SOURCE: Jaster, Margaret Rose. “Controlling Clothes, Manipulating Mates: Petruchio's Griselda.” Shakespeare Studies 29 (2001): 93-108.

[In the following essay, Jaster explores Shakespeare's use of apparel in The Taming of the Shrew as a marker of personal identity, manipulated by Petruchio as a means of controlling Katherina.]

One of the most hilarious—or hideous—scenes in Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew occurs in act 4, when Petruchio, with the aid of Grumio and Hortensio, symbolically addresses Katherina in apparel he chooses for her. Throughout the scene, Petruchio in effect undresses his new wife by contradicting enough of her sartorial desires to the delight of the assembled males, and to Katherina's manifest discomfort. Editors and playgoers have usually relished the banter among the men and Katherina's resultant frustration; they have often been relieved that Petruchio chooses to tame his new wife in so innocuous a manner.¹

But apparel is too potent a tool in any power dynamic to dismiss its manipulation as a benign taming game. In early modern England, as today, any contention about apparel raises issues of personal and social identity. Although Petruchio employs less physical abuse than traditional tamers, we cannot blithely disregard any attempts by one party to control another's identity through this most intimate device, even if those attempts are made by Shakespeare's “humane” husband.

“Dress defines not only who one is, but how one is: that is, how one fits into a culture's moral and religious value system.”² Female dress was complicated for early modern women by legal and social codes that, when they mention women at all, subjected wives to the personal taste and generosity of their spouses. This essay will examine the potency of apparel as a battle-site in gender relations in early modern England through an analysis of texts that retell the Griselda story. We can then return to Shakespeare's Shrew [The Taming of the Shrew]—perhaps to re-vision the controversial tailor scene.

Christiane Klapisch-Zuber has characterized the economic and social implications of nuptial arrangements in early modern Italy as the “Griselda Complex.”³ The term derives from Boccaccio's tale of the Marquis who chooses to wed a poor peasant girl and proceeds to test her worthiness through a series of emotional ordeals that rival Job's. Her image in cassone (wedding chest) paintings popularized her for patrician Italians; and the early modern English public would have been familiar with the tale through versions by Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Petrarch, as well as contemporary ballads, prose pamphlets, and plays.⁴

Klapisch-Zuber appropriates the fictional character to illustrate a social system that bridled women in an increasingly complicated pattern of trafficking in women.⁵ The exclusion of daughters as heirs in favor of their brothers effectively subjected wives to husbands—who managed, then, to control the entire conjugal estate. The considerable expenditure on apparel in this time period had the very real effect that the lady sported her husband's estate on her person; he was also responsible for her dressing within her class.

The very fact that the husband presents his bride with gifts of expensive clothing suggests a pecuniary one-upmanship between the father of the bride, who dowers his daughter, and the new husband, who expensively clothes her. The effect of this counter-trousseau is to restore the economic imbalance (of giver over recipient) that occurs when the wife's father establishes his superiority by paying the dowry. That the new bride's clothing might have been rented or borrowed by the husband for the wedding⁶ points up the symbolic character of the exchange, even as it reminds us of the material considerations.

A husband's investment in clothing his wife has resonances far beyond its significance as a fact of material culture. Indeed, the present study is most interested in Griselda's betrothal as a ritual act that uses apparel to mark her transformation from daughter of one male to the wife of another. This transformation, her vestizione, places the husband's gifts of apparel in the symbolic sphere where we can best analyze their use by Griselda's Walter and Katherina's Petruchio.

I noted above that a woman's garb defines her place in society's moral and religious value system, and that as the early modern bride dons her husband's gift of apparel, she is symbolically integrated into her husband's household and lineage. By accepting her husband's gift of wedding apparel, a bride assumes a new social identity, one that is, to a great extent, manipulated by her new spouse.

Thus, Griselda's plight emblematizes early modern women's sartorial subjugation; while Griselda's story is admittedly extreme, and fictional, we may learn something of the constraints on early modern women from an analysis of these presentations of Griselda. Though the edifying principle of an obedient wife accounts for a certain amount of the tale's popularity,⁷ its use of the ritualized exchange of clothing, a shared code among the various versions, may also be significant in the reception and dissemination of the story. Similarities among the accounts of Griselda's transformation also suggest that the tale's several audiences recognized in the depiction their own attitudes toward marriage, clothing, and identity.

