman forced into submission through the cruelties of a bully.² However, as is always the case with Shakespearean materials, the best analysis is begun in clear sight of the sources and analogues.³ In the closest analogue, a contemporary ballad—“A Merry Jeste of a Shrewde and Curste Wyfe Lapped in Morrelles Skin” (c. 1550)—the husband kills his sharp-tongued wife's horse (Morrelle) and incarcerates her in the horse's salted skin in order to “tame” her into submission. In other contemporary versions of this ballad, physical violence is again the approved remedy for a domineering wife—binding, beating, bleeding her, even beating her dead animal's hide upon her back—and the more ingenious and physically excruciating the techniques, the better.⁴ Petruchio's methods of “taming” reveal, however, the uniquely rhetorical emphasis⁵ of Shakespeare's version of this familiar story. Here, even the title gives ironic reference to other “tamings” of shrewish wives, for Petruchio does not “tame” Katherina into subservience; rather, he awakens Kate to her true nature, helping her to discover self-control, a joyful spirit of play, and an ability to care deeply for someone besides herself.

The play's emphasis on language is evident from its beginning, when the complaint throughout Padua is that Kate's sharp tongue cannot be endured: Bianca is made to “bear the penance of [Katherina's] tongue,”⁶ while Hortensio and Gremio cannot “endure her loud alarums” (I.i.127). Katherina is, in short, “Renown'd in Padua for her scolding tongue” (I.ii.100), using her language to drive away not only potential, undesirable suitors but family members and potential friends as well. Her language serves, then, not to graft her firmly into the network of social interaction but rather to isolate her from all humanity. Though critics have sought to identify causes for her self-imposed isolation—parental neglect, superior intelligence, high-spiritedness⁷—Katherina is in any case sketched in the traditional outline of the shrewish woman with a sharp tongue, and the structure of the comedy itself—if it is to remain a true Shakespearean comedy—indicates that Katherina must somehow turn her language from an instrument of bitter defense and isolation into a tool for human growth and humane instruction in the community.

Shakespeare's supreme innovation, actually, is his Petruchio—a skilled rhetorician who, appropriately enough, cures his wife's linguistic illness more with language than with physical brutality toward her. Petruchio claims to be a straight talker (I.ii.65-66), but it is evident from the beginning that he is more often a virtuoso circumlocutioner and punster in his “taming,” for as Grumio warns the suitors, if “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 … disfigure her with it” (I.ii.112-16, emphasis added): his means of assault against Katherina's shrewishness is thus a figure of rhetoric and not a fist. Whether it be in “rope-tricks”⁸ or what he calls “few words” between friends (I.ii.66), Petruchio employs language, rather than physical force, to serve his needs. Granted, Petruchio first appears on stage assaulting Grumio, but he does so in the context of their punning banter, telling Grumio if he will not “knock me here soundly” (I.ii.7) at the gate as he has bid the servant to do, then Petruchio himself will “ring” (line 16), whereupon he proceeds to wring Grumio by the ears. This passage indeed sets up Petruchio's character: he is capable of—and willing to use—physical violence and verbal abusiveness, as the text points out clearly throughout the play, for he repeatedly strikes and insults his servants even in Katherina's presence. However, though a long-standing stage tradition has often overemphasized the potential for violence in Petruchio's character—most notably in the famous “Good morrow, Kate” scene (II.i.181 ff.)—the text itself does not demand an actor's overtly violent characterization of Petruchio's actions toward Katherina. In fact, the only direct indication of Petruchio's physical force, apparently in restraining her, lies in Katherina's single line, “Let me go” (II.i.241), which itself is by no means univocal: we could interpret it to mean “Let me pass by you” as easily as to mean “Let go of me.”⁹ The text itself actually invites a reading in direct contrast to the stage tradition, one in which Petruchio's language—not his body, fists, nor masculine dominance in physical strength—accomplishes the persuasion, the “taming,” of Katherina.

Petruchio's rhetorical skill, then, most clearly defines his character, and his oratorical prowess is so evident that one can pick any line at random and find rhetorical figures which emphasize Petruchio's playful bombast, a quality delightfully obvious not only on the page but also to an audience's ears. The repetitiveness of the internal rhyme of “wive and thrive” (I.ii.56) is at the very least comic in sound, and more humorous still is the fact that he brings this whole array of rhetorical machinery, not to the orator's arena, but to a simple domestic encounter. His first extended speech in this scene pushes rhetorical floridity to the limits:

Signior Hortensio, 'twixt such friends as we
Few words suffice; and therefore, if thou know
One rich enough to be Petruchio's wife
(As wealth is burthen of my wooing dance),
Be she as foul as was Florentius' love,
As old as Sibyl, and as curst and shrowd
As Socrates' Xantippe, or a worse,
She moves me not, or not removes at least
Affection's edge in me. [Whe'er] she is as rough
As are the swelling Adriatic seas,
I come to wive it wealthily in Padua;
If wealthily, then happily in Padua.

(I.ii.65-76)

The ironic contrast between his opening statement—“'twixt such friends as we / Few words suffice”—and the number of his actual words is comic; we may notice the use of accumulatio in the gathering momentum of allusions, prosthesis in the “moves / removes” wordplay, and gradatio and antistrophe in the last two lines. It would appear, from the standpoint of the traditional, violent wife-taming folklore, that this master of verbosity belongs more in arenas of classical debate than in the domestic realm of “wiving happily in Padua,” and yet, ironically enough, this rhetor is precisely the one to transform the maladjusted “Katherine the curst” (I.ii.129) into a woman whose own language fosters the growth, recreation, and edification of her self and others.

