SOURCE: “The Taming of the Shrew: Inside or Outside the Joke?” in “Bad” Shakespeare: Revaluations of the Shakespeare Canon, edited by Maurice Charney, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1988, pp. 105-19.

[In the essay that follows, Garner maintains that whether people view The Taming of the Shrew as a “good” or “bad” play depends on where they see themselves in terms of the play's central joke, which Garner describes as one directed against women and written to entertain a misogynist audience.]

If you had grown up hearing that Shakespeare is the greatest writer in the English language (or at least one of the two or three greatest) and that he is a “universal” poet, who speaks across time and national (even cultural) boundaries, you—especially if you were a woman student—would be shocked to study him in a college or university in the 1980s and to read The Taming of the Shrew for the first time. My own students—particularly my women students, though sometimes the men in my classes as well—often exclaim in dismay, “I can't believe Shakespeare wrote this!” A graduate student, rereading the play with only a faded memory of having read it before, commented that it was commonly her experience now to read something that she had once enjoyed only to find it disappointing. That was what happened when she read Taming of the Shrew, and it gave her a sense of loss. Reading the play from a woman's perspective, she could not help but be a “resisting reader.”¹ Even if teachers of literature offer an ingenious reading of the play, their students will probably not be seduced into a very happy view of it. They will know in their hearts that—at the least—there is something wrong with the way Kate is treated. And they will be right.²

I am not sure that anyone except academics who have invested much—perhaps all—of their professional lives in studying Shakespeare would need to debate whether Taming of the Shrew is good or bad. The best that can be said for the play is just what Peter Berek concludes in his essay in this volume: that it shows Shakespeare had suppler attitudes toward gender than his contemporaries and that it “may have been a valuable, even necessary, stage in moving toward his astonishing expansion of the possibilities of gender roles.” This argument makes the play interesting, but it does not make it good.

The Elizabethans probably considered the play “good.” Attesting to the popularity of its main idea, numerous shrew-taming stories exist as well as another version of the play, evidently, acted close to the time of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew.³ The values that underlie the story are obviously those of a patriarchal society, in which the desirability of male dominance is unquestioned. When patriarchal attitudes are called into question, as they have been in our time, it becomes a more delicate matter to put an “uppity” woman in her “proper” place—on the stage or off—and she becomes a less easy mark for humor. Taming of the Shrew read straight, then, must seem less “good.”

Interpretations of the play that stress its farcical elements or view the ending as ironic are often efforts, I think, to keep the play among the “good,” to separate Shakespeare from its misogynist attitudes, to keep him as nearly unblemished as possible.⁴ These efforts to preserve Taming suggest that in our time it has become one of the problematic plays in Shakespeare's canon. They demonstrate how relative to time and place are the ideas of “good” and “bad.” What I wish to argue here is that no matter how you read the ending, no matter how you define the genre of the play, it is still a “bad” play. From the response of members in the seminar on “Bad Shakespeare,” at which the ideas here were first presented, it is clear that some people still like the play, still count it among the “good,” or “more good than bad.” This fact suggests that “good” and “bad” are also relative to the pleasures of the particular members of an audience. I would also argue that whether you see the play as “good” or “bad” depends on where you see yourself in terms of the central joke. If you can somehow be “in” on it, the play will undoubtedly seem better than if you cannot be.

The central joke in The Taming of the Shrew is directed against a woman. The play seems written to please a misogynist audience, especially men who are gratified by sexually sadistic pleasures. Since I am outside the community for whom the joke is made and do not share its implicit values, I do not participate in its humor.⁵ Because the play does not have for me what I assume to be its intended effect, that is, I do not find it funny, I do not find it as good as Shakespeare's other comedies.

