SOURCE: Deer, Harriet A. “Untyping Stereotypes: The Taming of the Shrew.” In The Aching Hearth: Family Violence in Life and Literature, edited by Sara Munson Deats and Lagretta Tallent Lenker, pp. 63-78. New York: Plenum Press, 1991.

[In the following essay, Deer argues that through his characterization of Katherina and Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare transcended the stock comic figures of shrew and braggart, and allowed an exploration of “the patriarchal assumptions that underlie Elizabethan marriage.”]

There is no question that The Taming of the Shrew incorporates spouse abuse. Its “knockabout” farce occurs chiefly at the expense of a wife who suffers verbal abuse, starvation, and material deprivation. Furthermore, the abusive husband seems to be more praised than blamed, for in the banquet scene with which the play closes, the wife appears to praise his right to control her and then to embrace dutiful obedience. Thus, the play seems to reinscribe many of the stereotypes that have been rejected by contemporary feminists. Whether one objects to the play's apparent condemnation of willful women or finds fault with its apparent praise of women who conform to men's rules for wifely conduct, The Taming of the Shrew seems to capitalize on the perception of women as marginal members of a hierarchical, masculine society. It therefore seems a potentially objectionable choice for a contemporary junior high school literature curriculum. Yet the play is taught without much protest by intelligent, sensitive people who would normally rebel against having to deal with such chauvinistic material. When one mentions that it may praise spouse abuse and the servitude of women, most teachers look puzzled and demur that since the abuse is all in fun, it should not be taken seriously.

One is therefore left with a contradiction, a play that capitalizes on spouse abuse and yet is palatable to late twentieth-century audiences. Given the uncritical reverence that Shakespeare is often accorded and the continuing prevalence of shrew stereotypes in our own time, one must first ask: Are we simply responding mindlessly to Shakespeare's name and to stereotypes so deeply seated in the grammar of farce that we accept them uncritically, or does the play elicit from us more complex responses than we recognize? Is there a possibility that the play may deftly undercut its surface chauvinism by making chauvinism itself the butt of the joke?

The play's most noticeable quality is not its chauvinism but its theatricality, and several sustained critical considerations of its theatricality have appeared. Thomas Van Laan's consideration in Role Playing in Shakespeare (1978, 21-52), J. Denis Huston's extended treatment in Shakespeare's Comedies of Play (1981, 58-94), and Sidney Homan's somewhat briefer observations in When Theatre Turns to Itself (1981, 31-54), all address the question of how a playwright uses the commonplaces of theatrical tradition to create something more than the commonplace. Their concern with theatricality springs from their postmodernist assumption that the models individuals live by—call them fictions or illusions—are creations of human beings, not facts of nature, and that one test of an artist is the extent to which he or she is aware of the act of model making and the limitations of the models used, both those inherited and those created. In other words, most postmodern criticism explores the creativity possible for the individual who knows how to play with models. If the individual is a playwright, then her or his great inherited model is the theater, and one of her or his major subjects is likely to be the significance of the theater and its conventions as ways of structuring our perceptions of the world. Even if individuals are merely participants in the dominant models of their time, their ability to play with and invent models is still analogous to the creative process of the playwright, and the problems of the dramatist are analogous to the problems of people who wish to control and invent the fictions that dominate their daily lives. Thus, the activity of the theatrical model maker and the activity of the individuals who are trying to find models for their daily conduct are not radically different in kind, and the process of model making in literature often reveals the process by which we make models in our lives.

Such an approach is particularly appropriate to Shakespeare's early comedies, since they are so openly about invention and conformity, and about the suffering that marginal people undergo when they must adapt to inappropriate conventions. In the early plays, Shakespeare is particularly concerned with women who have to conform to patriarchal marriage conventions whose implicit authoritarianism sanctions abuse in the name of conformity. Especially in The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare explores from many perspectives the idea that while slavish adherence to conventional theatrical models of plot and character may be dull and destructive—not only for both playwrights and actors but for society in general—using conventions as tools for discovering the lapses, inadequacies, and new possibilities in a society may transform them from devices encouraging inhumane homogeneity into lively sources for discovering ways to break free of that conformity.

