[In the essay below, Cheatham argues that The Taming of the Shrew is similar to Shakespeare's later romantic comedies, and demonstrates the ways in which the play, like A Midsummer Night's Dream, uses the metaphor of theatrical role-playing to explore the idea of transformation in general, and the transformational power of love in particular.]

The position of The Taming of the Shrew in Shakespeare's canon has been and remains uncertain. Well into the current century critics kept it distinct from the other comedies, terming it “ugly and barbarous,”¹ for example, or “altogether disgusting to the modern sensibility.”² Even contemporary critics have found the play difficult to place. As J. Dennis Huston complains, criticism of Shakespearean comedy has played a kind of shell game with The Shrew. Recent studies have shown, he says, that the play is neither happy, pastoral, nor festive comedy. Neither is it an early metadrama. Two recent studies of “early Shakespeare” even ignore the play.³ Critics have clearly had difficulty finding a critical niche to accommodate The Shrew. In one way, of course, such difficulty is good, for readers and auditors must approach the play not as a happy comedy, say, or a festive one, but as itself, as The Taming of the Shrew. Unfortunately, the difficulties with classifying the play may have caused some people not to approach it at all and to consider it only one of Shakespeare's unsuccessful early experiments, an oddity in Shakespearean comedy.

Critics in the last thirty or so years, though, have generally seen The Shrew more as romantic comedy than as farce.⁴ And in the last fifteen or so years they have begun to cite specific connections between The Shrew and Shakespeare's later, characteristic romantic comedies. John Russell Brown, now followed by others, first noted similarities between the ideas of the imagination and acting in The Shrew and in later comedies, especially A Midsummer Night's Dream.⁵ Brown, however, does not elaborate the similarities. Marjorie Garber more explicitly makes the connection between the two plays, explaining that Katherina's awakening as if from a dream (IV.i.166-68) is the turning point of her transformation. Although merely figurative and not literal, Kate's awakening nonetheless adumbrates Shakespeare's later mature use of dream devices, in which the dreamer is taken “momentarily out of time” and led “toward a moment of supernatural enlightenment, an accession of knowledge which is frequently self-knowledge.”⁶ In The Taming of the Shrew, she says, we find the germ of the idea of transformation which becomes central in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Garber's analysis is accurate as far as it goes, but the point merits still more elaboration than she gives it, for The Shrew contains more than just the germ of the idea of transformation. It, like A Midsummer Night's Dream, uses the central metaphor of theatrical role-playing and the subordinate metaphors of madness and magic to explore in detail the idea of transformation—specifically transformation through love.

Ironically, the very characteristic that has historically caused The Shrew to be judged as an atypical Shakespearean comedy—Petruchio's taming of Kate to be an obedient wife—connects it intimately with A Midsummer Night's Dream. Surprisingly, I have not seen anyone point out how closely Petruchio's taming of Katherina resembles Oberon's “tormenting” (II.i.147) of Titania and Theseus' wooing of Hippolyta:

Hippolyta, I woo'd thee with my sword
And won thy love doing thee injuries. …

(I.i.16-19)⁷

Both plays begin with disharmony caused by rebellious females, the implications of which Titania makes explicit, in oft-quoted lines:

                    The spring, the summer
The childing autumn, angry winter change
Their wonted liveries; and the mazed world
By their increase, now knows not which is which.
And this same progeny of evils comes
From our debate, from our dissension;
We are their parents and original.

(II.i.111-17)

The unnatural quarrelling between husband and wife spreads outward, since Titania and Oberon are gods, creating disharmony in nature itself. And even in The Shrew, although Katherina is certainly no goddess and the disruption proceeding from her shrewishness barely extends beyond her father's household, Shakespeare clearly suggests the unnaturalness of her forward temper. Such an uncontrollable person is no woman but a devil, a “fiend of hell” (I.i.88), until she be of “gentler, milder mould” (I.i.60).⁸

Order is restored in both plays, moreover, only when the women are subdued and returned to their natural position, subordinate to their husbands. As Kate herself eventually says, “Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper, / Thy head, thy sovereign …” (V.ii.146-47). Petruchio finally establishes rightful control only by out-shrewing the shrew; Theseus, by outfighting the Amazon warrior; and Oberon, by out-willing the willful one, showing Titania the folly of doting on the Indian boy by causing her to dote foolishly on Bottom.⁹

