SOURCE: “Kates for the Table and Kates of the Mind: A Social Metaphor in The Taming of the Shrew,” in English Studies in Canada, Vol. 17, No. 1, March, 1991, pp. 1-20.

[In the essay below, Martin proposes an examination of The Taming of the Shrew based on an understanding of the play's contemporary context, arguing that such a reading reveals that Petruchio's treatment of Katherina reflects the conflicted ideas held by the Elizabethans about the “nature of women.”]

I

The vigour of recent critical debate over Petruchio's treatment of Katherine has turned The Taming of the Shrew into the first of Shakespeare's problem comedies. Traditionally it has been staged as a whip-cracking farce in which Katherine's need for reform is taken for granted and Petruchio's strategy of giving her more than a taste of her own medicine is seen as justified and reasonable. Any anxiety audiences might feel about the harshness of Petruchio's methods is allegedly relieved by the play's conventional slapstick context, which presupposes characters of limited human sensitivities who are insulated from experiencing “real” pain, thus making compassion for Katherine's ordeal unnecessary.¹ This easygoing and still prevalent view of the play has been increasingly challenged, however, by critics and productions reinterpreting it as a vexatious social comedy. They anatomize the cultural assumptions of male superiority behind Petruchio's attempt to change Katherine and at the same time redefine her aggressive behaviour as self-preserving resistance to patriarchal repression.² This recontextualizing leads to rejection of the argument that the negative impact of Petruchio's actions is neutralized by the operation of artificial or essentializing dramatic formulas, since the play maintains a realistic historical dimension insofar as it parodies contemporary marriage customs (Hibbard 15-28). The presence of this dimension also counters assumptions that Katherine is tamed in any facile way, and prompts critics and directors to see her notorious submission speech as defiantly ironic (rather than facetious, as a farcical interpretation might play it), although some concede that she may be knowingly complicit at the end of the play so as to satisfy, in a purely pro forma way, the theatrical conventions of romantic comedy.

Such revisionist readings make it increasingly difficult to continue seeing the play as an uncomplicated romp whose sexist premises can be overlooked, as if gentle Shakespeare did not really mean them. Yet however indebted we are to this new orientation for refreshing the play's critical- and stage-life, its persuasiveness may ultimately be weakened by inherent aspects of the approach itself: marginalizing certain historical and theatrical perspectives that may partially mitigate our impatience with the play's outmoded assumptions; reading into speeches ironies that are unlikely to have been available to Shakespeare's audience and that cannot be supported by direct textual evidence. The interpretations produced by such re-readings may be stimulating and provocative, but may also tend to belie the complexity and pluralism of the original cultural context, and to deny the possibility of characters' motivations being anything other than good or bad. Strictly polemical readings, moreover, often seem out of touch with the play's history of searching and enjoyable productions (Morris 88-104, Thompson 17-24).

What I wish to suggest in this paper is that the tendency to polarity among late twentieth-century views of The Taming of the Shrew can be reversed, not by blurring the play's distinct conflicts within a universalizing middle ground, but by rehistoricizing those conflicts. Situating the play within its contemporary context of social ideas and practices will help to show that Petruchio's treatment of Kate reflects genuinely contradictory Elizabethan attitudes about the nature of women, and that the contradictions are the result of sixteenth-century revaluations of traditional views. Petruchio's undeniable urge to master Kate has led recent accounts to demonize him and thus to bar anything but a negative assessment of his motives, even though Shakespeare suggests something more multidimensional by contrasting his attitudes with those of characters in the plots involving, respectively, Christopher Sly and Bianca. And while Petruchio's actions represent the most ruthless expression of the play's dominant social paradigm of male supremacy, they are mediated through certain social metaphors that posit a variant yet equivocal paradigm: intellectual and spiritual equality between husband and wife within a domestic hierarchy. The result is a disjunction between liberating ideas and cultural conservatism, and thus a kind of doublethink, which precisely mirrors Renaissance attitudes toward women. The Taming of the Shrew makes little attempt to reconcile these tendencies, however; in fact, Petruchio's histrionic shifts in behaviour and the contrast between his attitudes and those of male characters expressed in the other two plots draw attention to their incongruity. Only at the very end does Shakespeare seem to impose closure on the play's cultural debate by subordinating Petruchio's unconventional mix of values, which Katherine has been forced to internalize if not necessarily accept, to a romantic love-conquers-all formula.

This paper will briefly examine the historical context of conflicting Renaissance ideas about the nature of women and of marriage, and also the relation of these ideas to neo-Platonic theories about love. Shakespeare reflects these different points of view in his various plots, and particularly in regular and parodic representations of the neo-Platonic “banquet of senses” metaphor. When discussing marriage, both neo-Platonic writers and Tudor social theorists habitually contrasted intellectual and material realms of being when advocating the merits of rational compatability over sensual love. Shakespeare uses their distinctions to clarify the ultimate position of Kate: she may claim equality with men in the former areas but must accept inferiority in the latter. Such an unresolved paradox reveals Shakespeare to be less proto-feminist (as one recent critic has claimed) than simply aware of the co-existence of contradictory ideas within the Elizabethan status quo, which The Taming of the Shrew thereby implicitly accepts.³ If my stress appears to be more on what Petruchio believes he is trying positively to achieve, it is not because I discount the negative aspects of his taming, but because these have been well examined in recent criticism, to whose work I hope to add a further historical dimension.

