[In the essay that follows, Daniell contends that The Taming of the Shrew takes marriage quite seriously, and in that sense it is a true Shakespearean marriage play. Daniell studies the play's views on marriage through an analysis of the theatricality in the play, and finds that by the play’s end the violence and rebellion are contained, and Katherina and Petruchio are able to be themselves, with all their contradictions intact.]

Nowadays, The Taming of the Shrew is taken in its entirety, without mutilation, crude business with whips (imported by Kemble) or announcements of the embarrassing incompetence of the prentice Shakespeare. It is winning increasing praise, for the structure of its interlocking parts among other things, and is becoming understood as a fast-moving play about various kinds of romance and fulfilment in marriage.¹

Problems remain, of course, particularly with Katherine's final speech: modern solutions making it a statement of contemporary doctrine, or of male fantasy, or of almost unbelievably sustained irony, do not any of them seem to suggest that there is much for Katherine and Petruchio to look forward to in marriage. The speech is a disappointment after the tender moment of ‘Nay, I will give thee a kiss’ (5.1.133) which suggested that something was coming with a lot of good feeling in it, an impression later supported by her having the wit to win Petruchio's wager for him. Moreover, submission, as it is first, and strongly, presented in the play, in the Induction, scene 1, is denigration, a game played by pretended attendants; and wifely submission, shown even more strongly in the following scene, is sport by a page dressed as the sham wife of a ridiculously deceived ‘husband’. It is all a pastime, and false.

Sly, however, disappears for good, and this is surely right in view of the serious point about marriage which can be seen to be made at the end of the play by Katherine. I want to suggest that it is a truly Shakespearian marriage-play, and as such takes marriage seriously and makes as high a claim for the state of matrimony as, from experience of him elsewhere, we should expect Shakespeare to do. The way into this, I suggest, is through the play's special sense of theatricality, linked with an understanding that it is wrong to think of such a marriage-play having a firmly closed ending.

That The Taming of the Shrew is imbued with a fresh excitement about the potentials of theatre now needs little elaboration. The most modern commentators take that as understood, and indeed enlarge on the matter with some precision. G. R. Hibbard in the New Penguin edition refers to

bravura pieces, conscious displays of the rhetorical arts of grotesque description, farcical narrative, and inventive vituperation. Language is being deliberately exploited for effect; and what, in another context, might well appear cruel, outrageous, or offensive is transformed into comic exuberance by a linguistic virtuosity that delights in the exercise of its own powers.

Brian Morris in his Arden edition notes among much else a contrast of ‘physical violence with the eloquence of persuasions and the rituals of debate’. H. J. Oliver sums up a major part of the introduction to his Oxford Shakespeare edition with the words ‘Shakespeare certainly plays with the subject of theatrical illusion, and through the Induction and elsewhere seems to warn his audience of the ambiguity of “belief”.’² Theatricality is everywhere. The Bianca plot works because people dress up as other people and assume roles. Petruchio, as is now frequently said, plays a part like an actor until he has subdued Katherine. It is universally agreed that the Induction spells out clearly that theatrical illusion can have powerful effect, and that this is important for the rest of the play. In the Lord's two long speeches which so dominate the play's first 136 lines he shows himself to be obsessed with the notion of acting, particularly with the careful creation of an illusion of a rich world for Sly to come to life in. This is even more developed in the following scene as his servants get the hang of the idea and fantasize freely about what sensual delights are in their power to offer. By the time Lucentio and Tranio enter to start the specially mounted play some quite large areas of the capability of theatre to create illusion have been coloured in.