The Induction makes immediately clear the assumptions about women and sexuality that are at the core of Taming. When a Lord, a character named only according to his rank, imagines and creates for Christopher Sly a world like his own (though more romantic), the “woman” he peoples it with suggests a sixteenth-century ideal: gentle, dutiful, utterly devoted to her husband. He directs his servingman to tell Bartholomew, his page, how to play the part of Sly's wife:

Such duty to the drunkard let him do
With soft low tongue and lowly courtesy,
And say, “What is't your honor will command
Wherein your lady and your humble wife
May show her duty and make known her love?”
And then, with kind embracements, tempting kisses,
And with declining head into his bosom,
Bid him shed tears, as being overjoyed
To see her noble lord restored to health
Who for this seven years hath esteemed him
No better than a poor and loathsome beggar.(6)

(2.114-23)

Surface manner, “With soft low tongue and lowly courtesy,” defines inner character, marks the “lady” as “feminine.” The importance of soft-spokenness as an essential attribute of femininity is suggested by King Lear's lament over his dead Cordelia: “Her voice was ever soft, / Gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman” (5.3.274-75). In a culture that tended to see things in opposition, to split mind and body, virgin and whore, the quiet woman represented the positive side of the opposition. The woman who spoke up or out, the angry woman, represented the negative side. At a moment when Hamlet feels the greatest contempt for himself, he mourns that he “must, like a whore, unpack … [his] heart with words / And fall a-cursing like a very drab” (2.2.592-93). When Bartholomew appears dressed as a lady and Christopher Sly wonders why the page addresses him as “lord” rather than “husband,” Bartholomew answers:

My husband and my lord, my lord and husband,
I am your wife in all obedience.

(Ind. 2.106-7)

The male fantasy that underlies this exchange is that a wife will be subject, even subservient, to her husband in all matters.

More subtly suggested as attractive in the Induction is a notion of sexuality associated with the violent, the predatory, the sadistic. The Lord immediately directs that the drunken Christopher Sly be carried to bed in his “fairest chamber,” which is to be hung round with all his “wanton pictures” (Ind. 1.46-47). After Sly is promised all the requisites for hunting, including hawks that “will soar / Above the morning lark” and greyhounds “as swift / As breathèd stags, … fleeter than the roe” (Ind. 2.43-48), he is offered the most desirable paintings. The movement from hunting to the predatory sexuality imaged in the pictures makes obvious the association between hunting and the sexual chase. Sly is promised by the Second Servingman:

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.

And the other men join in the game, revealing their own erotic fantasies:

LORD.
We'll show thee Io as she was a maid
And how she was beguiled and surprised,
As lively painted as the deed was done.
THIRD Servingman.
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. 2.50-60)

Suggestions of violence, particularly of rape, underlie all of these images. The figures the paintings depict are among the familiar ones in Ovid's Metamorphoses: Adonis, the beautiful, androgynous youth gored to death on a wild boar's tusks; Io, a maid Zeus transformed into a heifer in order to take her; and Daphne, who was changed into a laurel tree to prevent Apollo's raping her. The images of violence intensify, as though each character's imagination sets off a darker dream in another. Interestingly enough, the story of Adonis is drawn the least bloody though it is inherently more so. It is Daphne, the innocent virgin, who bleeds. It would seem that the most predatory and sadistic impulse calls forth the most compelling eroticism for those who participate in the shared creation of these fantasies.

It is appropriate that The Taming of the Shrew is acted for the male characters of the Induction, for its view of women and sexuality is attuned to their pleasure. Underlying the notion of heterosexual relationships in Taming, especially marriage, is that one partner must dominate. There can be no mutuality. The male fantasy that the play defends against is the fear that a man will not be able to control his woman. Unlike many of Shakespeare's comedies, Taming does not project the fear of cuckoldry (though perhaps it is implicit), but rather a more pervasive anxiety and need to dominate and subject. In taming Kate, Petruchio seems to give comfort to all the other men in the play. Before Hortensio marries the Widow, he goes to visit Petruchio, to see his “taming school,” which Tranio describes to Bianca:

                                                                                                              Petruchio is the master,
That teacheth tricks eleven and twenty long
To tame a shrew and charm her chattering tongue.