II

Renaissance humanist writers who debated the nature and social position of women during the sixteenth century reassessed classical and mediaeval views according to two broad lines of inquiry: positive re-interpretation of Biblical passages bearing on human sexuality, and the substitution of Platonic theories of human capability for Aristotelian ones.⁴ The first of these had the effect of raising the status of matrimony and rejecting the notion that celibacy was a superior spiritual state.⁵ Reformers issued handbooks redefining the purposes and conditions of marriage and outlining the mutual obligations of husband and wife. In England, Vives's Office and Duetie of an Husband (1553?) was followed by works of Agrippa, Bullinger, Erasmus (see also Bean, “Passion”), and, closest to the time of The Taming of the Shrew, Henry Smith, whose Preparatiue to Mariage is typical of the genre and was apparently widely read, having gone through three editions in 1591 alone. Like his colleagues, Smith emphasizes that there is no spiritual degradation in conjugal sex, and that to view marriage as the natural Christian state has the practical function of allowing for mutual help and companionship in addition to the traditional moral ones of assuring propagation and averting fornication (1, 13-26). The basis for compatability between wife and husband, which now assumes cardinal importance, must be what Agrippa calls a “reasonable and chast [faithful] loue” (Cvi^v).⁶ Humanists had two reasons for emphasizing the role of rationally based affection: to counter mediaeval notions of courtly love, which countenanced romantic passion outside marriage,⁷ and to avoid concentration on money and property, which were the foremost considerations in arranging pre-Reformation upper- and upper middle-class marriages (Stone, Family 137; Crisis 594-95, 599). Smith recommends that, as Adam slept before Eve was created, so should a man subordinate earthly desires when wooing to avoid basing marriage on “Venison” [= lust] or “gentrie” [= riches] (10). He concludes, “The goods of the world are good, and the goods of the bodie are good, but the goods of the minde are better” (29-30). Agrippa likewise advises the prospective husband to “chose a wyfe, not a garment, let thy wyfe be maryed vnto the[e], not her dowrye” (Cvi^r-v).

Despite these more progressive views, when it came to extending their implications to social equality for women, humanist theologians largely failed to overturn traditional prejudices.⁸ Indeed, as Lawrence Stone has demonstrated, the Protestant shift of moral responsibility from parish priest to head of the household, as well as primogeniture's empowerment of the nuclear-family patriarch, actually led to a loss of domestic and legal freedom for women (Family 137-40, 154-55). Moreover, theories about either political or domestic structures shared mutually reinforcing principles. Bullinger, for example, speaks often of “mutuall loue matrimoniall” as an ennobling spiritual state and the foundation of marital fellowship, yet at the same time compares the husband's position to the prince's as head of a kingdom (Hi^v). Smith juggles similar views:

The man & wife are partners like two owers [sic] in a boate, therefore hee must diuide offices, and affaires, & goods with her, causing her to bee feared and reuerenced, and obeied of her children and seruants like himselfe; for she is as an vnder officer in his Common weale.

(66)

Within the household humanist theory extols spiritual equality and mutual respect, but whenever a political dimension is introduced its claims revert to traditional assumptions concerning female inferiority.

The second general influence on sixteenth-century ideas about women came from neo-Platonism, the diffuse body of theories based on Plato himself (often imperfectly) and on later interpretations. Plato argued that because human souls were separate from and had a life prior to bodily existence, physical differences between men and women were “nominal” and did not indicate any natural disparity in moral or intellectual capacities.⁹ Beyond these basic ideas, neo-Platonism as it concerned women concentrated mainly on developing theories about the nature of love. The locus classicus is Marsilio Ficino's In Convivium Platonis De Amore Commentarius (1475). Although there was no English translation available during the sixteenth century, numerous French ones were printed (the latest being 1588), as well as Ficino's Italian version (1544) of his Latin original. Ficino describes love as a cyclical force radiating from the divine creator into the world as Beauty (a pure idea) and Love (Beauty's earthly image), and then returning to its heavenly source as human pleasure. When the eternal idea of Beauty is suffused throughout the physical world it becomes veiled in material objects and can be contemplated only by the rational soul in human beings. Contemplating Beauty allows individuals to achieve union with God, and because, women are the world's most beautiful creations they provide the material image that comes closest to Beauty itself. Neo-Platonic theory therefore not only denied the inferior status of woman but also regarded her, not always this side idolatry, as the earthly pathway to intellectual and spiritual enlightenment (52-53). Such ideas influenced a whole body of polemical writers such as Cornelius Agrippa, whose treatise Of the Nobilitie and Excellencie of Womankynde (1542) begins with this assertion:

The diuersitie of [male and female] kyndes, standeth onely in the sondry situation of the bodily partes, in whiche the vse of generation requireth a necessary differe[n]ce. He [God] hath giuen but one similitude and lykenes of the sowle, to bothe male and female, betwene whose sowles there is noo maner dyfference of kynd. The woman hathe that same mynd that a man hath, that same reason and speche, she gothe to the same ende of blysfulnes, where shall be noo exception of kynde.