Two things should reinforce the importance of this stress on theatricality itself for the rest of the play. The first is that the opening two scenes are not, in Folio, quite as detached as they are often assumed to be. The labels ‘Induction, scene 1’ and ‘Induction, scene 2’ used in virtually all modern editions, though in some senses technically correct (if un-Shakespearian) only go back as far as Pope.³ The Folio text begins firmly ‘Actus primus. Scoena Prima.’ (and then forgets all about divisions until ‘Actus Tertia’). Though the non-appearance of Sly in the Folio after the end of the first scene of the Bianca plot causes worry to some critics, the Folio arrangement of the scenes might prevent a general tendency to detach him too far. As I shall show, it is not true to say that Sly's concerns are later absorbed into the main action—that Katherine's arrival in a new world created for her has, as it were, consummated Sly's action. But the relentless insistence on the creation of controlled illusion from ‘Actus primus. Scoena Prima.’ does, as we shall see, have an important effect on the main actions, and particularly on the relation between Petruchio and Kate.

Secondly, it is difficult to miss the point about theatrical illusion when two early moments of transition in the first scene are so odd. It is peculiar that the hunting Lord's first thought on seeing the ‘monstrous beast’ (having apostrophized death in one line) should be to play such an elaborate trick. That is hardly an expected response. Then, to cap that, he hears a trumpet, and confidently expects ‘some noble gentleman that means, / Travelling some journey, to repose him here’. But it is no such thing. It is ‘players / That offer service to your lordship’. Their arrival, in view of the game of ‘supposes’ that he has in hand, is altogether too apt.

The two opening scenes bring together three of the play's chief concerns: hunting, acting, and the creation of an illusion of a powerfully rich world. As the second play-within-the-play begins (the first is ‘Sly as lord’) Lucentio and Tranio are caught up in a business which carries all three things forward. Lucentio has no doubt of the richness of Bianca: ‘… I saw sweet beauty in her face … I saw her coral lips to move, / And with her breath she did perfume the air’ (1.1.162, 169-70). With Tranio, he is going to hunt her down: ‘I burn, I pine, I perish, Tranio, / If I achieve not this young modest girl’ (ll. 150-1). And he is soon involved in a situation which makes play-acting both essential and exciting. The direct wooing of Bianca is forbidden by her father, and there are rivals. Indeed, disguise and part-playing are positively invited, as Baptista encourages the rivals to produce ‘schoolmasters’ who will be kept ‘within my house’. The theatrical game spins merrily, with Tranio playing Lucentio, Lucentio playing ‘Cambio’, Hortensio playing ‘Licio’—and Bianca playing the adorable young girl. Presently a Pedant plays Vincentio. At the end of the play all the disguises have come off. Lucentio is himself and successfully wedded to Bianca who, married, is not quite as she appeared to be when wooed. Tranio is himself, and seems to have been forgiven, as he comports himself boldly. The Pedant and the real Vincentio have, in a good deal of wonderfully rapid business, faced each other out and the truth has triumphed.

All this, however, is more a matter of simple change of name. The Pedant does not even need a disguise. Lucentio is disguised, and Tranio puts on Lucentio's finery (‘Enter Tranio brave’, 1.2.214). Hortensio dresses up. But the deceptions that are practised lack depth, and belong to the very fast-moving world of amorous intrigue. Everyone receives the appropriate reward, and the two who are married at the end of this plot, Lucentio and Hortensio, have wives who, as G. R. Hibbard says of Bianca, have realized that ‘deception is a woman's most effective weapon’.⁴

Inside this action is the other, that of Katherine and Petruchio. This can also be seen in the primary colours of hunting, acting and a special richness. It is so clearly set inside, like a jewel in a mounting, that the resulting extension of the significances comes to be unmistakable. By this device, the action is moved on to another plane, as it were: almost on to another dimension. If The Taming of the Shrew is seen as a set of Chinese boxes, then the opening of the last one has some magic qualities. Katherine is most firmly inset. Consider: the audience is in a theatre watching a play about a Lord who makes a play for a tinker who watches a play about two young Italians who watch ‘some show to welcome us to town’ (1.1.47) inside which is a play about the surreptitious wooing of an amorosa by a love-sick hero and his rivals. Inside that is set another play about, by contrast, the very blatant wooing of her sister. Katherine does not say very much; compared with Rosalind, or even Beatrice, she is positively silent; but she is undoubtedly the heart of the play. She is introduced at five removes, it might be said, from street-level. At each remove the illusion increases. (We might note that Petruchio's very late entry into the action could well be said to make a sixth remove; the play has run for 524 lines at his entry, before which he is not even mentioned.)

