SOURCE: Gottlieb, Erika. “‘I Will Be Free’: Shakespeare's Ambivalence to Katherina's Challenge of the Great Chain of Being.” In Essays on Shakespeare in Honour of A. A. Ansari, edited by T. R. Sharma, pp. 88-116. Meerut, India: Shalabh Book House, 1986.

[In the following essay, Gottlieb contends that The Taming of the Shrew should not be viewed as a farce with a determinate happy ending, but rather that the play demonstrates Shakespeare's ambivalence to feminine assertions of independence from authoritarian, hierarchical tradition.]

In spite of the great number of its critics and the wide range of critical directions, most commentators on The Taming of the Shrew insist on reading it as a comedy with a wholeheartedly happy ending. In contrast to this assertion, I suggest that The Taming of the Shrew represents one of the earliest examples of Shakespeare's ambivalence towards the dilemma of individual freedom and equality as inspired by the emerging new consciousness of the Renaissance, and opposed to the well-tried ideas of dependence and obedience to authority posited by the conservative, medieval tradition.

To respond to this dilemma, Shakespeare also presses into service the current romantic code of gentlemanly behaviour and courtly love as a buttress to the central ideological edifice, that of the Great Chain of Being. To illustrate this ambivalence, I shall concentrate on the question of Katherina's initial rebellion and plea for equality, the very question responsible for those unresolved contradictions which ultimately get in the way of a truly, wholeheartedly happy ending both in terms of the plot, and in the characters' psychological realization.

Conclusions of a ‘happily-ever-after’ ending have emerged from reading the play as antiromantic, ‘literally Shakesepeare's recoil from romance.’¹ This reading emphasizes that after his initial attempt at romantic comedy, in The Taming of the Shrew Shakespeare returns to the home-spun, the down-to-earth, to the scrutiny of the real behaviour of man and woman as opposed to the artificial behaviour imposed on characters by the high-falutin conventions of romantic comedy imported from Europe, particularly from Italy. The fact that there are indeed two lines of love intrigue developed in the play—Bianca's foreign and Katherina's more home-spun story; that the two girls' relationships are tested, as in a contest; and that it is Katherina's which undoubtedly wins the upper hand—seem to bear out this contention.

To arrive at the conclusion of happy ending critics have also drawn attention to Shakespeare's scrutiny of the contrast between reality and illusion in the play. They point out that Shakespeare introduces this contrast through the Sly frame-story, develops it through Bianca's unexpected change from pre-nuptial, maidenly sweetness to matronly assertiveness, even aggressiveness, right after her wedding, so that we may become aware of the difference between apparent and real in the relationship between Katherina and Petrucio. Indeed, it has been implied by critics of the most divergent persuasion that Petruchio only appears to be a ‘tamer’; as a matter of fact, he is more of a kind teacher—ultimately even a liberator—who allows misled, immature, or neurotic Katherina to catch a glimpse of her own better self and decide to cure herself of her shrewishness. In line with this interpretation, there have been several speculations developed about Katherina's background, suggesting that the original cause of her shrewishness could have been that she was a problem child because her father had favoured Bianca, because he was interested only in money, or because he was, simply, a family tyrant. According to these interpretations, Petruchio's role, in effect, was to rescue her from an intolerable family situation.²

What emerges from these quite different lines of interpretation is that Katherina's final defeat in the battle between the sexes is not really a defeat. Readers located on such widely different parts of the philosophical spectrum as psychoanalytical³ and feminist⁴ criticism agree that Kate's final speech of woman's absolute and unconditional surrender and obedience to the male is merely a clever trick to make Petruchio believe he has the upper hand. They imply that as long as Petruchio is under this illusion, it is actually Kate who, through her subtle feminine ways, is in command of their relationship.

Still in harmony with this central contention, explicators assume that in spite of the seeming brutality of Petruchio's taming techniques (Northrop Frye seems to be one of the very few who admits to distaste of at least one scene, where Petruchio forces Katherina to deny the evidence of her senses and describe an old man as a young woman⁵) the young couple achieves mutual love and understanding by the end of the play. Maynard Mack, for example, credits Petruchio's strategies with the sensitivity and maturity of a healer who, showing Katherina desirable mirror images of herself, succeeds in allowing ‘the loved one grow to match the dream’.⁶

Although individual insights within these interpretations may make valid contributions to our understanding of various aspects of the play, it seems to me that what they often overlook or evade relates to the issue of the unconditionally happy ending, that is, to some of the very basic questions of the comic conflict and its resolution.

A happy ending implies that Katherina is better off at the end than she was at the beginning, that the rebel has seen the error of her ways and gives up her cause wholeheartedly. There is no doubt that up to the very last scene Katherina is a rebel. As a young girl she resists the idea of marriage by taunting all of her potential wooers. When she meets Petruchio, she begins by striking him. When, after a disgracefully short period of wooing and a scandalously inappropriate wedding ceremony she is taken to Petrudhio's house, she still insists on her freedom to participate in making decisions (for example, to stay in her father's house for her own wedding banquet, to be able to have her dinner when she is hungry, to take her rest when she is tired, to choose her own clothes, to visit or not to visit her father when she considers it appropriate). Then, she merely insists on her freedom to be heard, to be allowed to speak. ‘I will be free’, she blurts out choking with anger and frustration, drawing attention to the fact that she is an adult, equal to Petruchio in intellectual matters; ‘Your betters have endured me say my mind’, she reminds him.

Finally, and as a shock to everyone around her, in the last scene we see a surprisingly new Katherina who is simply delighted to obey her husband's slightest and most irrational wish, and takes delight in demonstrating and justifying woman's absolute subservience to male dominance. What is the final experience, the great discovery that lies between her last assertion of independence and the celebration of her subservience in the last scene? Having gone through the trials involved in Petruchio's taming strategy, Katherina comes to understand that Petruchio's strength is consistently superior to her own, and what is more, suddenly she finds great joy in this discovery. The relationship which started with her striking him ends with Petruchio's satisfied command, ‘Come and kiss me, Kate’ (V, ii, 180), followed by his announcement ‘Come, Kate, we'll to bed’ (V, ii, 184). Those who argue for the unconditionally happy ending must assume that his last two commands are received by Katherina in a spirit of happiness, that in spite of her total defeat in asserting her ideas of equality and independence she holds no grudge and feels no regrets, that the lasting sexual bond forged by her union with Petruchio on his own terms is worth more to her than all her previous attempts at self-assertion.