(Aii^r-v)

Agrippa's book constitutes part of the rhetorical controversy over the nature of women that sprang from neo-Platonic thought during the sixteenth century. Most works in this genre, regardless of which side they took, were academic exercises to be admired for their skill at ingenious (and in the case of arguments defending women, paradoxical) argument rather than serious proposition and defence, and consequently these too had a limited influence on real social practices (Woodbridge ch. 1-ch. 5; Bornstein v-xiii). A few, however, such as Agrippa's, and Castiglione's Il Cortegiano (Englished as The Book of the Courtier by Thomas Hoby, 1561), went beyond literary games to present forceful and more serious challenges to traditional assumptions. Agrippa's philosophical daring was known elsewhere from Of the Vanitie and Vncertaintie of Artes and Sciences (1569, in Latin 1534), in which he catalogues variant opinions on a large number of topics to show that moral values are contingent because all knowledge is subjective. Although many of his arguments are clearly facetious, others, such as his belief that social customs are not based on an immutable natural order, are in earnest.¹⁰On the Nobilitie of Womankynde can in turn be distinguished from The Courtier in that Agrippa shows himself to be aware of the persistent discrepancy between theoretical and cultural attitudes toward women, whereas Castiglione (in part because of his intended courtly readership) is not. The body of Agrippa's book in fact parodies the whole controversialist method, with interminable lists of “excellent” women mingled with fantastic bits of etymology and natural folklore, so that like Of the Vanitie of Artes and Sciences it mixes absurd contentions with serious ones, partly for fun and partly to distance Agrippa from academic attack.¹¹ Toward the end of the treatise, however, he removes his tongue from his cheek and returns to the serious tone of his opening pages:

For anon as a woman is borne euen from her infancy, she is kept at home in ydelnes, & as thoughe she were vnmete for any hygher busynesse, she is p[er]mitted to know no farther, than her nedle and her threede. And than whan she commeth to age, able to be maried, she is delyuered to the rule and gouernance of a ielous husband, or els she is perpetually shutte vp in a close nounrye. And all offyces belongynge to the common weale, be forbydden theym by the lawes. Nor it is not permitted to a woman, though she be very wise and prudent, to pleade a cause before a Juge. Furthermore, they be repelled in iurisdiction, in arbiterment, in adoption, in intercession, in procuration, or to be gardeyns or tutours, in causes testame[n]tary and criminall. Also they be repelled from preachynge of goddes worde, agaynst expresse and playn scripture. … But the vnworthy dealyng of the later lawe makers is so great, that breakyng goddes commaundemente, to stablysshe theyr owne traditions, they haue pronounced openlye, that women otherwyse in excellency of nature, dignitie, and honour most noble, be in condicion more vyle than all men: And thus by these lawes, the women being subdewed as it were by force of armes, are constrained to giue place to men, and to obeye theyr subdewers, not by no naturall, no diuyne necessitie or reason, but by custome, education, fortune, and a certayne tyrannicall occasion.

(Fviii^r-Gi^v)

This passage goes to the heart of the Renaissance position on women, where the impasse between enlightened theory and familiar custom prevents the former from being translated into political and legal progress. Even in the area of access to education, where humanist arguments had some limited success during the mid- to late 1500s, advancement was confined almost exclusively to upper-class women (Stone, Family 202-06), whereas in general advocacy of women's intellectual freedom never trespassed upon traditional imperatives obliging social institutions to uphold a divinely ordained hierarchical order. From this point of view, The Courtier is entirely typical of the age's unconsciously ambivalent views, since it combines “a conservative desire to maintain the fabric of society as it is with a radical reappraisal of woman's capacity for virtue” (Maclean 42).

Not surprisingly, neo-Platonic ideas about women and love were reflected chiefly in the area of dramatic and non-dramatic poetry (see Harrison), and on this subject Ficino was recalled for what he had to say about contemplating beauty, since this was crucial to the attainment of spiritual growth. Since a woman is the veiled image of divine Beauty, contemplation of her physical attractions is of limited value because this is but a temporary stage in the soul's quest for Beauty itself. As a male lover journeys up the Platonic ladder of being, contemplation via the baser senses (taste, touch, and smell) recedes, since it is only through hearing, sight, and mind that love proceeds to ratiocination, and ultimately to a visionary state of union with the One:

Since, therefore, it is the intellect, seeing and hearing by which alone we are able to enjoy beauty, and since love is the desire to enjoy beauty, love is always satisfied through the intellect, the eyes, or the ears. What need is there for smell? What need is there for taste, or touch? These senses perceive odors, flavors, heat, cold, softness and hardness, and similar things. None of these is human beauty since they are simple forms. …

(41)

Love that prefers physical beauty contemplated through the lower three senses is not genuine but rather an appetite dominated by the blood humour (41, 113, 168), which condition Ficino calls lust or madness. He also describes the soul's journey through different stages of sensual knowledge by using the metaphor of a banquet, where, after ascending through each “course” or level, the lover is finally rewarded with an eternal feast of divine revelation (80). The “banquet of senses” became a common Renaissance metaphor for differentiating earthly love from that aspiring to transcendance.¹²

In faith I do not love thee with mine eyes,
For they in thee a thousand errors note;
But 'tis my heart that loves what they despise,
Who in despite of view is pleased to dote.
Nor are mine ears with thy tongue's tune delighted;
Nor tender feeling to base touches prone,
Nor taste, nor smell, desire to be invited
To any sensual feast with thee alone.