Such, in fact, is the magnitude of Petruchio's rhetorical self-confidence that he does not at all fear contact with this “irksome brawling scold” (I.ii.187):

Think you a little din can daunt mine ears?
Have I not in my time heard lions roar?
Have I not heard the sea, puff'd up with winds,
Rage like an angry boar chafed with sweat?
Have I not heard great ordnance in the field,
And heaven's artillery thunder in the skies?
Have I not in a pitched battle heard
Loud 'larums, neighing steeds, and trumpets' clang?
And do you tell me of a woman's tongue,
That gives not half so great a blow to hear
As will a chestnut in a farmer's fire?
Tush, tush, fear boys with bugs.

(I.ii.199-210)

Here Petruchio uses twelve lines of extended eloquence to tell the suitors simply that he does not fear Katherina! His uses of anaphora combined with grandiose diction serve to elevate and amplify with great rhetorical flourish the things he has heard—lions, stormy seas, wars—and to reduce Katherina's dreaded sharp tongue to the domestic sound of a tasty chestnut roasting in the homely fire of the humble farmer. Finally, this grandiloquent speech reduces Katherina's fearsomeness by ending with an appropriately comic thud: in “boys with bugs,” the commonness of diction, the alliteration and the monosyllables all produce the miniscule “reality” of Katherina's verbal intimidation.

As to the truth of Petruchio's professed reasons for wooing—if he marries “wealthily, then happily”—we might consider that hyperbole is the most characteristic device of his language and that he is apparently wealthy himself (I.ii.57), for his father is dead and has left his fortune to Petruchio (I.ii.191). Still, whether or not Petruchio actually begins the suit for financial gain, Acts I and II show him becoming increasingly intrigued by the challenge Katherina poses to his rhetorical prowess. When Hortensio graphically describes Katherina's outburst—she used “twenty such vild terms / As had she studied to misuse me so” (II.i.158-59, emphasis added)—Petruchio seems invigorated by the story: “Now by the world, it is a lusty wench! / I love her ten times more than e'er I did. / O, how I long to have some chat with her!” (II.i.160-63). The comic understatement in the euphemism “some chat” is meant to bring laughter from an audience steeped in the traditionally gruesome and excruciating remedies for such female terrors; further, the audience knows that before Petruchio is able to “tame” a shrewish wife he first must, of course, marry the woman, and such a maneuver will indeed take “some chat” to accomplish. How will this prince of prolixity manage it?

Petruchio's answer to this question lies in his soliloquy just before Katherina's entrance, where he announces that his “method” will be a series of linguistic disguises. His inventive approach to discourse with Katherina will simply be to say the opposite of whatever she accepts as reality: “Say that she rail, why then I'll tell her plain / She sings as sweetly as a nightengale; / Say that she frown, I'll say she looks as clear / As morning roses newly wash'd with dew” (II.i.170-73). Her speech can no longer serve to isolate her from others, as it has done in the past, because whatever she says will draw a response from Petruchio; even her silence will command a response from him: “Say she be mute, and will not speak a word, / Then I'll commend her volubility, / And say she uttereth piercing eloquence” (II.i.174-76). Petruchio's discourse, then, will refuse to mirror her own verbal reality but will rename it, and in renaming her reality, he will transform it. Clearly, his self-conscious emphasis upon language in transforming her is evident as he ends the soliloquy and begins his campaign: “But here she comes, and now, Petruchio, speak. / Good morrow, Kate, for that's your name, I hear” (II.i.181-82).

This famous “Kate” speech is his first attack; when she insists on being called “Katherine” (II.i.184), he responds by giving her every variation on “Kate” he can think of: “You lie, in faith, for you are call'd plain Kate, / … the prettiest Kate in Christendom, / Kate of Kate-Hall, my super-dainty Kate, / … Hearing thy mildness prais'd in every town, / … Myself am mov'd to woo thee for my wife” (II.i.185-94). His amplification and puns on “cates” (delicacies) are answered in kind by Katherina, who uses the precise pun uttered in the previous scene (I.ii.72) by Petruchio: “Mov'd! in good time! Let him that mov'd you hither / Remove you hence” (II.i.195-96). Clearly, beneath these exteriors are two kindred spirits, each using the “move/remove” wordplay in adjacent scenes; Katherina, apparently, has the same fixation on verbal pyrotechnics as Petruchio, but she has not learned how to use this gift for her own and others' benefit rather than for spite. While Ralph Berry suggests that Petruchio's “tongue-in-cheek hyperbole” cannot be combatted and Kate is “reduced to asking questions as a form of marking time while she works out the counter-strategy,”¹⁰ we might instead find in this scene the clash between two antithetical views of language. Kate is not “reduced” here; rather, for the first time in her life she is brought up sharply to discover that her customary view of language as mimetic medium of assault—a language that mirrors her turbulent emotions and fends off anyone who seeks to change her—is no longer functional when it meets with the epistemic language of Petruchio, a versatile and generative language which easily duplicates and reduplicates itself to meet her at every turn. Until this moment she has seen herself as fixed in a central self—the “Katherine” self—and has used her language to defend that essence, to protect it from change, which unfortunately protects her from growth as well; by renaming her “Kate,” Petruchio meets the challenge of this static conception of self and seeks to shatter the “Katherine” persona.

To disclose his motives to Katherina, Petruchio says he will speak to her in “plain terms”:

And therefore setting all this chat aside,
Thus in plain terms:
.....Now, Kate, I am a husband for your turn,
For by this light whereby I see thy beauty,
Thy beauty that doth make me like thee well,
Thou must be married to no man but me;
For I am he am born to tame you, Kate,
And bring you from a wild Kate to a Kate
Conformable as other household Kates.