But in each case the husband's supremacy leads not to domination but to peace and harmony. Kate eventually offers her hand below Petruchio's foot, but instead of standing over her as a conqueror, he raises her beside him: “Why, there's a wench! Come on, and kiss me, Kate” (V.ii.180). The long-delayed marriage-bed, symbol of fruitful and orderly union, follows, “Come, Kate, we'll to bed” (V.ii.184). Theseus' conquest of Hippolyta leads similarly to harmonious marriage, “With pomp, with triumph, and with revelling” (I.i.19), and to a blest marriage bed. Oberon's subduing of Titania leads to new amity and triumphant dance (IV.i.86-88). Such a view of marriage was, of course, the conventional Christian one, requiring that both partners, despite the male's rightful supremacy, treat each other with “gentilesse,” to use Chaucer's words, and not seek “maistrie.”

Marriage, as part of the social hierarchy, as part of the so-called Great Chain of Being, reflected all social relationships—the ruler's relation to his people, for example, or Christ's to his church or a master's to his servant—and was in turn reflected by each of them. Each of these relationships could be used metaphorically to describe any of the others. Katherina herself invokes the analogy of sovereign and subject, as quoted above, to describe marriage. Such comparisons were commonplace. In The Shrew, however, Shakespeare adduces another analogy to explore the marriage relationship, the unconventional metaphor of theatrical role-playing. Each of the play's three attempts at transformation through role-playing—Petruchio's of Katherina, Lucentio's of Bianca, and the Lord's of Sly—suggests that an ideal marriage requires gentilesse from both partners, not maistrie. Each suggests, specifically, that, first, one can play only a compatible role and that, second, the role-playing succeeds only if all parties exhibit sufficient selflessness.

Katherina's transformation from shrew to wife involves role-playing, and it succeeds, at least in part, because she is called on to play a congenial role, that of loving and obedient wife.¹⁰ Like a director, Petruchio explicitly details to her and to others the part he expects her to play:

                    she's not froward, but modest as the dove;
She is not hot, but temperate as the morn;
For patience she will prove a second Grissel;
And Roman Lucrece for her chastity. …

(II.i.292-95)

.....

And, honest company, I thank you all
That have beheld me give away myself
To this most patient, sweet, and virtuous wife.

(III.ii.187-89)

To induce Katherina to play the part he desires, Petruchio must himself assume a variety of roles, particularly those of madman and shrew. As Gremio notes about Petruchio's antics, “Petruchio is Kated” (III.ii.238)—that is, Petruchio acts like Kate. He acts mad and shrewish and, like her, sets his selfish will against all others. The resulting misery—the spoiled wedding and feast, the beaten servants, and disrupted household—reveals slowly to Katherina what she has been and what she has done to others.¹¹ Seeing herself in Petruchio's madness and shrewishness, she gradually adopts the alternate role he offers her, that of loving and obedient wife. Her new role, however, comes only with difficulty, and she is for a while disoriented:

                                                                                          she, poor soul,
Knows not which way to stand, to look, to speak,
And sits as one new-risen from a dream.

(IV.i.166-68)

This “stage of wonderment, this subjectivity of experience and suspension of ordinary assumptions is,” according to Marjorie Garber, “the turning point in the transformation of the shrew.”¹² Petruchio so treats her, says Brian Morris, that Katherina “is never allowed to be sure of her own nature until she surrenders to the character he has created for her.”¹³

That surrender occurs in Act IV, Scene v. There, meeting Vincentio on the road, Petruchio calls the old man a young woman and demands only that Katherina answer “no” and embrace Vincentio. She, however, responds effusively:

Young budding virgin, fair and fresh and sweet,
Whither away? or where is thy abode?
Happy the parents of so fair a child!
Happier the man whom favourable stars
Allot thee for his lovely bedfellow!