Even within the Induction concerning Christopher Sly, Shakespeare seems interested in both the nature of theatrical invention and its humane implications. As the play begins, Christopher Sly, a low drunk, is thrust out of a tavern, and passes out. He is so marginal a part of his society that even the other drunks cannot tolerate him. A passing lord and his hunting party discover Sly. Taking him at first for dead, the lord then realizes he is merely dead drunk and decides to use this clod for the amusement of his party. From his deathlike stupor, the lord will resurrect Sly, clothe him like a noble, place him in the lord's bed tended by a page disguised as his genteel “wife,” and convince him that he is a noble restored to his senses after long insanity. The lord's little masquerade is, then, primarily a source for condescending laughter about Sly, and a way of keeping Sly a clod rather than humanizing him.

The limitations of the lord's authoritarian imagination quickly become clear. Since the lord and his court have conceived a play with a central character who is almost totally passive, and since the courtiers think of themselves as observers, not participants, there is a limit to how far the play can be developed. Before the play is two scenes old, Shakespeare has suggested that the authoritarian imagination may be somewhat sterile. Fortunately, a troupe of strolling players happens by, for, without them, the lord's invention would come to an untimely end. The lord commands them to perform before Sly as if he were the lord; after the play begins, the assembled courtiers and Sly are heard from only once more, during a brief interruption early in the main play.

The Induction seems to have so little influence on the course of the central Shrew play that critics have sometimes questioned why it is there at all.¹ Yet its presence is important, for it is the “frame” through which the play is viewed. It establishes connections among the treatment of marginal members of society, society's authoritarian assumptions, the creative imagination, and the problems of art. These are the same connections that Kate and Petruchio will explore during the course of the main play, and the frame play suggests the interpenetration of the fictions of art and the fictions by which human beings live. If we look at The Taming of the Shrew without taking into consideration the failure of conventional values and the abuse of marginal members of society in the Induction, then we miss the perspective that allows us to see how original Kate and Petruchio are, how Petruchio uses role-playing to educate Kate, and how Kate finally learns enough about patriarchal conventions to transform these conventions into tools by which she can control her world rather than be controlled by it.

The players have been commanded to contrive a play that is supposed to satisfy impossible requirements. First, the play is to continue the lord's weak joke by attempting to please Christopher Sly, yet Sly is totally unfamiliar with plays. When he is told he will witness a comedy, he asks, “What is this Comonty?” He hopes it will be like “Christmas gambolds and tumbling tricks” (Induction.2.141). His concept of entertainment includes only the simplest physical action and conflict. Appealing to him is difficult in itself. Yet, the players must also appeal to the nobles, for although the nobles want to watch Sly watching the play, they also expect to be entertained by the play, and the nobles expect that the play will include those ready-made, genteel, self-flattering stereotypes common to courtly theater, stereotypes that affirm the superiority of a hierarchical vision and of the authoritarian vision of the nobles. Although the two ideas of entertainment seem incompatible, their forced juxtaposition so shatters our preconceptions that it encourages us to explore both the vitality and the limitations of each idea, and to discover the necessity for broader perspectives.

The conflation of courtly and folk tastes is observable even in the sources for this play. The tale of the shrewish wife is usually associated with the use of physical farce, and it generally includes physical abuse of the shrew; in a popular English ballad, the shrew is even wrapped in a salted horsehide to induce obedience.² Shakespeare's softening of abuse from the coarsely physical to the more verbal and psychological is one of the most immediately noticeable alterations he makes in the old tale, and this suggests that he is more concerned with the realities of abuse than with the knockabout stereotypes associated with it. The Lucentio-Bianca subplot springs from the courtly love tradition,³ and it stresses the conventions of courtly love—disguise, music, poetry, love at first sight, and true love versus materialistic marriage, to name only a few (Van Laan 1978, 21-52).

The two traditions—courtly and folk—are held together only by the particular theatrical imagination of the strolling troupe that devises the play. It is a commedia troupe, the kind of troupe whose roots stretch back in theater tradition at least as far as Plautus and forward at least as far as nineteenth-century Italy, where the still-surviving troupes serve as the inspiration for I Pagliacci. A commedia troupe is composed of actors who specialize in particular kinds of stock roles rendered familiar to their audience through long usage and prevalence in both folk and courtly literature. As the character types in The Shrew make evident, this particular troupe is composed of actors who are skilled in creating a number of stock characters prevalent in Renaissance literature: for example, it has several pantaloon actors (i.e., foolish older men), it has a very skilled coquette, a young lover type who handles witty language well, a miser type, at least one clown, a braggart type, and a shrew. Commedia players present plays, either by adapting their stock roles to already existing plots, or else by inventing plots that are appropriate for the characters that they know how to play. Thus members of a commedia troupe are part actor, part playwright, sometimes working with previously developed material but just as often “discovering” the turns of the plot as they face the problems of adapting their stock characters and commedia routines to a multitude of different plot situations.⁴