On this interior plane, displacements are not of name or clothes, but of two entire personalities, a very different thing altogether. Indeed, Petruchio has announced himself vigorously from his first entry into the action, and he bombards Katherine, in the very first seconds of their first meeting, with her own name—eleven times in seven lines. He forbids his wife the new cap and gown the Tailor has provided, and his change of clothes for the wedding makes a mockery of dressing-up.

Nor are the displacements, like the others, temporary. Katherine, her ‘lesson’ learned, will not revert to being a shrew. Petruchio, having tamed her, will not revert to bullying. Except that I do not believe that Shakespeare's play says anything quite so obvious, or so final. If, rather than dramatic life on a different plane, there were a straight parallel here with the Bianca plot, it would have to be argued that Petruchio was ‘really’ a gentle person who put on roughness only while he was wooing Kate. To say so is to forget that he enters the play knocking his servant about and his servant calls him, twice, quarrelsome and mad (1.2.13-32). It is to argue too that Kate is ‘really’ an emotionally mature young woman ready for marriage thrown temporarily into desperation by her impossible father and sister. But within thirty-five lines of meeting someone who has come to woo her, who announces ‘Good Kate; I am a gentleman’ she is crying ‘That I'll try’ and ‘She strikes him’ (2.1.216). Both have strong violent streaks. Katherine says she will not be made a puppet (4.3.103) to be knocked about, or not, for ever after. Rather, as the further inside, the more the increase of illusion, so the illusion now is of a greater ‘reality’, not less. Unlike ‘Cambio’ and ‘Licio’, Katherine and Petruchio are ‘real’ people. Their theatrical dimension allows them to do something quite different, and much more interesting. Katherine and Petruchio can be seen to grow to share an ability to use theatrical situations to express new and broadening perspectives in a world as unlimited as art itself.

I want to come at this now from another direction. Brian Morris, in the introduction to his Arden edition, says ‘There are few points of possible comparison between Shrew and the first tetralogy of history plays.’⁵ I feel that this is not quite true. There may well turn out to be quite a number—certainly more than it is possible to comment on here. In the first place, there are large areas of superficial similarity in the use of verse, where so often the rhythms of the lines of the Henry VI plays are clearly from the same mind as made Shrew. Equally generally, there are similarities in certain single lines where the reader, meeting the line on its own, would be hard put to it to place the line in the right play. Thus ‘I see report is fabulous and false’ might be from either a history play or Shrew. It is 1 Henry VI, 2.3.18, where, like Shrew's ‘And now I find report a very liar’ it is in a sexually charged two-hander in the first heat of a meeting.

Thus have I politicly begun my reign,
And 'tis my hope to end successfully

taken alone, would be put in the first tetralogy; it is of course Petruchio at 4.1.172-3, though it resembles 2 Henry VI, 3.1.341, and the tenor of the ‘jolly thriving wooer’ at Richard III 4.3.36-43. The 2 Henry VI line, ‘Well, nobles, well, 'tis politicly done’ also comes early in a soliloquy announcing a programme of action to win a personal triumph, and has the only other use of ‘politicly’ in Shakespeare. The game can be continued. I suppose ‘Cease, cease these jars and rest your minds in peace; / Let's to the altar’ might be mistaken for Shrew instead of 1 Henry VI, 1.1.44-5. Stamping a hat under a foot does not just belong to Kate—Gloucester does it to Winchester's hat at 1 Henry VI, 1.3.49. There are some similarities of situation. The duel of wits between Petruchio and Kate might be said to parallel the duels between Joan la Pucelle and the Dauphin, or Joan and Talbot, in 1 Henry VI, act 1, scenes 2 and 5, or more plausibly between Richard's outrageous wooing of Anne, and Elizabeth, in Richard III, act 1, scene 1, and act 4, scene 4. Eyes dazzled by the sun—in particular relation to a dramatically significant father—are the basis of special wordplay and action in both Shrew act 4, scene 5, and 3 Henry VI act 2, scene 1. The ‘martial’ quality of Joan and the bluff chivalry of Talbot suggests casting the same kind of actors as Katherine and Petruchio. Fancy can multiply parallels and echoes. It is odd that the only early plays of Shakespeare not mentioned by Francis Meres are the three parts of Henry VI and Shrew. Further analysis of what they might have in common, especially audiences, needs to be done.