Because the tale of Griselda is so salient to an understanding of how apparel figured in early modern gender relations, I will summarize her story here. In most versions, Griselda's dilemma derives from the commonplace in a patriarchal society that it is an aristocratic male's duty to provide an heir to rule after his death: Walter, the Marquis of Salusa, is prevailed upon by his court to marry, and so produce an heir. Walter agrees to marry if his nobles agree to his choice, sight unseen. They do. Walter then chooses to wed Griselda, the daughter of the poorest man in his region. She bears him a daughter, then a son. Though in all versions Griselda is an exemplary spouse, Walter tests his wife's loyalty by removing each infant from its mother. He fabricates the children's deaths, with the explanation that Griselda's low birth makes her an unfit mother. These horrors, and her eventual replacement by a younger aristocratic woman, are borne by Griselda with resilient patience. The tale ends happily ever after when Walter reveals that Griselda's replacement was, in fact, his own daughter, and the family is reunited.

In all versions of the tale, there are three occasions in which apparel figures significantly: the moment of Griselda's metamorphosis from peasant girl to noble lady; the point when Walter returns her to her father's house; and finally when she is reinstated as Walter's wife. For the sake of clarity, I will anglicize the names to Griselda, Walter, and Janicola (her father) though they vary in the different versions; for the sake of brevity, I will concentrate exclusively on Griselda's first transformation—from peasant to “princess.”⁸

In Boccaccio's tale (1353), Griselda's garments have been made for her long before the wedding, before she is aware of her destiny. Walter has

made … readie most riche and costlie garments, shaped by the body of a comely young Gentlewoman, who he knew to be equall in proportion and stature, to her whom hee had made his election.⁹

Walter is the sorcerer who effects a magical metamorphosis: “Presently he took her by the hand, so led her forth of the poore homely house, and in the presence of all his company, with his owne hands, he took off her meane wearing garments, smocke and all, and cloathed her with those Robes of State which he had purposely brought thither for her, whereat every one [stood] amazed. …”¹⁰

Walter's actions here are particularly significant for an understanding of Griselda's predicament. He removes her garments with his own hands, and in the presence of his company. Walter's direct intervention heightens the dramatic moment. Singularly, Boccaccio insists that Walter takes off “smocke and all,” emphasizing her vulnerable nudity. He then clothes her in Robes of State: Griselda is no longer a peasant girl, her father's daughter—she has become her role as Walter's consort, and a reflection of his status, not her own.

After Walter finishes her, we are told, everyone stood amazed—that their new mistress has been created from such coarse material? They need not have worried. Shortly after this, Boccaccio asserts the power of apparel to affect one's personality: “And the young bride apparently declared, that (with her garments) her mind and behavior were quite changed.” Boccaccio's Griselda is an example of how apparel contributes to the erasure of a peasant woman; the Griselda everyone knew has been subsumed into one who can more acceptably fill the shoes of “her whom he had made his election.”¹¹ Walter's confidence in the relieved response of his court suggests a society in which the ceremony of investiture symbolically transforms an inadequate individual into a suitable public servant; Walter's attitude would have been approved by the courtly readers of Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Petrarch, as well as by Shakespeare's audience.

While Boccaccio's Walter personally fashions Griselda by stripping off her old apparel and providing her with a new identity with his new clothing, Chaucer's Walter seems threatened by contamination through contact with Griselda's personal possessions. Chaucer's version of the betrothal scene.¹² offers hints at Griselda's future humiliation:

                              And for that no thyng of her old geere
                    She sholde bryng into his hous, he bad
That wommen sholde dispoillen hire right theere;
Of which thise ladyes were nat right glad
To handle hir clothes, wherinne she was clad.
          But nathelees, this mayde bright of hewe
Fro foot to heed they clothed han al newe.
                    Hir heris … they kembd, that lay untressed
Ful rudely, and with [their] fyngres smale
A corone on hire heed they han ydressed,
And sette hir ful of nowches grete and smale.
Of hir array what sholde I make a tale?(13)
Unnethe the peple hir knew for hir fairnesse
Whan she translated was in swich richnesse.