(II.i.268-78)

Actually, this speech is fairly “plain” for Petruchio; momentarily he drops his linguistic disguise and openly admits his intentions. And yet, this section contains many of Petruchio's major devices: “chat” is again Petruchio's term for his word games and deliberate bombast; now an added pun on “Kate”—“cat”—provides a delightful playfulness, precisely the quality his potential marriage partner needs to learn. Petruchio swears “by this light whereby I see thy beauty,” and this very sun will later be one of his means to teach Katherina the sportive uses of an epistemic language. Most significant, perhaps, Petruchio is relentless in calling her by the name he has thrust upon her, for in renaming “Katherine the curst” as “Kate,” he has made the first move in creating her new, functional identity.¹¹

His second step is to build a new public identity for Kate by explaining to the others that she still rails in public because “'Tis bargain'd 'twixt us twain, being alone, / That she shall still be curst in company” (II.i.304-305). The success of such a trick of language is inescapable, for no matter how vehemently Kate denies the charge, her speech will merely reinforce society's imagined view of her true “tame” personality in the private company of Petruchio. Since he has privately called her “pleasant, gamesome, passing courteous, / But slow in speech, yet sweet as spring-time flowers” (II.i.245-46), he can now present her publicly as having already demonstrated such qualities: she is now “the kindest Kate, / [who] hung about my neck” (II.i.307-308). And by publicly denying any mimetic quality to her language—that is, by denying that her language reflects the truth of her stormy nature, he further strengthens the creative quality of his own.

Clearly, Petruchio's reliance on language to obtain what he wants places this character in a very old comic tradition: the so-called “old” comedy hero of Aristophanes who “uses the grand style [which] seems to invent its own rules as it goes.”¹² As Cedric Whitman has shown, the hero of “old” comedy is “a low character who sweeps the world before him, who dominates all society … creating the world around him like a god … and abides by no rules except his own, his heroism consisting largely in his infallible skill in turning everything to his own advantage, often by a mere trick of language. He is a great talker.”¹³ A “great talker” himself, Petruchio also creates the world around him with his great skills in “mere” tricks of language. Indeed, much of the comedy of this play for Shakespeare's audience may have existed in the invasion of the traditional world of shrew-taming—beatings, bleedings, and mutilations—by a hero who, conversely, “talks the world into submission,” to use Dennis Huston's phrase, “remaking it according to his desires, almost as if he were a god.”¹⁴ Petruchio's astounding skills as rhetor provoke Katherina's stunned response, too; less than one hundred lines after their first meeting, she marvels, “Where did you study all this goodly speech?” (II.i.262).

Petruchio's creative use of language also places him in a still older tradition: the sophistic school of Gorgias of Leontini, who, in spite of Plato's attempts to defame him in the Gorgias, professed a very well-formed structure of rhetorical and epistemological theory.¹⁵ Gorgias's techniques later became the schemes or figures of traditional rhetoric, devices which emphasize the power of language to create new realities through the magical effects of skillful juxtaposition of words. The accomplished sophist can make the world appear according to his wishes, as Gorgias claims he does in the closing of the Encomium on Helen: “How then can one regard blame of Helen as just, since she is utterly acquitted of all charge? … I have by means of speech removed disgrace from a woman.”¹⁶ Here, language has created a new reputation for Helen by recreating the situations surrounding her ill fame; likewise, Petruchio seeks to “defend” an infamous woman by reshaping her fame through his powerful language.

Gorgian persuasion is an effort to build new versions of the world by eradicating static preconceived notions and offering the listener the freedom to choose a new mode of thinking or even, as Petruchio offers to Kate, a new and dynamic self. And the sophist accomplishes his persuasions through a verbal creation of potential situations, rather than a mimesis or mirroring of present conditions. This process necessarily amounts to deception because it creates in the mind not present “truths” but potential worlds of emotions or experiences. Yet this element of deception is, in sophistic language theory, neither negative nor irresponsible, for it is well founded upon the epistemology contained in Gorgias's On the Nonexistent, or On Nature,¹⁷ which suggests that identity is not a single pure essence but a harmony of contraries: the dissoi logoi, or disparate truths, constitute reality. Truth, then, is relative, and communication, like identity, can be no more complete than our finite sense perceptions; there being no absolute essence of reality, words as well are relative, subject to the speaker's own focus or interpretation. In fact, sophistic philosophy implies that language cannot operate without distortion—that is, without espousing but one aspect of a manifold truth. This ingredient of deception is for Gorgias, then, “not only inevitable—because of the nature of language—but necessary as well. If a man was not to be immobilized by irreconcilable contradictions, he had to be deceived into thinking that only one of the alternatives was correct.”¹⁸ Verbal deception, then, is not a lamentable necessity but a virtue, in that it allows the human mind to narrow alternatives and reach a decision.

The aesthetic implications of Gorgian language philosophy here need added emphasis: language bends to the will of its master, giving the sophist power not only over the word but over the psyche of his audience and ultimately over the world itself. Sophistic rhetoric asserts the violence of language, its capacity to ravish, to enthrall; it indeed revels in display, deriving pleasure from its own virtuosity, its own abilities to fashion a world of words. The existence of multiple truths and the polysemy of language allow the sophist to argue his own truth into being at the same time that it allows for the ludic, the playful and creative, aspect of his language. Discourse, for Gorgias, is like a drug, serious and potentially deadly, but also magical and equally playful: the Encomium on Helen states that “the effect of speech upon the condition of the soul is comparable to the power of drugs over the nature of bodies. For just as different drugs dispel different secretions from the body, and some bring an end to disease and others to life, so also in the case of speeches, some distress, others delight, some cause fear, others make the hearers bold, and some drug and bewitch the soul with a kind of evil persuasion.”¹⁹ And in Plato's dialogue Gorgias, we find the sophist again linking the splendid power of his art with the practice of medicine: “I have made calls on patients who were unwilling to take their medicine or submit to an operation or a cautery; and though their doctor could not persuade them, I did so, by no other art than rhetoric.”²⁰ Sophistic rhetoric, then, can serve a healing and curative effect when other arts cannot heal or cure, but the rhetor must intend to benefit the listener: Gorgias goes on to insist that one should “make use of rhetoric in the same way as one does of every other sort of proficiency. This, too, one should not employ against any and everybody. … The rhetorician is capable of speaking against everyone else and on any subject you please in such a way that he can win over vast multitudes to anything, in a word, that he may desire. But … he must use his skill justly.”²¹ And Gorgias's own epideictic speeches reveal a deliberate and self-conscious playfulness as he “justly” uses his skill; the audience's enjoyment—even when the subject is death, as in his oration the Epitaphios—is produced by a delight in words themselves, as language enlightens, reshapes, transforms, heals the listener who participates in the game. Indeed, the entire pattern of Gorgian rhetoric contains “many of the characteristics of a ‘language game,’ with all the emphasis on epistemological suppleness and versatility which the word ‘game’ implies.”²²