(4.2.56-58)

However pleasant the idea of a “taming school” may be for men, the attitude it implies toward women is appalling.

From the outset, Kate is set up so that her “taming” will be acceptable, will not seem merely cruel. This strategy serves as a means to release the play's misogyny just as madness allows Hamlet, Othello, and Lear to castigate the women who love them—their mothers, daughters, lovers, wives—and rail against them and women in general in shocking ways. In the play's only soliloquy, Petruchio delineates his plan to subject Kate:

Thus have I politicly begun my reign,
And 'tis my hope to end successfully.
My falcon now is sharp and passing empty,
And till she stoop she must not be full gorged,
For then she never looks upon her lure.
Another way I have to man my haggard,
To make her come and know her keeper's call,
That is, to watch her as we watch these kites
That bate and beat and will not be obedient.
She eat no meat today, nor none shall eat.
Last night she slept not, nor tonight she shall not.
As with the meat, some undeserved fault
I'll find about the making of the bed,
And here I'll fling the pillow, there the bolster,
This way the coverlet, another way the sheets.
Ay, and amid this hurly I intend
That all is done in reverent care of her,
And in conclusion she shall watch all night.
And if she chance to nod I'll rail and brawl
And with the clamor keep her still awake.
This is a way to kill a wife with kindness,
And thus I'll curb her mad and headstrong humor.
He that knows better how to tame a shrew,
Now let him speak—'tis charity to show.

(4.1.182-205)

Petruchio's stringent mode is just that used to tame hawks; it might well come from a manual on falconry. The notion behind this central metaphor of the play is that a shrewish woman is less than human, even less than a woman, so may be treated like an animal. Only the audience's acceptance of this premise allows them to feel the play as comic.

Critics' efforts to dismiss the play's harsh attitude toward women, to disclaim its cruelty, have led them to emphasize that Taming is a farce and not to be taken with the kind of seriousness that I am taking it.⁷ In other words, to pay attention to its cruelty, to give credence to its misogyny, is to misread its genre. Though Taming does not feel to me like farce, I do not wish to argue about its genre. Accepting it for the moment as farce, I would ask rather: Could the taming of a “shrew” be considered the proper subject of farce in any but a misogynist culture? How would we feel about a play entitled The Taming of the Jew or The Taming of the Black? I think we would be embarrassed by anti-Semitism or racism in a way that many of us are not by misogyny. I do not think critics could imagine writing about those fictitious plays a sentence comparable to this written of The Taming of the Shrew: “Once she [Kate] was naturally and unquestionably taken to be a shrew, that is, a type of woman widely known in life and constantly represented in song and story [italics mine].”⁸

To be sure, Kate is an angry woman. She threatens violence to Hortensio; ties Bianca up and strikes her; breaks a lute over Hortensio's head when he, in disguise, is trying to teach her to play it; beats Grumio; and strikes Petruchio. Yet what is said about her makes her worse than angry. When Hortensio refers to her as “Katherine the curst,” Grumio echoes him and makes clear how intolerable a “shrewish” woman is to the men in the play:

Katherine the curst!
A title for a maid of all titles the worst.

(1.2.128-29)

Gremio refers to her at various moments as a whore (1.1.55), a “fiend of hell” (1.1.88), and a “wildcat” (1.2.196). The other men repeat his sentiments. “Shrewd,” “curst,” “froward,” Kate is mainly noticeable for her “scolding tongue.” Many of the impressions of Kate are rendered through Gremio and Hortensio, who are the most threatened by her. Gremio insists that no man would marry her, only a devil would, and asks incredulously, “Think'st thou, Hortensio, though her father be very rich, any man is so very a fool to be married to hell?” When Hortensio affirms that there are “good fellows in the world” who will marry her for enough money, Gremio replies, “I cannot tell, but I had as lief take her dowry with this condition, to be whipped at the high cross every morning” (1.1.123-34). Hortensio confesses to Petruchio that though Kate is young, beautiful, and well brought up,

Her only fault—and that is fault enough—
Is that she is intolerable curst!
And shrewd and froward, so beyond all measure
That were my state far worser than it is,
I would not wed her for a mine of gold.