The troupe is an appropriate vehicle for combining farce and courtly traditions since, by Shakespeare's time, commedia actors had developed a broad range of stock characters that covered the spectrum of Renaissance social types and dramatic tastes. Some of their stock characters, the coquette and the young lover, for example, reflected the stock characters and plot expectations of courtly drama. Others, like the shrew and the braggart, reflected the demands of folk drama. And still others, like the servant types, could function in either courtly or folk drama, as do Lucentio's servant Tranio and Petruchio's servant Grumio. Since the actors in a commedia troupe are to some degree playwrights, they are inventors as well as interpreters of the dialogue and of the reactions of characters to each other within scenes. The nature of their trade makes them in some sense surrogate playwrights whose onstage struggles to create plays may mirror both the creative offstage struggles of playwrights to reconcile the stereotyped expectations of their society with their particular original visions and the problems these playwrights encounter in working with particular plots. Thus, the question for a commedia troupe is not whether but how to mix the apparently disparate traditions of folk and courtly drama. The demand placed on them to satisfy the tastes of both Sly and the courtiers challenges their inventiveness, and the varying levels of inventiveness with which they meet the challenge are connected not only with the kinds of conventions available to the various actors but also with their success in developing the social and humane implications of those conventions.

In his brilliant analysis of the play, Tom Van Laan points out three different levels of invention. The two lower levels are connected with the rather routine, aristocratic courtly love story concerning Bianca and Lucentio. The performers of this plot seem content to confirm the courtiers' assumptions concerning the superiority of nobility, the virtue of feminine dependence on and obedience to men, and the importance of maintaining the patriarchy. On the lowest level of invention are the hack actors, the minor characters who can barely stumble through their roles, let alone find fresh ways of treating them. Gremio, the pantaloon, is a good example of these. He is so stupid and inept that Lucentio can gull him almost effortlessly into permission to teach Bianca poetry, and he is so lacking in invention that when Lucentio's trick is revealed, he simply sinks into obscurity. He can neither complicate the plot nor test the validity of courtly values. He can only conform in the most unimaginative way.

Lucentio, playing the amoroso, represents a second, far more significant level, that of the virtuoso who practices his craft, not to understand and deepen the values and conventions implied in the stock characters he portrays, but rather to display his own style. He gains access to Bianca by employing a rather stale device, but he performs it with grace and wit; imitating Dante, he uses Ovid to court her, and his success seems in every way to confirm the stage audience's assumptions about the superiority of courtly conventions in the hands of a proficient performer. Although Bianca's character seems to be less developed, she is also proficient. She knows how to please her suitors, how to dissemble before her father, how to discriminate between Lucentio's love and the other suitors' interest in her dowry, and how to reap the rewards of conformity. Yet, despite their virtuosity, until the banquet scene both Bianca and Lucentio are purely conventional. Not until Bianca refuses to obey Lucentio does either of them seem anything more than a competent but uninventive courtly actor. Through Lucentio, Shakespeare gives the courtly tradition its due, allowing it virtuosity but denying it real vitality and imagination. Its demands for conformity make it the enemy of invention. His treatment of Bianca is more interesting, for during the banquet scene she violates the mindless conformity that Lucentio holds so dear. Bianca's conventional obedience may mask a capacity for rebellion about which she has remained silent throughout most of the play. Once married, she can afford to reject courtly ideals.

Kate and Petruchio represent the highest level of invention. Both theatrically and socially, they are marginal and antiromantic. The actor creating Kate is expert at shrewishness, temper tantrums, and brawling. His/her shrew character is outside the pale of polite society, marginal by definition. Petruchio is played by an actor who is an expert boor, more skilled at harangues and knockdown farce than at love. Because of his boorishness and bombast, he, too, is a somewhat marginal member of the aristocracy. Even the tale with which they are associated is only marginally romantic, for the shrewish wife is traditionally a “curst” woman who is brutalized into obedience by a husband more interested in securing peace than love. Nevertheless, however unpromising the material, these two folk characters from a crude folk tale are intended, on the one hand, to capture the interest of Christopher Sly and, on the other, to serve as the primary subjects of a romance suitable for a courtly audience. The necessity to concentrate on the Kate and Petruchio relationship becomes evident early in the play when the action is briefly interrupted by the nobles trying to waken Christopher Sly. The play has, to that point, been proceeding along routine courtly lines, far outside of Sly's experience, and he has gone to sleep. If he is to remain awake, that is, if the nobles are to have the fun of watching him watch a play, then the rough-and-tumble plot will have to be highlighted. But it must be brought into prominence in such a way that the taste of the courtiers for a love story is also satisfied.