These very qualities of suppleness, versatility, and playfulness are indeed the characteristics which Shakespeare's Katherina desperately needs to appropriate into her language and life. And Petruchio, in the fine Gorgian pattern, goes about talking Katherina into harmony with himself with all the godlike insouciance of the most powerful orators of sophistry. He “uses his skill justly”—to quote Gorgias—and does not publicly insult her, although he does behave outrageously in church at their wedding and forcibly kisses her “with such a clamorous smack / That at the parting all the church did echo” (III.ii.178-79). Though he is physically abusive to his servants and ruthless in depriving Katherina of food and sleep on their wedding night, his actions all work within a verbal context: his language transforms an edible supper, as Katherina calls it (IV.i.169), into a meal of rubbish “burnt and dried away” (line 170) which the servants must take away. And unlike his shrew-taming predecessors,²³ Petruchio himself does not eat or drink when his wife is so deprived; Katherina, in fact, laments that “he does it [all] under name of perfect love” (IV.iii.12). Similarly, though one might be anxious about the consummation effected by a bridegroom “shrew tamer,” Katherina instead receives from Petruchio a “sermon of continency” (IV.i.182) on their wedding night, depriving both Katherina and himself of sleep. He tells us quite bluntly that he is appropriating the linguistic deception of sophism when he soliloquizes, “Thus have I politicly begun my reign” (IV.i.188), with all emphasis upon the deviousness and deception inherent in the Elizabethan usage of “politicly.” His “politic” is a verbal one, intended to transform two warring opposites into one harmonious whole.

Throughout the last half of the play, Petruchio's rhetorical performances display his most brilliant exhibitions of the sophistic virtuoso. In his stunning abuse of the tailor, he combines tapinosis and diaeresis comically to reduce the tailor to the lowest emblem of his trade: “Thou liest, thou thread, thou thimble, / Thou yard, three-quarters, half-yard, quarter, nail! / … Away, thou rag, thou quantity, thou remnant!” (IV.iii.107-11). Diaeresis and hyperbole reach most astounding proportions in his well-known description of his bride: “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.230-32). Those who label Petruchio a domineering brute have pointed to the apparent chauvinism of this passage; in proper context, however, this speech need be no more a truthful representation of Petruchio's inner feelings than his abuse of the tailor when it suits his “politic.” Amplificatio and hyperbole tend to be characteristic of Petruchio when he is deliberately deceiving his listeners; there is no more reason to see in this speech a chauvinistic attitude toward women than to find in his description of the tailor a disregard for tailors. On the contrary, Petruchio's language displays Gorgian rhetoric at its finest—exploring the extremes of verbal deceptions and disguises in order to cure, heal, and transform an isolated, selfish, dysfunctional personality into a socially integrated woman at peace with herself and her world. Petruchio reconstructs Katherina's disagreeable statements into mild expressions of agreement, her approvals into complaints, denying her any effectiveness of language at all. Try as she may, she cannot insult Petruchio nor, indeed, locate any of the previous power once afforded her by her language. With utter delight in the virtuosity of his verbal skills, Petruchio goes about creating a new world for Katherina, even going so far as to create new words when the fancy strikes him: his exclamation of “Soud, soud, soud, soud!” (IV.i.142)—as an apparent expression of impatience at the first meal in his country home—shows us Petruchio at the height of the ludic sophism with which he verbally besieges his world.

Petruchio's most outlandish verbal game occurs during their return to her father's house; in Petruchio's insistence that “it is the moon that shines so bright” (IV.v.4) at midday and that the elder Vincentio is a fresh and lovely “gentlewoman” (line 29), his linguistic madness reaches its most comic proportions. And here Katherina finally gives in to the madcap flexibility of Petruchio's approach: he insists that “I say it is the moon” which shines at midday (line 4) and she responds with “I know it is the moon” (line 16), agreeing at last to the very epistemological possibilities of language that Petruchio has been trying to communicate to her from the beginning. She also implicitly indicates that she understands what is happening to her self in the process: when he contradicts her to say that “it is the blessed sun” (line 17), Katherina now responds, “Then God be blessed, it is the blessed sun, / But sun it is not, when you say it is not / And the moon changes even as your mind” (lines 18-20). Though she teases him with reference to the mood changes of the “lunatic,” she also makes it clear that she finally realizes these outlandish linguistic maneuvers have been “games” all along. Secondly, and most significantly, she lets him (and the audience) know that the transformation of “Katherine the curst” into “plain Kate” is hereby complete, for “What you will have it nam'd, even that it is, / And so it shall be so for Katherine” (lines 21-22) shows us that even the formerly rejecting persona, Katherina, now accepts his “renaming” of reality.