(Shakespeare, Sonnet 141: 1-8)

But like many neo-Platonic ideas, the metaphor was modified as it was put to different uses. In Elizabethan love-poetry the original Platonic notion of an unbridgeable gap between physical beauty and Beauty contemplated by the rational soul was affected by the idea of the Incarnation, in which human and divine natures could co-exist. The young man of Shakespeare's sonnets, to cite these again, exemplifies the divine within the realm of earthly experience (Leishman 149-77):

If I could write the beauty of your eyes,
And in fresh numbers number all your graces,
The age to come would say, “This poet lies—
Such heav'nly touches ne'er touched earthly faces.”

(Sonnet 17: 5-8)

Similarly, the normal metaphysical direction of the banquet of senses could be inverted, so that a lover who contemplates beauty without forgoing the baser senses experiences a heightening rather than a relaxation of sexual appetite. It is this kind of “Ovidian” banquet (so-called for its associations with Ovid's Ars Amatoria [Kermode 90]) that Shakespeare's Venus contemplates in Adonis:

Had I no eyes but ears, my ears would love
That inward beauty and invisible;
Or were I deaf, thy outward parts would move
Each part in me that were but sensible:
Though neither eyes nor ears, to hear nor see,
Yet should I be in love by touching thee.
Say that the sense of feeling were bereft me,
And that I could not see, nor hear, nor touch
And nothing but the very smell were left me,
Yet would my love to thee be still as much;
For from the stillitory of thy face excelling
Comes breath perfum'd, that breedeth love by smelling.
But oh what banquet wert thou to the taste,
Being nurse and feeder of the other four!

(Poems, “Venus and Adonis” 433-46)

It has been suggested that Shakespeare's poem as well as Ficino's Commentary influenced Chapman, whose Ovid's Banquet of Sense (1595) presents the best-known use of the metaphor, albeit in reversed form and with a hidden disclaimer (Bartlett, Myers). Here Ovid himself appears as a “counter-Plato” contemplating Corinna in her garden. He feasts on her charms through each of his senses, going from sight to touch. But just as he approaches his longed-for goal, Corinna's waiting-women return and physical consummation is interrupted. During the course of the poem the narrator pauses to discuss the idea of love as intellectual beauty, and so distinguishes Ovid's descent into physical passion from the true lover's journey toward spiritual revelation. This digression embeds an alternative conception of rational love within the surrounding anti-Platonic narrative, just as Beauty itself is veiled in human incarnations, and as potentially progressive humanist and neo-Platonic revaluations of women were contained by the vested cultural interests of patriarchal order. In The Taming of the Shrew Shakespeare seems to be using the metaphor to suggest similar distinctions between Petruchio's attitudes toward love and women and those revealed in the other two plots, and it is this subject I now wish to consider.

III

When the Lord stumbles upon Christopher Sly in the Induction and decides to have some fun reviving him, he plans a scene of illusion centring on which is a banquet,¹³ and explains carefully how it is to be managed:

Carry him gently to my fairest chamber,
And hang it round with all my wanton pictures.
Balm his foul head in warm distilled waters,
And burn sweet wood to make the lodging sweet.
Procure me music ready when he wakes,
To make a dulcet and a heavenly sound.
And if he chance to speak, be ready straight
And with a low submissive reverence
Say ‘What is it your honour will command?’
Let one attend him with a silver basin
Full of rose-water and bestrew'd with flowers,
Another bear the ewer, the third a diaper,
And say ‘Will't please your lordship cool your hands?’
Some one be ready with a costly suit,
And ask him what apparel he will wear.

(Ind. i. 44-58)

The provision of specific charms for each of Sly's senses recalls the banquet of sense and reminds us that the Lord's illusion relies on more than theatrical deception alone—a “suppose” making use of accompanying scenery and properties; it is also a process of sense-suggestion in which stimulation by new experiences will instil imaginative and emotional clues into Sly's mind to create a new identity. The Lord here draws on common Elizabethan ideas about the relation of mental states to physiological conditions that held that stimulation of any sense could have a direct impact upon personality. The nature of the banquet's “courses” also reveals its anti-Platonic design in that sexual appetites are excited by tendentious sense associations. The birds in Sly's chamber producing “Apollo's music” are nightingales, creatures proverbial for lechery. They create the appropriate atmosphere for the anticipated pleasures of his couch, “Softer and sweeter than the lustful bed / On purpose trimm'd up for Semiramis” (Ind. ii. 39-40). These provisions complement Sly's grosser preference for beef and ale over conserves and sack, while the proposed recreations of hawking and hunting, although not part of the immediate action, enrich the developing fantasy with associations of vicarious aggression and flatter the subconscious social pretensions revealed in his opening exchange with the Hostess (Leggatt 43). The “wanton pictures” contribute to the overall effect as well, especially when choice scenes are brought to Sly's attention:

SEC. Serv.
We will fetch thee straight
Adonis painted by a running brook,
And Cytherea all in sedges hid,
Which seem to move and wanton with her breath
Even as the waving sedges play with wind.
LORD.
We'll show thee Io as she was a maid,
And how she was beguiled and surpris'd,
As lively painted as the deed was done.
THIRD Serv.
Or Daphne roaming through a thorny wood,
Scratching her legs that one shall swear she bleeds,
And at that sight shall sad Apollo weep,
So workmanly the blood and tears are drawn.