To believe in this, we should assume, what indeed most commentators imply, that her relationship with Petruchio is a coming together in mutual understanding, respect, and even love. To see this total change in Katherina's character as a happy one, we should assume that she had understood that Petruchio is the man with whom she can live happily, and that we, ourselves, should be convinced that Petruchio is not a fortune-hunter who enjoys the whole game of wooing and taming simply as a means of acquiring a rich dowry; that he is not a disciplinarian who enjoys the game of imposing his will on any rebellious inferior; or that he is not an undisciplined ruffian himself, looking for ways to demonstrate his virility by overcoming woman's resistance by brutality or the threat of violence; that he is not a cynic, intent on proving that deep down it is precisely his brutal and aggressive behaviour that the woman really craves. But are any of these assumptions based on evidence in the play? When examining the plot and the individual character's development, there is little to encourage positive answers to any of these basic questions relating to the feasibility of a happy ending. There is little either in Katherina's or in Petruchio's character, and almost nothing in their relationship, which should make us secure in an optimistic interpretation of the young personal love for each other, or in the securing of love and happiness for their future. If we want to argue for any kind of a happy ending, we should, therefore, come to terms with the genre of the play. Neither the characters nor their relationship is individualized. If in the final tableau Petruchio and Katherina make a happy couple, their love and happiness is far more situational—what the relationship between any man and any wife should be according to Elizabethan expectations—than what we would accept by more recent conventions aiming at psychological realism, verisimilitude, or ‘three-dimensional” characterization.

As a matter of fact, the play follows many of the ‘two-dimensional’ character requirements of comedy in general and farce in particular. And here we come to an interesting incongruity in the critical history of the play that I would like to take issue with. Most of the play's critics have a tendency to minimize the cruelty and inhumanity of Petruchio's wooing techniques by insisting, often with good reason, that one should look at these techniques as stylized, metaphorical. On the other hand, the same critics also insist that Katherina's and Petruchio's love for each other is real, that is, it has achieved maturity, depth, and psychological credibility by the end.

It seems to me as if most critics were embarrassed by the obvious fact that if we looked at Petruchio's methods in contemporary terms, his ‘taming’ of his ‘hawk’ follows methods familiar to a modern reader from the accounts of prisoners of war describing braihwashing, the so-called rehabilitation of the dissident through sensory deprivation. Having been deprived of food, drink and sleep, victims find that their resistance is broken, until they willingly accept the ‘teacher's’ ideology, or going even further, may even come to identify themselves with the aggressor. The fact that Petruchio does not use direct violence—only the threat of violence—does not make this notion much more palatable.

Of course, the moment we remind ourselves that we are faced with the conventions of comedy, and Petruchio is less of a full-fledged character than a reminder of his theatrical type of Bragadaccio, we also realize that we are within a theatrical convention where the actors' romping, fighting, or striking each other is an acceptable form of stage diversion. If we are not invited to enter the play in terms of psychologically convincing actions or verisimilitude, the fistfights suddenly become a source of humour because they are not expected to hurt, actors may hurl obscenities at each other, (or at Katherina) because they do not really count, and the acts of physical violence or the threats of violence are stylized, indeed, because they do not have the weight of reality. Yet, if we admit to this farcical, necessarily two-dimensional convention in most of the plot, is it not incongruous to insist on the psychological depth and credibility of the comic resolution, that is, on Katherina's character development by the end, and on the maturity and convincing power of her relationship with Petruchio? Having pointed out this incongruity, I also disagree with the commentators when they assert that Katherina's final speech which sums up her domestic position and holds all the keys to her final position in society should be interpreted as an ironic gesture or even a comic trick to win the upper hand. What these assertions suggest is that in spite of her words to the contrary, it is actually the weaker sex who had emerged victorious from the battle between the sexes. It seems to me, however, that we really have had no reason to question Shakespeare's consistency in weaving the fabric of the play, that is to say, we have no more reason to doubt the sincerity of Katherina's words in the end when she advises capitulation than we had at the beginning when she expressed resistance, rebellion. Rather than argue for the three-dimensional, fully realized happy ending, while insisting on a stylized, two-dimensional route that has led to this resolution, I suggest that we approach the entire play by admitting to the two-dimensionality imposed on it by the stage conventions of its chosen genre, and by the ideology this convention and genre are intended to illustrate.

As a farce, The Taming of the Shrew presents us with types in various given situations, and not with individual characters engaged in credible, complex interaction. This situational definition of types and their relationships in society is also appropriate to the subject matter, that is the meaning, or the morale that emerges from the play in the context of the ideology operative for the writer and his audience. This ideology emphasizes the stability of a static, hierarchically ordered universe where each human being is defined in a continuum, according to his or her position to an inferior and a superior, a cosmic order based on the concept of the Great Chain of Being. In terms of this ideology, The Taming of the Shrew should be read as an amusing, but clearly didactic, dramatization of a parable, an illustration of what happens to a foolish virgin who wants to remain unmarried, to a young woman who openly challenges one of the most unquestioningly accepted axioms of this ideology: male dominance. At first Katherina challenges the power of her father, then of her suitor, and goes on, even after her wedding, to assert her right to resist her husband's will if she finds it irrational: ‘I see a woman may be made a fool / If she had not a spirit to resist (III, ii, 220-221). She quite openly and eloquently pleads for equal rights with Petruchio, for freedom to be heard:

                                                  I am no child, no babe
Your betters have endured me say my mind
And if you cannot, best you stop your ears,
My tongue will take the anger of my heart,
Or else my heart, concealing it, will break’,
And rather that it shall I will be free,
Even to the uttermost, as I please, in words.

(IV, iii, 73-80)

Challenging the stability of the hierarchical structure at the domestic level, most particularly in the relationship between the sexes, may appear obvious material for comedy to us, yet we should realize that this challenge held an underlying seriousness to the Elizabethan mentality which conceived of the world as a series of correspondences, a mentality which would interpret a challenge to the established order at any of its stages as a threat challenging the entire structure. That this notion was widely held and made accessible either directly or indirectly is proven by the great popularity of Richard Hooker's The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, one of the most significant documents in the background of Elizabethan literature.⁷ Hooker's treatise makes it quite clear that the most obvious axiom fundamental to the entire Chain is the demonstrable power of the male over women and children, since ‘to fathers within their private families nature hath given a supreme power … all men have ever been taken as lords and lawful kings in their own houses.’⁸ Therefore the dominance of the male over the female has to be taken as seriously as the dominance of ‘lords and lawful kings’ over their subjects, and, ultimately, as of the Lord over his obedient Creation. This idea of unquestioning acceptance of one's position as a religious and moral duty is precisely the message of Katherina's final speech, expressed in convincing detail and with rhetorical precision:

Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,
Thy head thy sovereign; one that cares for thee …

(V, ii, 146-147)

Such duty as the subject owes the prince,
Even such a woman oweth to her husband;
And when she is froward, peevish, sullen, sour,
And not obedient to his honest will,
What is she but a foul contending rebel
And graceless traitor to her loving lord?’

