SOURCE: Morris, Brian, ed. Introduction to The Taming of the Shrew, by William Shakespeare, pp. 1-149. London: Methuen, 1981.

[In the following excerpt from the introduction to the Arden edition, Morris provides an overview of the structure and themes of The Taming of the Shrew.]

STRUCTURES

The history of the text through its various adaptations is important because it focuses critical attention on what successive generations of actors and dramatists considered essentially dramatic in it. Garrick's Catharine and Petruchio dominated this transmission, suggesting that in the theatrical structure the taming plot makes the play's most powerful dramatic statement. It is, after all, The Taming of the Shrew, not Lucentio and Bianca, or Sly's Dream.

As we have seen, Garrick stitched together the large set pieces of the taming plot: the bargain between Petruchio and Baptista, the lute-breaking, the wooing, the wedding, the reception at Petruchio's house, the Tailor and Haberdasher scene, the sun and moon scene, and the last part of the final scene in which Petruchio displays his wife's obedience and makes his peace with her. A radical selection, made for purely theatrical purposes, it nevertheless lays bare one of the basic structures and rhythmic patterns of Shakespeare's play, and the enchaînement of the scenes isolates the process of domestication and reduction to conformity which lies at the heart of it.¹ After the Induction, Shakespeare's Act I is composed of relatively short episodes with little stage action (except for Petruchio's boisterous assault on Grumio), and mostly concerned with exposition or the creation of the various intrigues. Then follows what is by far the longest scene in the play (II.i), stretching to over four hundred lines, and presenting a four times repeated pattern of contest and recuperation, rising to a climax in the parodic ‘wooing’ and descending through the ‘auction of Bianca’ to the mundanities of plotting and intrigue. Balancing this overarching structure is a subsidiary pattern which contrasts physical violence with the eloquence of persuasions and the rituals of debate. The first contest opens the scene violently. Bianca, her hands tied, is haled about and struck by Katherina in a piece of stage action which reiterates and emphasizes the previous, lesser, conflicts between the Hostess and Sly, and Petruchio and Grumio. It is an angry episode, and when Baptista parts them Katherina leaves the stage in an outburst of frustration. Tension is released by the formal presentation to Baptista of the disguised lovers, Lucentio, Hortensio and Tranio, with civilized introductions and the giving of gifts until the ‘tutors’ are sent to meet their pupils off-stage. This leaves Petruchio and Baptista to begin the second contest, a brisk bargaining about Katherina's dowry (they are like merchants chaffering over a parcel of goods), which lacks the direct violence of the episode between the sisters. When the bargain is made, Hortensio enters ‘with his head broke’ and relates Katherina's off-stage attack on him. For the audience this is not a contest, since they are watching Hortensio's recuperation, but it repeats Katherina's propensity to violence, and creates anticipation for the third contest, the wooing, which is cunningly prepared and delayed by Petruchio's soliloquy—a moment of physical rest when he daringly reveals the first stage of his taming strategy. The wooing begins with a wit-bout, or, rather, a fast exchange of fairly crude insults, until Katherina takes an advantage by striking Petruchio. This provokes his reply: ‘I swear I'll cuff you, if you strike again.’ Katherina senses the danger and resumes wit-play: ‘So may you lose your arms. …’ It is a point of climax, marking a boundary in the dispute; this will not, we appreciate, be a matter of simple strength and brutality. The verbal jesting continues, Petruchio puts his plan into action, and so bewilders Katherina that she can offer only token resistance to his outrageous claims, made when Baptista, Gremio and Tranio enter. Recuperation follows, since Petruchio's announcement of the result of his wooing and his arrangements for the wedding go virtually unopposed. When Petruchio and Katherina leave the stage we witness the last contest, between Gremio and Tranio for the hand of Bianca. Baptista conducts this as a long, deliberate auction, and sells to the highest bidder. Tranio, having topped Gremio's bid, bandies a few words with the loser, plans how to make good his boast, and the scene ends.

Structurally, it is a theme and variations, the basic motif of a contest being repeated and modulated into different keys: a physical fight, the bargaining for a marriage contract, a contentious wooing, and an auction. And, each time, the form is related more and more obliquely to the content. The fight is natural, the marriage contract less so (since Petruchio talks of money and Baptista insists on love). The wooing is most abnormal, comprising insults, anger and the clash of wills, and the auction of Bianca's hand would have seemed as inappropriate to an Elizabethan audience (however well accustomed it was to hard bargaining over marriage contracts) as a broadly similar episode did to the first readers of Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge. The scene moves from the normal to the fantastic through repeated contests, separated by ever briefer episodes of rest, so that its pace increases steadily. As Jones says (of a scene in Titus Andronicus):

If we look back for a moment to the scene just discussed, we can hardly fail to be struck by the bold simplicity of its shape. … Shakespeare's big scenes are usually founded on such powerfully simple devices as this.²

Even in so early a play as The Shrew [The Taming of the Shrew] Shakespeare's constructive art is displayed in his elegant manipulation of such simplicities.³

The second big scene in the taming plot (a scene given full value in Garrick's adaptation) is the wedding scene (III.ii), which might be described as a ‘displacement’ scene, since the important action takes place off-stage, and is reported by witnesses. Petruchio's progress to Padua and the wedding itself are not allowed on the stage, and the two are linked only by the comparatively brief appearance of Petruchio, fantastically dressed, to claim his bride. The scene begins with Baptista's complaints about Petruchio's lateness, and Katherina's outburst of shame and anger. Biondello's entry, with his long description of Petruchio's grotesque clothing and knackered horse, builds up his eventual appearance on stage, but also allows the audience to realize that the bridegroom is approaching his marriage disgracefully unprepared. Petruchio's point is that so is the bride. He displaces her emotional unpreparedness on to his own garments and means of transport, just as the dramaturgy of the scene displaces the simple sight of him so arrayed on to the more explicit and telling verbal description. The same is true of the wedding. Gremio reports Petruchio's antics at the ceremony, cuffing the priest, stamping and swearing ‘As if the vicar meant to cozen him’, when the action itself (or something like it) would have made a most effective stage spectacle. The displacement of the action by the description reflects Petruchio's displacement of the solemn ‘union of this man with this woman’ with a violent, disrespectful travesty of it—which is what he believes marriage to an unreformed shrew to be. It is both an image of his belief and a part of his treatment, and the displacement technique opens up a receding perspective of great dramatic depth.

The pattern of ‘taming’ scenes in Act IV (which Garrick's version excerpts into an unbroken sequence) forms the very heart of the play in the theatre. This process of taming, teaching and testing, by various and unexpected dislocations of normality, is strongly visual and comparatively direct.⁴ In stage terms it is the busiest part of the play, with servants bustling about, food brought, meat thrown round the stage, the Haberdasher disdained and the Tailor abused, and all the preparations for the return to Padua as well as the journey itself. The climax comes at IV.v, in the form of what Jones recognizes as a ‘transformation’ or ‘conversion’ scene.⁵ Either from weariness or because she at last recognizes the game her husband is playing, Katherina turns from a contradicting shrew into an utterly compliant wife, agreeing with him that the sun is the moon, or the moon the sun:

What you will have it nam'd, even that it is,
And so it shall be so for Katherine.

This is the turning-point of the plot and the play, suitably and tellingly marked by the metaphor in Hortensio's line: ‘Petruchio, go thy ways, the field is won.’⁶ But, as before and after in the play, there is one more test than seems strictly necessary, and Katherina has to agree that Vincentio is either a budding virgin or an old man, whichever Petruchio decrees. Like many other of Shakespeare's transformation scenes, this climactic scene has a compelling effect in the theatre. We recognize triumph, we sympathize with surrender; we experience satisfaction in the completion of a long pattern, and we regret that an interesting fight seems finished.

Garrick's Catharine and Petruchio makes short work of Shakespeare's final ensemble scene, V.ii. By replacing Vincentio (in IV.v) with Baptista, Garrick telescopes the closing scenes. He omits both the feast and the wager, and severely cuts Katherina's long ‘obedience’ speech, redistributing parts of it to Petruchio. The result is brisk and bright, and it entirely falsifies Shakespeare's sense of an ending. Shakespeare, in V.ii, is at pains to have as many characters as possible on stage and involved in a series of rituals. The scene opens with a banquet⁷ at Lucentio's house (almost the first time in the play anyone has had anything to eat). Hospitality and generosity are the keynotes, but witty conversation soon gives rise to a verbal contest between Katherina and the Widow. This, in turn, slowly moves on to the idea of a larger contest and a formal wager on the obedience of the three wives. This produces the thrice-repeated ritual of the summoned wife and her response, culminating in the dutiful appearance of Katherina and her obedient departure to bring in the other wives. Petruchio has won his wager, but again there is the superfluous, and theatrically suspenseful, test. She must take off her cap and trample on it, and she must ‘tell these headstrong women / What duty they do owe their lords and husbands’. She obeys. This part of the scene is complex and vitally important to any interpretation of the play, and it is fully discussed below (see pp. 143ff.). For the moment, considering only its place in the theatrical structure of the taming plot, it is sufficient to say that the play ends with a long, full, formal, developed, public statement by Katherina, and Petruchio's recognition of the significance of that statement. This final ensemble scene, then, recapitulates the contests and the testings of the earlier Acts, in a strongly ritualized action, and guarantees the truth of the transformation brought about in IV.v, which was the climax of Petruchio's taming technique based on the dislocations of normal expectance and displacements which the wedding scene (III.ii) exemplifies and enacts. Shakespeare develops these various ‘scenic patterns’ in various ways throughout his dramatic career, but as they are deployed here they create a strong theatrical structure, forming the central statement of the play.

The strength of this structure is in no way vitiated by its refusal to employ the maximum of narrative suspense. We are told what is to happen, and we watch to see if it will. The theatrical pattern of ‘the fulfilled declaration’ creates a particular kind of audience participation. Petruchio's two soliloquies (II.i. 168-81 and IV.i. 175-98) make us privy to his intent as no one else in the play is permitted to be, and we watch the working out of his proposition, in two stages, like the demonstration of a mathematical proof. This places Petruchio squarely at the centre of the plot, and he is the focus of audience attention (it is surprising how small Katherina's part is, in terms of lines spoken). In the taming plot our principal concern is with the falconer, not with the bird.

Of all the post-Shakespearean adaptations of The Shrew only Lacey's Sauny the Scott has any use for the sub-plot, with its disguises and intrigues. The verdict of the theatre seems to have been that it is inferior, detachable and dispensable. As we have seen (p. 99), it was not until the Victorian period that it was restored to performance. Yet, almost alone among the early critics, Dr Johnson recognized that it is essential to Shakespeare's purposes. He says:

Of this play the two plots are so well united, that they can hardly be called two without injury to the art with which they are interwoven. The attention is entertained with all the variety of a double plot, yet is not distracted by unconnected incidents.⁸

Modern critics concur, virtually with one voice, and Hibbard is typical when he says, ‘the first audience to witness a performance of the play … were seeing the most elaborately and skilfully designed comedy that had yet appeared on the English stage’.⁹ Agreement about Shakespeare's constructional skills, however, should not blunt our recognition that the sub-plot is in quite a different key—less direct, less robust, more conventional in its characterizations, and by turns flatter and more ornate in its language. It does not work through such large set-piece scenes as the taming plot does. The lute-breaking episode in II.i and the scene (III.i) where Lucentio and Hortensio instruct Bianca in music and Latin are theatrically important and memorable, but for the most part the plot is conducted in comparatively brief episodes of scheming and deception. Shakespeare's skill in exposition may be illustrated from his delaying and integrating technique at the opening of the play. The title creates an expectation of conflict between a man and his wife, but the Induction¹⁰ offers us immediately a dispute between the Hostess and a Beggar, followed by a long episode in which a Lord and his train plan to deceive the sleeping Beggar that he is a Lord. This is interrupted by the arrival of the actors, after which the Lord's plot is seen in operation, with Sly deceived for over a hundred lines until the actors come to play their comedy. The play-within-the-play then begins with the sub-plot, Lucentio and Tranio arriving in Padua to pursue a course of study and meeting Baptista, his daughters and suitors at I.i.47. Until this point (350 lines into a play only 2750 lines long) there is no hint of a shrew, yet all that has taken place proves, in the end, to be thematically and structurally relevant. At I.i.48, Baptista firmly links the two plots by his initial announcement:

Gentlemen, importune me no farther,
For how I firmly am resolv'd you know;
That is, not to bestow my youngest daughter
Before I have a husband for the elder.