(IV.v.37-41)

Here Katherina does more than merely obey Petruchio; she sympathetically joins him in his game. She speaks to Vincentio with the “gusto,” says John Russell Brown, of an actor given a congenial role.¹⁴ Through this imaginative and generous participation in Petruchio's fiction, Katherina discovers the truth of that fiction. That is, in pretending to be what she does not appear to be, Kate recognizes what she really is. In this speech and in the later one at the wager, Kate helps to create her own role as obedient spouse. And in the creation she and Petruchio take pleasure and find love.¹⁵

As mentioned, Katherina's transformation succeeds, at least in part, because she is called to play a congenial role—one assigned to her, in fact, by nature. But the success of the transformation depends just as much on the spirit in which Petruchio works on her and in which she accepts his machinations. Such success as they have requires mutual giving, a willingness of both parties to transcend their narrow selves. Kate obviously does so when she surrenders to the role Petruchio provides for her. And Petruchio does so too by surrendering to the roles he must play to alter her. Were his motives, after all, truly selfish (as his famous lines suggest they might be: “I come to wive it wealthily in Padua; / If wealthily, then happily in Padua” [I.ii.74-75]), he could dispense with the role-playing altogether. But he does, finally, “give away” (III.ii.188) himself to Kate.

The failure of the play's other two attempts at alteration, moreover, at least in part through selfishness, underlines the mutual giving by Katherina and Petruchio.¹⁶ Both Lucentio and the Lord of the Induction, like Petruchio, attempt to direct another into a new role. Lucentio, like Petruchio, presents a role which he hopes Bianca to play, that of a goddess:

O, yes, I saw sweet beauty in her face,
Such as the daughter of Agenor had,
That made great Jove to humble him to her hand
When with his knees he kissed the Cretan strand.
.....Tranio, I saw her coral lips to move,
And with her breath she did perfume the air.
Sacred and sweet was all I saw in her.

(I.i.164-67, 171-73)

Unlike Katherina, however, Bianca never comes around, partly because the role offered her is unnaturally elevated and thus incompatible and partly because she never consents to play the role. She never overcomes the selfishness she exhibits early in the play—when she refuses to be instructed by her tutors, for example (III.i.16-20).

Bianca's failure is relatively minor, but the play's other failed transformation, that of Christopher Sly from tinker to lord, looms large in all discussions of The Shrew. Some critics argue that Sly's change, like Katherina's, succeeds, that he is transformed and redeemed through the wonderful powers of art¹⁷ or that he is created anew, raised up to life as a lord.¹⁸ Such interpretations, however, seem obviously erroneous. Katherina literally becomes an obedient wife; Sly neither literally nor even figuratively becomes a lord. His marriage with his “lady,” for example, will never be consummated. And when he awakens from his drunken slumber, no matter which possible epilogue one chooses, Christopher Sly will still be just a tinker.

Only Sly himself in any way believes the truth of his transformation, the actuality of his fictive role as lord:

Am I a lord? and have I such a lady?
Or do I dream? or have I dream'd till now?
I do not sleep: I see, I hear, I speak.
I smell sweet savours and I feel soft things.
Upon my life, I am a lord indeed,
And not a tinker nor Christopher Sly.

(Induction ii, 66-71)

But neither the auditors nor the other characters are ever convinced, for Sly and his new role are essentially incompatible; he does not play his role well. He cannot, for example, order wine, as a lord would, but calls instead for “a pot o' th' smallest ale” (Induction ii, 73). Nor can he master the correct form of address for his supposed wife:

BEGGAR:
… What must I call her?
LORD:
Madam.
BEGGAR:
Al'ce madam, or Joan madam?
LORD:
Madam and nothing else, so lords call ladies.
BEGGAR:
Madam wife, they say that I have dream'd. …

(Induction ii, 106-10)

Just as important to the failure of Sly's transformation, though, is the Lord's motive in practicing on him. The Lord seeks not to alter Sly but selfishly to amuse himself in “pastime passing excellent” (Induction i, 63). The Lord wishes not to change Sly to a lord but merely to place him in the circumstances of a lord so that his essential nature as a tinker will stand humorously evident.¹⁹

These three attempts at transformation in The Shrew lead to two conclusions about role-playing and romantic love. First, one can play only a compatible role. That is, one can become only what at some essential level he or she already is or should be. Katherina, for instance, no matter how shrewish she seems, can become a loving, obedient wife, for nature intends her to be such.²⁰ Bianca, on the other hand, cannot become a goddess. And Sly's attempts at lordship serve only to emphasize that he is essentially no more than a tinker. In this respect, The Shrew looks forward to A Midsummer Night's Dream and, indeed, to all Shakespeare's later love transformations. In the later play Bottom's famous “translation” is really no change at all but a literalizing of what he already truly is—an ass. He and Sly are alike in this: exalted surroundings only emphasize their low natures. Hippolyta and Titania, like Kate, similarly become what nature intended for them to be all along, subordinate wives. And Oberon's love potion works on Demetrius and Lysander only because it returns them to their initial love choices, Helena and Hermia respectively.