(V, ii, 155-160)

In effect, if we define the comic conflict as a deviation from, or even a reversal of the social standards, the resolution of the conflict depends on the character's (and audience's) understanding that the original position was ludicrous, wrongheaded. Chiding Bianca and Hortensio's new wife for their wrongheaded behaviour, in her final speech Katherina describes her own return to the norm established by the Great Chain of Being, a norm which operates on a cosmic, a social-political, and on a personal-sexual level:

I am asham'd that women are so simple
To offer war, where they should kneel for peace;
Or seek for rule, supremacy and sway,
When they are bound to serve, love and obey.

(V, ii, 161-163)

If we look at the play as an allegorical dramatization of this ideology, we should also realize that the central images, relating to the relationship between man and woman are either images referring to a battle, or to a contract, some kind of mutual agreement (bound, bind, debt, owe, etc.). In Katherina's final words, after the battle is acted out, women should kneel for peace, accepting a treaty in which their bond is to serve, love and obey. This bond or obligattion, however, is only one side of the treaty. Implied in the speech is the legitimization of the relationship between weaker and stronger sex in some kind of a contract which also implies obligations on the superior partner, a contract with social, sexual, and possibly romantic implications.

If Katherina, before her conversion, was a deviant in terms of her rebellion against the subservience imposed on women in relationship to the male, she was equally a deviant in terms of the behaviour expected from a gentlewoman according to the romantic code of courtly love. Although most critics insist that Katherina's story is a triumphant jibe against the entire romantic tradition, I suggest that the issues raised by the romantic code are never really absent from the plot or the characters of The Taming of the Shrew. As a matter of fact, if we recognize the Chain of Being as the ideology central to our understanding of the play, we will find that some of the fundamental ideas of the romantic code of courtly love emerge not really in contrast to, but as a corollary, to this ideology. Although Bianca and Lucentio's marriage based on romantic infatuation seems to be weak and fraught with mutual disappintment right after the wooing stage is over, this does not mean that Shakespeare is rejecting here the code as meaningless. On the contrary, the play explores the possibility of reconciling the openly authoritarian, male-oriented code of the Chain of Being with the Neo-Platonic Renaissance code of courtly love, based, at least on the surface, on the gentleman's reverential love for the lady. (That rules for this code were almost as current and readily available as those for the Chain of Being is borne out by the wide popularity of Sir Thomas Hoby's translation of Castiglione's The Courtier). Far from rejecting this code in its entirety, in The Taming of the Shrew Shakespeare examines the question of romantic love in terms of courtly, gentlemanly behaviour, a behaviour that also works as a mutual obligation, a contract imposed equally on gentleman and on gentlewoman. Complying with the rules of this behaviour also acts as a reinforcement of the couple's social status, their superiority over those below them on the social scale.

Maybe we should begin here with the concept of gentleman, because in spite of Petruchio's ruffian behaviour, the comedy is based on the implicit norm of gentility. It has been pointed out that both in satire and in comedy whenever we find ourselves laughing, we should become aware of some kind of a comic reversal of a social or rational standard that ordinarily is accepted, taken for granted. In the Sly episode we experience such a reversal as the source of humour when the Lord points out, ‘And how my men will stay themselves from laughter / When they do homage to this simple peasant’; (Ind.,ii, 134-136). It is also worth noticing that Sly shows himself even more ludicrous through his inability to deal with his gentle lady, thereby giving an even stronger proof of being a ‘simple peasant’, and not a gentleman.

If we now examine the reversal of standards as the source of comedy in Katherina's case, we will find that what we are expected to laugh at is not simply that she challenges male dominance (denying first her father's and then Petruchio's authority over her), but that her challenge takes an unladylike expression. And what will add to our sense of comedy is that Petruchio himself puts on the temporary guise of a ‘madcap ruffian’—a guise, emphasizing even more the deviation from the desirable, the gentlemanly norm.

If Petruchio were a real character in life, and not a character in a farce, we would now want to pause and examine this last statement. Is Petruchio's act as a ruffian merely a temporary masque, is it really a disguise? We hear him boast of his experience as an adventurer who had been through storm and eruptions of violence, and toughened by these accordingly, (I, ii, 198-209). Unfortunately also, the very first time we see him, we observe him abuse and strike his trusty old servant, Grumio (I, ii, 5-45), although in this scene he had not yet made the wager to tame Katherina with pretended rudeness. Nevertheless, we should once more remember that in the stylized, two-dimensional world of farce the roughhousing between master and servant is merely a convenient stage diversion. Also, in terms of situational evidence in the play, we see that Petruchio is made welcome by allegedly gentleman friends who repeatedly emphasize that both he and they are from fine, well-established families. Here, then, the question of Petruchio's true gentlemanly qualities must rest for the time being. As a matter of fact, much of the humour still accessible to the modern viewer comes from the fact that in the play the battle between the sexes is actually a game with its own rules, and therefore the hardships accompanying, and the consequences at the outcome of the battle, are severely limited. The particular game between Katherina and Petruchio is that of a gentleman and gentlewoman testing the rules of the romantic etiquette. To conform to these rules, the gentleman has to ‘obey, please, and honour with reverence’ his lady; he has to ‘reckon her more dear to him than his own life and prefer all her commodities and pleasures before his own.’⁹ It goes without saying that to remain a gentleman Petruchio cannot strike Katherina, cannot be rude to her openly, cannot use obscene language or force against her. Without these restrictions, their conflict would be settled quickly through Petruchio's undoubtedly superior physical power. But then the game would not be a game, and the play would not be a play. It is the restrictions implied in the code of gentlemanly behaviour, the hoops he has to jump that make his ‘taming’ of Katherina amusing.

To begin with, Katherina seemingly denies the rules of the romantic game as these relate to the lady who should ‘always show herself toward him tractable, lovely and sweet in language, and as willing to please him as be beloved by him.’¹⁰ In their first meeting it is Katherina who quite explicitly breaks the rules by hitting Petruchio. She does so quite deliberately to test him as a suitor, which in the context means to challenge him on being and remaining a gentleman.

P:
Good Kate, I am a gentleman—
K:
That I'll try. (She strikes him)
P:
I swear I'll cuff you if you strike again.
K:
So may you lose your arms.
If you strike me, you are no gentleman
And if no gentleman, why then no arms.
P:
A herald, Kate? O, put me in your books.

(II, i, 216-221)

In this short exchange, at first he threatens to retaliate violence with violence. She, however, successfully evades his terms by setting her own framework for their game. The moment you strike a lady, you prove yourself no gentleman and therefore not eligible for my hand (Once you lose your status or nobility, you lose your arms you would need to wage our war).