(372-85)

Griselda is “despoillen.” Glossed as “undressed” by the Riverside editor, the word is used elsewhere by Chaucer in its other Middle English usages: “to strip of possessions by violence”; and “to spoil or plunder, especially the arms or clothes of an enemy, or the skin of a beast.”¹⁴ Although modern readers might not figure Griselda as enemy or beast, we cannot ignore these implications present to earlier audiences, which implied violence or deprivation.”¹⁵

Chaucer himself seems unsure about Griselda's worth: despite the courtly ladies' scorn, Griselda is “a maid bright of hue” before she is “clothed all anew.” However, following Boccaccio, the people know her fairness only after she is translated into such richness.

Griselda alludes to this mutation of her identity later in the poem, when Walter rejects her:

                              “For as I lefte at hoom al my clothyng,
          Whan I first cam to yow, right so,” quod she,
“Lefte I my whyl and al my libertee,
          And took youre clothyng; wherfore I yow preye,
Dooth youre plesuance; I wol youre lust obeye. …”

(653-58; my emphasis)

Griselda's assertion reinforces the link between clothing and social identity—she relinquished her will, a part of her previous social role—when she accepted Walter's apparel.

That this scene of transformation is depicted on early modern cassone may help to emphasize the resonances of the literary Griselda in the lives of early modern women. Cristelle Baskins, in a study of images of Griselda on cassoni argues that any interpretation of these artifacts “must be located … in the strategic interconnections between textual narrative, pictorial narrative and the construction of gender difference.”¹⁶ She notes that the chests formed part of society's acknowledgement of the couple's new status in the community: a circumstance that is as public as the chest, and as private as the trousseau it contained. Baskins also reminds us that in the newlyweds' living quarters, the cassoni served as a “permanent reminder of the physical, material, and familial transformations produced by that marriage.”¹⁷

Explications of these cassoni as texts categorize them as either allegorical (relying on conventional readings and authoritative texts) or descriptive (considering the depictions as culturally and socially accurate). The paintings Baskins discusses render only the betrothal scene—a nude Griselda—and Baskins notes that her redressing—the transformation—is never depicted, but that “the thematics of dress and undress continue in the text and affect our understanding of her as a ‘bare bride.’”¹⁸

The choice of Griselda as a subject to decorate cassoni lays bare the power dynamics of early modern marriage. In these paintings, Walter suggests the complete submission that occurs with Griselda's advancement to her new role: he offers the spectacle of his nude wife to the court; this action foreshadows his later truculence when he will insist that Griselda return to her father's house in her smock. The paintings also operate outside the accepted discourse by displaying Griselda's nakedness—portraits of early modern women normally celebrate the wealth of their families, not the nude accessibility of their women.¹⁹ Furthermore, the familiar image of Griselda would have been a chronic reminder of the darker side of marriage: the depiction of Griselda's compulsory nudity recalls Walter's tyranny during the marriage, which, though it provided an exemplum for the new spouse, was problematic, as both Boccaccio and Chaucer conceded.²⁰

Griselda's shadow over the English stage projected forcefully into the cultural conversation on matrimonial matters. Although we know of only two plays that claim to tell her tale—both designated as “comedies” in their print versions—Griselda's image impacts a number of tormented female characters. Shakespeare's Hermione, Imogen, Helena, Hero, Julia, Desdemona, and Marina among the females who shared Griselda's fate of waiting patiently as “the injustices done to them by their menfolk are painstakingly resolved.”²¹

Let us look more closely at the betrothal scene in the two Griselda plays, observing the role of apparel in these theatrical versions. We can then return to Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, examining Katherina's transformation, with attention to the use of apparel in Shakespeare's treatment of marriage, women, and identity.

Unfortunately we have no record of any performance of John Phillips' 1565 play The Commody of Pacient and Meeke Grissill, though the printed text carefully instructs would-be directors how “eight persons maye easely play this Commody.”²² Griselda's transformation from peasant to princess takes place after Walter is convinced of his need for a wife; he falls in love with the grieving Griselda, whose mother has just died.