Second, the role-playing succeeds only if all parties exhibit sufficient selflessness. Here too The Shrew anticipates A Midsummer Night's Dream, and the later play's description of the imagination illuminates the former play. Actors must be able to transcend themselves through imagination in order to play roles, and the auditors must likewise use their imaginations to generously “amend” (V.i.208) the actors' feigning. When Philostrate suggests that Theseus can “find sport” in the “nothing” (V.i.78-79) of the mechanicals' play, Theseus argues otherwise:

The kinder we, to give them thanks for nothing.
Our sport shall be to take what they mistake;
And what poor duty cannot do, noble respect
Takes it in might, not merit.
.....Love, therefore, and tongue-tied simplicity
In least speak most, to my capacity.

(V.i.89-92, 104-05)

Even the relatively unimaginative feigning of the rude mechanicals, if charitably received, does, as Bottom promises, somehow fall pat, and the play thus “needs no excuse” (V.i.339).

These two conclusions about role-playing apply equally to that metaphor's tenor, romantic love. First, just as a play succeeds only if actors are assigned compatible roles, so true love emerges only if lovers' expectations for love are natural and reasonable.²¹ One should not, for example, expect a goddess, as Lucentio does, if he wants a wife. Second, just as a play succeeds only if the actors and audience both imaginatively accept the fiction, so true love emerges only if both lovers generously accept each other and “amend” each other's faults. Petruchio and Katherina are both lovers and, metaphorically, actors, and the same generous selflessness that enables them to be successful performers (imagination) enables them also to be successful lovers (gentilesse).

In The Shrew the successful lovers are also the actors. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, however, the two functions are distinct. The four wedding couples illustrate love; the rude mechanicals illustrate performing; and it remains for Theseus and Hippolyta to connect the two in their lunatic, lover, and poet exchange—their attempt to comprehend the happiness of the young lovers.

After a wild night in the woods the young couples in A Midsummer Night's Dream are awakened by Theseus and Hippolyta to find themselves—mysteriously—happy and in love. Theseus questions how “gentle concord” (IV.i.142) has grown from their earlier discord, but the youth cannot answer. “My lord,” responds Lysander,

                                                  I shall reply amazedly,
Half sleep, half waking; but as yet, I swear,
I cannot truly say how I came here.

(IV.i.145-47)

The others respond similarly.

Rational Theseus acknowledges the strangeness of the events related by the youth but not their truth, and he tries to explain away the events as merely a set of imagined falsehoods or senseless misunderstandings:

HIPPOLYTA:
'Tis strange, my Theseus, that these lovers speak of.
THESEUS:
More strange than true. I never may believe
These antique fables, nor these fairy toys.
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact.

(V.i.1-8)

Hippolyta, however, recognizes, although she cannot explain, a truth beyond “cool reason.” The lovers' story may not make rational sense. But sensible or not, the changes wrought by the night's happenings are undeniable: All the lovers' minds are “transfigur'd so together” that the events have grown to “something of great constancy / But howsoever, strange and admirable” (V.i.24-27). Discord has somehow become concord; enmity, somehow love. Even the auditors cannot explain the changes. They can know only that lovers, like lunatics and poets, have dreams and visions which can, although irrational, somehow be true. The strange and wondrously enriching power of love cannot be explained rationally; it can only be metaphorically compared to a dream's magically coming true through “fairy grace” (V.i.382).