Yet it is not entirely fanciful to see that from the moment of Petruchio's Richard-like soliloquy (‘Thus have I politicly begun my reign’) the Petruchio-Katherine relationship brushes against the world of the history plays, and indeed with their principal source. The other main plots, concerning Lucentio and Bianca, and the Lord and his servants, are Ovidian in tone and reference, as can be easily demonstrated. Katherina, however, suffers in a different key. Her description of herself as ‘starv'd for meat, giddy for lack of sleep; / With oaths kept waking, and with brawling fed’ (4.3.9-10) belongs more to Shakespeare's world of war than to anything remotely like the Ovid found elsewhere in the play. The ‘Beggars that come unto my father's door’ who ‘Upon entreaty have a present alms’ of the same speech suggest the same world, of displaced soldiery. She feels herself threatened with ‘deadly sickness or else present death’. Her violent reaction to Grumio's tantalizing game with beef and mustard is to beat him, with words which could be from a woman in the later plays of the tetralogy:

Sorrow on thee and all the pack of you
That triumph thus upon my misery!

Her experience of noise and violence and hunger and misery belongs to the earlier history plays.

Petruchio's courtship moves through several areas of reference. Just before he met Katherine, he saw his wooing in Petrarchan terms (2.1.169-72). He can flatter her with classical affinities—‘Dian’, ‘Grissel’, Lucrece; and carry on like any swashbuckler (3.2.229-35). It is only from the end of act 4, scene 1 that he hopes to end his ‘reign’ both ‘politicly’ and ‘successfully’, and the idea of the warlike is never far away after that. Even his violence about the gown is in battlefield terms: ‘'Tis like a demi-cannon … up and down, carv'd … snip and nip and cut and slish and slash …’ (4.3.88-90). Lucentio, indeed, presently thinks he announces the end of a civil war.

At last, though long, our jarring notes agree;
And time it is when raging war is done
To smile at scapes and perils overblown.

(5.2.1-3)

Petruchio won his first victory some time before that, in Katherine's apparent submission over the matter of the sun and the moon: ‘What you will have it nam'd, even that it is’ (4.5.21), and at that point Hortensio thinks all is over: ‘Petruchio, go thy ways, the field is won’ (l. 23). Petruchio, however, has not finished. Almost at once, Vincentio enters, and Petruchio greets him as ‘gentle mistress’:

Tell me, sweet Kate, and tell me truly too,
Hast thou beheld a fresher gentlewoman?
Such war of white and red within her cheeks!

(ll. 28-30)

For the moment, Kate has agreed no more than to play his game of pretence. It has cost her a good deal, no doubt, and it is a real step forward, which he acknowledges. But he himself goes ‘forward, forward’ (l. 24) from the ‘war of white and red’ to something more than one victory, more even than ‘peace … and love, and quiet life, / An awful rule, and right supremacy … what not that's sweet and happy’ (5.2.108-10) when she has won his wager for him. He does not know the full measure of his success until she has spoken her last, and famous, speech.

It is hard not to see in that ‘war of white and red’ a hint of the Wars of the Roses, however well-worn the notion of white and red cheeks was for Elizabethans. The probable dates of the writing of the first tetralogy encompass the likely dates for the writing of The Taming of the Shrew. Certainly, close to the time of writing the comedy, Shakespeare put on the stage a symbolic scene in which an imaginary origin is given for the name of the wars, an incident in the Temple Garden when English lords and others pluck red and white roses.