Although the dramatic convention of boy-actors playing women's parts precludes the stripping of Griselda in the stage versions of this tale, the betrothal scene remains pivotal. In this version, both Janicola and Griselda resist Walter's sartorial metamorphosis. Griselda uses their peasant attire to prove their unworthiness for the great honor women intends to bestow—and, one could argue, to avert imminent tragedy. Early in the play, Griselda argues:

My poore estate my missery, the tyme doth forth unfould,
What better profe can be here of, than these our ragges so torne,
These pante and shoe our penurie, which wee to bide were borne. …

(671-73)

But Walter argues that humble raiment signals noble virtues:

Thy ragged clothes the[y] argue not, in poore estate to lyve,
Thy vertues noble doe the[y] make, such Fate doth Fortune give. …

(694-95)

Walter's flattery reimagines the fantasy of reciprocity implicit in every fairy tale wherein the peasant girl is actually a princess by birth; but unlike Shakespeare's Marina or Perdita, Griselda is only a princess because Walter makes her one. Walter's praise renders her a metaphorical princess, made noble by virtue, but society will recognize only the princess created when his clothes transform her.

Soon Walter tells his ladies to dress Griselda; when Griselda returns with the ladies, she protests that she is uncomfortable with the new finery:

O noble Lord, these costlye Robes, unfittly seeme to bee:
My ragged weed much more then this, doubtles contented mee.

(822-23)

Walter's contradiction reminds us that, in all of these versions, Griselda discards her earlier social role—and her contentment—when she exchanges her ragged weeds for his costly robes:

These garmentes nowe to thine estate belong, my lady deare,
Disdaine them not, but for my sake refuse them not to weare.

(824-25)

Walter reminds Griselda that the garments belong to her estate, another reminder of the elevation in status wrought by marriage. In addition, the use of the word “disdaine” betrays his apprehension that by elevating Griselda's status, he has rendered himself vulnerable to rejection. So these lines also illustrate that while the changes in Griselda accommodate the needs of Walter and his domain, the alterations in both characters are not due entirely to Walter's decision to marry out of his class but are, rather, the expected result of entering into the state of matrimony.²³

Although in all versions of this tale Griselda gracefully acquiesces to her new station, it is also true that she seemed content in her poverty. That Walter has the most to gain from plucking Griselda from her peaceful penury is admitted in the betrothal scene from the 1599 play The Pleasant Comodie of Patient Grisill by Thomas Dekker, William Haughton, and Henry Chettle.²⁴ In the betrothal scene, this Walter says:

Ile gild that pouertie, and make it shine,
With beames of dignitie: this base attire,
These Ladies shal tear of, and decke thy beautie
In robes of honour, that the worlde may say,
Vertue and beautie was my bride today.

(1.2.270-75)

Significantly, Walter boasts that he is wedding the embodiment of womanly qualities, virtue and beauty, and Griselda is defined by those personifications. As her base attire is torn off and replaced with Walter's robes of honor, Griselda becomes a reflection of her husband's wealth, status, and interests.

While in Phillip's play the betrothal transformation occurred off-stage, in the 1599 version we witness the betrothal, but our attention is deflected by the shenanigans of Janicola's servant, Babulo. Babulo trenchantly metonymizes his objections to social intercourse between the classes:

Its hard sir for this motley lerkin, to find friendship with this fine doublet.

(1.2.304)

When Babulo verbalizes the impossibility of a friendship between Walter and himself, and advises Walter that he himself would make a better consort for Griselda (line 315), he underscores Griselda's double indemnity: she is distanced from Walter by the impediments of gender as well as status.

In act 2, scene 1 of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew (1593?), Petruchio promises the world a second Griselda, linking Griselda's hapless image to the fate of his betrothed. The allusion occurs in Petruchio's boast to Baptista and his guests that, despite what they know of Katherina, and what the audience has just observed of her, he has won the consent of the recalcitrant Katherina. As Petruchio's lie incorporates the figure of the unfortunate Griselda, his false narrative of the events of the “courtship scene” (2.1.177-267) presages his manipulation of the rhetoric of apparel through the rest of the play. In the only reference to Griselda in the entire Shakespeare canon, Petruchio declares to the assembled males that “For patience she will prove a second Girssel …” (2.1.284). with that telling allusion, Petruchio alerts the attentive interpreter to the shaping of Shakespeare's Griselda which occurs when Petruchio exploits apparel to realize his boast.

So we return now to the dilemma with which I opened this essay: how is one to react to the tailor scene (4.3)? In order to address that question, we must recognize that the signals Shakespeare sent to his original audience do not suggest a sympathetic Katherina, one who is worthy of the reward of a humane husband. The play's title arouses the expectations of his early modern audience, and the playwright does not disappoint: from our first view of her through her wedding scene, Katherina is the very caricature of a “shrew.” She threatens violence to Hortensio (1.1.63-65) and is physically abusive to her sister, Bianca, whose hands she ties while she verbally attacks her (2.1.1-22); she even strikes Petruchio at their initial meeting (2.1.213).