In A Midsummer Night's Dream the figures of magic and dream which metaphorically explain love are concretely presented through the fairies and their potions. In The Taming of the Shrew the figures convey the same theme, but only imagistically, through Petruchio. In him the lunatic, lover, and poet—and a bit of the magician—all meet. He is obviously a lover, and his role as an actor/director/playwright who guides Katherina into her role as wife qualifies him as poet. He is also a lunatic, and Shakespeare systematically presents him as such. Katherina calls him “one half lunatic” (II.i.286) after their first meeting. On the wedding day (III.ii) she names him a “mad-brain rudesby,” a “frantic fool” (ll. 10, 12), and his “mad attire” (l. 118) and “mad-brain'd” (l. 157) actions during the wedding elicit the appellation “mad” from Gremio, Tranio, and Bianca (ll. 176, 235, 237). And despite the general madness of Petruchio's actions, specific references to it occur only at these points in the text. That fact seems significant. For immediately after Katherina calls him “one half lunatic,” Petruchio describes her ideally to Baptista, in lines already quoted:

Father, 'tis thus: yourself and all the world
That talk'd of her have talk'd amiss of her.
If she be curst, it is for policy,
For she's not froward, but modest as the dove;
She is not hot, but temperate as the morn;
For patience she will prove a second Grissel,
And Roman Lucrece for her chastity.

(II.i.289-95)

Immediately after he is termed mad by the wedding guests, Petruchio thanks them for their attendance and again describes Katherina ideally, again in lines already quoted:

And, honest company, I thank you all
That have beheld me give away myself
To this most patient, sweet, and virtuous wife.

(III.ii.187-89)

To the audience these words seem madness at the time Petruchio speaks them—Kate seems obviously a shrew and no “second Grissel”—but they are a madness in which truth resides, like the madness in the play's Induction. There what is called Sly's “strange lunacy” (Induction, ii, 27)—that he is Christopher Sly, old Sly's son of Burton Heath—is actually the truth. And by the play's end Petruchio's madness too has become truth: Katherina by then is temperate, patient, sweet, and virtuous.²² His descriptions of her may be the irrational imaginings of a madman, a lover's vision of an ideal wife, and a poet's description of the ideal role for a woman. But they are also true. Petruchio's visions, which the rest of Paduan society has judged madness, have somehow become real—and in a way that others can explain only by calling the transformation a “wonder” (V.ii.106, 189), thereby acknowledging Petruchio a sort of miracle worker.²³ Like the story of the night in A Midsummer Night's Dream, which strangely grows to something of great constancy, Petruchio's ideal vision of Katherina wonderously bodes, as he says,

                    peace … and love, and quiet life,
And, to be short, what not that's sweet and happy.

(V.ii.108-10)

With Petruchio's generous help, Katherina, like the young lovers, rises as if “new-risen from a dream” (IV.i.173), mysteriously loved and in love. And like Bottom/Pyramus rising from the dead, she finds her less-than-perfect performance accepted. Her shrewishness yields wondrously to the harmonious joy of the marriage-bed in much the same way that the Burgomask of rude mechanicals yields magically to the dance of fairies.

Notes

1. John Bailey, Shakespeare (London: Longmans, 1929), p. 100.

2. G. B. Shaw in Shaw on Shakespeare, ed. Edwin Wilson (New York: Dutton, 1961), p. 188.

3. J. Dennis Huston, “‘To Make a Puppet’: Play and Play-Making in The Taming of the Shrew,” Shakespeare Studies, 9 (1976), 73. Huston cities, respectively, J. D. Wilson, Shakespeare's Happy Comedies (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1962); Thomas McFarland, Shakespeare's Pastoral Comedy (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1972); C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1959); James Calderwood, Shakespeare Metadrama (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1971); A. C. Hamilton, The Early Shakespeare (San Marino: Huntington Library Press, 1967); and Early Shakespeare, Stratford-Upon-Avon Studies 3, eds. J. R. Brown and Bernard Harris (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1962).

4. Roughly since Northrop Frye's “The Argument of Comedy” in English Institute Essays 1948 (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1949), pp. 58-73.

5. Shakespeare and his Comedies (London: Methuen, 1957), pp. 94-98. G. R. Hibbard [ed. The Taming of the Shrew (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1968), p. 38] says briefly in his introduction that in The Shrew Shakespeare was very much interested in imagination, which he explored in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Calderwood calls Sly Bottom's “spiritual cousin” (p. 131). Alexander Leggatt [Shakespeare's Comedy of Love (London: Methuen, 1974), p. 42] says that Sly's awakening “is a dramatic moment of a kind that will continue to fascinate Shakespeare throughout his career” and, specifically, that Sly resembles the waking lovers in A Midsummer Night's Dream. T. F. Van Laan (Role-Playing in Shakespeare [Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1978], p. 52) says that role-playing as structure in The Shrew anticipates nearly all of Shakespeare's subsequent plays. Alvin Kernan (The Playwright as Magician [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979], p. 67) says that The Shrew connects with Shakespeare's later plays thematically in the use of theatrical art.