Whereas the Lucentio-Bianca plot requires only expert handling of and conformity to predictable motives and situations, the Kate—Petruchio plot defies convention. Shrews and braggarts are not courtly lovers, and thrusting them into a romantic plot forces everyone to examine, on the one hand, the motives and assumptions that underlie shrewishness and verbal abuse and, on the other, the conventional expectations that wives should bring with them a dowry and should practice obedience and conformity. Although the conventions associated with shrews and boors seem intended to deny the possibility that either character might be able to love anyone else, the actors must use those conventions to create a love story. And although a shrew is per se an undesirable mate, this shrew must find a way to convince her audience that she will live happily ever after. The task is gargantuan, and it cannot be accomplished simply by rearranging existing rules. It requires that the actors rethink the potential of their roles and the assumptions implicit in the conventions associated with them. The task requires not only virtuosity, but the development of a highly independent creative imagination.

What I am suggesting is that the Shrew deals with more than playfulness, as Denis Huston suggests, or with levels of role-playing, as Van Laan argues. Both are important aspects of the play, but they are secondary to its exploration of the relationship between theatrical conventions and social values. The play deliberately develops an analogy between the difficulties that the skilled actor-playwright encounters when he or she tries to convert popular plots, roles, and acting techniques into new uses and wider meanings and the struggles of marginal human beings, both male and female, to convert the destructive and abusive conventions associated with Renaissance marriage and marginality into sources for new kinds of relationships. Just as the playwright must create vitality while still retaining the established conventions on which actor and audience depend for communication, so women in a patriarchal society must learn to use the conventions of conformity necessary to their survival as sources for affirming their own creativity and imagination. From one perspective, Shakespeare is talking about how players can put old dramatic conventions to new uses, and, from another, about how women (and men) performing conventional roles within a society also try to discover new possibilities for human relationships.

Kate and Petruchio make great sense if we think of them as stock actors who can perform their play only if they discover new possibilities within the routines and conventions they have always unquestioningly performed. Part of their solution is to center the plot not on routine courtship but on the search for conventions that would make courtship possible. At the beginning of the play, each actor is presenting his usual routines—Kate throwing tantrums and brawling with her sister, Petruchio boorishly announcing that he has “come to wive it wealthily in Padua.” But braggart and shrew stereotypes cannot develop the romantic relationships that the plot requires. Romance conventions require that a character be able to care for at least one other person, yet the conventions of shrew and braggart are specifically structured to prevent the characters from noticing anyone else. The actors cannot discard their stock characters; those are the only acting conventions they are any good at performing. They must improvise until they can discover in the mannerisms and interactions of their characters some possibilities that can be used to develop more complex characters capable of multiple reactions. They must, in other words, particularize the shrew and braggart so that they can find out why this particular pair exist and what other qualities their behavior may imply.

Almost immediately the shrew and braggart begin to acquire specificity, because the plot requires that their stereotypes develop some motivation. The character playing Kate develops the idea that she resents her father's oft-repeated belief that she is simply marriage material to be awarded to a high bidder. She has rejected the marriage contract, but not the idea of marriage itself. She refuses to cooperate with her father or to adopt the manners that would make her desirable merchandise. But her shrewishness is a self-defeating strategy, for her unpleasantness, intended to fend off merely mercenary suitors, guarantees that the only reason anyone would marry her is for her fortune. Petruchio, like most of his society, regards marriage as a business proposition. He wants wealth. Yet, he does want a wife as well as a dowry, although his stream of expletives makes him the most inept of suitors. If Kate's shrewishness offends courtly suitors, then Petruchio's verbal assaults offend the courtly fathers of genteel daughters. Nevertheless, within the desire for marriage the pair can find enough common ground to improvise the beginnings of a romance. But how to sustain a romance? How to reconcile Petruchio's materialism with Kate's rejection of it? How to direct the process of improvisation and invention so that some kind of interaction can take place?