As other interpreters have noted,²⁵ Shakespeare's audience would understand her unbridled speech as “shrewishness”; in order for Petruchio to prove to an early modern audience that he has tamed Katherina, he must silence her. He begins that process shortly after the “wooing scene” (2.2.177-267), when he convinces her father that he speaks for the two of them; he continues it at the wedding, where he cuts off Katherina's protestations by claiming her as his “goods” and “chattel” (3.2.219), and finally silences her in the tailor scene (4.3).

Although I realize, as I mentioned earlier, that this scene is admired for its good-natured humor, let us consider it anew in relation to the figure of Griselda, which Petruchio has introduced. First, the scene occurs immediately after Grumio, a servant, then Petruchio, with Hortensio's aid, bait Katherina with food. Are we constrained to laugh along with the Gentlemen as Katherina, apparently fasting since the wedding, begs for food (4.3.1-60)?

The tantalizing that Petruchio began with victuals continues with clothes, when Petruchio promises Katherina that they will return to her father's house

          And revel it as bravely as the best,
                    With silken coats and caps, and golden rings,
With ruffs and cuffs and farthingales and things,
With scarves and fans and double change of brav'ry,
With amber bracelets, beads and all this knav'ry.(26)

(4.1.54-58)

Petruchio had already pulled a sartorial bait-and-switch before the wedding. He promised that for the wedding he and Katherina “will have rings, and things, and fine array” (2.1.312), only to arrive at the wedding in a mockery of wedding attire that even the obtuse Baptista noted was “a shame to your estate, / An eyesore to our solemn festival” (3.2.90-91).

In the tailor scene, Petruchio employs apparel to continue his mockery of Paduan society that had begun in the wedding scene, and he further humiliates his spouse. The leering courtiers who scrutinized the nude Griselda are replaced by an audience of servants and salesmen. Alone in the presence of these males, Katherina must endure slurs to her social position and her chastity, comments that provoke Katherina's final speech of resistance.

As in the Griselda tales, the solicitous husband has already ordered his wife's postnuptial apparel; by this action Petruchio reasserts his right to control his wife's image, the embodiment of his estate to the world.²⁷ In his denunciation of the new hat, Petruchio taunts Katherina with food words as well as sexual innuendoes. He says,

                    Why, this was moulded on a porringer—
A velvet dish! Fie, fie, 'tis lewd and filthy …
A knack, a toy, a trick, a baby's cap.

(4.3.64-67)

“Porringer” and “dish,” and “knack” remind her of her empty stomach, while “lewd,” “filthy,” and “trick” have sexual connotations. Linking the images of sex and food reminds Katherina and the audience that in his role as husband, Petruchio controls the necessities of Katherina's life. Petruchio's behavior throughout the play insists on his right to “husband” the goods and chattels of his household, including his wife, in whatever manner he sees fit.

But Katherina likes the hat, insisting that it is both fashionable and fitting for a gentlewoman (line 70)—to which Petruchio retorts that when she is a gentlewoman, she shall have one, too. Petruchio's play on Katherina's words slights her social position and intimates that she thwarts her master with her supposed recalcitrance.

In the next short speech (lines 73-80) Katherina pleads to be heard; she reminds Petruchio that his “betters” have endured her speaking her mind (line 75). Her tongue, she says, will tell the anger of her heart—or else it will break. Unfazed, Petruchio returns to a linguistic maneuver he has used frequently in the play: he pretends to misunderstand her, agreeing with her dislike of the hat, telling her he loves her more because she hates it.²⁸ Katherina appears to win this round. She retorts,

Love me or love me not, I like the cap
And it will have or I will have none.

(84-85)

But he ignores her remarks and moves to the gown:

Thy gown? Why, ay …
What's this—a sleeve?
'Tis like a demi-cannon.
What, up and down carved like an apple-tart?