The crucial growth in Kate's character is her metamorphosis into a fully human creature who is able now to view life—through sportive language—with a spirit of “play.” Johan Huizinga suggests that play fosters growth because play “creates order, is order. Into an imperfect world and into the confusion of life it brings a temporary, limited perfection” for it allows transport out of one's present self “without, however, wholly losing consciousness of ‘ordinary reality.’”²⁴ Petruchio indeed teaches Katherina the benefits of approaching life in a ludic manner, as if life were a game,²⁵ but Petruchio's games are very much in the Gorgian spirit of discourse, verbal games that can transform, heal, cure, recreate. As John Poulakos points out, the advantage that the Gorgian rhetorician offers to help listeners solve their “existential dilemma” is that he “tells them what they could be, brings out in them futuristic versions of themselves, and sets before them both goals and the directions which lead to those goals. All this he does by creating and presenting to them that which has the potential to be.”²⁶ Petruchio's language has taught Kate that she can find health in her life—an ability completely outside her grasp at the beginning of the comedy—through linguistic play, exploring potential selves towards her own growth. “Katherine the curst” saw language only as a medium of sharp and offensive combat, a means of preserving the present personality by protecting the vulnerable inner self from exposure, assault, and change; Petruchio's sophistic language, however, has taught her that “futuristic versions” of the self can be imaged and assumed, thus healing the dysfunctional portions of the personality.

Kate now continues this newly discovered playfulness with joyful abandon, addressing Vincentio, with great rhetorical flourish, as a “Young budding virgin, fair, and fresh, and sweet” (IV.v.37). In fact, Kate has so fully accepted Petruchio's language that she now talks like him,²⁷ with figurative excess, outlandish hyperbole, and nonsensical wordplay; Kate's discourse also confirms here that she, at last, realizes they are a team. And though Kate is reluctant to kiss in public, she does so at Petruchio's insistence and calls him “love” (V.i.148), suggesting her willingness to celebrate physically the union that their linguistic games have created. This kiss is the final “contract” they arrive at and, ironically, it is a non-verbal one: though Shakespeare's comedies are full of characters who give and take love with oaths, vows, and promises of affection, this non-verbal contract is appropriate to the inventive structure that Petruchio has constructed all along—language used deliberately to conjure the non-real, the potential, rather than to describe the real and present state of being.

Dennis Huston suggests that the final scene is “a revised version of Kate's original wedding celebration” displayed for the audience.²⁸ There is, however, a deeper thematic significance, for the audience has already seen—in their kiss—a symbol of their compatibility. Rather, this final scene functions as Kate's display in her own world of her own newly appropriated sense of language used to heal, to edify, to cure disease located outside the self. The games which precede Kate's final speech—her obedient responses to Petruchio's call and to his command that she throw down her cap—are Kate's affirmation that she is willing now to incorporate teamwork into their marriage. Petruchio says that her response to his call bodes “peace … and love, and quiet life” (V.ii.108), a point which applies also to Kate, who has been freed from her former restrictive view of herself and her world.²⁹

Kate's controversial monologue³⁰ in the last scene thus emerges as Kate's use of language to recreate her friends—those “froward and unable worms” (V.ii.169) who refused their husband's calls—to teach them, at Petruchio's prompting, what she learned through a long series of painful events ranging from the self-imposed isolation of girlhood to the self-perpetuated marital disharmony she has experienced up to this day. She points her listeners toward the proper course of behavior by first illustrating the antithetical consequences of shrewishness: “Fie, fie, unknit that threat'ning unkind brow, / … It blots thy beauty, as frosts do bite the meads” (V.ii.136-39). To view this speech as a mystifying indication of Shakespeare's reactionary attitude toward women is to overlook a substantial portion intended for the men seated at the feast: “Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper, / Thy head, thy sovereign; one that cares for thee,” and risks his life “for thy maintenance” (lines 146-48, emphasis added). This description of man's proper marital virtues is surely directed specifically toward Hortensio and Lucentio, neither of whom appears to be Petruchio's equal in caring for the growth of his partner. That Petruchio and Kate are well-suited to each other is more evident in this speech than anywhere else in the play: this monologue makes clear that Kate has grasped the principles of mutual care and health that are the foundation of the recreational, literally re-creational, language she has learned. Germaine Greer has called Kate's final speech “the greatest defense of Christian monogamy ever written” for it “rests upon the role of a husband as protector and friend, and it is valid because Kate has a man who is capable of being both.”³¹ Surely, Petruchio's true friendship has resided in his patient insistence upon Kate's health and growth and in his willingness to use his linguistic skills to awaken her, and she rewards his gift through loyalty and teamwork in the public realm.

Kate also confesses the sickness of her own previous condition, citing strong personal testimony for the truth of her argument. While a woman is “like a fountain troubled, / Muddy [and] … bereft of beauty” (lines 142-43), “none so dry or thirsty / Will deign to sip, or touch one drop of it” (lines 144-45): these poignant lines strike at the very heart of her characterization, her own self-defeating rhetoric having kept her isolated and lonely, lacking any conception of her own beauty and potential for nurturing any “thirsty” ones around her. “But now I see,” she says, “our lances are but straws, / Our strength as weak, our weakness past compare, / That seeming to be most which we indeed least are” (lines 173-75). Clearly, “bandy[ing] word for word” (line 172) proved to be a “straw lance” for Katherina, for in her apparent strength—the mightiness of her scolding tongue—she was unknowingly weak “past compare”: in seeming to be most controlling of her world, she was actually at the mercy of her isolating language. Kate's “but now I see” is thus a moving, personal testimony to the power of Petruchio's language which has purged the dysfunctional personality and has reconstructed a new definition of selfhood for this intelligent and sensitive woman.