PLANTAGENET.
Meantime your cheeks do counterfeit our roses;
For pale they look with fear, as witnessing
The truth on our side.
SOMERSET.
                                                            No, Plantagenet,
'Tis not for fear but anger that thy cheeks
Blush for pure shame to counterfeit our roses,
And yet thy tongue will not confess thy error.

(1 Henry VI, 2.4.62-7)

In Shakespeare, these wars end with a marriage, a union. His principal source, Hall's Chronicle, is properly entitled The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies …, and Hall's direction is not just visible in his title. His brief preface, setting out the necessity and value of the writing of history, concludes his address to Edward VI with references to the marriage which healed the national split.

Wherefore … I have compiled and gathered (and not made) out of diverse writers, as well forayn as Englishe, this simple treatise whiche I have named the union of the noble houses of Lancaster and Yorke, conjoyned together by the godly mariage of your most noble graundfather, and your verteous grandmother. For as kyng henry the fourthe was the beginnyng and rote of the great discord and devision: so was the godly matrimony, the final ende of all discencions, titles and debates.⁶

These matters would be merely curious were it not for the metaphoric strain of Katherine's last speech, which is either the proper climax to a marriage-play or it is nothing. Here, indeed, she is speaking in terms which could also be lifted from Shakespeare's earlier history plays.

Fie, fie! unknit that threatening unkind brow,
And dart not scornful glances from those eyes
To wound thy lord, thy king, thy governor.

(5.2.136-8)

She refers to ‘thy lord, thy life, thy keeper, / Thy head, thy sovereign’ (ll. 146-7) who ‘craves no other tribute at thy hands / But love, fair looks, and true obedience’ (ll. 152-3). There is owed ‘Such duty as the subject owes the prince’ (l. 155): if not, the result is ‘a foul contending rebel / And graceless traitor …’ (ll. 159-60). She is ashamed that women ‘offer war where they should kneel for peace; / Or seek for rule, supremacy, and sway …’ (ll. 162-3).

Why Katherine chooses such language is the heart of the problem of her last speech. Is she really saying that a disobedient woman is a ‘foul contending rebel and graceless traitor’? Partly she is, because she is specifically addressing two women, Bianca and the Widow, who have been ‘disobedient’ and who have seemed to have got the upper hand by an unpleasant kind of deception. But the dynamic of the play assuredly means that she has to be saying something private to Petruchio as well. Whatever happened between them, they have been together, and not with the others, all through the play, as a rule. They are spectators, merely, of the wild complications of the Pedant-Vincentio scene, act 5, scene 1, in which the rest of the plots of the play are resolved, and their enjoyment has included enjoyment of each other, so much that at the end Katherine can kiss Petruchio, even in public, adding ‘now pray thee, love, stay’ to which her husband replies ‘Is not this well? Come, my sweet Kate …’ (ll. 133-4).

H. J. Oliver has noticed how the matter of Katherine and Petruchio keeps becoming too well-understood for farce. ‘It is as if Shakespeare set out to write a farce about taming a shrew but had hardly begun before he asked himself what might make a woman shrewish anyway … We sympathize with Katherine—and as soon as we do, farce becomes impossible.’⁷ This is right, but I take it far further than Oliver would have approved. The Taming of the Shrew is a play unusually about marriages as well as courtships, and the quality of the marriage of Katherine and Petruchio might be expected to depend, as I said at the beginning of this essay, on more than a wink and a tone of irony, or a well-delivered paper on the necessity of order in the State. I am suggesting that a special quality of mutuality grew between Katherine and Petruchio as the play progressed, something invisible to all the others in the play and sealed for them both by Kate's last speech. It is surely unsatisfactory for Kate simply to flip over from one state into its opposite, or for Petruchio to have ‘really’ been gentle all along. I suggest that they have found, led by Petruchio, a way of being richly together with all their contradictions—and energies—very much alive and kicking. Beatrice and Benedick go into their marriage at the end of Much Ado About Nothing as witty and spirited as ever, but together and not apart. I believe that Katherine and Petruchio do the same, and do it through an understanding of the power of acting, of being actors.