It is from this decision that all the scheming of the sub-plot flows, with Hortensio, Lucentio and Gremio pursuing their various ways to win Bianca. As Alexander Leggatt has suggested,¹¹ the taming plot, by coming later, may be seen as, in part, ‘a reflection of it at a deeper level’, but the contest for Bianca is also a parallel to the contest between Petruchio and Katherina. In both cases courtship is seen as a struggle, a conflict, and Shakespeare signals this by the way in which, after I.i, the plots interweave.

Shakespeare derived several advantages from his choice of Gascoigne's Supposes as his sub-plot's source (see pp. 78-84). Italian literature was fashionable, Roman comedy was academically respectable, but not many vernacular plays had been built on these bases. As Charlton remarked, ‘Not many English comedies of the sixteenth century are built directly on Italian models’,¹² so that Shakespeare's work had the advantage of novelty. By a discreet ‘italianizing’ of the taming plot—giving the characters Italian names, setting the play in Padua, and so on—and by integrating it with Gascoigne's efficient translation from the popular Ariosto, Shakespeare, as M. C. Bradbrook says, adjusted ‘native popular traditional art’ to the ‘socially more esteemed classical and foreign models’.¹³ The title of the play, The Taming of the Shrew, would have sounded very like a contribution to the growing debate on the status of wives and the rights and duties of marriage, and the added Italian flavour provided a dash of sophistication.

The use of Supposes also adds a dimension of intrigue and indirection to The Shrew, counterpointing Petruchio's direct methods of courtship. Baptista's ban (I.i.48) on direct competition for Bianca makes subterfuge necessary, and brings about the disguises of Hortensio and Lucentio. These create both confusion and deception, prospering the action of the play, but they also imply a significant enlargement of Bianca's part. Polynesta (her original in Supposes) has been seduced two years ago, and is pregnant by Erostrato, but she rarely appears in the play. By making her a virgin, Katherina's younger sister, and by adding a third (Hortensio)¹⁴ to the list of her suitors, Shakespeare can increase the element of romance in the play (as with Lucentio's rapturous ‘love at first sight’ in I.i), and permit the younger sister to have a personality of her own, to complement the Shrew's. The development of Bianca is subtle. In I.i she appears the dutiful, submissive daughter, all ‘mild behaviour and sobriety’, though her first words, to Katherina, are beautifully barbed: ‘Sister, content you in my discontent.’ She obeys her father, suffers physical violence from her sister (II.i), and publicly accepts the appointment of her ‘tutors’. When she is alone with them, however, she is in complete, cool command:

Why, gentlemen, you do me double wrong
To strive for that which resteth in my choice.
I am no breeching scholar in the schools,
I'll not be tied to hours nor 'pointed times,
But learn my lessons as I please myself.

(III.i.16-20)

It comes as small surprise, when she is married to Lucentio, that she assumes many of the characteristics of her shrewish sister when she is sent for in the final scene. The treatment of Bianca is typical of the ‘room for development’ which Shakespeare gives himself when he integrates the two plots.

The intrigues and the romantic quality of the sub-plot also allow Shakespeare to make comparisons and contrasts which clarify and deepen the thematic development. Leggatt points out that the two plots ‘present a contrast in conventions, both social and dramatic’.¹⁵ And the contrasts are not simple. Leggatt adds: ‘The courting of Bianca follows literary convention: and this is played off against the social conventions followed by her father, the romanticism of the one contrasting with the realism of the other.’

Lucentio's rapturous passion in I.i is contrasted not only with Petruchio's realistic declaration ‘I come to wive it wealthily in Padua’ (I.ii.74) and with his brisk financial bargaining over Katherina's dowry (II.i.119-27), but also with Baptista's thoroughly commercial auction of his daughter later in the scene. Contrasts of social and dramatic convention of this kind are the staple of the play's development, and they comment ironically one on the other, refusing to allow any single attitude to love and marriage to go unchallenged.¹⁶ But the sub-plot is patient of other kinds of contrast, some superficial, some deep. From its Roman and Italian sources comes the opposition of youth and age: Baptista, Vincentio, the Pedant and Gremio are the targets of the scheming young men, Lucentio, Tranio and Hortensio, made explicit in Grumio's comment: ‘Here's no knavery. See, to beguile the old folks, how the young folks lay their heads together’ (I.ii.137-8). Then there is the direct comparison between Petruchio and Lucentio as the principal wooers in their respective actions. Petruchio is superficially direct, simple, overbearing and business-like (though, on inspection, his methods are seen to be more subtle and based on a shrewd psychological appreciation); Lucentio, on the other hand, is lovesick, devious (employing Tranio in disguise to do all his real work for him),¹⁷ and proceeds by expediency rather than plan. There is also the larger contrast between the stock, stereotyped characters, inherited from the sub-plot's sources, and the more highly-individualized personalities of the taming plot (though in this group we may include Bianca, created by Shakespeare from mere hints in his source). Lucentio, in this respect, is little more than the romantic young man of Italian comedy, and Tranio displays his origin as the resourceful slave of Roman drama. Baptista is a type of the anxious father (we know nothing more of him except that he is a rich merchant), the Pedant is not even allowed the dignity of a name, and Gremio is specified in the stage-direction at I.i.47 as ‘a pantaloon’, the stock ‘old man’ character of the commedia. Such characters are circumscribed, they act in predictable ways and within defined limits. Against them are ranged the individualized, unpredictable, developing figures of Katherina and Petruchio. The creative tension set up between the conventions and the different modes of characterization in the two plots is epitomized in the climax of the sub-plot (V.i), when the true and false Vincentios at last come face to face, and the intrigues are resolved. Shakespeare is careful to place Katherina and Petruchio (who have resolved their differences and come together in the previous scene) as eavesdropping witnesses to this action: Petruchio says, ‘Prithee, Kate, let's stand aside and see the end of this controversy’, and from a position of dramatic superiority they watch the events of the dénouement.

The two plots comment on each other at a deeper level as well. The most obvious example is in the matter of disguise. Lucentio and Hortensio are disguised as private tutors simply to gain access to their mistress; Tranio is disguised as Lucentio to further his master's designs by his own ingenuity. These are simple changes of identity. But Petruchio disguises his true nature by his assumption of the ‘tamer's role’, for it is a role, a performance, for a particular purpose, and this is made perfectly clear at the end of the play (though there have been hints before) when he is asked what his reform of Katherina implies. He answers:

Marry, peace it bodes, and love, and quiet life,
An awful rule, and right supremacy,
And, to be short, what not that's sweet and happy.

(V.ii.109-11)

Mutatis mutandis, a similar case might be made for the emergence of Katherina from her disguise as a shrew, a role forced on her by a neglectful father, a sly sister and an unsympathetic society.

It has also been argued that the plots are united by the pervasive presence of ‘supposes’, or mistakings, but since this concerns the Sly material as well it is discussed below (see p. 19). In his chapter on ‘Double plots in Shakespeare’ Salingar sums up the structural importance of the sub-plot and its integration with the story of Petruchio and Katherina:

Above all, he applies the lesson of the balanced and interconnected double plot, which he is more likely to have learned from Supposes than anywhere else. In his first act, the marriage of Kate is introduced only as a means to another end, the release of Bianca, and the rivalry over Bianca occupies most of the dialogue, although Shakespeare ensures the momentum of his double plot by interesting the audience more in Kate. He maintains the latent contrast between the two halves of his plot by devising scenes dealing with the pretended tutoring of Bianca before he comes to Petruchio's ‘schooling’ of Kate in Act IV. He then links the two plots causally together, first by making Hortensio and his real or pretended rivals join in offering Petruchio inducements to ‘break the ice’ for them [I.ii.265] by wedding the elder sister, and then by making Tranio point out to Lucentio ‘our vantage in this business’ in the midst of Kate's marriage-scene [III.ii.142], before he brings the two marriages together (with Hortensio's added) for comparison in the final scene. This is not mere imitation of New Comedy or Italian plots, but the application of Italian methods to new purposes.¹⁸

One might only add that the union of the two plots is not, in Johnson's phrase, ‘distracted by unconnected incidents’ to appreciate the subtlety and complexity of Shakespeare's constructional art.

What Hosley has described as ‘the brilliant threefold structure of induction, main plot, and subplot … perhaps all the more remarkable for being without parallel in Elizabethan drama’¹⁹ is completed by the two Induction scenes and the episode which ends I.i.²⁰ This ‘Sly framework’ is at once the most realistic and the most fantastic and bewildering structure in the play, closely related as it is to the play it encloses, in matters of theme, tone and proleptic irony.

Sly himself is a memorable creation²¹—earthy, addicted to ale, fond of ease, firmly rooted in the Warwickshire countryside, and garrulously eloquent either as beggar or supposed lord. Yet he is only one part of what is the widest social spectrum in the play, comprising a beggar, an innkeeper, huntsmen, actors, a page, servants and a lord (to say nothing of Stephen Sly, and old John Naps of Greece). This social group is strongly contrasted with the narrower, bourgeois-mercantile society of Padua where money is master and marriage is commerce, just as the rural English setting of the Induction guarantees a certain artificiality and sophistication to the main play's locations in Italy. We move easily from realism to romance, just as Sly assumes the role of ‘a mighty lord’ with alacrity, remembering that ‘the Slys are no rogues. Look in the Chronicles, we came in with Richard Conqueror.’ To explore the relationships between the Induction and the play is to skin an onion, or open a set of Chinese boxes, so interwoven are the anticipations of the one in the other. This is a vital part of The Shrew's larger strategy.

The most obvious link is between Sly's assumption of a new personality and Katherina's translation into a loving wife. In each case, the victim is ‘practised upon’, deluded, and the result is bewilderment. ‘What, would you make me mad?’ asks Sly (Ind. ii. 17), enumerating his friends by name to prove his sanity, but a little later it is ‘Am I a lord, and have I such a lady? / Or do I dream? Or have I dream'd till now?’ and then ‘Upon my life, I am a lord indeed’. We may compare Katherina's stunned incomprehension at Petruchio's behaviour in the wooing scene (II.i), her ineffectual resistance after the wedding, and her few and feeble words before the Haberdasher and the Tailor. Once Sly is convinced that he is a lord he adopts what he feels to be an appropriate utterance (‘Well, bring our lady hither to our sight’), and Katherina, after Petruchio's ‘field is won’, learns gradually to speak the dialect of the obedient wife. Katherina's new role is anticipated by the Page's description of a wife's duties (the more ironic as the Page is not what he seems): ‘My husband and my lord, my lord and husband’. In different ways, both Sly and the Page parody what Katherina is to become.

The Induction's use of music similarly foreshadows the play's concern with it as a part of the action and a metaphor for harmony. The Lord commands his huntsmen to ‘Procure me music when he wakes, / To make a dulcet and a heavenly sound’, and in the following scene music is called for in a stage-direction, when the Lord suggests:

Wilt thou have music? Hark, Apollo plays,
And twenty caged nightingales shall sing.

Here music is a means to deception, just as in the play Hortensio is disguised as a musician to gain access to Bianca, who is described as ‘the patroness of heavenly harmony’, and there follows all the business of the lute-breaking and the music lesson, the wedding music (III.ii) and Petruchio's scraps of old songs (IV.i).

The sense of gracious living created in the Induction (with its music, its soft beds, its fine pictures, its perfumed rooms) includes hunting with hawk and hound. The Lord first enters ‘from hunting’, and the talk of Silver, Belman and Echo opens the play with an extended evocation of field sports. Sly is told that his ‘hounds shall make the welkin answer them’, and if he prefers hawking, ‘Thou hast hawks will soar / Above the morning lark’. All this gives a local habitation and a name to the hunting imagery of the main play, both in Petruchio's taming methods and all that is summed up from the sub-plot in Tranio's comment in V.ii:

O sir, Lucentio slipp'd me like his greyhound,
Which runs himself, and catches for his master.

Once again, the comparison produces a bewildering mixture of fantasy and reality, since the Lord's hounds and huntsmen are credible and real, while Sly's are imaginary, and Petruchio's and Lucentio's hunting is in the field of courtship only. Petruchio calls for his ‘spaniel Troilus’ (IV.i), but it never comes.

The Induction makes great play with actors and acting. The Players are courteously and expansively received, the Lord clearly knows something of their art, and Sly himself, although we are told he has never seen a play, garbles a phrase from The Spanish Tragedy in his opening lines. As Anne Righter points out,²² ‘The theatrical nature of the deception practised upon the sleeping beggar is constantly stressed’: the huntsman promises ‘we will play our part’, the Page will ‘well usurp the grace’ of a gentlewoman, and the Players promise to contain themselves, ‘Were he the veriest antic in the world’. This foreshadows the main play's concern with plays and the acting of parts, from Tranio's belief in I.i that Baptista and his party represent ‘some show to welcome us to town’, through the various disguises and performances of Tranio, Lucentio, Hortensio and the Pedant.