Petruchio admits to the truth of her warning and accepts her terms when saying, ‘Put me in your books’, with a possible pun on ‘Put me in your good books.’ What is important in this exchange is that it is actually Katherina who challenges Petruchio. Also, when he comes to accept the challenge and the terms of their duel, the battle immediately turns into a kind of contract, the terms of which Katherina could indeed enter in her ‘books’.

Later again Petruchio reminds her of the terms of this original contract in the scene where he denies her the clothes and cap appropriate to a gentlewoman of her status. When Kate argues that ‘gentlewomen wear such caps as these’, he answers, ‘When you are gentle, you shall have one too, / And not till then’, (IV, iii, 70-72). In the meantime, however, Petruchio's strategy is to behave himself in a most ungentlemanly, that is most rude, inconsiderate and unjust way to everyone around them. Behaving as a ruffian at his own wedding, he strikes the priest and the sexton, makes impossible, contradictory demands on his inferiors, until Katherina finds herself being pushed into a new position. Feeling ashamed of Petruchio's ungentlemanly behaviour, she comes to stand up for his servants, asking him to practise self-control and, in general, to return to polite, genteel behaviour. In other words, Petruchio does not domesticate Katherina by bringing her admit that she is a woman, but by making her admit that she is a lady.

Therefore it is extremely important that in his ‘taming’ Petruchio never deviates from the code of gentlemanly behaviour to a lady, that he demonstrates that he prefers ‘all her commodities and pleasures before his own’. When Kate is reluctant to leave for his home immediately after the scandalous wedding ceremony, Petruchio pretends that he will have to gallantly rescue her from the others who would not let her go (II, ii, 234-239). He will deny her food and sleep, yet pretend that he does so only because neither the meat nor the bed are good enough for her, that is, reassuring her each time that ‘all is done in reverent care of her’ (IV, i, 198).

At first glance in curious contradiction to the romantic etiquette of reverence and gentility is the openly admitted, crassly commercial basis of Petruchio's wooing: ‘I come to wive it wealthiliy in Padua / If wealthily, then happily, in Padua’ (I, ii, 74-75), he announces at the very beginning, and there is little indication in the play that he changes his mind later by falling in love with Katherina.

He is not at all ashamed of admitting that he looks at marriage as a means of increasing the wealth left him by his father: ‘Antonio, my father is deceased, / And I have thrust myself into this maze, / Happily to wive and thrive as best I may’ (I, ii, 53-55). It is worth pointing out, however, that he is no fortune-hunter in the sense of looking for a dowry to save him from debt, or because he wants to gamble it away. He immediately makes clear that ‘Crowns in my purse I have and goods at home / And so am come abroad to see the world’ (I, ii, 5). Looking for new experience and increasing his wealth is the twin purpose of his coming abroad, ‘To seek fortune further than at home / Where small experience grows’ (I, ii, 50-51).

He regards marriage as the most obvious and rational means of increasing his property, displaying the sober, prudential mentality of an enterpreneur with great consistency throughout the play. Marriage as an economical success is hinted at again at the end when he wins his bet against Lucentio and Hortensio. Katherina's obedience and ‘well tamed’ answer brings him—in effect to both of them—its immediate financial returns. And to drive this point home, Petruchio explains that both Lucentio and Hortensio are bound to lose money as a result of their failure in taming, or dominating their wives: ‘We three are married, but you two are sped. ‘Twas I won the wager’ (V, ii, 184).

The theme of marriage as a test of prudential financial management is also supported by several points in the frame story. Sly, the old drunk, who is allowed to view the whole play as a masque, is a wastrel, unable to ‘husband’ his resources well. Yet it is also Sly who reminds us of the importance of the romantic code of behaviour: Both the lord and his servants laugh at him for being unable to use the language of gentlemanly, romantic love when approaching his lady, for thinking only of the immediate gratification of his sexual appetite.

The rites of marriage explored in The Taming of the Shrew are primarily social, combining the practical foundation of marriage as defined by the rules of the Great Chain of Being and the superstructure of the Romantic code of genteel behaviour. When we observe the two themes more closely, we realize that the economic considerations implied in the bargain between father and suitor complement the other kind of bargain arranged between the lady and her suitor: Both themes are expected to reinforce the central metaphor of marriage as a contract, a bond between two people who are certainly not regarded equal, but are bound together in terms of a well-understood agreement based on mutual obligation.

As a matter of fact, much of Petruchio's wooing sounds more like a discussion of a mutual investment in real estate, than a declaration of affection. No doubt he aims at impressing his future father-in-law by emphasizing his prudence in financial matters: ‘You knew my father well; and in him, me / Left solely heir to all his lands and goods, / Which I have better'd rather than decreas'd’ (II, i, 116-118). It is as a result of this good husbandry of his property that he also feels entitled to a good dowry. ‘Then tell me, if I get your daughter's love, What dowry shall I have with her to wife?’ (II, i, 6-12). He also emphasizes that he is in haste because he is busy with his thriving affairs: ‘Signior Baptista, my business asketh haste / And every day I cannot come to woo’ (II, i, 114-115).

It is still in the spirit of an exclusively financial bargain that Petruchio offers to assure Katherina's widowhood in exchange for the twenty-thousand-crown dowry he will receive at their wedding:

                              And for that dowry, I'll assure her of
Her widowhood, be it that she survive me.
In all my lands and leases whatsoever,
Let specialties be therefore drawn between us
That covenants be kept on either hand

(II, i, 123-127)

Baptista's answer to Petruchio's offer is the first indication that the contract in question is not exclusively financial. Through a pun he points out the difference between the ‘specialties’ of the contract to be drawn in the lawyer's office and the ‘special thing’ that Petruchio must obtain beforehand, ‘Ay, when that special thing is well obtained, / That is her love, for that is all in all’ (II, i, 127-128).

To return to the theme of mutuality, Petruchio claims that what Baptista may consider ‘all in all’ is actually ‘nothing’, that is not at all difficult to obtain. He describes his method of obtaining Katherina's love as the meeting of fire with fire, that is, yielding to her fierce method, to make her yield to him: ‘So I to her, and so she yields to me, / For I am rough and woo not like a babe’ (II, i, 136-137).

Nevertheless, at the end of the scene when wishing Petruchio good luck to his wooing, Baptista reiterates his former point that the signing of the contract hinges upon Petruchio's success in getting Katherina's loving consent.

At this point it is important to mention that Baptista has been accused by several commentators of the play of being an unfeeling materialistic old man who thinks of his daughters exclusively in materialistic terms, and it is true that at one point he as well as promises Bianca to the highest bidder (or rather, to the suitor who can offer a stronger guarantee that he will leave all his property to Bianca in case of her widowhood). Yet, although the discussion of marriage does indeed begin with a bargain between father and suitor, it is only fair to point out that Baptista does not bargain for himself. As their superior, he is also the protector of his daughters and it is his duty to assure their financial security for the rest of their lives, by providing a dowry made available to their husbands. We would be unfair to this basic responsibility of the Elizabethan father if we agreed with the modern reader who claims that Katherina is a neurotic and unhappy human being because she has a tyrannical, a monstrously materialistic, or, even, an uncaring father.