That Petruchio sets out to play a part is now commonly understood. Theatricality, however, attaches to him rather more than has been seen. He is an actor—a man who loves acting with a full-spirited craftsmanship far ahead of the Lord's thin-blooded connoisseurship. He has a violent streak, and is impetuous: but he has an actor's power of control, as well as an actor's apparent sudden switch of mood. He arrives quarrelling with his servant and is still smouldering when Hortensio has parted them (1.2.1-45). But presented instantly with Hortensio's offer of a ‘shrewd ill-favour'd wife’ (which is only Hortensio's thirteenth line) Petruchio shows excellent manners, saying like any easy guest ‘Sure I'll go along with it’. More, he says it as if he were Pistol, in high style full of classical tags:

Be she as foul as was Florentius' love,
As old as Sibyl, and as curst and shrewd
As Socrates' Xanthippe or a worse.

(ll. 67-9)

We then watch him move, step by step, towards Katherine. He learns that their fathers knew each other, so he is on visiting terms. He discovers that she has a wider reputation as ‘an irksome brawling scold’ (l. 184) but is loud in his claim not to be put off: indeed, he speaks like a mini-Othello:

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?

(1.2.196-203)

Of course he hasn't: or at least, some of it is unlikely. He has only just left home by his own confession, apparently setting off for the first time (ll. 48-56). He is using one of his voices. We soon hear another one, in the one delicious sentence from the sideline with which he sums up Tranio's posturing (as opposed to acting)—‘Hortensio, to what end are all these words?’ (l. 246). He visits Baptista to present ‘Licio’ (Hortensio) and sees for himself the peculiarities of the household. He understands the ‘little wind’ with which the father and sister increase Katherine's fire, and offers himself, in another voice, as a ‘raging fire’.

He quickly takes two big steps towards her, first when Hortensio enters ‘with his head broke’ (2.1.140) and then when he hears as it were a tape-recording of her voice in Hortensio's report (‘“Frets, call you these?” quoth she “I'll fume with them’”) and finds that she can make a theatrically appropriate strong action while saying a witty line, and that she has a liberated tongue (‘with twenty such vile terms’)—in other words, she could well turn out to have the stuff of actors too. He is eager to see her, and sets up in soliloquy a programme not based on violence (‘raging fires’) but on his actor's ability to present her with a new world for her to live in (‘I'll tell her plain / She sings as sweetly …’).

They meet, and fall in love. Both are taken aback. Petruchio is surprised to lose some rounds of the wit-contest on points. But he holds to his purpose, though she has struck him and made him forget the part he is acting (‘I swear I'll cuff you, if you strike again’, 2.1.217).

Thereafter it is possible to watch him acting his way through his relationship with her, and with everyone else. From the moment of meeting, he is hunting, and in deadly earnest. He uses all his skills to make worlds for her to try to live in, as he does, as an actor, even in what appears to be bullying.⁸ (She seems, pretty well from the start, to understand him as an actor. ‘Where did you study all this goodly speech?’ she asks (2.1.255).) In all his dealings with her, he acts out a character, and a set of situations, which present her with a mirror of herself, and in particular her high-spirited violence and her sense of being out in the cold and deprived. She who had tied up her sister's hands—apparently because she was dressed up (2.1.3-5)—finds her own hands tied, as it were, in the scene with the Tailor, where she can't actually get her hands on the finery that was ordered. The speed of all this action in the central scenes, in the third and fourth acts, helps by presenting not so much development of ‘character’ as a set of projected slides, almost cartoons, of the wedding, the journey, the honeymoon, and so on. Katherine is not alone in finding it all ‘unreal’: it is part of a play.