At first, Petruchio seems the more inventive player. He exploits the aspects of his behavior that most resemble those of Kate—that is, the conventions of boorishness associated with his stock character—to intensify and mirror back to Kate her own outrageous behavior. If she attacks him, he will attack her. If she affects disdain for marriage, he will arrive in antic dress for the wedding. If she makes unreasonable, arbitrary demands of others, he will treat her to extremely unreasonable behavior, arbitrarily refusing her food, rest, and proper clothing. If she throws tantrums, he will harangue her to death. Petruchio's mirroring technique is not a departure from his usual bag of acting tricks or his virtuosity as a braggart; in recognizing the resemblance between the abusive language of his stock responses and those of a shrew's, he is developing a tool for discovering new perspectives on the two roles, new ways of generating action when one would normally expect only impasse. From stock tricks, a kind of creativity is emerging. His well-practiced routines are put to the new purpose of forcing on Kate an awareness of the way her violent language and actions frustrate her desires.

Unfortunately, Petruchio's mirroring tactics create more self-awareness in Kate than they create in him. Although his acts allow Kate to understand a great deal about herself, they do not create similar insight in Petruchio. He is still a “controller,” still boorish, still in danger of seeing Kate merely as an extension of his own ego, just as her father saw her merely as a tool for improving his family fortunes. Although he has found a way to be Kate's mirror, his ego and control of the plot prevent Kate from returning the favor. Yet, if Petruchio is to educate Kate, he must recognize and limit the destructive possibilities of his usual mode of acting. He must not go beyond education to sheer manipulation. Such recognition is difficult for Petruchio, since he is enjoying his lord-and-master role, and we sense that unless some new device intervenes, boorishness will overwhelm inventiveness. One device that helps Petruchio to retain some balance is his servant Grumio, who often mirrors his master's actions without his master's wit or awareness. Like Petruchio, Grumio also harangues others, particularly the tailor. But Grumio's harangues are directed toward hapless bystanders; his bamboozling of the tailor constitutes gratuitous abuse, and Petruchio, observing this, has to set matters right. Petruchio's intervention reminds him that Kate may be more like the unfortunate tailor than he had realized, and that his own abuse may go beyond education to a gratuitous exercise of power. The mirror Grumio can furnish is too simplistic and limited, however, to save Petruchio from his own ego. Grumio's actions are a form of burlesque, naive distortions of Petruchio's actions; they do not furnish the kind of sophisticated and intense mirror that Petruchio has given Kate.

One yearns to place Petruchio before such a mirror, for the performance strategies and the imaginative uses of boorishness by the actor playing Petruchio suggest that, placed before the right mirror, he might find creative alternatives to his egocentric desire to control everything and everyone around him. Yet Petruchio, the actor and the character, is so consumed with his desire to control that he seeks to impose on Kate his own vision of the world; on the road when they are returning to Padua for Bianca's wedding, he even invents tests for her to be sure she has learned his lesson; he is willing to let her walk every step of the way back to Padua unless she conforms to his demands.

Despite Petruchio's creativity in using the conventions of the boor to make Kate recognize the destructiveness of her shrewishness, he cannot see that the alternative to the shrew that he advocates is the courtly convention of the obedient and dependent wife. The character-actor improvising this courtship can imagine no relationship between man and woman that does not involve mastery and submission. He can devise no plot that does not, despite its inappropriateness, affirm the ideals implicit in the Lucentio-Bianca courtship plot. Thus, as the plot moves toward its conclusion, and despite the appreciation that he has displayed for Kate's high spirits, the Petruchio character is driven to rely on the courtly ideal of an obedient wife, and thus he seems willing to sacrifice Kate's spirit to coerce her obedience. The plot of depriving Kate of food, sleep, and clothing is far less destructive than the device of depriving her of her own vision. Whereas the first device leaves Kate with room to react and retain some kind of identity, the second device leaves the stage and the action entirely to Petruchio. Wanting to civilize Kate is one thing; wanting to displace her independence and vitality with a mere echo of himself is quite another. We are forced to ask whether Petruchio's “mirroring” technique is only a way of giving Kate new awareness, or whether it is also a way of forcing her to conform to his vision. We wonder whether controlling another person's imagination may not be the worst abuse that one spouse can inflict on another. Petruchio has pretended to mime Kate's routines as a way of freeing her from the destructive implications of the shrew character, but, in the end, we discover that he does not really want to free the character, he merely wants to substitute a compliant wife for the shrew, one who will agree to behave according to the ideal held by all Bianca's suitors. That desire is Petruchio's blind spot and the opening for which the actor playing Kate has been waiting.