A dominant theme here is Kate's complete appropriation of Petruchio's language—a curative, healing medium which also embodies delightful deception and play. On the one hand, her speech is serious in both presentation and intent—to cure these wives who “offer war where they should kneel for peace” (line 162). To Petruchio alone, however, her imagery communicates a different and more playful message—a ludic self-mockery of her own previous folly.³² Other sportive messages are possible: this oration is the closest to either a frank admission of his wisdom and her previous blindness or an open thanks for his perseverance that Petruchio will ever receive. In any case, the spunky spirit Petruchio so admired early in the play has not been vanquished but has been redirected. And Petruchio's understanding of these subtleties is signaled in his response, “Why, there's a wench! Come on, and kiss me, Kate” (line 180), which is as affectionately playful on the overt level as Kate's speech on the implicit level: though Petruchio is clearly impressed with her speech—after all, the terse response is uncharacteristic of him and this is the first time he has listened so quietly or patiently to anyone in the play—he returns her eloquent oration with as lusty and brief an understatement as he can devise. This exchange portrays not a sad image of lifeless surrender to male dominance but a spirit of flirtatious fun that will generate a rich creativity in this marriage grounded upon self-respect, mutual respect, and proper care. And their wedded harmony which reverberates on many complex verbal levels will now be demonstrated on a non-verbal level, as Petruchio indicates, “Come, Kate, we'll to bed” (line 184). As Shakespearean comedy always reminds us, the medium of language is neither the only, nor always the best, mode of communication and communion in love.

In this context, then, the induction to The Taming of the Shrew emerges not as an unrelated or abandoned experiment,³³ but rather serves as an introduction to these themes of identity and transformation through language. The attempted metamorphosis of Sly from tinker to lord is emphasized by the very surroundings which the tricksters say they will fetch for him—the true Lord's “wanton pictures” (Ind.i.47): paintings of “Adonis painted by a running brook, / And Cytherea all in sedges hid, / … Io as she was a maid / And how she was beguiled … / Or Daphne roaming through a thorny wood” (Ind.ii.50-57). These actual pictures are never presented to Sly, but are only verbally created in his imagination. This verbal creation of transformational instants, or “Ovidian moments,”³⁴ strikes the thematic keynote of the play that will follow, itself a verbal artifice intended to transform identity, to usher Sly into a world where language creates new identities and transforms the beggarly into the lordly, the foolish into the wise.

The Lord of the induction and Petruchio thus bear a certain kinship,³⁵ for each attempts to remake a particularly stubborn specimen into something more like himself. Yet these two creators further become extensions of the playwright's persona, himself the great manipulator of language to effect creations, recreations, metamorphoses. For the playwright as well as for Petruchio, language is a means for transforming his world: Petruchio, the skilled rhetorician, succeeds in creating a new Kate from “Katherine the curst,” and it is with this optimistic revelation that the comedy ends. That language can and does bring real and positive change, magical transformations, to this world becomes, then, the final emphasis, for Shakespeare lets the play-within-a-play end the action. However, the Lord's creation of a new Lord Sly is only brief and apparently abortive: no matter how hard the Lord and his companions try to transform Sly, they cannot succeed. And from the beginning, we are shown that the Lord seeks to force this new identity upon the drunken Sly in the spirit of a mere “jest” (Ind.i.45). Yet Petruchio's business, we must remember, is both serious and magnanimous—he seeks to liberate Katherina from the prison of her own rhetoric in order to provide for them both “peace and love and quiet life.” The induction and play combined thus underscore the burden of responsibility facing the playwright himself; in order to effect change, not only must he be brilliantly skilled at the uses of rhetoric, but his heart must be in the right place as well. It is a somber note that this perspective injects into the joyfully optimistic chord at the play's end, but it is nevertheless an essential one: if, as Dennis Huston points out, “Petruchio offers us the image of the player and playwright as all-conquering hero,”³⁶ then the burden of the conqueror must be always to perfect his talents and to use them for the true benefit of his audiences. No other comedy in Shakespeare's works presents such unequivocal trust in the ethics of the artist and the efficacy of language to order lives and create positive change in the human world. In fact, the sheer world-building power of sophistic language will have few happier results anywhere in literature than in The Taming of the Shrew.

Missing from the world of this youthful play, however, is any account of man's use or misuse of language for gain at the expense of other human beings; evil, though it becomes an increasingly essential element in Shakespeare's later plays, is indeed noticeably absent from the world of Padua. Here we find no Shylock using language to reduce human commerce to serve his own revenge and greed and to insulate himself from the redemption of generative language, nor do we find a Falstaff using the language of seduction in order to feed an insatiable appetite, nor even a comic though traitorous word-magician like Parolles, his very name an indication of Shakespeare's growing ambivalence toward the terrible demiurgic powers of language. In fact, the sophistic word-wizard Petruchio is reincarnated countless times throughout Shakespeare's canon, in diverse guises and in possession of various degrees of skill and magnanimity: from the professional “corrupters” of words, Touchstone and the other sophisticated fools, to the delightful and deadly Falstaff, to the naive Dogberry, whose passion for sophistry unfortunately cannot insure his mastery over language, to Iago, whose fascination with the power of demiurgic language is matched only by his intense love of evil, even finally to Prospero, who discovers his tragic potential for misuse of linguistic power but learns how to own his failures as well as his victories. Clearly, Petruchio is an early embodiment of a proposition—that language can recreate reality—to which Shakespeare was to return again and again; thus, on a continuum representing his gradual incorporation of evil into the complex interrelations among language, human life, and art, The Taming of the Shrew remains firmly at the optimistic extreme: Petruchio and Kate stand, harmoniously united, in testimony to the youthful playwright's conception of the beauty and world-building power of language in the hands of the skilled and magnanimous artist.

Notes

1. G. Blakemore Evans, editor of The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), pp. 48-50, sees the progression from The Comedy of Errors (c. 1592) to The Taming of the Shrew (c. 1593) to The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1594) to Love's Labor's Lost (1594), and this chronology has much to recommend it thematically in the growing complexity of comic vision and language theory. Editors who place Love's Labor's Lost first in the chronology seem to do so based only on the diction and versification of the play, while a concern for theme, genre, and language theory surely must place The Taming of the Shrew early in Shakespeare's development, as will be argued here.