(1.2.87-91)

Even Baptista accuses Kate of having a “devilish spirit” (2.1.26).

We come to understand, perhaps, that Kate does not deserve this kind of denunciation, that the male characters rail so against her because she refuses to follow patriarchal prescriptions for women's submission to men. When Bianca, so praised and desired for her “beauteous modesty” (1.2.233-34), rejects Hortensio, he immediately denounces her as a “proud disdainful haggard” (4.2.39). This sudden reversal suggests that the men see women only in relation to male desires and needs and describe them accordingly. Yet we only glimpse the way their bias works. Shakespeare does not reveal it so obviously as he does in, say, Antony and Cleopatra, where the men who degrade and insult Cleopatra are clearly threatened by her and jealous because she is able to seduce Antony away from them.

Shakespeare also adumbrates circumstances that account for Kate's anger. The preference of everyone around her, including her father, for a quiet woman (in other words, a woman without any spirit) is enough to provoke her. She undoubtedly understands the high value placed on women's silence, which Lucentio reads, in Bianca for example, as a sign of “maid's mild behavior and sobriety” (1.1.70-71). She, of course, understands Bianca's competitiveness with her, which is acted out with passive aggression: “Her silence flouts me and I'll be revenged” (1.1.29). She also chafes at her certain sense that she is men's possession, a pawn in the patriarchal marriage game. She reproaches Baptista about Bianca:

                                                                                                                                  Now I see
She is your treasure, she must have a husband;
I must dance barefoot on her wedding day,
And, for your love to her, lead apes in hell.
Talk not to me; I will go sit and weep
Till I can find occasion of revenge.

(2.1.31-36)

Though Baptista tells Petruchio that he must obtain Kate's love before he will give his permission for the two to marry (2.1.128-29), when it comes down to it, Kate is simply married off, bargained over like a piece of goods:

BAPTISTA.
Faith, gentleman, now I play a merchant's part
And venture madly on a desperate mart.
TRANIO.
'Twas a commodity lay fretting by you;
'Twill bring you gain or perish on the seas.
BAPTISTA.
The gain I seek is quiet in the match.

(2.1.319-23)

She is not a woman to accommodate easily an economy that makes her a possession of men, in which a husband can say of a wife:

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

(3.2.229-32)

Shakespeare also allows Kate to claim her anger and gives her a moving explanation of her outspokenness:

My tongue will tell the anger of my heart,
Or else my heart, concealing it, will break,
And rather than it shall I will be free
Even to the uttermost, as I please, in words.

(4.3.77-80)

Yet what is said or shown to extenuate Kate does not weigh heavily enough to balance the condemnation of her, which is an effort to prepare us to accept Petruchio's humiliation of her as a necessity, or “for her own good.”

Kate and Petruchio are both strong-willed and high spirited, and one of Petruchio's admirable qualities is that he has the good sense to see Kate's passion and energy as attractive. When he hears of her tempestuous encounter with Hortensio, he exclaims:

Now, by the world, it [sic] is a lusty wench!
I love her ten times more than e'er I did.
O how I long to have some chat with her!

(2.1.160-62)

Presumably Petruchio puts on an act to tame Kate; he pretends to be more shrew than she (4.1.81). As one of his servants says, “He kills her in her own humor” (4.1.174). But Kate's “shrewishness” only allows Petruchio to bring to the surface and exaggerate something that is in him to begin with.⁹ When we first see him, he is bullying his servant—wringing him by the ears, the stage direction tells us—so that Grumio cries, “Help, masters, help! My master is mad” (1.2.18). It surprises only a little that he later hits the priest who marries him, throws sops in the sexton's face, beats his servants, and throws the food and dishes—behaves so that Gremio can exclaim, “Why, he's a devil, a devil, a very fiend” (3.2.154). When he appears for his wedding “a very monster in apparel,” we learn that his dress is not wholly out of character; Tranio tells Biondello:

'Tis some odd humor pricks him to this fashion,
Yet oftentimes he goes but mean-appareled.