During the entire play, the Kate actor-character has had difficulty converting the special tricks of the shrew to constructive ends. The logic of the plot has placed Petruchio in command, and the action has followed a pattern in which Petruchio acts, Kate reacts, and Petruchio then counteracts in such a way that she is forced to abandon one shrewish trick after another. She has been stripped of the shrew conventions that constituted her identity without being given the opportunity to find alternative conventions. In the scene on the road back to Padua, Petruchio's attacks become so outrageous that they finally reveal his desire not only to obliterate the shrew role, but to obliterate the independence and sense of self that gave the shrew role its originality and vitality. Petruchio is so determined to control the action that he commands Kate to swear that the sun is the moon, that an old man is a budding virgin; in other words, he wants her only to see the world according to the vision he allows her. He wants her to deny both the surface tricks of the shrew stereotype and the underlying sense of independence that has made her shrewishness a vital if unproductive activity.

Petruchio's demand cuts to the core of the character the shrew actor has developed during the play. Kate has been transformed into a motivated shrew; her shrewishness is presented as a defense against becoming a mere puppet, a mere reflection of the courtly values required by her entire society. Her excesses have proved to be counterproductive, and she has been auctioned off to Petruchio, but her motivation still remains. How can she turn the tables on Petruchio, and create through her actions a mirror of his expectations with such intensity and distortion that he recognizes how his expectations fundamentally rob her of the ability to act at all? If she cannot create a new awareness in Petruchio, then alternatively, how can she use his authoritarianism and egotism to create freedom for her own inventions? The question for Kate, the character, is the same as the question for Kate, the actor. The conventions for stage roles and the conventions for social roles seem to become interchangeable. The character's struggle to solve her marital problem is like that of the actor's or playwright's struggle to find a way of using conventions creatively rather than mechanically.

Kate's chance comes in the last act, when she finds a way to control Petruchio using his own illusions. The plot develops into a paradigm of a courtly “game” situation, a trial of the three new husbands based on their success in commanding their wives' absolute obedience. Petruchio, Lucentio, and Hortensio have all wagered that their wives will come when bidden. According to conventional expectations Bianca, as the courtly ideal, should immediately obey her husband's arbitrary command. But Bianca, now married, is no longer controlled by the “rules” of the coquette. She is therefore free to ignore her husband's command. Hortensio's wealthy widow is also free, and just as casual in answering his command as he was early in the play when he decided to marry her because it seemed easier than fighting for Bianca's hand.

Although the test has failed, the three husbands, instead of questioning whether their ideal of absolute obedience is either desirable or attainable, wait for Kate. She enters and in a remarkable tour-de-force performance mirrors back to Petruchio his own values and strategies. As he has often done to her, she delivers a long harangue, this time to the other two wives. As he desires, she delivers a conventional encomium on the values of obedience. Even the most uncritical viewer is amazed by Kate's “taming.” The harangue and encomium are too good to be true; they have nothing to do with the rest of the play, with Kate's attitudes or experiences, with Petruchio's actions, or, for that matter, with the realities of Elizabethan marriage implied in Petruchio's capacity to deprive Kate of food, sleep, and clothing. Coming from Kate, they are so outrageous that they throw into relief the emptiness of the cliché responses demanded of her, and the lack of inventiveness of the actor and society who would approve such a demand. Just as Petruchio, earlier in the play, performed Kate's tantrums with even greater intensity than Kate did, so Kate is now performing, with an intensity that mocks credibility, the courtly rules of marriage that Petruchio seems to demand of her. The very exaggeration of the performance calls attention to the possibility that what we are seeing is so blatantly conventional that the viewers ought to beware. We begin to conceive the possibility that Kate, who has not lost her wits, is setting a trap, that her performance is a comment on, not merely an imitation, of Petruchio's own values. Our sense of such a possibility is increased when, with a single theatrical gesture, Kate commits an act so outrageous that only someone like Petruchio, who is utterly consumed with his own success, could accept it without question. Kneeling to him as if he were her God, her object of worship, she offers to let him tread on her hand.