2. Charges of sexism and questions of gender problems in criticism are complex, to be sure. For example, Coppélia Kahn, “The Taming of the Shrew: Shakespeare's Mirror of Marriage,” in The Authority of Experience: Essays in Feminist Criticism, ed. Arlyn Diamond and Lee R. Edwards (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1977), pp. 84-100, maintains that the play satirizes masculinity and thus does not glorify Kate's apparent submission to Petruchio. It should be noted, however, that it may not be useful to label such a reading of the play as “feminist” merely for its darker interpretation of the play (or, conversely, to label as “anti-feminist” a reading which celebrates Kate's marriage), since some “feminist” critics do not see Kate as sadly submissive to male supremacy at the play's end: see, for example, John C. Bean, “Comic Structure and the Humanizing of Kate in The Taming of the Shrew” in The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Carolyn R. S. Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1980), pp. 65-78, who demonstrates that the play shows a liberation of femininity from medieval concepts of male supremacy; and Juliet Dusinberre, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women (London: Macmillan, 1975), who finds that “Kate's submission gives her power over Petruchio” (p. 108). Early critics who see the play as offensive or equivocal include E. K. Chambers, Shakespeare: A Survey (1925; rpt. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1951), p. 40; Arthur Quiller-Couch, introduction to The Taming of the Shrew, ed. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and John Dover Wilson, (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1928), p. xvi; John Masefield, William Shakespeare (New York: Henry Holt, 1911), pp. 108-109 (though Masefield's 1954 revised version is less emphatic on this point); George Bernard Shaw, Shaw on Shakespeare, ed. Edwin Wilson (1961; rpt. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1971), pp. 186-88.

3. See Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson, The Types of the Folk-Tale: A Classification and Bibliography, FF Communications No. 74 (Helsinki, 1928); Jan Harold Brunvand, “The Folktale Origin of The Taming of the Shrew,” SQ 27 (1966):345-59. Folktale tradition contains most of the play's major motifs—the muddy trip, the wager, “fairer” sister(s), deprivation of meals and sleep, and the attempts to force the wife to agree to absurd statements—but always in conjunction with physical abuse of the wife and/or domestic animals.

4. Anne Barton, introduction to The Taming of the Shrew in The Riverside Shakespeare, p. 106. See also Brunvand, p. 345, and W. C. Hazlitt, Remains of the Early Popular Poetry of England (London: J. R. Smith, 1864-1866).

5. Several critics have pointed out the linguistic emphasis of Petruchio's character, though without a focus on classical rhetoric or sophism: Thomas Marc Parrott, Shakespearean Comedy (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1949), p. 152; Richard Levin, “Grumio's ‘Rope-Tricks’ and the Nurse's ‘Ropery,’” SQ 22 (1971):82-86; Ralph Berry, Shakespeare's Comedies: Explorations in Form (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 63-65; Theodore Weiss, The Breath of Clowns and Kings: Shakespeare's Early Comedies and Histories (New York: Atheneum, 1971), p. 61; and J. Dennis Huston, Shakespeare's Comedies of Play (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1981), pp. 62-80.

6. William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, I.i.89, in The Riverside Shakespeare. All subsequent quotations from this play refer to this edition.

7. See Huston, pp. 78-80; Weiss, p. 70; Hugh M. Richmond, Shakespeare's Sexual Comedy: A Mirror for Lovers (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971), pp. 83-101; Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1951), p. 69.

8. Levin, pp. 82-86, shows “rope-ripe” to be (by Shakespeare's time) “already well established as a designation for the self-conscious and over-elaborate use of language” (p. 85). Although the phrase is also a sexual double entendre, “rope” commonly meaning “penis” in Elizabethan usage (p. 83), Grumio is also “boasting that Petruchio will defeat the shrew not only in the erotic arena but also in the rhetorical, by developing a more recondite verbal battery to out-scold her” (p. 86). While this emphasis on the “self-conscious and overelaborate use of language” in Petruchio is appropriate, it will be argued here that Petruchio does not defeat or “out-scold” Katherina, but rather recreates her through his creative rhetoric.

9. Similarly, many stage directors have interpreted Petruchio's line about Kate's “limp” (“O, let me see thee walk. Thou dost not halt,” II.i.256) to mean that he has necessarily wounded her foot in a scuffle, but this line, too, is equivocal: Kate could be simply refusing to walk at his command, sitting down defiantly, and thus offering her next line, “Go, fool, and whom thou keep'st command” (line 257), to say, “Go walk, yourself.” The text is explicit in its references to Kate's violence toward her sister and to Petruchio's violence toward his servants, even toward the priest in the church, but nowhere does the text explicitly direct Petruchio's physical abuse of Kate, nor that he even touches her except to kiss her, once in the church (forcibly) and twice (with Kate's permission) before the play's end.

10. Berry, p. 65.

11. Juliet Dusinberre notices that the “Kates” in Shakespeare (Lady Percy, wife of Hotspur; Henry V's queen; Petruchio's wife) “all get the same kind of man” (p. 289). I would argue that Petruchio's renaming of this “Kate” is an attempt to insure the “fine match” that Dusinberre discusses in the other two Kates' marriages.

12. Cedric Whitman, Aristophanes and the Comic Hero, Martin Classical Lectures Series, vol. 19 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1964), p. 25.