(3.2.72-73)

The strategy of the plot allows Petruchio “shrewish” behavior; but even when it is shown as latent in his character and not a result of his effort to “tame” Kate, it is more or less acceptable. Dramatically, then, Kate and Petruchio are not treated equally.

In general, whatever is problematic in Petruchio is played down; whereas Kate's “faults” are played up. For example, we tend to forget how crassly Petruchio puts money before love at the beginning of the play since he becomes attracted to Kate for other reasons. He speaks frankly:

I come to wive it wealthily in Padua;
If wealthily, then happily in Padua.

(1.2.4-75)

And Grumio assures Hortensio in the most negative terms that money will be Petruchio's basic requirement in a wife:

Nay, look you sir, he tells you flatly what his mind is. Why, give him gold enough and marry him to a puppet or an aglet-baby or an old trot with ne'er a tooth in her head, though she have as many diseases as two-and-fifty horses. Why, nothing comes amiss so money comes withal.

(1.2.76-81)

No one in the play speaks against this kind of materialism; indeed, it seems to be the order of the day.

Kate's humbling begins from the moment Petruchio meets her. Petruchio immediately denies a part of her self, her identity as an angry woman. Just as the Lord of the Induction will make Christopher Sly “no less than what we say he is” (Ind. 1.71), so Petruchio will begin to turn Kate into his notion of her. Yet because her will and spirit meet his, the absurdity of his finding Kate “passing gentle” (2.1.235-45) and his elaboration of that idea is more humorous than not. It is when Petruchio begins to give Kate ultimatums, which I know he can and will enforce, that the play begins to give me a sinking feeling:

                                                            Setting all this chat aside,
Thus in plain terms: your father hath consented
That you shall be my wife, your dowry 'greed on,
And will you, nill you, I will marry you.
.....For I am he am born to tame you, Kate,
And bring you from a wild Kate to a Kate
Conformable as other household Kates.

(2.1.261-71)

The reason I begin to lose heart at this point is that I am certain Kate will not be able to hold her own against Petruchio. The lack of suspense is crucial to my response. I know that an angry woman cannot survive here. When I read or see Macbeth or The Merchant of Venice, though I know the witches' prophecies will come true to defeat Macbeth and that Portia will trick Shylock out of his pound of flesh, I always feel the power of the contest. But not in Taming.

After Kate and Petruchio are married and go to Petruchio's house in act 4, the play loses its humor for me. The change in tone follows partly from the fact that Petruchio's control over Kate becomes mainly physical. In Padua, the pair fights mainly through language, a weapon that Kate can wield as well as Petruchio. When Kate strikes Petruchio in the city, he swears he will hit her back if she does it again (2.1.218). Though he deserves slapping in the country, she cannot risk that there. While Petruchio never strikes her, he tries to intimidate her by hitting the servants and throwing food and dishes at them. The implication is that if she does not behave, he will do the same to her. Petruchio's physical taming of Kate is objectionable in itself; it is particularly humiliating because it is “appropriate” for animals, not people. Petruchio's description of his plan to tame Kate has no humor in it; related in soliloquy, it has the sound of simple explanation.

Kate's isolation in the country among Petruchio and men who are bound to do his bidding creates an ominous atmosphere. Her aloneness is heightened by the fact that even Grumio is allowed to tease her, and her plight becomes the gossip of Petruchio's servants. Her humiliation has a sexually sadistic tinge since there is always the possibility that Petruchio will rape her, as he threatens earlier:

For I will board her though she chide as loud
As thunder when the clouds in autumn crack.