These analogies, anticipations and ironic prolepses between the Induction and the main play subserve a larger purpose—the relentless questioning of the boundaries between appearance and reality. As we shall see (pp. 133ff.), The Shrew is deeply concerned with processes of change, metamorphosis and transformation, and the movement through the Induction into the play itself deliberately dislocates our sense of what is true and what is fiction. As Stauffer puts it:²³

Most of the conflicts here between appearance and reality, between shadow and substance, are generated from the outside. How can Christopher Sly be sure he is a drunken tinker when all those around him assure him that he is a lord? And is not the old father Vincentio almost justified in doubting his identity when everyone on the stage is crying away to prison with the dotard and impostor?

Tillyard sees the conflict between appearance and reality as the play's overriding theme, and says:²⁴

There is exquisite comedy in Sly, newly awakened in his gorgeous surroundings, demanding a pot of the smallest ale; and there is the hint, through his bewilderment and his final acquiescence in the reality of the moment, that the limits of the apparent and the real are not easily charted. Such thoughts would well occur in an age of allegory, with Spenser the chief poet, to any thoughtful man.

Marjorie B. Garber argues that the formal device of the induction affects the play as a whole especially because the Induction purports to tell a dream, and the dream metaphor, like the stage metaphor, ‘presents the audience with the problem of comparative realities and juxtaposes a simple or “low” illusion with the more courtly illusions of the taming plot itself’.²⁵ She adds:

The ‘dream’ to which the lord and his servants refer is Sly's conviction that he is a tinker named Christopher Sly. Thus, what they call his dream is actually the literal truth, while the ‘truth’ they persuade him of is fictive.²⁶

Shakespeare's Induction sets up the problem of appearance and reality as a puzzle, a corridor of mirrors, and this conditions our experience of the whole play. Leggatt sums it up:²⁷

it would certainly be too simple to say that each new perspective takes us one step closer to reality, or one step further away from it. … The audience remains detached from Sly's experience when he becomes a lord, but begins to share it when he watches the play. … The barriers that separated different experiences of life in the earlier plays are now less tight, and there is more traffic across them.

This has ramifications for our understanding of the play as a whole, which, in one sense, may be no more than ‘Sly's Dream’, and it is the direct result of Shakespeare's decision to preface the story of the taming of the shrew with the story of ‘the waking man's dream’ as well as undergirding it with the sub-plot of intrigue, competition in courtship, and romance. These structures are brilliantly reticulated, or interwoven, both at narrative and thematic levels, to create a seemingly seamless web of story (The Shrew is dazzling, but not difficult to follow, in the theatre). Its structural unity may well be compared to that of plays like The Merchant of Venice or Twelfth Night.

Examination of structures and sources has also revealed what is widely felt to be the feature which unifies the three plots and informs Shakespeare's whole dramatic intention. C. C. Seronsy has proposed the idea that ‘the sub-plot, with its theme of “supposes” which enters substantially into both the shrew action and the induction … will account in large measure for Shakespeare's superior handling of all three elements of the plot’.²⁸ As Gasciogne's Prologue states, a ‘suppose’ is ‘nothing else but a mystaking or imagination of one thing for an other’ (see p. 80), and he indicates twenty-four of them in his play, marking them carefully in the margins of his text. Seronsy argues that the term need not be so confined as to mean only one character disguised as another, and if we accept a wider sense for the word—‘supposition’, ‘expectation’, ‘to believe’, ‘to imagine’, ‘to guess’, ‘to assume’—we may see how it becomes ‘a guiding principle of Petruchio's strategy in winning and taming the shrew’. He sees the Induction, too, as ‘a steady play of suggestion, of make-believe, and of metamorphosis’: Sly is to be persuaded that he has been lunatic, the Page is subtly transformed into his supposed new identity, the Players are to join in the Lord's game and imagine that they are not playing before a drunken tinker but before a lord. Sly's transformation comes when he wakes in the second scene, and though it is never complete, it forms the central action of that scene. Seronsy concludes that The Shrew's artistic success ‘lies chiefly in the union of the three strands, in their having a fundamental likeness, the game of supposes or make-believe’. This is a strong argument, and it provides insights into many areas of the play. It links and contrasts Sly's assumption of his false lordly role with Katherina's final conformity to the image Petruchio has made of her: thinking has made it so. And it connects each of these with the comedy of errors and misprisions in the sub-plot. Nevertheless, I feel it does not fully comprehend the organic unity of the play; it relates principally to the narrative and constructional conduct of the action, and pays less than full attention to the deeper and more primitive structures of the play. To these we must now turn.

The play grows from two primal images—the shrew and the hawk. These are far more than metaphors to illustrate the vagaries and varieties of human behaviour. They are the basic raw material from which story, character and poetic structure are formed. In places, the very scenic structure of the action arises from the natural characteristics of the animal and the bird. And it is not a simple matter of character-correspondences: Katherina is both shrew and haggard; Petruchio is both falconer and fool. We need to see how both images are rooted in myth and nature and folklore to appreciate how organic the play's unity is.

The play's title sounds proverbial, but, surprisingly, neither Tilley nor Smith and Wilson records it. There are many proverbs about shrews (e.g. Tilley, A9, E229, I59, M684, S412-14), but they are concerned with the habits of the animal, and ‘Every man can rule a shrew but he that has her’ (M106), the closest to Shakespeare's phrase, is not recorded before 1546. In this context ‘shrew’ clearly means ‘a woman given to railing or scolding’ (OED, sb.² 3), but the word has many earlier meanings. Originally, of course, it referred to any animal belonging to the genus Sorex (OED, sb.¹ 1), and occurs in Old English as early as c. 725. But by the middle of the thirteenth century it had come to mean ‘a wicked, evil-disposed, or malignant man’ (sb.² 1), and by the end of the fourteenth century it was regularly applied to the Devil.²⁹ The earliest recorded example of its application to a woman ‘given to railing or scolding’ is in Chaucer's Epilogue to The Merchant's Tale: ‘But of hir tonge a lobbyng shrewe is she.’ By the end of the sixteenth century this had become the dominant meaning, but behind Shakespeare's use of the word lies a long sense of the shrew as evil, malign, even satanic, and this must inform our understanding of what Shakespeare meant by it.

In natural history, too, the shrew has had a uniformly bad and wholly undeserved report.³⁰ Topsell gives a fair idea of what Shakespeare's contemporaries would have believed:³¹

It is a rauening beast, feygning it selfe to be gentle and tame, but being touched it biteth deepe, and poisoneth deadly. It beareth a cruell minde, desiring to hurt any thing, neither is there any creature that it loueth, or it loueth him, because it is feared of al. The cats as we haue saide do hunt it and kil it, but they eat not them, for if they do, they consume away in time. … They go very slowely, they are fraudulent, and take their prey by deceipt. Many times they gnaw the Oxes hooues in the stable. They loue the rotten flesh of Rauens. … The Shrew being cut and applyed in the manner of a plaister, doth effectually cure her owne bites. … The Shrew falling into the furrow of a Cart wheele doth presently dye: the dust thereof in the passage by which she went being taken, and sprinkled into the woundes which were made by her poysonsome teeth, is a very excellent and present remedy for the curing of the same … if horses, or any other labouring creature do feede in that pasture or grasse in which a Shrew shall put her venome or poyson in, they will presently die.

So absorbed were the natural historians with these (totally imaginary) venomous and maleficent qualities of the shrew that they failed to record what every countryman would have observed as its dominant peculiarities. Shakespeare was country-bred, and his play virtually ignores the old wives' tales, but shows striking affinities with what modern mammalogists have identified as the true characteristics and behaviour patterns of the shrew.

Corbet's standard work summarizes what is now generally believed:³²

Shrews are very active, solitary, surface-dwellers. … They are very voracious and suffer from lack of food within a few hours. … Shrews are preyed upon extensively by birds, but much less so by mammalian carnivores. … Dispersion is maintained by aggressive behaviour at all times except during the brief period of oestrus and copulation. The fighting is stereotyped and involves great use of the voice, resulting in ‘squeaking matches’.³³

These primary characteristics, energy, irascibility and noise, have their analogies in Shakespeare's play.

The Shrew is much concerned with the search for food. In the Induction the Lord proposes ‘a most delicious banquet’, and Sly (to whom drink is food) calls for it repeatedly; conserves are offered, and Sly smells ‘sweet savours’. Katherina is denied her bridal dinner (III.ii), starved at Petruchio's house (IV.i), mocked with the promise of food by Grumio (IV.iii), and not finally satisfied until Lucentio's banquet in V.ii, where there is nothing to do ‘but sit and sit, and eat and eat’. From Act I she is presented as vigorously active, in contrast to Bianca's ‘mild behaviour and sobriety’: she is a ‘fiend of hell’, whose ‘gifts are so good here's none will hold you’. She fights with Bianca in II.i, strikes her, ‘flies after her’, breaks a lute on Hortensio's head, strikes Petruchio, weeps on her wedding day, and opposes Petruchio on the matter of the bridal dinner because ‘a woman may be made a fool / If she had not a spirit to resist’. Her raging energy is amply demonstrated throughout the play's first three Acts.

We are left in no doubt about her fiery temperament and irascibility. Gremio (I.i.55) says at once ‘She's too rough for me’, and five lines later Hortensio rejects her, ‘Unless you were of gentler, milder mould’. She threatens ‘To comb your noddle with a three-legg'd stool’, as we have seen she attacks both Bianca and Petruchio physically, and her anger is even more emphasized in word than in action. The long verbal dispute with Petruchio in II.i has been inaccurately described as a ‘wit-bout’; it is far more of a flyting match, in which the contestants vie in vilification. As it concludes, Petruchio sums up her temperament in ironic inversions:

                                                  I find you passing gentle.
'Twas told me you were rough, and coy, and sullen. …
Thou canst not frown, thou canst not look askance,
Nor bite the lip, as angry wenches will,
Nor hast thou pleasure to be cross in talk.

(II.i.236-43)

These are, of course, precisely the qualities she has just displayed. We have already heard of her as ‘an irksome brawling scold’ (I.ii) and Petruchio describes her as ‘a wasp’ (II.i), and as late as III.ii, after the wedding, she has an outburst of anger which draws from her husband the mockingly suave request: ‘O Kate, content thee, prithee be not angry.’ She insists, even at this late stage, on her right to free expression of wrath: ‘I will be angry; what hast thou to do?’ In Acts IV and V things are different, but until then Katherina's shrewish nature is predominantly emphasized by her shrew-like irascibility. She is, as Hortensio says, ‘Renown'd in Padua for her scolding tongue’.

Although not averse to using her fists, Katherina fights principally by noise. We are told that Petruchio's ‘taming-school’ (IV.ii) exists ‘To tame a shrew and charm her chattering tongue’. Tranio's first comment on her (I.i) notes how she

Began to scold and raise up such a storm
That mortal ears might hardly endure the din.

She loses no opportunity for verbal contest, with Bianca, with Petruchio, or with her father, when Petruchio is late arriving on the wedding day (III.ii):

No shame but mine. I must forsooth be forc'd
To give my hand, oppos'd against my heart,
Unto a mad-brain rudesby, full of spleen,
Who woo'd in haste and means to wed at leisure. …

Her freedom of speech is almost the last liberty she surrenders, making a spirited stand for it as late as IV.iii:

Why, sir, I trust I may have leave to speak,
And speak I will. I am no child, no babe.
Your betters have endur'd me say my mind,
And if you cannot, best you stop your ears.
My tongue will tell the anger of my heart,
Or else my heart concealing it will break,
And rather than it shall, I will be free
Even to the uttermost, as I please, in words.

Her resistance is ignored, her angry words silenced, and her most ‘shrewish’ quality subdued to the tamer's hand.

Shakespeare's presentation of Katherina subsumes several of the available characteristics of the shrew. From the history of the word comes the sense of her as a devil: the word (and its derivatives) is applied to her no less than fifteen times. As Hortensio says (I.i.66): ‘From all such devils, good Lord deliver us!’ From the observed characteristics of the animal itself come the distinguishing features of energy, irascibility and (above all) noise. By dramatizing Katherina in this way in the first movement of the play Shakespeare puts down deep roots into social, verbal and natural history.