(Ind. ii. 50-61)

Each of these portrays episodes in Ovid's Metamorphoses involving an actual or attempted rape, and the last two add a dimension of violent compulsion to the scene's other uses of “blood” as sexual heat.

These allusions, as well as the Lord's deliberate stimulation of Sly's baser appetites, leave no doubt of the banquet's outcome, so that when the Page-disguised-as-Wife responds to Sly's summons saying, “Here, noble lord, what is thy will with her?” (Ind. ii. 104), the word “will” immediately assumes its secondary meaning of “lust,” as Sly tries to steer “her” toward bed. The Lord's artful illusion has enlarged Sly's “swinish” and “bestial” nature (see Ind. i. 32) by rehabilitating it in a form recognizable from the testimony of contemporary marriage handbooks and social practices: a husband's rule over his wife empowered by unrestrained will and “will.” The wife accordingly exists as the banquet's fulfilment of masculine desire, what might be called the pièce de résistance. But the Page, also drawing on officially approved forms of behaviour, plays the maid's part well and manages to divert Sly's advances with warnings about lapsing into his former delusion, so he reluctantly tarries, “in despite of the flesh and the blood” (Ind. ii. 128). With the arrival of the players to present their history the secondary effects of small ale take their course.

Part of the comic appeal of Sly's transformation is that in one aspect it is distanced: his heightened predatory desires are rendered frivolous by the indefinitely delayed consummation and the plainly theatrical nature of the Lord's trick. But when in the main play we see similar desires motivating Lucentio's falling in love with Bianca, their implications occur within a setting dominated by real cultural institutions—marriage and education—thereby rendering them more immediate and serious. Here Shakespeare mingles the artificial conventions of his dramatic source with actual Elizabethan customs, and the result is a sometimes perplexing combination. On the one hand a genuine feeling of “life as it was lived” arises from Shakespeare's portrayal of Elizabethan practices in arranging marriages, as G. R. Hibbard has demonstrated (18), and from his attention to tutelage. He sets the play in Padua, a Renaissance “nursery of arts,” refers to universities and subjects favoured by contemporary teachers, and gives free reign to progressive notions about education in Baptista's household, which are based on the assumption that women possess intellectual capacities equal to men.¹⁴ Yet these views are undercut when Baptista presumes his daughters do not know how to choose husbands for themselves and, acting upon his patriarchal prerogative, secures profitable and dynastically enhancing marriages for them. This conflict between theory and established practice exemplifies educated attitudes toward women in Shakespeare's time, and provides an analogy with which to explore the play's various representations of love. In the Bianca plot, Tranio declares Lucentio's options in this matter schematically:

                                        while we do admire
This virtue and this moral discipline,
Let's be no stoics nor no stocks, I pray,
Or so devote to Aristotle's checks
As Ovid be an outcast quite abjur'd:

(I.i.29-33)

The bookish infatuation that follows, accompanied by Petrarchan complaints of pining and burning, indicates Lucentio has chosen Ovidian studies. No less than Sly, yet at first shielded from being shamed by his disguise, his progress in love proceeds through encounters stimulated by the sight, sound, touch, and finally taste of Bianca as his desires grow commensurately bolder. Similarly, classical allusions to Dido, Anna, and Europa (I.i.154, 168) recall themes of duplicity and sexual violence introduced by the Lord's pictures in the Induction, although in one instance Lucentio's tastes are mocked when he mistakes Bianca for Minerva, the goddess of war (I.i.84).

By the standards of contemporary marriage handbooks, Lucentio's pursuit of love is clearly deplorable. He fails to establish relations based on mutual compatibility and instead builds upon plain desire, whose self-indulgent nature becomes manifest in both him and Bianca as their courtship advances (“See how beastly she doth court him.” [IV.ii.34]).¹⁵ By contrast, the match between Katherine and Petruchio begins with the issue of compatibility (out of which Shakespeare makes better dramatic capital than previous shrew-taming stories by giving Katherine's rebellion moral and social justification), and leads later to modest (because reluctant) displays of public affection. Furthermore, since the devotion of Lucentio and Bianca to “Venison” contradicts one of the handbooks' main injunctions, it is not surprising that the crass auction of Bianca defies another against greed. Here it is telling that the goods Tranio (as Lucentio) and Gremio publish to bid for possession of Bianca recall the material luxuries provided for Sly's banquet:

                                        my house within the city
Is richly furnished with plate and gold,
Basins and ewers to lave her dainty hands,
My hangings all of Tyrian tapestry.
In ivory coffers I have stuff'd my crowns,
In cypress chests my arras counterpoints,
Costly apparel, tents, and canopies,
Fine linen, Turkey cushions boss'd with pearl,
Valance of Venice gold in needlework,
Pewter and brass. …

(II.i.339-48)

The Bianca plot re-enacts the Induction's association between appetitive and materialistic desires, but in a realistic context that openly satirizes those popular notions of love that venerate “young modest girls” while treating them as choice comestibles.