(86-89)

Again, Petruchio's words suggest bawdy connotations (“sleeve,” “cannon,” “carved,” and “tart”) and remind her of her hunger. Katherina's plea for this dress reminds us of a woman's spousal subjection in matters of her wardrobe. She asserts,

I never saw a better-fashioned gown,
More quaint, more pleasing, nor more commendable.
Belike you mean to make a puppet of me.

(101-3)

When Petruchio contradicts her, asserting that it is the tailor who tries to make a puppet of her, Katherina is silent.²⁹ She stands by while the men discuss her raiment—at one point her chastity is impugned again when the dress is described as “a loose-bodied gown,” a term for prostitutes' dresses, which allow easy access and conceal the results of the women's labors.

Finally, Petruchio decides that they will proceed to her father's house in their old clothes:

For 'tis the mind that makes the body rich,
And as the sun breaks through the darkest clouds,
So honour peereth in the meanest habit.

(166-68)

In the light of his previous manipulations, Petruchio's proselytizing seems a yet another strategy in the subjugation of the mind through the subjugation of the body. In adding this sartorial humiliation to the traditional shrew tale, Shakespeare is surely drawing upon the tale of Griselda. In both stories, reshaping the body is imperative before one can reshape the mind.

At the same time, Petruchio's insistence on humble apparel at this point is yet another blow at the social status of Katherina and her family: as newlyweds, Petruchio and Katherina were entitled to demonstrate their elevated marital status through sartorial display. To return to Padua dressed in “garments poor” may not be the exact equivalent of sending Katherina naked to her father's house, but Petruchio does strip Katherina of her social position, and the sartorial slight is an attempt to demonstrate to all that Katherina's identity and will are now subject to her husband.³⁰ The gesture is, at the least, an echo of Petruchio's “eye-sore to [the] solemn festival” that was their own wedding.

The connection between apparel and social identity is again apparent in act 5, and contributes to the image of a Katherina who has completely capitulated to her husband. When Petruchio needs to prove his wife's subservience, he orders her to publicly destroy her cap. His behavior is unnecessary; she has already obeyed him—she has come at his call, and has left and returned with the less-compliant wives. But Petruchio persists, again masking his tyranny under solicitousness:

Katherine, that cap of yours becomes you not:
Off with that bauble—throw it underfoot!

(5.2.121-22)

Whether or not this cap is the same one that Petruchio denied her in act 4, scene 3, it is the cap she chose to wear on this special occasion. The jubilant tone of the remaining comments from the males suggests that Katherina divests herself of the cap and tramples it underfoot, extinguishing her own desires in favor of her husband's.³¹

It is significant, I think, that in act 5, the other man who knew Katherina well expresses astonishment at this Katherina who has responded to her master's call, and mouthed his dictates. In her father's praise of Petruchio, we may discern Katherina's fate:

Now fair befall thee, good Petruchio!
The wager thou hast won, and I will add
Unto their losses twenty thousand crowns,
Another dowry to another daughter,
For she is changed, as she had never been.

(5.2.111-15)

Baptista voices the relief of all the men: the shrew has disappeared as though she never was. Like Janicola, Baptista has acquiesced to the superiority of the new husband; like Griselda, Katherina is now a woman nobody knows.

In conclusion, Shakespeare's introduction of the image of Griselda recollected Griselda's ritual sartorial submission, which emphasized Katherina's eventual compliance—absolutely essential to the comic ending. Petruchio's behavior can then be understood in the light of a husband's duty to transform a headstrong woman into an obedient wife, a transformation that required control of his wife's sartorial desires.³²

But Shakespeare's use of the Griselda tale also complicates the connection between clothes and matrimonial dominion in early modern England. While Petruchio, following Walter, controls his wife's public persona through her apparel, by emphasizing the clothed body (rather than Griselda's nude or smocked body), Shakespeare's character suggests that clothing forms the essential being. Instead of proffering his unclothed wife to ogling courtiers, in 4.3 Petruchio invites the audience of merchants and servants to fantasize Katherina's nudity and her marital relations with him by sexualizing Katherina's wardrobe. His dominance in marriage is more obvious and more subtle than Walter's: Petruchio dispenses with the redressing that signals Griselda's reentry into society. At the play's end, Katherina is appareled in whatever “mean habiliments” (4.3.167) Petruchio permitted. Echoing early modern sumptuary regulations and marriage homilies, Shakespeare maintains that the clothed person matters most, and that marital authority supersedes society's expectations of the well-dressed wife. From the moment that Petruchio conceives of the notion to take a wife, he asserts his rights as a husband, including especially his prerogative—and duty—to dress his wife as he will. He does not submit to the expectations of the wedding guests at his own or Bianca's celebration: his complete sartorial control in both instances authenticates his dominion. Once she dons her husband's chosen apparel, Katherina mouths his words—the words of a patriarchy in whose interest it was to transform stubborn women into submissive wives. As he boasted in act 2, Petruchio has created a second Griselda, her existence powerfully proven by Katherina's complete sartorial submission.