Shrew imagery dominates the first half of the play. Petruchio's first soliloquy (II.i.168-81), outlining his plan for dealing with his shrew, says nothing about taming her. He will ‘woo her with some spirit when she comes’ and the only bird mentioned is a nightingale. His technique will be to oppose reality with a created fiction, and make the appearance more real than the fact:

Say that she rail, why then I'll tell her plain
She sings as sweetly as the nightingale.

The plan is to confuse, to baffle, to bewilder her by presenting her with a perpetual image of what he thinks her behaviour ought to be. And it is important that Katherina should fail to understand what he is doing. Throughout the play she is presented as not particularly intelligent, and she never stops to analyse his behaviour, to plan, to counter. She simply reacts, violently, to stimuli. In this respect, too, she is like the animal: her reactions are ‘shrewish’.

The play's title, The Taming of the Shrew, is, in the literal sense, an absurdity. Men tame animals either for companionship or for use. In Shakespeare's day there is no evidence to suggest that men ever kept shrews as pets³⁴ and such a tiny beast could do no useful work. At one level, Petruchio is a fool for making the attempt, and his technique is certainly seen by others as eccentric and fantastic. Katherina, not surprisingly, enquires after his ‘coxcomb’ (II.i), and refers to him as ‘one half lunatic’, ‘A madcap ruffian’, ‘a mad-brain rudesby’ and ‘a frantic fool’, but Bianca points out, after the wedding (III.ii), ‘That being mad herself, she's madly mated’. It is left to Tranio, commenting on Petruchio's fantastic clothing as he arrives for his wedding, to make the crucial point: ‘He hath some meaning in his mad attire.’ Petruchio is playing the Fool, just as Lear's Fool does, presenting unpalatable truths under the cloak of entertainment, displacing his master's folly on to himself. It is Katherina who is ill prepared for marriage, and Petruchio, in his foolishness, is telling her so. To ‘tame the shrew’, then, is, in one sense, to exorcize an evil and irascible spirit (in this case by outdoing it—he ‘kills her in her own humour’), and in another, to reduce a wild bird to obedience, so that she can hunt for you and with you. It is this taming image, the reclaiming of the haggard, which controls the second half of the play.

Falconry was so well known and so widely practised in Shakespeare's day that little needs to be said about it.³⁵ As Lascelles says: ‘To the reader or playgoer of Shakespeare's time the technical terms describing the training of hawks for the sport of falconry were household words.’ In The Shrew, however, Shakespeare focuses attention almost exclusively on one part of that training: the watching, or ‘manning’³⁶ of the wild bird, by keeping it awake day and night, and by limiting its food, until from sheer fatigue it settles down into docility and tameness.³⁷ This is often a long, exhausting process, but, when successfully completed, it sets up a close and special relationship between the falconer and his bird which makes them an efficient hunting team. It is as if Shakespeare's imagination focused as narrowly and intensively on the ‘hawk’ image as it had ranged extensively when exploring the ‘shrew’. His dramatic presentation of it alerts a particular kind of audience attention by its directness, explicitness, and an almost Euclidian insistence on stating a theorem and proceeding to prove it. It is also surprising that it is introduced so late in the play.

Allusions to falconry are not absent from the first three Acts of the play, but they are slight, passing, almost incidental. The Induction is strongly concerned with hunting, but mainly it is hare coursing, with only one direct bird-image:

Dost thou love hawking? Thou hast hawks will soar
Above the morning lark.(38)

Apart from the buzzard at II.i.206-8 (which comes in for its value in word-play) the allusions to falconry before Act IV are oblique, and apply to Bianca, not Katherina. Gremio asks Baptista ‘will you mew her up … ?’³⁹ and Tranio explains to Lucentio that her father has ‘closely mew'd her up’, but the term carries little metaphoric force. The first overt reference to taming does not occur until II.i.269-71 (concerning Katherina), when Petruchio intends to ‘bring you from a wild Kate to a Kate / Conformable as other household Kates’, and the allusion is to cats, not birds. At III.i.87-90 Hortensio, suspecting Bianca of inconstancy, refers to her as ‘ranging’, and casting her ‘wandering eyes on every stale’, which probably refers to a straying hawk stooping to any lure,⁴⁰ and at IV.ii.39 he calls her a ‘haggard’, Shakespeare's usual word for wildness and inconstancy.⁴¹

All this amounts to very little compared with Petruchio's direct declaration of intent in the soliloquy at IV.i.175-98. This arises quite naturally from the ‘displacement’ activity in the earlier part of the scene, when he beats the servants, flings the meat about, and refuses to allow the weary, bemoiled Katherina anything to eat.⁴² He announces that ‘this night we'll fast for company’, and Curtis reports that the ‘manning’ has begun with Petruchio ‘Making a sermon of continency to her’ so that she ‘Knows not which way to stand, to look, to speak’. Petruchio's soliloquy begins with a reference to his hierarchical position vis-à-vis his wife (‘Thus have I politicly begun my reign’) which foreshadows Katherina's words in V.ii (‘Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper, / Thy head, thy sovereign’), and he then develops at length his metaphor of Katherina as an untrained falcon who must be ‘manned’. What follows is an extended, almost conceited, image, addressed directly to the audience, and introducing the technical terms of the ‘manning’ technique: the bird must be ‘sharp’, and not ‘full-gorg'd’ until she has ‘stooped’, he will man his ‘haggard’ by watching, and so on. The force, the directness of this speech impart a new impetus to the play's action, and in the scenes which follow we witness a clear, relentless demonstration of the programme which has been announced. This is carried out in the terms of the metaphor, applied plainly—there is no dense ‘hawking’ imagery in Acts IV and V. In IV.iii we see Katherina, starving, tempted with the prospect of food by Grumio and Petruchio. Then her natural inclinations towards fashionable dress are systematically checked and frustrated in the scene with the Haberdasher and the Tailor. Even her speech is checked by Petruchio's resolute attention to her desires—his ‘reverend care of her’. By the end of the scene she is not even allowed to say what time it is, since Petruchio interprets this as ‘crossing’ him. She relapses into silence, baffled, thwarted, and, above all, weary. This is the first stage of ‘manning’.

Once tameness and docility are assured, the hawk must be taught and tested in obedience. Lascelles describes the process:

… in a few weeks our hawk will display no fear of men or dogs, even when bareheaded in the open air. … When this stage has been reached, there is no more in the way of training to be done but to accustom the hawk to fly to the lure … and not to leave it on the falconer's approach. At first she is for safety's sake confined by a creance or long light line, but ere long she is flown loose altogether and … is ready to be entered to the quarry which she is destined to pursue.⁴³

This process is reproduced in human terms in a series of scenes which show Katherina being tested, and permitted to operate at steadily increasing distances from her handler's control. It begins in IV.v, on the journey to Padua, when Petruchio comments provocatively on the brightness of the moon. A dispute arises:

KATH.
The moon? The sun! It is not moonlight now.
PET.
I say it is the moon that shines so bright.
KATH.
I know it is the sun that shines so bright.
PET.
Now by my mother's son, and that's myself,
It shall be moon, or star, or what I list,
Or e'er I journey to your father's house.

This is a simple test in obedience, taking up the ‘what time is it?’ test which ended IV.iii. Katherina has not learned her lesson, however, and Petruchio threatens to go back to square one and begin the process all over again. Hortensio provides her the clue: ‘Say as he says, or we shall never go.’ Katherina shrugs, obeys, and the journey is resumed. Petruchio naggingly insists that she repeats her lesson—‘I say it is the moon’—and she does as she is told. The second test, the encounter with Vincentio, follows immediately. This is a more advanced examination since it involves a third person and exposes her to more than private ridicule. But Katherina has learned what is expected of her; as we have seen (pp. 107-8) the fulcrum is placed between these two episodes in IV.v. In the following scene (V.i) Petruchio and Katherina witness and eavesdrop on the climax of the sub-plot; having made their own peace they watch the resolution of the other intrigues. But the scene ends with yet another test of Katherina's education: she must kiss her husband in the public street. She demurs, he threatens, she obeys. But what is far more important, she offers a tiny gesture of affection: ‘Nay, I will give thee a kiss. Now pray thee, love, stay.’ This is not lost on Petruchio. There is great depth of implication in his question ‘Is not this well?’; in the theatre it can be a most moving and expressive moment, a moment of reconcilement, replete with unspoken understanding. The final scene represents the greatest test, because it is not only the most extensive but the most public. Katherina must display her obedience before the entire household, and Petruchio insists on the most rigorous standards:⁴⁴

Katherine, that cap of yours becomes you not.
Off with that bauble, throw it under foot.

[She obeys.]

This comes perilously close to a public degradation, and, theatrically, it provides no small element of suspense, from which the ‘obedience’ speech issues almost as a release.

The twofold pattern of manning and testing, announced in Petruchio's soliloquy and systematically applied in a cumulative sequence of scenes, dominates the second part of the play and creates its dramatic form. So beneath the complex organization of the narrative—Hosley's ‘brilliant threefold structure’—lies a deeper, contrasting, two-part organization arising from the controlling symbols of the shrew and the hawk. These anchor the play in the realities of man's commerce with nature, his dealings with birds and animals, following God's command to Adam that he should have dominion ‘over every living thing that moveth upon the earth’. The first three Acts of the play explore the peculiar characteristics of the shrew, ranging extensively through the analogies between human and animal behaviour; the last two Acts focus intensively on the single action of manning a wild hawk, translating it relentlessly into human terms. What unites the two symbolic patterns, at this deeper level, is the concept of all life as contest—the noisy, fighting shrew opposed by another of her kind, the battle of wills between the bird and its tamer. The result, in this case, is a particular and peculiar kind of peace, a resolution of conflict, that happy issue out of all our afflictions which is the essence of comedy.

THEMES

EDUCATION

All formal education is, in some sense, a reduction to conformity, a restraint upon freedom. The child is subjected to experiences not of its own choosing, introduced to preferred patterns of social behaviour, expected to comply. Before anything can be drawn out of the individual mind, much is put in, and the line between liberal education and socio-cultural indoctrination is difficult to draw and harder to hold. Elizabethan educationists were less concerned with liberating the pupil's consciousness by encouragement to free-ranging enquiry than with inculcating an approved body of knowledge in the context of a serenely accepted social order, to the end that the young might grow up literate, useful citizens of the commonwealth, and, if possible, good and wise as well. The Shrew both illustrates this and explores its limitations. But the accepted background must be borne in mind.⁴⁵

The Induction offers the theme obliquely. In his ‘practice’ upon Sly the Lord conducts an experiment in human nature, so that Sly is offered a picture of himself as a cultured English gentleman—hunting, hawking, but also taking delight in music, pictures, and the performance of plays.⁴⁶ Sly, however, remains resolutely himself, rural, vulgar and illiterate, although vastly attracted by the pleasures of gentility, illustrating the truth that education cannot be imposed, it must be achieved. Sly belongs with Barnadine and Caliban in Shakespeare's gallery of the incorrigible and ineducable, upon whose natures nurture can never stick. The opening of the main play sets up a strong contrast. Lucentio comes to Padua to institute ‘A course of learning and ingenious studies’ and seeking the ‘happiness / By virtue specially to be achiev'd’.⁴⁷ Padua was famous throughout Europe as a university city, the centre of Aristotelianism, and a debate ensues between Lucentio and Tranio about the curriculum to be followed. Tranio advocates a wide syllabus, philosophy, logic, rhetoric, music, poetry and mathematics, balancing the discipline of Aristotle against sweet witty Ovid on the doubtful principle that ‘no profit grows where is no pleasure ta'en’, and ends with the permissive prescription ‘study what you most affect’. We feel that this intellectual voyage ‘is but for two months victuall'd’.⁴⁸ The entry of Bianca with her family puts an end to this academic planning and we never hear of it again. But the brisk bargaining and match-making which follows in I.i creates a contrast between the world of romantic love, allied to cultural and intellectual pursuits, and the world of realistic marriage contracts, made in a society of merchants and adventurers.

Education has a high social value in Padua, as we see from the stately conduct of the episode (in II.i) in which the disguised suitors are presented to Baptista as tutors. Both are described as ‘cunning’ men, and he is careful to instruct that they should be ‘used well’. Yet the formal lessons we hear of or witness are parodies of instruction. Hortensio's impatient pupil breaks his lute over his head, and when he and Lucentio wrangle over who shall instruct Bianca first (III.i), the pupil seizes the opportunity to assume the master's role. Lucentio makes his Latin lesson a cover for declaring his love, and Hortensio puts his music to the same use. The effect of all this is to depreciate the value of book-learning, or, at least, to show that artistic and intellectual pursuits have little attraction against the pull of ‘love, first learned in a lady's eyes’.⁴⁹ This is precisely the demonstration Shakespeare makes in his most intellectual and erudite comedy, Love's Labour's Lost. It is epitomized in The Shrew at the opening of IV.ii, where Tranio and Hortensio overhear the brief love-conversation between Lucentio and Bianca:

LUC.
Now, mistress, profit you in what you read?
BIAN.
What, master, read you? First resolve me that.
LUC.
I read that I profess, The Art to Love.
BIAN.
And may you prove, sir, master of your art.