Petruchio's ideas of love in marriage, on the other hand, reflect the more progressive ideas of the Tudor marriage books, such as that the disposition of worldly goods in marriage is a serious matter yet not the top priority, and that relationships should be based on mutual affection within a domestic hierarchy. Unfortunately, the more positive aspects of Petruchio's motives originating in these ideas become lost amid his initial bravado and subsequent obduracy. His lines about coming to wive it wealthily in Padua ring more memorably in an audience's ears than Grumio's deflation of them as histrionic bombast; a more balanced attitude comes out in his brisk handling of financial arrangements with Baptista. Shakespeare also provides Petruchio with literary allusions pointing to underlying attitudes that are markedly different from those of Lucentio and of Sly before him. Though a cluster at I.ii.68-70 (Florent's wife, Sibyl, Xanthippe) occurs in a typically over-the-top speech, it refers to tales of hard-won fellowship rather than rape and wilful desire; and while Lucentio sees himself as an Ajax (III.i.50-51, proverbial for brainless passion), Gremio likens Petruchio to Hercules (I.ii.255-56), whom Renaissance humanists identified with powers of rational persuasion and regularly adopted as an emblem of their educational aspirations.¹⁶ More stereotypical are Petruchio's comparisons of Katherine to Diana (promoter of marital union as well as chastity), patient “Grissel,” and “Roman Lucrece” (II.i.252-54, 288-89). These references to exceptional women, juxtaposed with Petruchio's verbal and physical aggression, appear to echo the romantic attitudes of Lucentio and Hortensio, which simultaneously idolize and degrade women; yet their purpose lies more in Petruchio's opening strategy of surprising Katherine through audacious contradiction and, just as important, of prompting a display of her mental and verbal agility.

That all the play's literary allusions contribute seriously to distinguishing characters' unconscious attitudes is suggested by their selective distribution: Shakespeare uses them only until III.i, as if after that they have supplied a sufficient number of clues to personality; and in this they parallel the physical presence of the Induction characters watching the main performance. For if we accept the Folio text without interpolations from The Taming of A Shrew, whose Christopher Sly scenes may or may not reflect a different version of Shakespeare's, the Induction actors leave the stage at some point after I.i. The theatre audience takes over their roles as spectators, while characters performing in the main play enact the performance that the Induction actors originally introduced. Since the series of classical allusions begun by the Induction disappears at about the same time as its actors, it seems the implications of both are intended to be integrated into our understanding of the main play.

The dichotomy in Petruchio's treatment of Katherine emerges distinctly after their first wooing scene. His offensive behaviour in church during their wedding is described by Gremio, whose report trivializes its blasphemous details. Petruchio then arrives for the celebrations grotesquely decked-out and sporting a high-minded disdain for feasting. His studied non-conformity as well as Tranio's (really Hortensio's?) earlier remarks about his normally modest dress indicate that he has shifted the focus of his aggression and now intends to épater les bourgeois:

Go to the feast, revel and domineer,
Carouse full measure to her maidenhead,
Be mad and merry, or go hang yourselves.

(III.ii.222-24)

This whole speech (220-37) is a characteristic blaze of theatrical poses, each representing a different exaggerated role in Petruchio's moral repertoire. The attack on feasting frees him from participating in tiresome social rituals that connive at conspicuous consumption, and sets him apart from Bianca and Lucentio, who prepare for a lifetime of demi-monde dinner parties by taking his and Katherine's place. Petruchio's stagey outrage runs roughshod over Kate's bridal rights, yet in the wider context of the play it is difficult to dismiss as merely contrived, because his later actions (which I shall deal with in a moment) reiterate the same theme, as do apparently unguarded remarks such as “Nothing but sit and sit, and eat and eat!” (V.ii.12). Petruchio then switches to a patriarch's vein in the infamous passage describing Kate as his goods and chattels. Again this is and is not Petruchio. It is an attitude borne out by the way he goes about crushing Kate's independence in act IV, but it is at odds with the respect for her witty resilience he has revealed in their earlier flyting. Finally Petruchio parodies Lucentio's romanticism by imitating the chivalrous lover who rescues his helpless mistress from unworthy rivals, just as Tranio/Lucentio imagines he delivers Bianca from the clutches of Hortensio and Gremio.

To decide what Petruchio is by choosing among these roles is to miss the point: he is nothing if not all three, a pastiche of stereotypical attitudes toward women presented at various times and places by Elizabethans themselves. A further role (the trainer who channels a falcon's maverick energy) appears during Petruchio's next show, IV.i, especially in the “politic” speech at the end of the scene. As a set-piece of cool self-justification set amid the surrounding bustle, it is reminiscent of Richard of Gloucester's soliloquies, which reveal dramatic character yet make an audience hesitate to take them entirely at face value because of their overtly histrionic expression. Like Richard, Petruchio establishes a self-regarding engagement with the audience by adopting a stance of superiority and impatient defiance: “He that knows better how to tame a shrew, / Now let him speak: 'tis charity to show” (IV.i.197-98). Even when Petruchio applies the falcon-taming policy, its methods suggest incongruous motives. His strenuous insistence on fasting, sexual continence, and innocent “company” (IV.i.160, 164, 170) extends his earlier ascetic role, while Grumio's business concerning the unseasonably frigid weather softens its rough edges through comic refraction. Petruchio's effort to change Kate's personality by controlling her physical needs also recalls the Induction's banquet of illusion, except that here he reverses the process to correspond with a neo-Platonic objective. If his actions consisted only of starving Kate, they would simply reflect the strategy announced in his “politic” speech. But since they include a shared sexual dimension as well as abstinence from other sensual pleasures, they suggest he wants to guide her away from “will”-ful desires and toward joining him in a companionate pursuit of higher values, culminating in what Irene Dash calls a state of “spiritual intimacy” (37). As with Sly's delusion, the initial effect of Petruchio's régime is disorientation: “she, poor soul, / Knows not which way to stand, to look, to speak, / And sits as one new risen from a dream” (IV.i.171-73). But as it proceeds, the basis of contention evolves: from food, sex, and sleep (IV.i), to clothes (IV.iii), to visual perception, the pivotal sense (in neo-Platonic terms) between physical and intellectual being (IV.v). Petruchio's refusal of the haberdasher's and the tailor's goods thus becomes more than just another battleground in the contest of wills; it questions uncritical acceptance of those respectable but ultimately self-serving social norms parodied by his outlandish behaviour at the wedding:

Well, come, my Kate, we will unto your father's
Even in these honest mean habiliments.
Our purses shall be proud, our garments poor,
For 'tis the mind that makes the body rich,
And as the sun breaks through the darkest clouds,
So honour peereth in the meanest habit.

(IV.iii.169-71)

He encourages Katherine to distinguish between gratifying sensual desires, or what Ficino calls the love of “simple forms,” and enjoying an intellectual rapport that is independent of material claims and that forms the basis of “reciprocal love” (98).

Nonetheless, Petruchio's pursuit of what might be called the taming-school's metaphysical objective—spiritual equality based on rational love—also involves accommodating Kate to a paradoxical (yet, by Elizabethan practices, typical) binary element: social differentiation. His motives elevate mutual understanding to the status of an absolute good entirely separate from everyday existence, which otherwise adheres to the traditional claims of hierarchy oblivious to any real contradiction. This dual value system becomes manifest in IV.v, when Katherine's ability to solve the riddle of the sun and moon depends on her ignoring the material evidence of her senses and imitating Petruchio's anti-empirical mode of thinking. During the second round of their game, however, a crucial change occurs; for while Kate is freely practising confusions on Vincentio, Petruchio suddenly drops his anti-conventional pose and plainly describes what he sees:

Why, how now, Kate, I hope thou art not mad.
This is a man, old, wrinkled, faded, wither'd,
And not a maiden, as thou say'st he is.

(IV.v.41-43)

When Katherine follows suit, by now out of exhaustion but perhaps also out of love (Kahn 97), she implicitly enters into Petruchio's intuitive relationship between respecting minds, distinct from, yet still existing within, the predefined social order. Since this order's “natural” or universal status is the usual justification for maintaining its hierarchical basis (from which source the premisses of Shakespearian comedy also take their cue), Katherine and Petruchio's intellectual compact remains a private luxury. Ultimately it is subsumed within the play's larger dynamic of social discord harmonized through marriage, whose ritual expression of female subordination confirms the apparently immutable superiority of male authority.

The final scene follows the nuptial feast of Lucentio and Bianca and is the last of the play's banquets.¹⁷ After Vincentio's strained outcries for his “murdered” son the pace is relaxed, and the obviously theatrical nature of the husbands' wager, like the Induction, has the effect of distancing discordant elements. While not trivial, the implications of Bianca and the Widow's assertions of independence are projected into the future and for the moment appear wryly amusing when set against the strong dramatic pull toward omnia amor vincit. We also recognize familiar Shakespearian attempts to portray the final transformation as something extraordinary and quasi-magical. Katherine's reappearance is greeted by the unusual Shakespearian oath, “Now, by my holidame” (V.ii.100), a four-fold repetition of “wonder” (107-08, 190), and Baptista's pledge of “another dowry to another daughter” (115), which faintly anticipates the resurrection motifs of Shakespeare's later comedies and romances. In such an atmosphere Katherine's final speech inevitably becomes portentous. After the Widow's insults, it is reasonable to expect her to defend herself (as she did earlier: “And I am mean, indeed, respecting you” [32]). Petruchio provides the occasion for this defence by setting up the Widow as a playful target just as he had earlier set up Vincentio (IV.v.27-34), so that Katherine's lecture on wifely duties becomes a rhetorical bid for intellectual superiority over her detractors, and thus a conscious performance. But like the numerous roles Petruchio has played, and unlike all the other roles adopted by the play's would-be lovers, the speech is not self-evidently a false identity; for, after the events on the road to Padua, it also re-enacts Katherine and Petruchio's now concordant ideas about the nature of love in marriage. Katherine apparently reconciles herself to an unequal social position because the cultural assumptions underpinning it derive from a plane of existence inferior to that from which she derives her intellectual being. In effect, she must live in both worlds. The intellectual realm remains a substantial source of integrity and pleasure she shares with Petruchio, while the creed of obedience she flourishes here points to the strictly “nominal” importance she attaches to her domestic role.