6. Dream in Shakespeare (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1974), p. 34.

7. Peter Alexander, The Complete Works of Shakespeare (London and Glasgow: Collins, 1951).

8. At least as early as the medieval Uxor Noah and Gyll in The Second Shepherds' Play, the shrewish wife has been a type of sinful disobedience.

9. Titania's doting on Bottom is a clear reversal of natural order: a goddess submitting herself to a mortal—to an animal, in fact, to an ass. She awakens with no thought of claiming the Indian boy, for the obvious folly of such a perverse submission to Bottom reveals to her the unnaturalness of her refusal to submit to Oberon. The doting on an ass suggests further that Titania, in refusing to obey her rightful lord, reverts to her bestial nature, which should be subordinate to her rational one. In refusing to play the role nature intends for her, she necessarily becomes beast-like, less than nature intends her to be. Perhaps something of such an idea inheres in the term “shrew” and in the falcon metaphor Petruchio uses with Kate. Also Sly's drinking himself to the level of a “beast” or a “swine” (Induction, i, 30) is similar.

10. Kernan, for example, argues that “theatrical methods alone” enable Petruchio to alter her from shrew to wife (p. 66), and Van Laan claims further that the play characterizes all life as a theatrical enterprise (p. 43).

11. Hibbard, p. 21.

12. Garber, p. 34.

13. Morris, p. 135.

14. Brown, p. 98.

15. See Leggatt, p. 59. Staging of the play, moreover, could very nicely support such an interpretation, as Ronald Bryden pointed out in conversation (13 April 1984). In the first part of the play Kate is able to control the situation. That is, coming from offstage, railing, she is able to present herself as she wishes others to see her. But as the play progresses, she comes to be surrounded by other characters, hedged in. In III.ii, for example, she enters in a group, a wedding train, and even though she is the center of the group's attention, the others nonetheless limit her, as does her engagement. She re-enters later in III.ii, again in a group, this time as a wife, and exits physically carried off by Petruchio. In IV.i she is, in effect, a prisoner in Petruchio's house.

    In IV.v, however, the situation changes. Once she accepts Petruchio's game with Vincentio, she is no longer hedged in. That is, she and Petruchio stand apart from the others—here in the sense that they are in on the joke while Vincentio is an outsider and literally in V.i. Her and Petruchio's joint knowledge, which the others lack, gives them joint control. Her acceptance of her assigned role thus frees her. In V.ii she again is able to enter and present herself. But this time she presents herself for and with Petruchio, not just to him. She and he understand what is going on, while to the others her actions can be only a “wonder.”

16. See also Van Laan, pp. 44-53. He, though, considers Lucentio a successful actor/director, who “changes Bianca from Baptista's daughter to Lucentio's wife” (p. 47).

17. Kernan, p. 67.

18. Huston, p. 79.

19. The Lord's joke is appropriate in one sense, though. Through his drinking Sly has become a “beast,” a “swine” (Induction, i, 30), less than a tinker. Being shown to be a fool and no more than a tinker is a fit punishment for Sly. See also note 8.

20. See note 8.

21. To paraphrase Bottom, love and reason must keep at least some company. For example, no distinction exists between Demetrius and Lysander capable of explaining Hermia's initial love of Lysander and not Demetrius. Her choice, while inexplicable, is nonetheless consistent with reason, for Lysander is undeniably “a worthy gentleman” (I.i.52). See R. W. Dent, “Imagination in A Midsummer Night's Dream,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 15 (1964), 117.

22. Katherina, too, is mad, but in two distinct ways. Initially “stark mad or wonderful froward” (I.i.69), Kate willfully and obstinately sets herself against all society. Such selfish madness, that of the pariah, does not enrich her life but instead narrowly limits it. The madness of the lover, on the other hand, that which Katherina exhibits toward the play's end, is enriching. In concurring with and actually surpassing Petruchio's mad assertion that Vincentio is a young maiden, she goes beyond her narrow selfishness, surrendering willingly to something outside of herself. The expansive madness of the lover thus liberates her.

23. The term is Huston's (p. 77).