The point is that Ovid's Ars Amatoria is anything but a manual for romantic lovers.⁵⁰ It is a witty, cynical textbook for seducers, offering here an ironic comment on Lucentio's wooing methods and Bianca's mixture of naïveté, sentiment and calculation.

The play makes clear that the true paths to learning are not those of the school or university. Formal education is contrasted to its detriment against the practical academy of experience. Here, as elsewhere, Petruchio stands at the centre of the stage. He is the teacher, Katherina is his pupil. His task is to inculcate such knowledge and instil such behaviour as will fit her to take a useful place in the existing society. The play gives his qualifications, and is significantly concerned to demonstrate his teaching methods in an exemplary way. His first appearance, in I.ii, shows him ready to use his fists to teach Grumio how to knock at a door when he is told; this teacher is direct, practical, distinctly rough and very ready, and intent on being master. When presented with the prospect of educating Katherina into conformity he presents his credentials:

Have I not in my time heard lions roar?
Have I not heard the sea, puff'd up with winds,
Rage like an angry boar chafed with sweat?
Have I not heard great ordance in the field,
And heaven's artillery thunder in the skies?
Have I not in a pitched battle heard
Loud 'larums, neighing steeds, and trumpets' clang?
And do you tell me of a woman's tongue,
That gives not half so great a blow to hear
As will a chestnut in a farmer's fire?
Tush, tush, fear boys with bugs!

(I.ii.199-209)

He has faced many things, and his experience gives him confidence that he is a strong candidate for this post.⁵¹

His teaching technique is a rich and strange mixture of the academic and the practical. At the heart of it lies the most commendable pedagogic principle of presenting his pupil with an image of what he wants her to become:

Take this of me, Kate of my consolation,
Hearing thy mildness prais'd in every town,
Thy virtues spoke of, and thy beauty sounded,
Yet not so deeply as to thee belongs,
Myself am mov'd to woo thee for my wife.

(II.i.190-4)

Throughout the play this ideal picture is constantly kept before Katherina, and she is gradually wooed and induced into conformity with it. Part of Petruchio's technique is coercive: he gives as good as he gets in the flyting match of II.i, he subjects his pupil to disgrace and humiliation in the wedding scene, and he deliberately keeps her without food or sleep in the testing scenes of Act IV. But it is significant that he never physically assaults or chastises her, and this sharply distinguishes The Shrew from earlier plays on the taming theme like Tom Tyler and his Wife. The larger part of Petruchio's teaching method is puzzlement. Katherina is reluctantly fascinated by his energetic and outrageous behaviour (there is no precedent for it in the Padua of her upbringing), and she only gradually comes to recognize it as a travesty of her own wild behaviour. The audience, duly instructed by Petruchio's two explicit soliloquies, can watch the series of lessons from a position of informed superiority. Katherina has to work out, incident by incident, the significance of the instruction she is being given. All this is so unlike the normal processes of Elizabethan education, with its rote learning of grammar and syntax, its translation and retranslation, its imitation of approved literary and philosophical models, that it hardly looks like a teaching process at all. But the subject, the bringing to conformity of an aberrant member of a social group, was no part of any school curriculum, though it was the first premise and ultimate object of all schooling. Petruchio's teaching task, self-imposed, is to bring Katherina into conformity with the acceptable social image of a marriageable young woman in ‘Paduan’ society. No one has analysed this aspect of the play better than M. C. Bradbrook in the essay I have already cited.⁵² She says:

In real life, to see persons as merely fulfilling one or two rôles, as merely a lawyer, a priest, a mother, a Jew, even as merely a man or a woman is to see them as something less than images of God; for practical purposes this may be necessary. … Assigning and taking of rôles is in fact the basis of social as distinct from inward life.

She goes on to describe the unique way in which Petruchio instructs Katherina in the assumption of the role he, and her society, have decreed for her:

The wooing of Katherine takes up rather less than half the play, and her part is quite surprisingly short; although she is on the stage a good deal, she spends most of the time listening to Petruchio. The play is his; this is its novelty. Traditionally, the shrew triumphed; hers was the oldest and indeed the only native comic rôle for women. If overcome, she submitted either to high theological argument or to a taste of the stick. Here, by the wooing in Act II, the wedding in Act III, and the ‘taming school’ in Act IV, each of which has its own style, Petruchio overpowers his shrew with her own weapons—imperiousness, wildness, inconsistency and the withholding of the necessities of life—combined with strong demonstrations of his natural authority.

The unorthodoxy, and novelty, of this educational programme is the central point of interest in the play's exploration of teaching and learning, and all the other lessons are subservient and contributory to it.

Katherina, however, is not Petruchio's only pupil, and he varies his methods according to his students. Grumio, in I.ii, is taught by the most direct method, a box on the ear. Hortensio and Lucentio, the pupil-teachers, are given the example of the ‘taming school’, and exhorted to follow it. These are the traditional and time-honoured techniques; Petruchio's innovation in educational methodology lies in his treatment of Katherina. It is still capable of raising heated debate when the play is performed on the stage, and perhaps this is because it presents with alarming directness the dichotomy which underlies all educative processes. On the one hand, education is designed to liberate and bring to full fruition the innate capabilities of the pupil. On the other, it is a means of reducing the individual to social conformity through the imparting of approved knowledge and acceptable skills. To some extent it is always a taming procedure, at odds with the very human desire for liberty. But it also works on the deep human need to conform and to be socially approved within the tribe. The tension between these contrary impulses is always present. The Taming of the Shrew makes them uncomfortably evident.

METAMORPHOSIS

Education is one way of transforming a person into someone else, but it is not the only form of change the play investigates. The theme of transformation, of metamorphosis, raises perhaps some of the subtlest questions in the play but it does so through the medium of very direct allusion and reference, and in some of the play's most obvious stage action. It is notable that most of the reference to classical mythology takes place in the early part of the play, where it serves a variety of purposes. Douglas Bush points out:⁵³

Even in such a boisterous farce as the Shrew (which has much less, and less detailed, allusion than A Shrew) the sophisticated Lucentio can speak to his man-servant with stilted irrelevance—‘That art to me as secret and as dear / As Anna to the queen of Carthage was’ [I.i.153-4]—or with the undramatic elaboration of the allusion to Europa in [I.i.168-70]. … Now and then Ovidianism is less high-flown and more dramatic. The luscious pictures offered to the drunken Sly in the Induction to the Shrew have their point.

They have their point indeed, and they are very firmly placed to make it. At the very opening we are presented with the spectacle of a man transformed into a beast.⁵⁴ The Lord, approaching the sleeping Sly, comments: ‘O monstrous beast, how like a swine he lies.’ He at once resolves to ‘practise on this drunken man’ and transform him into a lord, asking his huntsmen: ‘Would not the beggar then forget himself?’ Such transformations, up and down the social scale, with the participants either losing their old identities or shrewdly retaining them, are to become essential ingredients of the play's action. No sooner has the transformation of Sly been agreed than the actors enter, themselves professional shape-shifters, and they are enlisted to take part in the sport ‘Wherein your cunning can assist me much’. The scene ends with instructions sent to ‘Barthol'mew my page’ to transform himself into a lady and play the drunkard's wife. In the second scene of the Induction Sly stubbornly resists the possibility that he has been metamorphosed into a lord, until he is seduced by the images of Cytherea, Io and Daphne, all taken directly from Ovid's Metamorphoses, into exclaiming: ‘Upon my life, I am a lord indeed.’ The comic significance of what he then says and does in performance of his new role lies, of course, in his inability to play the part. His metamorphosis must be imperfect because he is ignorant of how to behave. But the whole game of shape-changing in the Induction is proleptic of the metamorphoses in the main play. One character after another assumes a disguise, practises to deceive, and takes on a new identity. As we have seen (p. 116), the disguised Page of the Induction prefigures the obedient and compliant wife which Katherina becomes in V.ii. The bewildered Sly, incapable through ignorance of changing himself, contrasts with the Katherina who slowly and painstakingly learns her part.

As the main play opens, Lucentio hopes, by the study of Aristotelian virtue, to transform himself into a scholar, but Tranio reminds him that this might be a barren role if ‘Ovid be an outcast quite abjured’, which links the poet of the Metamorphoses with that of the Amores, which is to be the lovers' textbook. The first sight of Bianca transforms Lucentio instantly into a lover, and he likens her beauty to that of ‘the daughter of Agenor’. According to Ovid (Metamorphoses, ii. 846-75) Agenor's daughter, Europa, was the beloved of Jupiter, who appeared before her transformed into a snow-white bull. And so the transformation game goes on, through allusion and action. The love-plot brings about the exchange of clothing and identity between Lucentio and Tranio (the first of the ‘disguisings’ in the play), and Tranio becomes his master for most of the rest of the action. In II.i Lucentio becomes Cambio, and Hortensio becomes Litio, so that, through the central Acts of the play, nearly half the cast are not what they seem. These metamorphoses are relatively simple, parts of the machinery of the plot, and true identities can be resumed by so simple a device as the changing of clothes. Like the Pedant, and Vincentio, later, they are all, as Biondello says, ‘busied about a counterfeit assurance’, and no one of them is ever in doubt about his true identity.

Sly, however, is unsure of himself. If, as I believe, the play originally contained Induction, episodes and Epilogue (see p. 44), it seems clear that he was intended to remain bewildered. Reluctantly, and because it seemed the best thing to do, he assumes the identity of the Lord, and at the end of the play he equally reluctantly becomes a beggar again. He is perpetually bewildered, and in this he is the prefiguration of Katherina, who, once Petruchio accosts her, is never allowed to be sure of her own nature until she surrenders to the character he has created for her. She is secure, if discontented, as the typical ‘shrew’ in II.i, and this is the identity she offers to Petruchio in the flyting match. But, in spite of the evidence, he refuses to believe her, assuming that she is ‘pleasant, gamesome, passing courteous, … sweet as spring-time flowers’. This is the dislocating picture, held up to her as a mirror to nature for the rest of the play. And the mutation of her personality which takes place is achieved not with the ease of a change of clothes, but with difficulty, with reluctance, with recalcitrance. Yet the metamorphosis is permanent. Just as the changes in Ovid's Metamorphoses are mutations which preserve the life of the subject, or apotheosize his or her state, so the change in Katherina is shown as a development into a better, and enduring, condition. And, in keeping with the bewildering changes in which the play abounds, Petruchio brings her change about by himself assuming a variety of roles. The bluff, rough wooer of Act II is succeeded in III.ii by the fantastic bridegroom, coming to his wedding ‘in a pair of old breeches thrice turned’. The purpose of this disguise is to enforce upon Katherina her own unpreparedness for marriage, just as the roistering bully Petruchio becomes in IV.i and IV.iii is a means of displaying to his wife her own inability to manage a household and command her servants. As Peter says (IV.i), ‘He kills her in her own humour’.

Although the majority of references to Ovid occur in the earlier scenes of the play, the poet maintains a presence as late as Act IV. In III.i Lucentio invites Bianca to construe a passage from the Heroides, and in IV.ii he instructs her in the Ars Amatoria. It is as if the mythological Ovid of the Metamorphoses gives place, as the play progresses, to the sweet, witty poet of love. The play's development is in tune with this, for the dazzling changes of identity in the manifold disguisings take place, for the most part, in the first two Acts, while the later part of the play is concerned with the longer rhythms of the change of personality which overcomes Katherina. It is upon her transformation that we focus, though we may note the foil which Shakespeare provides for her in her sister. Bianca is the only major character who assumes no disguise, and achieves no development. She begins, in I.i, with her own form of covert and clever shrewishness to her sister, securing herself the sympathy of her father and all his household, and she ends the play bidding fair to take up where her sister left off. The morality of The Shrew is a morality of change.

LOVE AND MARRIAGE

Unlike Love's Labour's Lost and the later comedies, Much Ado, As You Like It and Twelfth Night, The Shrew is concerned with both love and marriage. It takes the romantic action on beyond the wedding, contemplating not only the coming together of lovers but the relationship between man and wife. It belongs with The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Merchant of Venice. Once again, this theme is explored in a rich mixture of modes: romance, a kind of knockabout farce, realism and parody.