The difficulties of Baptista's role as father to two not equally marriageable daughters must have been quite clear to an Elizabethan audience. Baptista is not a tyrant offending against Bianca by insisting that her older sister should be married first. Neither is he an indifferent or cruel father to Katherina when wishing Petruchio luck in wooing her. Implied in his reasoning is the fact that there is a certain age after which girls are not marriageable. And not to be marriageable is to be a laughing-stock. Katherina is obviously unfair to her father: in one moment she accuses him of not caring whether or not she remains a ridiculous old maid who ‘must dance barefoot on [her younger sister's] weddfng day, And … lead apes in hell’ (II, i, 33-34); in the next moment she attacks him for lacking ‘tender fatherly regard’ when forcing her to marry ‘a madcap ruffian’ (II, i, 279-280) just for the sake of getting rid of her. Marriage may be against her will at the moment, but both she and the audience would agree that it is not against her interest. In effect it must be quite clear to her that she does not have any real alternatives, because when Petruchio declares that they will get married, she does not put up a great deal of resistance. What is more, when Petruchio is late for the wedding, she weeps bitterly in her impatience and humiliation.

Because, although this point is only implicit in the play, Katherina simply has to get married in order to receive protection, security and respect in society—a truism quite clear to her and to the Elizabethan audience as well. And equally true, therefore, is that she also has to accept the undeniable superioriiy of her protector in that society, first the authority of her father and later the authority of her husband.

The comic conflict, then, consists of her premature, foolish denial of her ‘bond’, her ‘duty’ to her superiors, that is the denial of her proper place by challenging the authority of her father and of her husband. At the end of the play she seems to be convinced of her error, preaching the beauty, the harmony resulting from man's unquestioned dominance over woman: ‘Dart not scornful glances from those eyes / To wound thy, lord, thy king, thy governor,’ (V, ii, 137-138), she warns the other wives. Petruchio has made her accept dependency unconditionally, tacitly offering in return his protection and the affection between master and servant, superior and inferior.

In addition, and underlying the affirmation of cosmic, social and domestic hierarchies is the sexual innuendo that deep down, of course, this is exactly what Katherina had desired all the time, driven less by the need to be wooed than by the need to be forcefully claimed by a man. Only by being ‘tamed’,¹¹ that is, cured of her rebellious behavior, is she prepared to consummate her marriage, to take her place as a sexually attractive young woman.

It is at this point that we should look at the last question in connection with Petruchio's taming process. Most of the play's commentators are in agreement praising Petruchio for having chosen his methods in a way to preserve Katherina's chastity until the last ‘Kiss me Kate’, when this exclamation will signal mutual love and understanding. Even feminist critics have been impressed with Petruchio's respect for Katherina's integrity¹², for not forcing upon her conjugal duties until she is emotionally ready to consummate the marriage bond. Reassuring and enlightened as this interpretation may sound, it seems to me that it is very much in discord with the rest of Petruchio's taming strategies. Although he does not use open violence, he uses the technique of physical deprivation, the thwarting of instinct and appetite as a weapon to break her will and enforce obedience. His final declaration, ‘Come Kate, we'll to bed!’ (V, ii, 184) clearly implies a reward for her having behaved according to his expectations, declaring that only now had she proven herself truly desirable to her husband. The consummation of marriage, then, like the satisfying of her other appetites, will follow only after her taming has been fully successful, a reward for her acceptance of her subservient position.

When Katherina explains to the other, still disobedient wives that only if they follow the rules of obedient, pleasing behaviour can they become sexually attractive to their husbands, her words reinforce this interpretation.

A woman mov‘d is like a fountain troubled,
Muddy, ill-seeming, thick, bereft of beauty.
And while it is so, none so dry one thirsty
Will deign to sip, or touch a drop of it.

(V, ii, 142-145)

Katherina's final lecture with its sanctimonious celebration of the feudal social order—a recognizable dramatization of the basic concepts of the Great Chain of Being—must have been quite naturally acceptable to the Elizabethan audience: it simply returns to those concepts of the dominant ideology that have been tested, quite consistently, throughout the play. Nevertheless, it is worth pointing out that the speeeh takes the form of a hyperbole. By offering excessive praise to woman for being a powerful but gentle provider and protector, she also encourages him to fulfil the obligation outlined precisely by his superior position. Lecturing all women, Katherina sings the praise of man who ‘For they maintenance commits his body / To painful labour both by sea and land, / To watch the night in storms, the day in cold, / Whilst thou li'st warm at home, secure and safe’ (V, ii, 148-150). The earnestness of Katherina's gratitude for being protected from the raging storms of the external world should remind us that she cannot mean Petruchio in person—neither has Petruchio been away from her to face the storm, nor has her experience of marriage demonstrated, so far, a sense of warmth, peace and security. What her speech celebrates, therefore, is an abstract norm, the relationship between man and woman in general.

It is the emphasis on the general, on the abstract in Katherina's speech which should make us reflect on some of the more disturbing personal questions left unresolved in the play. Even if Katherina returns to the acceptance of woman's dependence upon man in general, is Petruchio indeed a true gentleman, is he, in person, the best choice for Katherina? Has he ever fallen in love with her? Was his ungentlemanly crudeness deliberate and temporary only? Will he relinquish the rule of the tamer once he achieved victory? Instead of reflecting on any of these questions in terms of the character development, Katherina's speech seems to indicate Shakespeare's sober return from an emphasis on personality to an emphasis on one's role in society; from the youthful exploration of the limits of her personality, Katherina returns to the affirmation of her fixed and circumscribed role and position in the social structure.

Re-examining Katherina's final position in terms of the romantic code, the romantic contract, we should realize that Petruchio should acknowledge ‘such duty as the subject owes the prince’ with particular kindness. According to the rules binding him as a true gentleman, he should not, he cannot, accept the crowning gestures of subservience in which Katherina urges all wives to ‘place your hands below your husband's foot’ (V, ii. 177). Nevertheless, it is within his power to accept or reject the feudal homage offered to him by Katherina in the spirit of abject humility.