But the play has a clear direction. It is always worth asking what Shakespeare does not do. Brian Morris points out what can be learned by seeing what appealed to the young playwright looking for ideas in the old Italian comedy. Shakespeare's Lucentio is not desperate for money, and has not seduced Bianca and got her pregnant, as Erostrato, his equivalent in Supposes, has done. Instead, he is seen ‘to fall instantly, rapturously, romantically in love with her at first sight … It is this potential for romance, for love leading to marriage, which Shakespeare detected and exploited in Gascoigne's work.’⁹ Indeed, no one in Shrew is desperate for money. There is no seduction or rape. The horrifying violence of such folk-tales of shrews tamed as have been sometimes produced as ‘sources’, or even analogues, is removed far away, mercifully, as is any tone of cynicism.

The direction of the play, for Katherine and Petruchio, is towards marriage as a rich, shared sanity. That means asserting and sharing all the facts about one's own identity, not suppressing large areas. Sly, floundering in the Lord's trickery, tried to assert himself like that (Induction 2.17-23). But then he sinks into illusion and is never undeceived. That is important. He ‘does not become what others pretend him to be’.¹⁰ Nor does Katherine. If she is a true Shakespearian heroine, in marriage she becomes herself only more so: in her case, almost as capable of future strong, witty, over-verbalized action as Beatrice. Marriage is addition, not subtraction: it is a sad let-down if the dazzling action of the play produces only a female wimp. But at the end of the play she shows that she shares with Petruchio an understood frame for both their lives. Whatever Petruchio has done, he has given her his full attention in action; she has learned to act too, in both senses. This, with the special ability of acting to embrace and give form to violence, is the mutuality they share.

Her first clear step was when she learned that simple deception worked (something her sister had, infuriatingly, known by instinct). She privately called the sun the moon, and then publicly greeted Vincentio as a ‘Young budding virgin, fair and fresh and sweet’ (4.5.36). Soon after this, she and Petruchio are shown not only married, but tenderly in love (the kiss). Her final step is when she shows to Petruchio that she has understood that they, the two of them, can contain violence and rebellion in their own mutual frame.

Now civil wounds are stopp'd, peace lives again—
That she may long live here, God say amen!

(Richard III, 5.5.40-1)

are the last lines of the Roses tetralogy. The ‘war of white and red’ ends in a true union of strong, almost over-strong, dynasties, and not in the impoverishment of one side. (Sly had suggested such a link in the fourth line of the play—‘Look in the chronicles’.)

Muriel Bradbrook made clear what a new thing Shakespeare was making. ‘Katherine is the first shrew to be given a father, the first to be shown as maid and bride …’

Traditionally the shrew triumphed; hers was the oldest and indeed the only native comic rôle for women. If overcome, she submitted either to high theological argument or to a taste of the stick … Petruchio does not use the stick, and Katherine in her final speech does not console herself with theology.¹¹

Instead of the stick, or theology (which is certainly present at that point in A Shrew) Shakespeare makes Kate move herself further into, rather than out of, a play-world. Her final deed is to act a big theatrical set-piece, speaking the longest speech in the play, its length totally disrupting the rhythms presented by the other plot. ‘Women’, she says—that is, the conventionally married in front of her—are to be submissive. But she has been hunting with Petruchio as a couple for some time now, and she sends him, inside the speech, a message about themselves, Katherine and Petruchio, in the language of dramatized civil war. The play would founder—which it doesn't—if Katherine had merely surrendered to a generalization about ‘women’, and said nothing intensely personal about herself and Petruchio.¹²

She concludes, and starts the final run of couplets, by admitting that women are weak in such wars, and must accept it, and indeed, with a startling theatrical gesture she demonstrates it (‘place your hands below your husband's foot’). She has successfully acted a long speech with interior reference to an imaginary history play, though only Petruchio can appreciate that. Partly she is telling him that the civil war in her is over, and she will not fight her rescuer. Partly she is rejoicing in their new world.