The Induction offers extensive and subtle parody of all the play's attitudes to love. As we have noted already (p. 110), the opening lines offer what appears to be the Shrew of the play's title roundly berating an unfortunate man. It looks like a version of the traditional quarrelling between Noah and his wife in the Moralities, and echoes of this persist in the attacks made by Katherina on Bianca and on Hortensio, and in the flyting match between Petruchio and Katherina in II.i. Sly is the befuddled victim of the Hostess's outburst, and he falls asleep as bemused and bewildered as Katherina is, at several points in the main play, when faced with expressions of Petruchio's outrageous energy. The Lord and his huntsmen, with their elaborate talk of the chase, suggest the play's concern with the royal hunt of love, culminating in Tranio's greyhound image at V.ii.52-3. Petruchio sums up the two kinds of hunting when he says of the wager:

I'll venture so much of my hawk or hound,
But twenty times so much upon my wife.

The actors, in the Induction, are welcome, and remembered, because one of them had previously played a romantic lead—‘'Twas where you woo'd the gentlewoman so well’—and the main play's element of romance is thus delicately introduced in the Lord's memory of a player's play. It is carried through in Induction ii, by the proffers to Sly made by the Lord and his servants: ‘Apollo plays’, ‘twenty caged nightingales do sing’, ‘the lustful bed / On purpose trimm'd up for Semiramis’, and the evocative pictures of Adonis, Cytherea, Io and Daphne.⁵⁵ But the most prolonged and direct anticipatory parody occurs in the Lord's instructions for the behaviour of ‘Barthol'mew my page’, who is to enact Sly's wife:

Tell him from me, as he will win my love,
He bear himself with honourable action,
Such as he hath observ'd in noble ladies
Unto their lords, by them accomplished.
Such duty to the drunkard let him do,
With soft low tongue and lowly courtesy,
And say ‘What is't your honour will command,
Wherein your lady and your humble wife
May show her duty and make known her love?’

This precisely predicts the compliant and obedient Katherina of V.ii, who enters with the line: ‘What is your will, sir, that you send for me?’ In the same way the Page, in Induction ii, says:

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

And this pre-echoes Katherina's phraseology:

Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,
Thy head, thy sovereign. …

The analogies are too close and too numerous for coincidence or accident. Shakespeare clearly intended the comic incidents of the Induction to throw a forward light on the main play's concern with the development of love in marriage.

But the technique of parody is not confined to the Induction. Petruchio's arrival at his wedding, fantastically dressed, is a deliberate parody of the bridegroom's approach. The uneaten feast, in IV.i, is a parody of the wedding breakfast, and the night spent in fasting and watching, with Petruchio ‘Making a sermon of continency to her’, is a travesty of the wedding night. The purpose of parody in the play is to illuminate by distortion the true lineaments of love, by imbalance to suggest balance, by impersonation to propose the truth of nature, by comic exaggeration to seek out the lovers' real estimate of one another.

Realism⁵⁶ adds a second dimension to the presentation of love. In The Shrew there are neither seductions nor adulteries, love is indissolubly linked with marriage, and marriage with money. John Russell Brown,⁵⁷ after examining Errors, turns to The Shrew and says:

In this play love and commerce are brought closer together. Petruchio, as he determines to woo Baptista's elder daughter Katharina, blatantly identifies the two:

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

Grumio immediately and brutally underscores Petruchio's statement: ‘Why, give him gold enough and marry him to a puppet or an aglet-baby, or an old trot with ne'er a tooth in her head.’ Hortensio maintains the commercial imagery in describing his love for Bianca:

For in Baptista's keep my treasure is.
He hath the jewel of my life in hold.

In the following scene the exchange between Baptista and Tranio sets the scene for the ‘auction’ of Bianca in appropriately mercantile terms:

BAP.
Faith, gentlemen, now I play a merchant's part,
And venture madly on a desperate mart.
TRA.
'Twas a commodity lay fretting by you,
'Twill bring you gain, or perish on the seas.

The ‘auction’ itself, with its catalogues of plate and gold, Tyrian tapestry, ivory coffers, cypress chests, apparel, tents, canopies, and the like, may appear fantastic to modern sensibilities, and it is certainly comic, since the audience knows that Tranio has no title whatever to the wealth he bids, but it would not have seemed very odd to the Elizabethans. Marriages depended upon satisfactory contracts being agreed between the participating families. A manuscript in the Shakespeare Centre, Stratford-upon-Avon (Shakespeare's Birthplace Record Office, Willoughby de Brooke Collection, DR 98/1027A) records ‘Articles of agreament Indented hadd and made betweene Elianor Peyto widowe … And William Jeffes of Walton’, dated ‘20 May, 10 James I’, in which William agrees to marry Elinor ‘before the feast of S^t John Baptist next ensuinge’. In consideration of this marriage the said William Jeffes to the intent ‘that he may haue possesse & enioye … all the goodes chattels cattles household stuffe money & plate w^ch shee the said Elianor hath or claimeth to haue as administratrix to the said William Peyto hir late husband’, and that he may ‘quietly & peaceably likewise haue hold possesse & enioy all such landes tenementes pastures meadowes groundes comons & comodities whatsoeuer’ which William Peyto in his lifetime conveyed to Elinor, seals and delivers ‘Sixe seuerall obligacions … in the seuerall sommes in such obligacions appearinge’. These obligations amount to some £3000 in all, and so Elinor agrees to make an absolute deed of gift of all her goods and chattels to Jeffes before they marry. Such a marriage contract is typical of thousands in Shakespeare's day, and the original audience of The Shrew would have seen nothing strange in hard bargaining over money and domestic possessions before a marriage. In The Shrew, as nowhere else, Shakespeare roots his presentation of romantic love in the rich soil of finance.

If the fiscal background to courtship is strongly presented in the first part of the play, the domestic realities of the married state are made crystal clear in Acts IV and V. The first three Acts offer only a sketchy outline of Baptista's household. It is true, as Bradbrook says,⁵⁸ ‘Katherine is the first shrew to be given a father, the first to be shewn as maid and bride; she is not seen merely in relation to a husband.’ But, like almost all the heroines of Shakespearean comedy, she is not shown to have a mother. Baptista is a rich merchant who has two daughters. Beyond this, we know nothing of him. The domestic dimension does not appear until IV.i, with Grumio's arrival at Petruchio's house, but this scene marks a turning-point in the play, with its insistence on the daily duties and drudgeries of domestic life, a life into which Katherina is pitched as precipitately as she had been pitched from her horse on her journey (IV.i.65-6). It is a world with servants concerned with practical household tasks: there are fires to be lit, the cook to be enquired after, and Grumio asks:

Is supper ready, the house trimmed, rushes strewed, cobwebs swept, the serving men in their new fustian, their white stockings, and every officer his wedding-garment on? Be the Jacks fair within, the Jills fair without, the carpets laid, and everything in order?

This realistic presentation of the details of everyday living is maintained in Petruchio's concern for his boots, his spaniel, his slippers and his supper, and (in IV.iii) with the cut, colour, fashion and material of Katherina's dress. Realism depends upon the convincing evocation of relevant detail, and the last two Acts are full of such things. In a different key it even enters into the plotting between Lucentio and Biondello in IV.iv, where Biondello, with superb irrelevance, says: ‘I cannot tarry. I knew a wench married in an afternoon as she went to the garden for parsley to stuff a rabbit.’ It is this constant presence, throughout the play, of concrete, unromantic detail about love and marriage—whether it be dowries or marriage contracts, pots, pans or parsley—which creates the strong sense of actuality. As Hibbard has said:⁵⁹ ‘The Taming of the Shrew, unlike most of Shakespeare's other comedies—the nearest to it in this respect is All's Well that Ends Well—deals with marriage as it really was in the England that he knew.’

The idea that The Shrew is in any sense a farce derives less from the text than from the history of that text in the theatre. As we have seen (pp. 91-9), Worsdale's A Cure for a Scold and Bullock's The Cobler of Preston are farces derived from parts of Shakespeare's play, and Kemble's adaptation of Garrick's version of the play is responsible for popularizing the ‘whip-cracking’ Petruchio and sacrificing everything to vigorous, knockabout stage action. But the essence of farce is the dramatist's intention to provoke laughter in his audience, and laughter is by no means our dominant response when watching or reading The Shrew. Anne Barton's estimate is judicious:⁶⁰

There are undeniable elements of farce in the Katherina/Petruchio plot, as well as a robust glee in that age-old motif of the battle between the sexes which Shakespeare does, at moments in the play, exploit for its own, eminently theatrical, sake.

The elements of farce are ‘eminently theatrical’, no doubt, but they occur only ‘at moments in the play’. Apart from the opening exchanges between Sly and the Hostess the two scenes of the Induction are not farcical. Neither is the opening scene of the main play. Knockabout begins in I.ii, with Petruchio wringing Grumio by the ears, and by then the other tones of the play have been firmly set. It is continued with Katherina's assault on her sister in the following scene, but, far from developing, it is thereafter subtly controlled and diminished. In the same scene, Katherina's attack on Hortensio with her lute takes place off-stage, and the battle between Katherina and Petruchio is conducted verbally until the crucial moment when ‘She strikes him’, and he replies: ‘I swear I'll cuff you, if you strike again.’ Katherina backs down, faced (and outfaced) by the utterly serious prospect of superior physical strength. This is a point of inner and lesser climax in the play. From this moment on it becomes clear that the traditional methods of shrew-taming are not going to be used, and the traditional methods, the ‘Punch and Judy’ methods, are matter of farce.

Farce is not exploited, but transcended. Nevertheless, the basic situations and techniques of farce remain. Petruchio's entry to his wedding, fantastically attired, would be farcical if it were not obvious that he is playing the fantastic in order to teach Katherina how inappropriate is her approach to marriage. Similarly, when he abuses and beats his servants in IV.i, and throws the food around the room, he is employing farcical methods to teach his new wife the true order of domesticity. Even this is subdued in the Tailor and Haberdasher scene (IV.iii), where the lesson continues, though no one is beaten and the only abuse is verbal. The relationship between Petruchio and Katherina is too serious, too delicate, for farce, and the play's strongest strain of farce is reserved for the association of master and servant between Petruchio and Grumio. This obviously has its source in the beatings regularly inflicted on the clumsy or impertinent zanni in Italian comedy, and the knockabout, verbal abuse and jest, and the general low comedy which opens IV.i clearly derive from this tradition. It is not surprising that Lacey's farcical adaptation Sauny the Scott (see pp. 89-91) is centrally concerned with developing the comic possibilities in the character of Grumio. Love and marriage, in The Shrew, are too important to be presented as farce.

Romantic love is a presence in the play from beginning to end, and it functions as a kind of prolonged and delicious illusion, sustained in the face of a plethora of contrary facts. Not the least of the achievements of Shakespeare's dramaturgy is the way in which he interweaves the passion of Lucentio for Bianca with the Katherina-Petruchio plot. Nothing could be more patently Petrarchan than Lucentio's confession of love at first sight in I.i:

Tranio, I burn, I pine, I perish, Tranio,
If I achieve not this young modest girl. …
Tranio, I saw her coral lips to move,
And with her breath she did perfume the air.
Sacred and sweet was all I saw in her. …
And let me be a slave, t'achieve that maid
Whose sudden sight hath thrall'd my wounded eye.

Through all the disguises and deceptions of the lovers' plot he maintains this tone, and at the dénouement in V.i he is still singing in the same key:

Love wrought these miracles. Bianca's love
Made me exchange my state with Tranio,
While he did bear my countenance in the town,
And happily I have arriv'd at the last
Unto the wished haven of my bliss.

It is not until he loses the wager in V.ii that Lucentio is undeceived, and even then he is let down easily, with little more than a grumble:

The wisdom of your duty, fair Bianca,
Hath cost me a hundred crowns since supper-time.

Romantic love is allowed full weight in the play. It is not mocked. It is seen as the source of endless ingenuity, invention and youthful exuberance. It invites adventure and collusion: ‘Here's no knavery. See, to beguile the old folks, how the young folks lay their heads together.’ But the illusions and delusions of romantic love are seen as essentially a young man's passion. One thinks of Petruchio as somehow older than the other characters. When he became a man he put away the adolescent fantasies of romance, and learned to see his mistress not through a glass, darkly, but face to face. And, by contrast with Lucentio's romanticism, this makes his few, hard-won moments of tenderness all the more moving and convincing. At the end of V.i he demands a kiss from Katherina in the middle of the public street (see p. 128). After some demur, she kisses him, and he says:

Is not this well? Come, my sweet Kate.
Better once than never, for never too late.