Some of the ambivalence in the comic resolution harks back to the dilemma at the very heart of the romantic code that The Taming of the Shrew is exploring in its social context. On the one hand, woman is placed on a pedestal and praised as man's guiding light, even mediator between the light of heaven and the light of the senses. Hence the courtier is encouraged to ‘obey, please and honour her with reverence … and love no less in her the beauty of the mind, than of the body’. On the other hand, if we only follow the same source to the next passage, we hear that ‘Therefore let him have a care not to suffer her to run into any error, but with lessons and good exhortations always to frame her mind to modesty, to temperance, to true honesty, and so to work that there may never take place in her other than pure thoughts far wide from all filthiness of vices’.¹³ Suddenly, the lady the gentleman should revere and obey has turned into a weak, fallible creature to be commanded and protected from many things (among them the filthiness of vices she may have assumedly greater predilection for than he himself). There is a split at the very heart of the romantic code, then, quite obvious if we follow the language starting at its inception in the Neoplatonism of the Renaissance, and going on, almost without a break, to the great Romantic tradition in the nineteenth century. In ‘She was a phantom of delight’ Wordsworth's famous lines describe

A perfect Woman, nobly planned,
To warn, to comfort, and command;
And yet a Spirit still, and bright,
With something of angelic light’

Woman the guiding light that also has to be guided and commanded by the biologically, rationally, socially, superior male—here is the rift at the heart of the romantic code, an attitude to woman that shows its own unresolved contradictions.

The defeat of Katherina's rebellious assertion of freedom and independence foreshadows much of the ambivalence of the mature comedies and the later tragedies. In this early comedy the rebel's personal, psychological conflict is resolved by a conventional, somewhat oversimplified comic resolution: in Katherina's final speech we return to the truisms about man and woman in general. Having recovered from her shrewdness, Katherina offers praise to domestic happiness as an illustration of an authoritarian, hierarchical concept of order and harmony. Yet, the very fact that the ‘happy ending’ makes so many readers wonder, that they feel compelled to justify its conviction and validity, implies that Katherina's original assertion of ‘I will be free’ created a resonance difficult to forget. In effect, in spite of the two-dimensionality of the characters—as a comedy, a farce, or even an allegory to illustrate the Elizabethan truisms of woman's dependence on the male—Katherina's words hit a chord which anticipates the far more disturbing and evocative reverberation raised by the truly unforgettable voices of Emilia and Desdemona in Othello, of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, of Edmund in King Lear—all of them questioning, challenging the authoritarian world order, all of them in search of equality, independence, individuality, all of them tragic voices.

II

In the past two decades Feminist criticism has been paying close attention to many of Shakespeare's woman characters and to the male-female relationships within various plays, concentrating in each case on the questions of sexual politics, on the problems of power and powerlessness. Valuable as the corrective vision of feminist criticism may be, it often ignores the characters' own ideological framework, overlooking the fundamental influence of the Great Chain of Being as it illuminates the cosmic, political, social, and even psychological aspects of the powerplay between Shakespeare's males and females.

Irene Dash, for example, draws attention to the changes in the sexual politics between Othello and Desdemona as the couple leaves behind the first phase of their relationship established at the wooing, and enters a new stage in marriage. Dash suggests that Othello's tragic mistake follows from a psychological block that develops between him and Desdemona due to the fact that after marriage he suddenly comes to see her as property, and therefore no longer an autonomous human being.¹⁴ Although no sensitive reader would disagree with this observation, Dash's interpretation remains incomplete until we realize that the tragic error in Othello's behaviour is by no means an exclusively private, personal error, a shortcoming restricted to Othello alone. Othello's behaviour to his wife as his property he is responsible for is an attitude sanctioned by the entire ideology of the Chain of Being, an ideology advocating the unquestioned authority of the superior over his dependent. Desdemona's own repeated admission of unconditional obedience and willingness to put up with even the most unreasonable moods of her Lord only underlines the orthodox, conservative affirmation of Othello's absolute authority due to his position as her husband.

Yet, Othello, like The Taming of the Shrew, also offers a highly controversial documentary evidence of Shakespeare's ambivalence to woman's assertion of independence and her plea for equal rights. It is Emilia's speech about the wife's right to be unfaithful to a husband who is unreasonably jealous, or himself unfaithful to his marriage vows:

But I do think it is their husbands' faults
If wives do fall: say that they slack their duties
And pour our treasures into foreign laps;
Or else break out in peevish jealousies,
Throwing restraint upon us: or say they strike us,
Or scant our former having in despite,
Why, we have galls; and though we have some grace,
Yet have we some revenge. Let husbands know,
Their wives have sense like them: they see, and smell,
And have their palates both for sweet and sour,
As husbands have. What is it that they do,
When they change us for others? Is it sport?
I think it is: and doth affection breed it?
I think it doth. Is't frailty that thus errs?
It is so too. And have not we affections?
Deisres for sport? and frailty, as men have?
Then let them use us well; else let them know,
The ills we do, their ills instruct us so.

(IV, iii, 86-103)

Emilia's logic may appear so irrefutable to us modern readers that we may be tempted to accept her speech as a mouthpiece for Shakespeare's own opinion. Most likely even the Elizabethan audience must have responded to some of its ingenuous arguments for woman's infidelity with a smile of recognition, the way we may respond to the insights of a clever, precocious, but basically naive child. But whatever the audience may think or have thought about these ideas in themselves, the speech can reveal its true meaning only when we look at it in context of the rest of the play, and not in isolation.

Although Emilia's plea for woman's right to be as unfaithful to her vow as the male is may seem to us a rather amusing suggestion, Desdemona's response of outraged innocence and genuine sadness should immediately establish for the audience that Emilia is not to be taken seriously. ‘Good night, good night: God me such usage send, / Not to pick bad from bad, but by bad mend’ (IV, iii, 104-105). It is Desdemona's highminded vision with the higher truth of orthodox religion which should override the apparent, false attraction of Emilia's argument.

Emilia's view is irresponsible in the wider view of the world order which relies on the undisputed superiority of the male over the female. The falseness of Emilia's position in terms of this ideology is also supported by her role as a character in the play. As a rebel, she is proven a traitor both to her mistress, Desdemona, and to her own words when she obeys Iago's dishonest demand and lets him take Desdemona' handkerchief (although she knows that it means a great deal to Desdemona).

Both Juliet's Nurse and Emilia can rant and rave against women's subordinate position to man, and introduce, as it were in their naivete', the piquant new notion of male-female equality. They are uneducated, socially inferior, and, of course, they are also women. Hence their words are not taken quite seriously by the Elizabethan audience. To bear this out, in the context of the dramatic action they are both shown as flawed, irresponsible, confused, even treacherous. In their own lives they are actually quite complacent to the existing rules of social-sexual politics and have learnt to take advantage of it.