(1.2.93-95)

Petruchio's notion of sexual relations here is worthy of Iago, who says of Othello's elopement, “Faith, he tonight hath boarded a land carack” (Othello 1.2.49). Grumio immediately tells Hortensio, “A my word and she knew him as well as I do, she would think scolding would do little good upon him. … I'll tell you what, sir, and she stand him but a little, he will throw a figure in her face and so disfigure her with it that she will have no more eyes to see withal than a cat” (1.2.107-14). He suggests that Petruchio can out-scold and outwit Kate, but he also implies, through particularly violent imagery, that Petruchio will use force if necessary. Petruchio even tells Baptista, “I am rough and woo not like a babe” (2.1.137).

When we hear that Petruchio is in Kate's bedroom “making a sermon of continency to her” (4.1.176), I imagine that he is obviously acting contrary (his favorite mode), preaching abstinence when he might be expected to want to consummate his marriage. I have also wondered whether we are supposed to imagine that Kate has hoped to please him by offering herself sexually. Or does she actually desire him? Is the play reinforcing the male fantasy that the more a man beats and abuses a woman the more she will fawn on him?¹⁰ But the episode is probably related mainly to assure us that Petruchio does not rape Kate, since we have been led to think he might. A play within a play, The Taming of the Shrew is enacted to crown Christopher Sly's evening. I think it is intended to have the same salacious appeal as are the paintings proposed for his enjoyment.

Kate and Petruchio's accord is possible only because Kate is finally willing to give up or pretend to give up her sense of reality—which is reality—for Petruchio's whimsy. He will do nothing to please Kate until she becomes willing to go along with him in everything, including agreeing that the sun is the moon. When she will not, he stages a temper tantrum: “Evermore crossed and crossed, nothing but crossed!” (4.5.10). Eager to visit Padua, she gives over to him in lines that can only be rendered with weariness:

Forward, I pray, since we have come so far,
And be it moon or sun or what you please.
And if you please to call it a rush-candle,
Henceforth I vow it shall be so for me.

(4.5.12-15)

What follows is one instance after another of Petruchio's testing Kate's subjection to him.

One of the most difficult aspects of the play for me is the way the women are set against each other at the end. Kate and Bianca have been enemies from the beginning, but now the Widow takes sides against Kate, calling her a “shrew” (5.2.28). Kate's famous speech on wifely duty is addressed to the widow as a reproach. The men use their wives to compete with each other:

PETRUCHIO.
To her, Kate!
HORTENSIO.
To her, widow!

(5.2.33-34)

Betting on whose wife is the most obedient, the men stake their masculinity on their wives' compliance. A friendly voice will be raised against this kind of wager in Cymbeline, but not here. Only the Widow and Bianca, who will subsequently become “shrews,” demur. When Kate throws her cap under foot at Petruchio's direction, the Widow remarks, “Lord, let me never have a cause to sigh / Till I be brought to such a silly pass”; and Bianca queries, “Duty call you this?” When Lucentio reproaches Bianca for costing him five hundred crowns, she replies, “The more fool you for laying on my duty” (5.2.123-29). Though the Widow and Bianca are hateful characters, I find myself in sympathy with them. The ending of the play simply goes awry for me.

Kate's final speech may be taken straight, as a sign that she has “reformed”; or it may be taken ironically, as though she mocks Petruchio. The happiest view of it is that Kate and Petruchio perform this final act together, to confound those around them and win the bet. Even if we accept this last interpretation, I cannot take pleasure in Kate's losing her voice. In order to prosper, she must speak patriarchal language. The Kate we saw at the beginning of the play has been silenced. In one sense, it does not matter whether she believes what she is saying, is being ironical, or is acting: her words are those that satisfy men who are bent on maintaining patriarchal power and hierarchy. For them, Kate's obedience, in Petruchio's words, bodes

                                                  peace … and love, and quiet life,
An awful rule and right supremacy;
And … what not that's sweet and happy.