‘Is not this well?’ establishes, in one brief question, a mutuality, a gentle and loving concern for union which shows that the teaching is over, the pupil has graduated, and all that is left is love.

The last scene of the play marks the climax of its exploration of the theme of love and marriage, and this scene has given rise to more differences of interpretation than anything else in the play. The earliest adaptations were uneasy with it. Lacey's Sauny the Scott, though vastly more brutal than Shakespeare's play, omits Katherina's ‘obedience’ speech entirely, and the same is true of Worsdale's A Cure for a Scold. As we have seen (p. 95), Garrick's Catharine and Petruchio distributes the ‘obedience’ speech between Petruchio and his wife, presumably on the grounds that what Shakespeare wrote represented an unacceptable presentation of marriage at the end of a comedy, and Garrick's judgement held the stage until Shakespeare's text was reinstated in the nineteenth century. But the restoration of the text meant the restoration of the problem. What was taken to be the abject and unconditional surrender, in public, of the ‘tamed’, broken-spirited wife was uncomfortable to the male self-esteem of the Victorian or Edwardian gentleman. Though he might, privately, most powerfully and potently believe it, yet he held it not honesty to have it thus set down. Shaw was offended:⁶¹ ‘the last scene is altogether disgusting to modern sensibility’. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch was embarrassed:⁶²

the whole Petruchio business … may seem, with its noise of whip-cracking, scoldings, its throwing about of cooked food, and its general playing of ‘the Devil amongst the Tailors’, tiresome—and to any modern woman, not an antiquary, offensive as well.

Later in the twentieth century the robustly feminist view of the final scene as essentially an ironic performance by Katherina was first and most strongly argued by Margaret Webster,⁶³ but perhaps most persuasively expressed by Harold C. Goddard:⁶⁴

the play ends with the prospect that Kate is going to be more nearly the tamer than the tamed, Petruchio more nearly the tamed than the tamer, though his wife naturally will keep the true situation under cover. So taken, the play is an early version of What Every Woman Knows—what every woman knows being, of course, that the woman can lord it over the man so long as she allows him to think he is lording it over her. This interpretation has the advantage of bringing the play into line with all the other Comedies in which Shakespeare gives a distinct edge to his heroine. Otherwise it is an unaccountable exception and regresses to the wholly un-Shakespearean doctrine of male superiority, a view which there is not the slightest evidence elsewhere Shakespeare ever held.

More recent critics have seen it as part of Petruchio's wooing dance,⁶⁵ an example of ‘the Games People Play’,⁶⁶ or even as Petruchio's reward,⁶⁷ and it is not surprising, in the light of the recent importance of feminist studies, that this final scene should be the subject of critical dispute.

There can be no question but that the ‘obedience’ speech is meant to be a final statement on the subject of love and marriage.⁶⁸ It is forty-four lines long, and only ten lines after it the play is finished. It is a great set piece and no one challenges it. So it is important to be quite clear what Katherina says, and what implications her words would have had for the play's original audience.

She begins by rebuking the Widow for darting scornful glances designed ‘To wound thy lord, thy king, thy governor’. Straight away this establishes her argument on the basis of degree, status in ‘the chain of being’, and this is one theory which Shakespeare endorses totally from the first scene of 1 Henry VI to The Tempest, where it is the principle which disqualifies Caliban's claim that ‘This island's mine’.⁶⁹ When Ulysses, in Troilus and Cressida, I.iii, enunciates the theory at length he is simply establishing the norm from which the Greek army has declined with such disastrous results. What has been called ‘the Elizabethan world picture’ asserted a hierarchy, a series of correspondences, which descended from God to inanimate nature, and on this ladder a wife stands one rung lower than a husband. Katherina's speech accepts this, and reiterates it:

Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,
Thy head, thy sovereign.

As the lord is to the servant, as the head is to the body, as the sovereign is to the subject, so is the husband to the wife. Katherina goes on to emphasize the benefits which accrue to accepting your place in the hierarchy of degree. When you accept your status you enter into the enjoyment of its rights and privileges; a dutiful wife may lie ‘warm at home, secure and safe’ for no other tribute than ‘love, fair looks, and true obedience’. It cannot be too strongly stressed that this does not make a husband into some kind of ‘lord of creation’. Katherina states the relationship with perfect clarity:

Such duty as the subject owes the prince
Even such a woman oweth to her husband.

The wife is vassal to the husband, the husband is vassal to the prince, the prince is vassal to God, the only Lord of Creation. If a wife denies her duty to her husband, if she is not ‘obedient to his honest will’, Katherina has very strong words for her:

What is she but a foul contending rebel,
And graceless traitor to her loving lord.

Shakespeare's audience would have seen the heads of rebels exposed in public places; they would have heard in their parish churches the Homily Against Wilful Rebellion. ‘Graceless’ meant not only ‘unpleasing’ but ‘lacking the grace of God’. In emphasizing a wife's duty ‘to serve, love, and obey’ Katherina clearly alludes to the well-known phraseology of the Book of Common Prayer, where, in the Marriage Service, the priest says to the woman: ‘Wilt thou obey him, and serue him, loue, honor, and kepe him in sickenes and in health?’⁷⁰ Even Katherina's reference to woman's comparative physical weakness finds an echo in so impeccably orthodox and familiar a source as the Homily ‘Of the State of Matrimonie’, first published in the Second Book of Homilies (1563):

For the woman is a weake creature, not indued with like strength and constancy of minde, therefore they bee the sooner disquieted, and they bee the more prone to all weake affections and dispositions of minde, more then men bee, and lighter they bee, and more vaine in their fantisies and opinions.⁷¹

The ‘obedience’ speech, taken as a whole, is completely in accord with normal Elizabethan opinion on the rights and status of wives. This opinion assumed, as we do not, that a wife was inferior in degree to her husband, and owed him submission and obedience which he repaid with protection and maintenance. For this opinion there was the authority of Holy Writ: ‘Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church.’⁷² The speech is rooted and grounded in well-known, sacred and serious expressions of the duty of wives. Shakespeare cannot possibly have intended it to be spoken ironically.

So the great final speech of The Shrew is a solemn affirmation of the great commonplace. The play's exploration of the theme of love and marriage comes to rest in that. But there is more to this final scene than one speech, and Shakespeare's dramaturgy personalizes what Katherina expresses generally. The real irony lies in the context. We, the audience, know from the last lines of V.i that Katherina and Petruchio have made their peace, and that she is in love with him as he is with her. Act V, scene ii opens with a wit-bout in which Petruchio attacks the Widow and Katherina surreptitiously comes to his aid. The alliance between them is, to the audience, another example of their developing trust, though to the other characters on stage it shows no more than the ‘shrewish’ Katherina acting aggressively to another woman, just as she had to her sister in II.i. Petruchio supports his wife, ‘A hundred marks, my Kate does put her down’, honouring the new alliance, but betraying nothing of it to the other characters. When the women withdraw the men agree upon the wager. It is important to note the terms in which Petruchio proposes it:

… he whose wife is most obedient,
To come at first when he doth send for her,
Shall win. …

It is to be a simple test of obedience, nothing more. There is a continuing flicker of irony in Petruchio's comment on the amount of the wager:

I'll venture so much of my hawk or hound,
But twenty times so much upon my wife.

It hints that the falconer's training, the manning and the coming to the lure, forms the basis for his confidence. Nevertheless, he is taking a risk, he is giving his wife the freedom to humiliate him if she chooses to do so. The three women are together off-stage, ‘conferring by the parlour fire’, and so Katherina has ample opportunity to see what the game is, as Biondello summons first Bianca and then the Widow. When Grumio comes for her she obeys her husband's command, but it is no cowed, broken-spirited compliance, but a duty which she does and a gift which she offers freely. It is a gift which Petruchio values highly because, as Germaine Greer has pointed out:⁷³ ‘The submission of a woman like Kate is genuine and exciting because she has something to lay down, her virgin pride and individuality.’ With the stage-direction ‘Enter Katherina’ the test is over, the suspense is lifted, the wager is won, and the love relationship triumphs. As Anne Barton puts it:⁷⁴

What Petruchio wants, and ends up with, is a Katherina of unbroken spirit and gaiety who has suffered only minor physical discomfort and who has learned the value of self-control and of caring about someone other than herself.

What follows may appear to be a stern continuation of the testing and humiliation, but it is in fact a willing ‘display’ by Katherina in response to a series of coded messages from her husband, which have a secret meaning for the two of them alone. Petruchio enquires after the Widow and Bianca, and instructs Katherina to ‘fetch them hither’. But he adds: ‘If they deny to come, / Swinge me them soundly forth unto their husbands.’ In other words, he offers her the chance to use physical violence on the Widow who has insulted her, and the sly and shrewish sister she has been itching to beat since Act II. And it would all be legitimate, praiseworthy and ‘obedient’. Katherina sees and appreciates the clever, generous point he makes. When she returns with the ‘froward wives’ Petruchio makes what looks like an impossibly humiliating demand:

Katherine, that cap of yours becomes you not.
Off with that bauble, throw it under foot.

The audience, and Katherina, recall the episode with the Haberdasher in IV.iii, when, in her unregenerate state, she stubbornly insisted on keeping the cap, and Petruchio refused to allow her to do so because she was wild:

KATH.
I'll have no bigger. This doth fit the time,
And gentlewomen wear such caps as these.
PET.
When you are gentle, you shall have one too,
And not till then.

Now she has learned the pointlessness of such selfish stubbornness, and the gesture of throwing down her cap when told to do so has a deeper, private meaning for the two participants, the shared secret bringing them closer together. Petruchio's third order to his wife is the most subtly and brilliantly phrased of all:

Katherine, I charge thee, tell these headstrong women
What duty they do owe their lords and husbands.

He does not say ‘Tell the assembled company what duty you owe your husband’, nor does he say ‘Rehearse the duties of wives to husbands’. He deliberately abstains from humiliating her in any way. He offers her the opportunity publicly to instruct her cunning little sister and the Widow who has been insulting her in their marital duties. He offers her a position of superiority from which to lecture. And the tiny exchange before she begins permits Petruchio covertly to direct his wife's performance even more carefully:

WID.
Come, come, you're mocking. We will have no telling.
PET.
Come on, I say, and first begin with her.
WID.
She shall not.
PET.
I say she shall. And first begin with her.

The angry Widow is pointed out as the target for the regenerate shrew, and Katherina can begin with a just rebuke: ‘Fie, fie!’ The particular form of Petruchio's command, ‘tell these headstrong women’, allows Katherina to avoid any reference to her own changed state. She does not have to say anything about her relationship with her own husband. She is permitted and encouraged to take refuge in the most bland and incontrovertible generalities—‘What duty they do owe’.

She is grateful for the delicate way in which he has handled the situation. And she expresses her gratitude in the full and expansive exposition she gives not only of the duty of the Widow to Hortensio, but the duty of all wives to their husbands. She gives more than Petruchio asked. She gives full measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over. And she ends by doing something that was never required of her. She refers openly to her own situation, ‘My mind hath been as big as one of yours’, and to her own change of heart: ‘But now I see our lances are but straws.’ Finally, and quite gratuitously, she offers a public gesture of subservience freely and unasked:

                    place your hands below your husband's foot.
In token of which duty, if he please,
My hand is ready, may it do him ease.

Petruchio responds to this unsolicited act of love and generosity with one of the most moving and perfect lines in the play, almost as if he is lost for words, taking refuge in action: ‘Why, there's a wench! Come on, and kiss me, Kate.’ I believe that any actor striving to represent Petruchio's feelings at this moment in the play should show him as perilously close to tears, tears of pride, and gratitude, and love.

Notes

1. In considering the ‘scenic structure’ of The Shrew I have been much indebted to Emrys Jones's Scenic Form in Shakespeare (Oxford, 1971), especially chs 1-4.

2. Jones, op. cit., p. 13.

3. Other contrasting or distinguishing patterns might, of course, be observed: the double frustration of Katherina, silenced by her father in her rage, then stunned into acquiescence by Petruchio's behaviour; the contrasted marriage contracts, the one almost a parody of the other; or the central, cameo episode of the lute-breaking, an almost emblematic presentation of the union of comedy and violence which informs the taming plot.

4. There are some displacements, as when Petruchio's anger at Katherina's intransigence is directed at his offenceless and obedient servants. This may come from the folk-tale sources, where the husband kills his innocent dog or horse instead of beating his recalcitrant wife. Such obliquities seem to have attracted Shakespeare's imagination.