13. Whitman, pp. 25, 51.

14. Huston, p. 62.

15. Nancy S. Struever discusses the influence of Gorgianism in the Renaissance in The Language of History in the Renaissance: Rhetorical and Historical Consciousness in Florentine Humanism (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 13-14. My discussion of Gorgias's rhetorical and epistemological theory is also indebted to: Charles P. Segal, “Gorgias and the Psychology of the Logos,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 66 (1962): 99-155; Richard Leo Enos, “The Epistemology of Gorgias' Rhetoric: A Re-Examination,” Southern Speech Communication Journal 42 (Fall 1976): 35-51; Richard Lanham, The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1976); Richard A. Engnell, “Implications for Communication of the Rhetorical Epistemology of Gorgias of Leontini,” Western Speech 37 (Summer 1973): 175-84; John Poulakos, “Toward a Sophistic Definition of Language,” P&R 16 (1983): 35-48; Bruce E. Gronbeck, “Gorgias on Rhetoric and Poetic: A Rehabilitation,” The Southern Speech Communication Journal 38 (Fall 1972):27-38.

16. Gorgias, Encomium on Helen, in The Older Sophists, trans. George Kennedy, ed. Rosamund Kent Sprague (Columbia: Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1972), p. 54.

17. See Sextus, Against the Schoolmasters, in The Older Sophists, pp. 42-46.

18. Engnell, p. 177.

19. Gorgias, in The Older Sophists, p. 53.

20. Plato, Gorgias, trans. W. C. Helmbold (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1952), p. 15.

21. Plato, Gorgias, pp. 15-16.

22. Struever, p. 13.

23. See Brunvand, p. 358, who shows that in Northern European folktale traditions, the “tamer” reveals an added measure of cruelty by helping himself to hearty servings of food and wine at the table where the wife is denied any repast.

24. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), pp. 10, 14.

25. The idea that Katherina learns a “game” is a point made by many other critics, though without special emphasis upon language games. See William O. Scott, The God of Arts: Ruling Ideas in Shakespeare's Comedies (Lawrence: Univ. of Kansas Publications, 1977), pp. 15-16; Cecil C. Seronsy, “‘Supposes’ as the Unifying Theme in The Taming of the Shrew,” SQ 14 (1963):23-24; E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's Early Comedies (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1965), pp. 82-83; Berry (whose title of the chapter for this comedy is “The Rules of the Game”), pp. 54-71; Huston, who notes that Petruchio teaches Kate through play to embrace life rather than push it away (p. 80).

26. Poulakos, p. 43.

27. Both Huston (p. 90) and Berry (p. 69) suggest that Kate's style in this passage resembles Petruchio's.

28. Huston, p. 91.

29. Kate's being “freed” from a false conception of self is a point supported by many critics, among them: Scott, p. 19; Huston, p. 80; John C. Bean, “Comic Structure and the Humanizing of Kate in The Taming of the Shrew” in The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Carolyn R. S. Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1980), pp. 65-78; Joan Hartwig, “Horses and Women in The Taming of the Shrew,” Huntington Library Quarterly 45 (1982): 285-94; James P. McGlone, “Shakespeare's Intent in The Taming of the Shrew,” Wascana Review 13 (1978): 79-88; S. C. SenGupta, Shakespearean Comedy (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1950), p. 115.

30. The catalog of critical controversy over the last scene is too voluminous to itemize here, but see Robert B. Heilman, “The Taming Untamed, or, The Return of the Shrew,” MLQ 27 (1966):150-51, for a survey of critics who explore an ironic reading of Kate's monologue; Northrop Frye, in A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1965), says that “when we first see Katharina she is bullying Bianca, and when we take leave of her she is still bullying Bianca, but has learned how to do it with social approval on her side” (p. 80); similar positions are also taken by Larry S. Champion, The Evolution of Shakespeare's Comedy: A Study in Dramatic Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1970), p. 40; E. M. W. Tillyard, p. 85, though Tillyard sees her as “the same girl, only with her will broken”; and Goddard, p. 68. G. B. Shaw pronounced the ending and Kate's submission to male authority “altogether disgusting to modern sensibility” (p. 188). For recent criticism exploring patriarchy and ideological considerations in the play or in the comedies generally, see Kathleen McLuskie, “Feminist Deconstruction: The Example of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew,” Red Letters 12 (1982):33-40; Valerie Wayne, “Refashioning the Shrew,” Shakespeare Studies 17 (1985):159-87; Joel Fineman, “The turn of the shrew,” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Methuen, 1985), pp. 138-59; Karen Newman, “Renaissance Family Politics and Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew,” ELR 16 (Winter 1986): 86-100; Catherine Belsey, “Disrupting Sexual Difference: Meaning and Gender in the Comedies,” in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 166-190.

31. Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (New York: McGraw- Hill, 1971), p. 206. Greer goes on here to note that “it is a vile distortion of the play to have him strike her ever” (p. 206). In a more recent publication, Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986), Greer notes that the play “is not a knockabout farce of wife-battering, but the cunning adaptation of a folk-motif to show the forging of a partnership between equals” (p. 111). A similar emphasis on equality is shown by Jeanne Addison Roberts, “Horses and Hermaphrodites: Metamorphoses in The Taming of the Shrew,” SQ 34 (1983):159-71, who terms this play “Shakespeare's most sexist comedy” but notes that Shakespeare modifies a “standard tale of male supremacy with a humane vision” in that “Petruchio himself is equally tamed” (p. 171).

32. Huston, p. 92., suggests that she incorporates into her speech several veiled references to her “earlier failures,” such as the wooing scene (“threatening unkind brow”), the wedding (“confound thy fame”), the first journey (“muddy, bereft of beauty”), the ordeal at Petruchio's country home (“so dry or thirsty”). If this is indeed the case, the wordplay clearly bears the influence of Petruchio's sophistry in the versatility of interpretation and focus as well as in the puns.

33. See, for example, Dusinberre, p. 108; Berry, p. 57; Scott, p. 113; and Peter G. Phialas, Shakespeare's Romantic Comedies: The Development of Their Form and Meaning (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1966), p. 43.

34. Weiss, p. 51.

35. Weiss, pp. 46-47, and Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare's Comedy of Love (London: Methuen, 1974), pp. 41-62, both point out similarities between Petruchio and the Lord.

36. Huston, p. 10.