(5.2.108-10)

For Kate, it means speaking someone else's language, losing a part of her identity. She no longer engages in the high-spirited play of wit that was characteristic of her when Petruchio first met her (2.1.182-259).

If I stand farther back from the play, it seems even less comic. It is significant that Taming is a play within a play: “not a comontie a Christmas gambold or a tumbling trick” or “household stuff,” but “a kind of history” (Ind. 2.137-42). It seems to carry the same weight as The Murder of Gonzago in Hamlet or the rustics' dramatization of Pyramus and Thisbe in A Midsummer Night's Dream. The pithy truth that Taming contains implies a kind of heterosexual agony. It is noticeable that just before the play begins, the Induction calls attention to the fact that the Page, though pretending to be a woman, is actually a man. Convinced that he is a lord and that the Page is his wife, Sly wants to take his “wife” to bed. The Page begs off, claiming the physicians have said that lovemaking would be dangerous for Sly, and adds: “I hope this reason stands for my excuse.” Picking up the double meaning attendant on the similarity of pronunciation between “reason” and “raising,” Sly continues the phallic pun: “Ay, it stands so that I may hardly tarry so long” (Ind. 2.124-25). The source of Sly's desire is ambiguous: Is it the woman the Page pretends to be, or is it the man the Page reveals he is? Perhaps they are the same: a man in drag. In any case, the breaking of aesthetic distance here asks us to recognize that we are watching a homosexual couple watch the play. From their angle of vision, Taming affirms how problematic heterosexual relations are, especially marriage. The fault would seem to lie with women, who are all “shrews” at heart. If a man aspires to live in harmony with a woman, he must be like Petruchio (a comic version of Hotspur) and able to “tame” her. If he is gentle, like Lucentio, he will undoubtedly become the victim of a shrewish wife. This is not a happy view of women; it is an equally unhopeful vision of love and marriage.

Even though there may be ambiguities at the conclusion of Shakespeare's comedies, they are most joyous when couples join with the prospect of a happy marriage before them. In order for marriage to be hopeful in Shakespeare, women's power must be contained or channeled to serve and nurture men. When it is—in As You Like It, Twelfth Night, or A Midsummer Night's Dream—the comic ending is celebratory. When it is not, in The Merchant of Venice or Love's Labor's Lost, the tone of the ending is less buoyant, even discordant. In Love's Labor Lost, when women remain in power and set the terms of marriage, it is implied that something is not right. Berowne comments:

Our wooing doth not end like an old play;
Jack hath not Jill. These ladies' courtesy
Might well have made our sport a comedy.

(5.2.872-74)

When the King insists that it will end in “a twelvemonth and a day,” after the men have performed the penances their ladies have stipulated, Berowne replies, “That's too long for a play.” The final songs contain references to cuckoldry, and their closing note is on “greasy Joan” stirring the pot.¹¹ What is different about the movement toward a comic ending in Taming, is that women are set ruthlessly against each other, Kate's spirit is repressed, and marriage is made to seem warfare or surrender at too high a price.

Taming is responsive to men's psychological needs, desires, and fantasies at the expense of women. It plays to an audience who shares its patriarchal assumptions: men and also women who internalize patriarchal values. As someone who does not share those values, I find much of the play humorless. Rather than making me laugh, it makes me sad or angry. Its intended effect is spoiled. It is not only that I do not share the play's values, but also that I respond as a woman viewer and reader and do not simply respond according to my sense of Shakespeare's intention or try to adopt an Elizabethan perspective (assuming I could). I stand outside of the community the joke is intended to amuse; I sympathize with those on whom the joke is played.

I understand that within the tradition of shrew stories, Shakespeare's version is more generous of spirit and more complex than other such stories. But Taming seems dated. I think that it is interesting historically—in tracing a tradition, in understanding sixteenth-century attitudes toward women—and that it is significant as part of Shakespeare's canon, as any work of his is. But limiting its importance this way, I imply that I find it less good than many of his comedies. And I do. If I went to see it, it would be out of curiosity, to find out how someone in our time would direct it.