There can be little doubt that in spite of Shakespeare's power to evoke our sympathy with those who challenge the restrictions preventing men and women from becoming autonomous, individual beings, the concepts of the Great Chain of Being form a moral guide in Othello. Othello is not blamed for brutally killing Desdemona; what he is blamed for is killing her innocent of the crime of adultery. Even in the moment before his suicide, that is in the depth of his grief and regret over having lost her, Othello insists on having been ‘An honourable murderer … For naught I did in hate but all in honor.’ (V, ii, 289-291). In other words, had Desdemona been indeed unfaithful, Othello should not blame himself for killing her: to revenge himself on an unfaithful wife would be simply a matter of defending his honour.

It is also interesting to see that some of Desdemona's misfortune is due to her loving Othello too much. Having rebelled against her father's authority by marrying Othello, now she is becoming suspect of rebellion, of treachery against man's authority in general. Once Othello is made to turn against her, he himself will regard Desdemona's rebellion against her father as proof of her unreliability.

As a matter of fact, women caught in open rebellion, like Emilia, or in the conflict of loyalty or obedience to two authorities—that is caught between their ‘bond’ to their husband and to their father at the same time—are to lose inevitably. Cordelia is in such a double bind between Lear and her future husband, and Desdemona between her father and Othello.

Putting Desdemona's and Katherina's plight in the wider ideological framework of the Great Chain of Being would also help us to see their predicament in a perspective that has philosophical and aesthetic significance beyond the boundaries of male- female relationships. Although Katherina, for example, may be still regarded as predominantly a type her predicament already anticipates Shakespeare's preoccupation with the conflict between traditional, dogmatic definitions and their challenge by the individual, the growing creative tension between the powerful ideology inherited from the Middle Ages and the emerging consciousness of a subjective, multi-dimensional, psychologically ‘modern’ feeling for the individual character.

Going even further, we may even argue that this conflict, this duality, is not exclusive to Shakespeare, or even to literature alone. In the visual arts, for example, the medieval emphasis on design and two-dimensional representation finds itself in conflict with the Renaissance emphasis on perspective, the three-dimensional presentation of figures in space, a greater emphasis on detail, close observation, verisimilitude.

As for the Renaissance artist's own ambivalence to his inherited tradition, the analogy with Shakespeare seems to be most obvious in the case of Michelangelo, in Michelangeo's ‘furious and all-consuming effort to attain an equilibrium between past and present, religion and self, humility and spiritual pride [which], gives his work much of its extraordinary dynamism and edge’.¹⁵

It seems to me that what is the experience of space and three-dimensionality to the Renaissance artist is the experience of psychological space and three-dimensionality, that is, an awareness of character as more than simply a type, an awareness of the individual as more than his definition according to his fixed position in the Chain of Being.

One could develop the parallel even further by looking at Michelangelo's use of contraposto, which, related to literature, seems to me surprisingly close to some basic elements of dramatic conflict, concepts relating to tension, suspense, the expectation of movement.

For Michelangelo ‘creating movement depended on the kind of paradoxical thinking reflected in the term of contraposto. Balancing different pictorial and sculptural elements against each other was the key to movement and volume, which were, in turn, the key to the experience of three-dimensional space’. It is through the ‘paradoxical thinking’ behind contraposto that Michelangelo is determined to accomplish his ‘final goal … to make the stone or the fresco alive, to give the human figure the appearance of life.’¹⁶

Although we would be hard put to define exactly what this pictorial ‘appearance of life’ consists of, there is no doubt that all subsequent great painters demonstrate a desire to achieve it. Just so in the world of drama. Although we may have trouble defining how Shakespeare's mature characters have achieved their ‘appearance of life’, one cannot really argue that subsequent writers have been trying to accomplish the effect of psychological complexity and verisimilitude in ways which are strikingly and recognizably different from the interpretation of reality established in the Middle Ages.

Although we have been warned by scholars of Elizabethan literature not to expect an abrupt, radical break between Medieval and Renaissance world pictures both Lovejoy and Tillyard¹⁷ would agree that the coherence of this medieval world picture had been threatened by the New Philosophy of the Renaissance, a Philosophy which will, eventually ‘call all in doubt’. Nowhere is this struggle more dramatic, more complex, than in the dynamic world of Shakespeare's plays, both in his characters' energetic challenge of the authoritarian, hierarchical, static ideology of the Great Chain of Being, and in his own return, play after play, to the traditional, conservative ideology of this same world order in the resolution of the dramatic conflict.

In the mature comedies and later tragedies the challenge of this New Philosophy is often carried out by characters who quite openly and consistently plead for equality, rights equal to those above them in rank, characters who knowingly challenge the justice of the authoritarian, hierarchical world order. It is ironic that it happens to be the Feminist critic who overlooks the fact that Katherina's argument for her right to resist the authority of a superior puts her in the company not only of Emilia and Desdemona, but also of Shylock and Edmund.

When Edmund, for example, chafes against the right of Edgar, his older brother, arguing that neither Edgar's legitimacy nor his ascendance in age should justify his sole right to their father's wealth and title, his argument for equality echoes the feelings of Emilia and also those of Shylock. Examined in itself, that is in isolation from the rest of the play, Edmund's idea carries even greater philosophical and psychological conviction than did the pleas of Katherina or Emilia:

                                                                                                    Wherefore should I
Stand in the plague of custom, and permit
The curiosity of nations to deprive me.
For that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines
Lag of a brother? Why bastard? Wherefore base?
When my dimensions are as well compact
My mind as generous, and my shape as true,
As honest madam's issue? Why brand they us
With base? with baseness? bastardy? base, base?
Who in the lusty stealth of nature, take
More composition and fierce quality
Than doth, within a dull, stale, tired bed,
Go to th' creating a whole tribe of fops
Got 'tweem asleep and awake? Well then,
Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land:
Our father's love is to the bastard Edmund
As to th' legitimate. Fine word ‘legitimate’!
Well. my legitimate, if this letter speed,
And my invention thrive, Edmund the base
Shall top th' legitimate: I grow, I prosper.
Now. gods, stand up for bastards’!

(I, ii, 1-22)

Challenging the authority of the old over the young in general, Edmund is ready to overthrow the authority of his old king, Lear, and of his own old father, Gloucester, cynically admitting the necessity of their destruction for his own advancement: ‘The younger rises when the old doth fall’ (III, iii, 23).

Put in a modern context, Edmund's argument may sound ‘legitimate’ indeed when he denies the supremacy of his brother. We may even understand some of his antagonism to his father, especially if we interpret the first scene in a way that allows Edmund to overhear Gloucester's tactless remarks about his bastard son. Our modern, liberal tendency for identifying with the underdog may encourage sympathetic or at lest understanding attitudes to Edmund when he challenges his father's supremacy, just as we may find ourselves tempted to assume that Shylock's well-known speech on the equality between Jew and Gentile may represent Shakespeare's personal views on religious tolerance:

Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, psssions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? and if you wrong us shall we not revenge?