5. ‘Another powerful device used by Shakespeare is a pattern of human transformation from one polar extreme to the other’ (Jones, op. cit., p. 14). Cf. the Forum scene (Caes., III.ii); the Lady Anne scene (R3, I.ii); the temptation scene (Oth., III.iii).

6. The metaphor is immediately modified by Petruchio's following lines: ‘Thus the bowl should run, / And not unluckily against the bias.’

7. A banquet, in this context, is a dessert course served after the principal meal (which must have been served at Baptista's house). See OED, Banquet, sb.¹ 3. The play has several examples of the ‘broken feast’ motif. Cf. Err., III.i; Mac., III.iv; Tp., III.iii.

8. Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Raleigh (1908), p. 96. It is curious to note that Charles and Mary Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare (1807) tells the story of The Shrew, omitting the Sly scenes entirely and making only minimum mention of the sub-plot.

9. Hibbard, pp. 11-12.

10. It was Pope who labelled the first two scenes ‘Induction’. The word does not occur in the Folio text, which begins ‘Actus primus. Scoena Prima.’

11. Shakespeare's Comedy of Love (1974), p. 49.

12. H. B. Charlton, Shakespearian Comedy (1938), p. 88. See also R. W. Bond, Early Plays from the Italian (Oxford, 1911); Leo Salingar, Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy (Cambridge, 1974). As Charlton says (p. 76): ‘The sub-plot of The Shrew is one of the few English plots immediately traceable to a sixteenth-century Italian comedy.’

13. ‘Dramatic Role as Social Image’, SJ [Shakespeare Jahrbuch] (1958), p. 134.

14. By also making Hortensio Petruchio's friend Shakespeare creates a strong narrative link between the two plots. For the alleged ‘inconsistencies’ in the presentation of Hortensio see pp. 37-9.

15. Leggatt, op. cit., pp. 46-7.

16. Cf. the central scenes of AYL (III.i-IV.iii).

17. Tranio (disguised as Lucentio) is a major character in the play. He creates almost all the intrigue in the sub-plot; it is he who ‘propels the action and who of all the characters best corresponds with Petruchio in the Katherina plot’. See E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's Early Comedies (1965), pp. 92ff.

18. Salingar, op. cit., p. 225.

19. Hosley, HLQ [Huntington Library Quarterly] (1964), p. 294. See also Donald A. Stauffer, Shakespeare's World of Images (New York, 1949), p. 46; Maynard Mack, ‘Engagement and Detachment in Shakespeare's Plays’, in Essays … in Honor of Hardin Craig, ed. Hosley (Columbia, 1962), pp. 279-80.

20. I believe there were other episodes, and an epilogue. See pp. 39-45.

21. It is noteworthy that he attracted considerable attention from the early adaptors of the play, especially Johnson and [Christopher] Bullock [The Cobler of Preston (fourth edn., 1723; reprinted Cornmarket Press, 1969)]. See pp. 92 ff.

22. Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (1962), p. 105. See her perceptive remarks on ‘the play within the play’ in The Shrew, pp. 104ff.

23. Shakespeare's World of Images, p. 46.

24. Shakespeare's Early Comedies, p. 106.

25. Dream in Shakespeare (New Haven and London, 1974), p. 27.

26. Ibid., p. 29. Cf. Brooks's note on Lyly's interest ‘in the idea that his plays were “unreal”’, in his Arden edn of MND [A Midsummer Night's Dream] (1979), p. cxlii.

27. Leggatt, op. cit., pp. 43-4.

28. C. C. Seronsy, ‘“Supposes” as the Unifying Theme in The Taming of the Shrew’, SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly] (1963), pp. 15-30.

29. OED, sb.² 1b. See Langland, Piers Plowman, A. x. 209; Chaucer, Can. Yeo. Tale, 364. For the transference from male to female in the medieval period cf. Witch (OED, sb.¹, sb.²). Derivatives like ‘shrewd’, ‘shrewish’, originally meant ‘rascally or villainous’; the verb ‘to shrew’ meant ‘to curse’. Cf. beshrew.

30. See Emma Phipson, The Animal-Lore of Shakespeare's Time (1883); H. W. Seager, Natural History in Shakespeare's Time (1896); C. Plinius Secundus, The Natural Historie, trans. Philemon Holland (1601; 1634, 43e, 50i, 55e, 56m, 71e, 167a, 168m, 277c, 322k, 360m, 361a); Gordon Corbet, The Terrestrial Mammals of Western Europe (1966); Peter Crowcroft, The Life of the Shrew (1957).

31. Edward Topsell, The Historie of Foure-footed Beasts (1607), pp. 536-40. See also Thomas Lupton, A Thousand Notable Things (1579, 1601, etc.); John Swann, Speculum Mundi (1635); Robert Plot, The Natural History of Stafford-shire, vi. 51 (1686), p. 222; Gilbert White, Natural History of Selborne (1776); OED, Shrew, sb.¹ 2, for shrew-ash, shrew-bitten, shrew-running, shrew-struck, etc.

32. Corbet, op. cit., pp. 106-10.

33. Cf. Crowcroft, op. cit.: ‘It is typical of the animal's general behaviour that when it digs, it digs furiously and with a great show of energy’ (p. 36); ‘it is clear that newly caught shrews always eat about their own weight of food daily’ (p. 25); ‘What is astonishing is that the shrew should require so much food of such high energy content’ (p. 26); ‘The explanation seems to be that their physiology is adjusted for a rapid turnover of energy’ (p. 28); [a shrew] ‘having disembowelled a comrade, attacked with equal ferocity snakes, slow-worms and vipers, from an unequal conflict with which it was removed unhurt in body and unsubdued in spirit’ (p. 20, quoting Barrett-Hamilton); ‘most “fights” do not involve actual physical contact, the outcome being decided by screaming contests. If one shrew encounters another and the other does not give way, the first raises its muzzle and squeaks loudly. When a shrew is squeaked at … its reaction is to return the compliment—or insult—and a screaming contest takes place, the two animals only a few inches apart, facing one another. Many fights are decided without anything more serious than the one contestant apparently becoming intimidated by the squeaks of the other’ (p. 51); ‘whereas [rodents] usually fight in grim silence, shrews continue to squeak loudly’ (p. 52); ‘The noisy nature of the fighting of shrews is its most prominent feature’ (p. 61); ‘It has a particularly scolding and complaining note, which immediately convinces the hearer that a fight is going on’ (p. 48); ‘the various species of Sorex utter sounds of at least two distinct types: (1) staccato squeaks and (2) soft twittering sounds’ (p. 62).

34. The best-known of the few recorded modern attempts to tame a shrew is in Konrad Lorenz, King Solomon's Ring, trs. Wilson (1952), ch. 9.

35. See Hon. Gerald Lascelles, in Shakespeare's England (Oxford, 1916), vol. II, pp. 351-66, who lists and describes the principal Elizabethan authorities.

36. ‘To man’ is ‘to accustom (a hawk, occas. other birds) to the presence of men’: OED, Man, v. 10.

37. See Commentary on IV.i.175-98.

38. Probably flight ‘at the high mountee’ as opposed to ‘at the river’. See Lascelles, op. cit., p. 359.

39. A hawk was ‘mewed up’ (confined in a ‘mew’ or cage) at moulting time: OED, v.² 1.

40. See OED, V.¹ 8, quoting Shr.; cf. Caes., II.i.118, ‘So let high-sighted tyranny range on’.

41. Cf. Oth., III.iii.264-7; Ado, III.i.35-6.

42. It was not normally considered advisable to starve hawks during manning (see Lascelles, op. cit., p. 357), but obviously a full-fed hawk would not respond so readily to the technique.

43. Op. cit., pp. 357-8.

44. Among all the hunting, sporting and gaming images of V.ii there is only one allusion to hawking, but its irony is important. Of the twenty crowns' wager Petruchio says:

    I'll venture so much of my hawk or hound,
    But twenty times so much upon my wife.

45. See Louis B. Wright, Middle Class Culture in Elizabethan England (Ithaca, 1958).

46. Cf. the image of himself which the Lord offers Sly with the image of herself which Petruchio offers Katherina in II.i and later.

47. The principal concern in Aristotle's Ethics.

48. Cf. the response evoked by Navarre's ‘edict’ in LLL, I.i.

49. LLL, IV.iii.323.

50. It was considered so licentious when it appeared that it was made the pretext for the poet's banishment.

51. He adds enthusiasm to his credentials in his self-recommendation to Baptista at II.i. 130 ff.

52. ‘Dramatic Role as Social Image; a Study of The Taming of the Shrew’, SJ (1958), pp. 132-50.

53. Douglas Bush, ‘Classical Myth in Shakespeare's Plays’, in Elizabethan and Jacobean Studies Presented to F. P. Wilson in Honour of his 70th Birthday (1959), pp. 68-9.

54. A possibility which Shakespeare takes up later, and in greater detail, in MND.

55. Cf. Marlowe, 2 Tamburlaine, I.ii.31ff. (Plays, ed. Gill, pp. 126-7):

    Choose which thou wilt; all are at thy command. …
    The Grecian virgins shall attend on thee,
    Skillful in music and in amorous lays,
    As fair as was Pygmalion's ivory girl
    Or lovely Iö metamorphosèd. …
    And as thou rid'st in triumph through the streets,
    The pavements underneath thy chariot wheels
    With Turkey carpets shall be coverèd,
    And cloth of Arras hung about the walls,
    Fit objects for thy princely eye to pierce. …
    And, when thou go'st, a golden canopy
    Enchas'd with precious stones, which shine as bright
    As that fair veil that covers all the world,
    When Phoebus, leaping from his hemisphere,
    Descendeth downward to th' Antipodes.

56. In using this vexed critical term I intend no more than ‘a powerful illusion of actuality, a sense of conformity to real life’.

57. John Russell Brown, Shakespeare and his Comedies (1957), pp. 57-8; see also pp. 94-9.

58. [M.C.] Bradbrook, [“Dramatic Role as Social Image: A Study of The Taming of the Shrew, SJ (1958)], p. 139.

59. Hibbard, p. 30.

60. Anne Barton, Introduction to The Taming of the Shrew (Riverside edn, Boston, 1974), p. 107.

61. Shaw on Shakespeare, ed. Edwin Wilson (1961; reprinted Penguin, 1969), p. 198.

62. NCS, p. xvi.

63. Margaret Webster, Shakespeare Without Tears (New York, 1942), p. 142.

64. The Meaning of Shakespeare (Chicago, 1951), vol. 1, pp. 68ff.

65. Michael West, ‘The Folk Background of Petruchio's Wooing Dance: Male Supremacy in The Taming of the Shrew’, Shakespeare Studies (1974).

66. Ralph Berry, Shakespeare's Comedies (Princeton, 1972), p. 7.

67. Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (New York, 1971), pp. 220-1.

68. See Ruth Nevo, Comic Transformations in Shakespeare (1980), esp. p. 50.

69. See The Tempest, ed. Kermode (Arden edn, 1954), pp. xxxivff.

70. In ‘The Forme of Solemnizacion of Matrimonie’, The First & Second Prayer-Books of Edward VI (Everyman's Library, 1910), p. 253.

71. Quoted in Helen Gardner, The Business of Criticism (Oxford, 1959), p. 71, in the context of a discussion of Donne's ‘Air and Angels’. This poem, and the recent extensive critical debate about it (see The Elegies and The Songs and Sonnets of John Donne, ed. Gardner (Oxford, 1965), pp. 75 and 205) are very relevant to any full understanding of Katherina's final speech.

72. Ephesians, v. 22-3.

73. Greer, op. cit., p. 221.

74. Anne Barton (Riverside edn, Boston, 1974), p. 106.

Abbreviations and References

The abbreviated titles of Shakespeare's works are as in C. T. Onions, A Shakespeare Glossary, 2nd edn (1919). Passages quoted or cited are from the complete Tudor Shakespeare, ed. Peter Alexander (Collins, 1951).

Editions

Hibbard: The Taming of the Shrew, ed. G. R. Hibbard, 1968 (New Penguin Shakespeare).

Johnson: The Plays of William Shakespeare … To which are added Notes by Sam. Johnson, 1765.

NCS: The Taming of the Shrew, ed. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and John Dover Wilson, Cambridge, 1928 (New [Cambridge] Shakespeare).

Other Works

OED: Oxford English Dictionary.

Onions: C. T. Onions, A Shakespeare Glossary, 2nd edn, revised, 1919.

Smith and Wilson: The Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs, compiled by William George Smith; 3rd edn, ed. F. P. Wilson, Oxford, 1970.

Tilley: M. P. Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1950.