Shakespeare continually depicts in comedy an infertile world in which lovers are separated; the task of the play is to restore the world by bringing lovers together. In several instances, he presents characters who are “man-haters” or “woman-haters” and unites them. Benedick and Beatrice, Hippolyta and Theseus are examples; Kate and Petruchio are forerunners of these couples. Interestingly enough, Shakespeare never again shows a woman treated so harshly as Kate except in tragedy. I think that Shakespeare either began to see the world differently or that he recognized the story of Kate and Petruchio did not quite work. Most significantly, he obviously enjoyed portraying witty women characters, and he must have seen that it was preferable to leave their spirits untamed.

Notes

1. I use Judith Fetterley's term because it so aptly names the common position of the woman reader (The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction [Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1978]).

2. Students recognizing the misogyny of Taming may encounter a response similar to that which, according to Leslie Fiedler, a Jewish child may meet when he confronts the anti-Semitism of The Merchant of Venice: “A Jewish child, even now, reading the play in a class of Gentiles, feels this [the full horror of anti-Semitism] in shame and fear, though the experts, Gentile and Jewish alike, will hasten to assure him that his responses are irrelevant, even pathological, since ‘Shakespeare rarely “takes sides” and it is certainly rash to assume that he here takes an unambiguous stand “for” Antonio and “against” Shylock’” (Leslie A. Fielder, The Stranger In Shakespeare [New York: Stein and Day, 1972], 98-99.

3. The other version of the play, entitled The Taming of A Shrew, may be by another author or a bad quarto of an earlier version of the play by Shakespeare. For a discussion of the differences between the two plays, their relationship, and the critical controversies regarding them, see Peter Berek's essay in this volume.

4. Carol Thomas Neely comments that feminist analyses of the play, including her own, emphasize “Kate's and Petruchio's mutual sexual attraction, affection, and satisfaction while deemphasizing her coerced submission to him.” She provides an excellent summary of this criticism and suggests that feminist critics are responding to “conflicting impulses—to their profound abhorrence of male dominance and female submission and to their equally profound pleasure at the play's conclusion.” She comments, “Feminists cannot, without ignoring altogether the play's meaning and structure, fail to rejoice at the spirit, wit, and joy with which Kate accommodates herself to her wifely role. Within the world of the play there are no preferable alternatives. But we cannot fail to note the radical asymmetry and inequality of the comic reconciliation and wish for Kate, as for ourselves, that choices were less limited, roles less rigid and unequal, accommodation more mutual and less coerced” (Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare's Plays [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985], 218-19).

5. Though her reading of the play is different from mine, Linda Bamber describes a response similar to mine. Agreeing with Coppélia Kahn that “the play presents Kate's capitulation as a gesture without consequence to her soul,” she comments that “it cannot seem so to a feminist reader.” She adds: “The battle of the sexes as a theme for comedy is inherently sexist. The battle is only funny to those who assume that the status quo is the natural order of things and likely to prevail. To the rest of us, Kate's compromise is distressing” (Comic Women, Tragic Men: A Study of Gender and Genre in Shakespeare [Stanford: Stanford University Press], 35).

6. This and subsequent quotations from Shakespeare's plays are from The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare, ed. Sylvan Barnet (New York: Harcourt, 1963).

7. Robert B. Heilman, Introduction to The Taming of the Shrew in The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare, 323-27.

8. Heilman, 323.

9. Joel Fineman is either reading wishfully or perversely when he argues that Petruchio's “lunatic behavior” is “a derivative example” of Kate's shrewishness; see “The Turn of the Shrew” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, eds. Geoffrey Hartman and Patricia Parker (London: Methuen, 1986), 142.

10. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. and ed. Robert M. Adams (New York: Norton, 1977), 72.

11. Shirley Nelson Garner, “A Midsummer's Night's Dream: ‘Jack shall have Jill / Nought shall go ill,’” Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 9(1981): 47-63.