Brian Vickers demonstrates ‘the speed and fluidity with which Shakespeare can modulate from one medium to the other as his dramatic intention requires’. He comments on the last lines of Shrew act 5, scene 1 (‘kiss me, Kate’). He also analyses the verse and prose of the Sly scenes, making an excellent point about the ‘new’ Sly's blank verse, ‘a step up to an assumed dignity and style’, which is then exploited ‘by inserting into this new frame fragments of the old Sly that we used to know … The incongruity between style and subject-matter is now so marked that it re-creates on the plane of language the visual effect of Sly sitting up in bed, newly washed and nobly attired.’¹³ I see a much developed and mature incongruity in the violence with which Katherine uses, in a speech about the experience of marriage, the vocabulary and rhythms of a contentious claimant to a throne from a history play. It is right that it is incongruous. The married state of Katherine and Petruchio has, from the end of the play, no connection with the married state of Lucentio and Bianca or Hortensio and his Widow. (‘If she and I be pleas'd, what's that to you?’ (2.1.295).) For them, as Lucentio fatuously said, the war was over. For Katherine and Petruchio, it has barely started. This is the play which is beginning. The Taming of the Shrew has shown us (‘So workmanly the blood and tears are drawn’ (Induction 2.58)) a conflict of very close relationship—in play terms. Petruchio, having met her, ‘thought it good’ that she should ‘hear a play’ (Induction 2.131). Now she shows that she has understood. They go back to the beginning, as it were, to watch a play that they are creating. That is the true Shakespearian touch, going back at the end of a comedy, in a spiral movement, to the same point only higher. Thus Portia and Bassanio begin, at the end of Merchant, in a Belmont modified by the play-scene of the trial in Venice. Thus Beatrice and Benedick, at the end of Much Ado, start again (‘Then you do not love me? … No, truly, but in friendly recompense’), but now together and changed by the play-scene at the church.

Together, Katherine and Petruchio have filled-in many more areas of the capability of theatre than seemed possible at the beginning. In particular they have, like Beatrice and Benedick after them, created an open world for each other; they are themselves, only more so being now together. Their mutuality is based on the power of acting. Kate's speech is rivalled in length only by those of the Lord in the Induction when he is setting up a play-world. This shared power can encompass continual challenges for sovereignty, and even violence, together. Far from such things splitting their marriage apart, they will bring them into closer union. ‘We three are married, but you two are sped.’

Notes

1. Brian Morris concludes the Introduction to his Arden edition (1981) with a long section ‘Love and marriage’, pp. 136-49.

2. G. R. Hibbard, The Taming of the Shrew (Harmondsworth, 1968), p. 8; Brian Morris, p. 105; H. J. Oliver, The Taming of the Shrew (Oxford, 1982), p. 57.

3. ‘His contemporaries found the implied play metaphor of the induction device extremely attractive; Shakespeare himself seems to have preferred the less artificial form of the play within the play.’ Anne Righter, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (1962), p. 104.

4. Hibbard, p. 35.

5. Morris, p. 59.

6. Edward Hall, The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies … (1548), pp. vi, vii.

7. Oliver, p. 51.

8. John Russell Brown, in Shakespeare and his Comedies (1957), p. 98, comes near to making this point, but then veers off to something else.

9. Morris, pp. 82, 83.

10. Oliver, p. 38.

11. M. C. Bradbrook, ‘Dramatic Role as Social Image; a Study of The Taming of the Shrew’, Shakespeare-Jahrbuch, 94 (1958), pp. 139, 134-5.

12. The play would go down even faster if she were using the forty-four lines to declaim a thesis about ‘order’, as maintained by G. I. Duthie, Shakespeare (1951), p. 58, and Derek Traversi, An Approach to Shakespeare I: Henry VI to Twelfth Night (1968), p. 89.

13. Brian Vickers, The Artistry of Shakespeare's Prose (London and New York, 1968), pp. 13, 14.