Lucentio and Hortensio are awestruck. Here is surely the ideal of obedience that they have dreamed of. And Petruchio? We are not sure whether he has or has not gotten the point. Does Kate's hyperbolic performance of his courtly ideal reveal to him its destructiveness and emptiness? Does her performance reveal to him her wit, imagination, and independence? Does his roar of approval, “Why there's a wench! Come on, and kiss me, Kate” (5.2.180), signal his discovery of Kate's inventiveness? Or is Kate now to play on him the kinds of mirroring tricks he played on her? Is he Kate's partner or her fool? Will she merely control him or will they join in creative inventions? Is this the end of the play or the beginning of a new one? We are not sure. What we see is that the play's conclusion, which is often treated as Kate's conversion to a simple, mechanical conformity, has become problematic. What we see is that Kate, who appears so conventionally tamed, may have found a way to tame Petruchio. We see the clear possibility that she has used Petruchio's own conventions as a way of achieving control of the plot and her destiny. Seeing the play in that way puts fresh meaning and fresh doubts into the aristocratic wifely ideal: even as Kate pretends to be blindly obedient, she springs the trap implicit in the ideal of blind obedience, to wit, that he who believes in blind obedience is likely to be blindly enslaved by it.

Shakespeare has not created a play in which a “conversion” necessarily occurs, nor one in which the female characters must choose nontraditional roles. He has done something more important. He has found modes of questioning established values, of demonstrating that the systems of family values traditionally considered to be unified and justified are merely logocentric models that can be unmade just as well as they were originally made. In so doing, he has opened for the audience a world of the imagination in which the possibility of alternative relationships between husbands and wives, fathers and daughters, and masters and servants can be contemplated. What Shakespeare has done in this early play is to use the process of performance as a way of exploring the unstated values embodied in the traditional stereotypes on which stock characters are based, ways of testing their limits and their validity. By focusing on the difficulties that a group of actors encounter during the improvisational process of reconciling stock commedia characters with courtly plots, he has been able to probe the difference between static, closed assumptions and flexible, open ones. Employing a shrew and a braggart, he has been able to explore the patriarchal assumptions that underlie Elizabethan marriage and to show that spouse abuse is not an aberration, but an intense expression of those values that reduce Elizabethan wives to the status of appendages. Using the process of acting and playmaking as a microcosmic test of larger social assumptions, he has expanded the patriarchal assumptions underlying stock characters as sources for creative response without at the same time affirming those assumptions or their destructive effects. The Taming of the Shrew does indeed exploit spouse abuse as a major source of action and humor. But it does not encourage such behavior; rather it reveals how destructive and widespread is its hold on society.

Notes

1. Some critics have suggested that the Induction sets the tone for the play; it establishes that this is a play ostensibly for Sly and thus it cushions us from the inner play's brawling physicality. Van Laan (1978), Huston (1981), and Homan (1981) all suggest that the Induction calls our attention to the fact that we are witnessing a piece of theater, and thus shifts our attention from what happens to how it happens—from plot to style, performance, and invention—an observation fundamental to both their observations and mine. None of them, however, takes into account the main plot line of the Induction, which is simply that a lord invents a practical joke in the form of a courtly play. His play runs out of steam because it cannot be developed, and it cannot be developed because both the playwright and his audience are so hedged in by assumptions about Sly's inferiority and their superiority that they cannot generate action; they can only generate a static emblem of their assumptions. For them, theater is merely a static, illustrative activity which confirms the aristocratic status quo, it is not a generative, exploratory one.

2. For a brief but very helpful discussion of sources for both the Kate-Petruchio plot and the Induction, see G. B. Harrison's (1968) introduction to the play.

3. Probably from George Gascoigne's translation of Ariosto's Supposes.

4. The extent to which Shakespeare is thinking in commedia terms is made clear in the Folio, where Gremio, Bianca's aged, greedy suitor, is first noted namelessly simply as “a pantaloon.”

References

Harrison, G. B., ed. “Introduction to The Taming of the Shrew,” in Shakespeare: The Complete Works. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968.

Homan, Sidney. When the Theater Turns to Itself: The Aesthetic Metaphor in Shakespeare. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1981.

Huston, J. Denis. Shakespeare's Comedies of Play. Columbia University Press, 1981.

Shakespeare, William. The Taming of the Shrew. In G. B. Harrison, ed., The Complete Works. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968.

Van Laan, Thomas F. Role Playing in Shakespeare. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978.