IV

I have tried in this paper to put the play's marital relationships into historical perspective by showing that, despite his enforcement of male supremacy, Petruchio's underlying motives suggest some degree of respect for Katherine's spiritual and intellectual being. That this is expressed through his crude domination of her physical needs can be seen as Shakespeare's stage metaphor for contradictory attitudes of writers on women in Elizabethan society, which on the one hand acknowledge a woman's spiritual and intellectual freedom and equality, and on the other do not question, with very few exceptions, her inferiority in the social order. Because Kate is forced to accept this contradiction, it is not solely her last speech that questions what is universal law: the questioning also occurs in the play's wider exchange of attitudes. Shakespeare conveys the two main lines of Renaissance thought on women by presenting variations on the banquet of sense metaphor in both its neo-Platonic and its “Ovidian” forms. Like Chapman's poem, the former, with its more positive view of women, exists as a minority position embedded in and tamed by the dominant dramatic—and corresponding social—structure. Although neo-Platonic ideas about human capacities had the potential to challenge traditional cultural practices, they here remain an ideal presence with no impact on the social side of Petruchio's relationship with Katherine. Shakespeare is not prepared to let the potentially emancipating theories of neo-Platonic love challenge romantic comedy's traditional assumptions about marriage any more than humanist writers on the subject of women felt obliged to recognize or promote the wider political implications of their reforming principles. The Taming of the Shrew acknowledges the existence of these contradictory attitudes but does not resolve them in any forward-looking way.

Notes

1. See Daniell, Heilman, Morris 104-49, Saccio and Seronsky.

2. See Dash, Dusinberre, Jardine, Kahn, Novy, “Patriarchy,” and Woodbridge. For views that seek a middle way see Andresen-Thom and Bean, “Comic Structure.”

3. The optimistic view is Dusinberre's. For a response see Barton.

4. In brief, traditional authorities asserted that human sexuality was motivated by passions that were part of fallen nature and that the “daughters of Eve” were naturally more disposed towards sin than men. The main scriptural evidence is Genesis 3:1-16 and Pauline texts such as Ephesians 5:22-33 and 1 Corinthians 11:3-12. Theological arguments were buttressed by Aristotle's accounts of natural history asserting that women were spiritually inferior to men because a) they lacked real souls, and b) physical differences between men and women corresponded to mental ones, and in both areas the female was the disadvantaged sex. See a) Aristotle, De Generatione Animalium II.3 (737a), Ethica Nicomachea III.10-12 (1117b-19b), Problemata XXVIII (949a-50a); b) Aristotle, Historia Animalium IX.1 (608a-b), Ethica Nicomachea VII.7 (1150a-b). Also Maclean.

5. That marriage was the natural Christian state for men and women, in which they were equally capable of spiritual growth, was indicated by Jesus's participation in the wedding at Cana and the fact that he first performed miracles there (John 2:1-11). Also Stone, Family 135-36.

6. Also see Vives Cviii^r-Di^r, Erasmus, A Modest Meane Bviii^r, Bullinger Div^r.

7. This is the main theme of Erasmus's Modest Meane, a dialogue between a romantic lover, Pamphilus, and his sensible friend, Maria. When she rejects his apparently frivolous advances by saying he has not considered marriage seriously, he surprises her by talking at length about rational companionship and matrimonial obligations. Maria is won over and agrees to seek her parents' permission to wed, but (still sensibly) holds back the “three words” Pamphilus longs to hear and offers him a “Pomander to cheere [his] harte wyth” in lieu of a kiss.

8. Besides the cited examples see Vives Eiii^v and P1^v and Agrippa Cvi^v-vii^v. For further discussion see Jardine 37-67, Maclean, 47-67, Stone, Family 137-38, Kelso, Novy, “Demythologizing,” and Woodbridge 129-36. Among lower-class women, where property considerations were not a factor, it has been presumed there was more autonomy (Stone, Family 192). Servant women migrating to London from the provinces, in particular, seemed to have enjoyed a more active role initiating relationships, finding partners, and conducting courtships, because they were not under direct or surrogate patriarchal control. Yet in both these cases freedom must have been relative, given the inherent hierarchy within service and marriage as institutions. See Elliot.

9. The Republic V, 452e-57c, Laws VII, 804d-06c. Also Allen 131-38.

10. For example, “[Moral philosophy consists of] diuers vse, custome, obseruation, & practise of common life, and … is mutable according to the opinion of times, places, and menne, whiche with threatninges, and flatteries they teache to children, and to the elder sorte with lawes, and punishment …” (Tiii^v). Also Ssiv^r.

11. This came anyway. See Nauert 108-09, 194-97.

12. See Kermode, Watkins, and Anderson. The last of these traces the use of the banquet as a poetic metaphor for love-making.

13. Ind. i. 35-39. (Shrew quotations are from Morris.) The Folio stage direction states, “Enter … some with apparel, Bason and Ewer, & other appurtenances,” where modern editors now begin Induction ii. The equivalent direction in The Taming of A Shrew reads: “Enter two with a table and a banquet on it, and two other, with Slie asleepe in a chaire, richlie apparelled, & the musick plaieng.”

14. These details do not derive from Shakespeare's source. George Gascoigne's Supposes (1566) is set in Ferrara, to which Erostrato, the equivalent of Lucentio, comes simply “to studie.” Bullough I, 114.

15. Most modern productions of the play (e.g., Stratford, Ontario, 1982) show Bianca and Lucentio engaged in fairly explicit activity here, in contrast to the reluctant kiss Katherine offers Petruchio at the end of V.i.

16. Agrippa compares his task to that of Hercules, on the opening page of The Vanitie and Vncertaintie of Artes and Sciences, A1^r. Also see Wind.

17. “Enter … bringing in a banquet” (Folio s.d.).

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