Notes

1. In her New Cambridge edition of the play (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), Ann Thompson comments that critics frequently defend Petruchio's methods, which are “positively kindly when compared with what happens in most of the other medieval and Renaissance versions of the shrew-taming plot where violence is commonplace” (28). Elsewhere, Thompson herself admits to being “less sanguine” than feminist apologist critics (“The Warrant of Womanhood: Shakespeare and Feminist Criticism,” in The Shakespeare Myth, ed. Graham Holderness [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988], 74-87, 78).

2. Ruth Barnes and Joanne B. Eicher, Dress and Gender: Making and Meaning (New York: St. Martin's, 1991), 2.

3. Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, trans. Lydia Cochrane (London: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 228.

4. The most comprehensive treatment of the impact of the Griselda tale from Boccaccio until the present is Judith Bronfman's Chaucer's “Clerk's Tale”: The Griselda Story Received, Rewritten, Illustrated (New York: Garland, 1994).

5. Klapisch-Zuber, Woman, Family, and Ritual, 214, and passim.

6. Klapisch-Zuber, 224, 227-28.

7. See, for example, Linda Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984), who utilizes the Griselda myth as an exemplum of the formal controversy about women; Edward Pechter also recognizes the use of Griselda in homiletic domestic dramas (“Patient Grissil and the Trials of Marriage,” The Elizabeth Theatre XIV: Papers Given at the International Conference on Elizabethan Theatre held at the University of Waterloo in Ontario in July 1991 [Toronto: P.D. Meany, 1996], 83-108, especially 84 n. 4).

8. I will limit the study of nondramatic versions to those by Boccaccio and Chaucer, which enjoyed greatest dissemination in their own century and in ours. Three other nondramatic texts—Petrarch's De insignia obedientia et fide uxoria (1374), which directly influenced Boccaccio's version; Thomas Deloney's ballad “Of Patient Grissell and a Noble Marquis” (1586?); and an anonymous English pamphlet of 1619—also utilize apparel to signal the changes in Griselda's status. The ritual of sartorial transformation is handled similarly in these texts.

9. Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, translated into English 1620, vol. 4, ed. Edward Hutton (New York: AMS Press, 1967), 295-312, 298.

10. Boccaccio, Decameron, 299.

11. Boccaccio, Decameron, 229.

12. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd ed. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 137-53.

13. As Carolyn Dinshaw illustrates, the clerk does spend an inordinate amount of time on Griselda's apparel (Chaucer's Sexual Politics [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989], 134, 144, and passim). Also see Kristine Gilmartin Wallace, “Array as Motif in the Clerk's Tale,” Rice University Studies 62.2 (Spring 1976): 100, and passim.

14. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “despoil.”

15. William Caxton also links undressing with despoiling in The Golden Legend: “He … wold not relece hir obdeyence til that she was destroyed to hir smocke.” While this linguistic linkage might seem to normalize the activity, we should note that being stripped to one's smock is, once again, connected to a woman's submission.

16. Cristelle Baskins, “Griselda, or the Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelor in Tuscan Cassone Painting,” Stanford Italian Review 10.2 (1991): 153-75, 156.

17. Baskins, “Griselda,” 160.

18. Baskins, “Griselda,” 161, 164, 175.

19. In “Women in Frames: The Gaze, the Eye and the Profile in Renaissance Portraiture,” Patricia Simons discusses early modern portraiture as a cultural event participating in the construction of gender rather than a naturalistic reflection of its society (History Workshop 25 [1988]: 4-30).

20. See Lee Bliss, “The Renaissance Griselda: A Woman for All Seasons,” Viator 23 (1992): 301-43, for a comprehensive study of the tale's influence and controversy. Laura Lunger Knoppers persuasively links a woman's nudity and her ritualized degradation in “(En)gendering Shame: Measure for Measure and the Spectacles of Power,” English Literary Renaissance 23 (1993): 450-71.

21. Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1983), 184.

22. John Phillip The Play of Patient Grissell [1565], ed. Ronald B. McKerrow (London Malone Society Reprints, 1909), Ai,r. The title page suggests the multiple parts each actor can play, including Griselda doubling as the midwife.

23. As Wallace points out, Chaucer also emphasizes that Griselda and Walter assign different symbolic significance to her changed clothes: while she obviously sees her transformation as perfect acquiescence to his will, Walter sees only that she has been raised to his high estate (“Array as Motif in the Clerk's Tale,” 102).

24. The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. Fredson Bowers, vol. 1 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1953). The title page, dated 1603, states “it hath beene sundrie times lately paid.” The play was owned by the Admiral's Men and performed at the Fortune in 1600 (Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 3rd ed. [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980], 240).

25. See Barbara Hodgdon, “Katherina Bound; or, Play(K)ating the Strictures of Everyday Life,” PMLA 107.3 (May 1992): 538-53; Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters, esp. 121-33; and Karen Newman, Renaissance Family Politics and Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew,” English Literary Renaissance 16.1 (Winter 1986): 86-100, among others.

26. All citations from New Cambridge edition of The Taming of the Shrew. The play was owned by the Lord Chamberlain's Men, and performed at the Globe, Blackfriers, and possibly the Theatre (Gurr, Shakespearean Stage, 241).

27. In scene ten of the anonymous play The Taming of the Shrew (1594; ed. Stephen Roy Miller [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998], Kate has chosen her own clothes, to which her husband objects, piece by piece; this dissension typifies that play's theme of the perpetual battle of the sexes. In contrast, as Katherina admires the new clothes, Petruchio objects to the clothes that he himself has chosen; his petulance demonstrates his belief that within matrimoney, he is entitled to determine his wife's appearance.

28. Karen Newman details the devastating effects of Petruchio's deliberate misunderstanding. She reminds us that Katherina has established the connection between the use of language and one's independence during the altercation over staying for the wedding dinner (“Renaissance Family Politics,” 94). Newman continues, “Kate is figuratively killed with kindness, by her husband's rule over her not so much in material terms—the withholding of food, clothing, and sleep—but the withholding of linguistical understanding” (95).

29. Carolyn E. Brown (“Katherine of The Taming of the Shrew: ‘A Second Grissel,’” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 37.3 [Fall 1995]: 285-313) comments that Katherina is quite unshrewish in this scene, clearly pleased with the tailor's work (303).

30. Patricia Cramer notes the connection between ritual stripping and destruction of the will in “Lordship, Bondage, and the Erotic: The Psychological Bases of Chaucer's Clerk's Tale, Journal of English and Germanic Philology (October 1990): 505.

31. Petruchio's expectation that his wife will relinquish her sartorial preferences to his is echoed in spiritual conduct books of the time. Consider, for example, William Gouge's dictum on the matter in Of Domesticall Duties: Eight Treatises (1620):

    For as it well beseemeth all women, so wives after a peculiar manner, namely, in attiring themselves, to respect rather their Husbands place and state, then their own birth and parentage, but much rather then their own minde and humour. …

    On the contrary, such proud dames as must have their owne will in their attire, and thinke it nothing appertaineth to their husbands to order them therein, who care not what their husbands ability, or what his place and calling be, they show little respect and reverence to their husbands. …

    (Third Treatise, 164; italics mine)

    While the main concern here is that the wife choose apparel appropriate to her husband's status, his command, desire, and example must clearly take precedence over her “minde and humour.”

32. In her powerful discussion of the predicaments of Griselda and Katherina, Carolyn E. Brown cites linguistic and sartorial proof that Katherina's future looks bleaker than Griselda's. Chaucer's Walter, she reminds us, has at least admitted “this is ynogh” (line 1052); Petruchio offers no such guarantee.

This paper was originally delivered at the March 1993 Symposium on Women and the Arts in the Renaissance, under the auspices of the National Museum of Women and the Arts, Washington, DC. I am grateful to Jane Donawerth, Theresa Coletti, Ann Rosalind Jones, Peter Stallybrass, Elizabeth Welles, and Linda Woodbridge for their helpful comments on various revisions of that paper.