(III, i, 52-60)

In this famous challenge to the supremacy of Gentiles Shylock argues—and most modern readers feel that he argues with eloquence and irrefutable logic—for the equality of Jews based on their equal sensibility, their demonstrably common humanity with their oppressors.

Yet, if we return the speeches into their context in each play, as soon as we look at the role of the character in the play, we have to realize that our sympathy was immature, or indeed misplaced in both cases. There is no doubt that Edmund's tremendous ambition for power goes together with the energy and vitality of the Machiavellian villain-hero. But this energy is destructive; he is treacherous as a brother, as a son, as a lover, as well as a political subject to his king. Although his explicit challenges to the cosmic order and to the body politic are eloquent, even heroic challenges to assert the right of the individual to break the social mold, the aims and energies of individualism are intended to benefit no one else but himself. In spite of Edmund's seeming vitality, in his case the individual rebel is proven to be destructive and ultimately self-destructive.

As for the role of Shylock in the play, there is no doubt that he is the ‘blocking character’ in the comedy, standing in the way of all the major characters' happiness, his own daughter included. In other words, both in the context of the play as a dramatic convention and in context of what has been called Shakespeare's ‘allegorical impressionism’¹⁸, there is no doubt that Shylock represents the Old Law of Justice versus the New Law of Mercy, and since the first is considered by the Elizabethan audience clearly inferior to the latter, Shylock simply has to be defeated, or rather, the terms of his contract have to be defeated. In effect, Shylock is probably the only one of Shakespeare's father characters who is not only defeated, but also proven to be morally wrong. Although Desdemona's father is humiliated by her marriage to Othello, and he dies, assumedly, of a broken heart, even in his bitterness and frustration he carries a sense of nobility and dignity. As for Lear, although he is defeated he has the audience's sympathy in his misfortune as a man, as a father ‘more sinned against than sinning’.

In itself either Edmund's or Shylock's speech challenging the cosmic order may inevitably engage our sympathy as a plea for equality coming from the downtrodden, as an assertion for the right of the individual. However, in the context of the whole play we are asked to consider that rebellion is short-sighted, that the idea of equality may have disastrous consequences, destroying the security of order and harmony in the family circle, in the body politic, indeed in the whole cosmos. Because, as already Katherina's speech has indicated, at the bottom of the acquiescence to the ideology of the Chain of Being lies the religious argument. God has created the Chain of Being as a means for universal order and a proof of divine benevolence. Hence removing a single link at any level of the chain is equivalent to challenging the whole structure, threatening its collapse. Therefore, railing against one's position in the hierarchical structure is tantamount to railing against the ordering Intelligence beyond it all. Thus the rebel against one's king and sovereign is inevitably a traitor, and almost as inevitably, representative of spiritual evil. By the same token, pleading of equality, that is, for the overthrow of authority within the family is also equivalent to political treachery. Although we may find both Shylock's and Edmund's argument for equality moving, for the Elizabethan audience the attraction of the idea of equality must have been short-lived, indeed. Upon examination, the propositions of equality carry only a partial truth, inferior to the higher truth of the cosmic order established in accordance with the dominant religious beliefs.

Representative of the emerging consciousness of Renaissance man as an individual, Shakespeare is compelled to make some of his most unforgettable characters express doubt, challenge the validity of the static, hierarchical world system based on uncritical obedience to rank and authority. Nevertheless, as a thinker whose values and conceptions are still based on the reassuring system of order and harmony inherent in the Chain of Being, he cannot negate or reject the fundamental concepts of this ideology in the end. Hence the motivating force of deeply felt and often unsolvable dramatic conflict, the individual caught in the need for rebellion to assert his integrity and uniqueness, and the almost inevitably tragic or melancholy solutions to this conflict.

The Taming of the Shrew introduces Shakespeare's ambivalence to the idea of equality, and his ambivalence to the challenger of authority. Although Katherina happens to be one of the most outspoken and verbal of Shakespeare's challengers of authority, the play traces the troubling question of equality in the relationship between a young man and a young woman, in a situation where Katherina's rebellion is clearly not a matter of life and death. Also, the conflict between rebel and authority is enacted in a situation where the seriousness of the potential clash is modified by the healthy sexual appetite of both opponents who are supposed to be developing a mutual attraction for each other in the course of the resolution of their conflict. As a result, although the idea of equality is certainly rejected after Katherina's initial attempt to assert her self our sense of her defeat is blunted by Shakespeare's emphasis on marriage as a legal, and therefore mutually binding contract, including both pragmatic and romantic terms both partners should honour and accept.

It is a conservative emphasis that offers mutuality to substitute for equality in the relationship between master and servant, superior and inferior, and it is to the entrenched position of a conservative authoritarian ideology that Katherina is forced to retreat in order to assure us of a ‘happy ending’. Nevertheless, it was through her spirited exploration of asserting herself as a free human being that she has come to anticipate the spirit, the complexity, and the vitality of some of the most unforgettable, most vividly realized characters in the mature comedies and in the great tragedies.

Notes

1. H. B. Charlton, Shakespearean Comedy, London, Macmillan, 1938, p. 46

2. For a short discussion of some recent commentaries, see Robert Heilman, ‘Introduction’ to Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, Signet Classics, 1966, pp. xxiii-xiii

3. For psychoanalytical interpretations, see Norman Holland, Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare, New York, McGraw Hill, 1964, p. 269

4. Irene Dash, Wooing, Wedding and Power: Women in Shakespeare's Plays, New York, Columbia University Press, 1981, pp. 61-64

5. Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance, New York, Harcourt, Brace 1965

6. Maynard Mack, ‘Engagement and Detachment in Shakespeare's Play’, in The Taming of the Shrew, Signet, p. 215

7. E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture, New York, Vintage [n. d.] p. 10

8. Richard Hooker, Excerpts from The Laws of Ecclcsiastical Polity in The Conservative Tradition in European Thought, ed. by R, E. Schuettinfer, New York, Putnam, 1970, p. 129

9. Sir Thomas Hoby, The Courtier, translation of B. Castiglione's II Cortegiano, in Tudor Poetry and Prose, ed, J. W. Hebel and al., New York, Appleton-Century Crofts, 1953, p, 702

10. Ibid.

11. Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1951, p. 69

12. Dash, p. 64

13. Hoby, p. 702

14. Dash, Ibid.

15. Michael Brenson, ‘Seeing Contemporary Art in the Light of Michelangelo’, The New York Times, Aug. 19, 1984, p. 23

16. Ibid.

17. A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, Cambridge; Harvard U: P. 1936, p. 101; Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture, p. 100. lia Formigiari, ‘Chain of Being, in Dictionary of the History of Ideas; Scribner, 1972, v. l, pp. 325-333

18. Nevil Coghill, ‘The basis of Shakespearean Comedy’ in The Taming of the Shrew, Signet, p. 182