[In the following essay, Blake argues that the critical reputation of The Taming of the Shrew has suffered because its comedic elements have often been considered farcical.]

In The Sense of Humor Stephen Potter remembers in his youth discovering his ‘first free contemporary’ laugh in Shakespeare. This was when the ‘Hotspur humour’ plays on ‘the humourless Glendower’:

GLEN.
I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
HOTS.
Why, so can I, or so can any man,
But will they come when you do call for them?

(1 Henry IV III. i. 52-4)¹

Potter's reaction to Hotspur's quip, or to others like it, is no doubt a common experience of early theatre-going. I remember how it amused me, as did another rather less witty ‘contemporary’ put-down when I first saw The Taming of the Shrew. This was what Lucentio said to his rival Hortensio, then disguised as a music master, as he tried to get him out of the way of his own wooing of Bianca: ‘Spit in the hole, man, and tune again’ (III. i. 38). And from that same production I also remember Hortensio coming on with the lute not so much on his head as round his neck, like a wooden ruff. The Shrew [The Taming of the Shrew] is a play that revels in the broadest comic effects.

Not surprisingly then, in its many versions and adaptations, it has an impressive performance history, on screen as well as stage. But for all its long history of popularity, the critical standing of this early comedy has been not particularly high, since it is often found to be too close to farce. This aesthetic judgement antedates its current lack of favour on ideological grounds, for its notorious patriarchal assumptions and misogyny. Farcical elements do indeed dominate the situational comedy of the Bianca plot, with its multiple disguises and mistakings, and the reworking of the ‘Mery Jest’ of wife-taming. Though there is undoubtedly much psychological interest in the taming, in regard to both Petruchio and Katherine, and in the dynamics of Katherine's family, in comparison with later comedies, the characterisation of the chief figures is limited to their roles in the taming plot. Moreover, what is revealed is of the surface. In many of his lines Petruchio is performing an exaggerated version of what his servants recognise as his usual impatience, while Katherine is locked into her shrewishness. And of course, unlike other Shakespearean comedies, there is almost no poetic evocation of romantic feeling to sound a contrast. Lucentio's initial raptures over Bianca are at once made fun of by his man Tranio (in the fashion of slaves in Roman comedy), and when Petruchio addresses Kate, the lover's praise of the lady takes an uncourtly turn, as he suggests that she is not, after all, physically deformed but as wholesome as a country wench:

Why doth the world report that Kate doth limp?
O sland'rous world! Kate like the hazel twig
Is straight and slender, and as brown in hue
As hazel-nuts and sweeter than the kernels.

(II. i. 242-5)

Thereafter, as he promises, Petruchio is ‘rough and woo[s] not like a babe’ (II. i. 133):

For, by the light whereby I see thy beauty—
Thy beauty that doth make me like thee well—
Thou must be married to no man but me …

(II. ii. 262-4)

His efforts alone are enough to ensure that The Shrew is, as Hazlitt wrote, a play ‘full of bustle, animation, and rapidity of action’.²

Those arguing that the play transcends farce stress that the later stages of the wooing of Katherine provide more developed characterisation and situations which blend into comedy, and that, for all the farcical business, serious themes and romantic concerns—good marriages, domestic ‘peace’ (V. ii. 107)—lie underneath. Defenders of farce as a genre, and of The Shrew as a superlative example of it, reverse the second argument and ask, more interestingly, ‘how it is that themes, quite serious in other contexts, become the stuff of farce’.³ Certainly The Shrew is more thoroughly a farce than any other Shakespearean comedy, even The Comedy of Errors, because, unlike that play, as Anne Barton wrote, The Shrew has no ‘genuinely dark tones’.⁴ This is a judgement that many would not accept, but which in my view it is important to defend, to counteract a lack of confidence in the enjoyment of farce's innocent if unsubtle pleasures.

The opening slanging match between the drunken Sly and the Hostess is an invitation to enjoy a good fight:

SLY.
I'll feeze you, in faith.
HOSTESS.
A pair of stocks, you rogue!
SLY.
Y'are a baggage, the Slys are no rogues. Look in the Chronicles; we came in with Richard Conqueror.

(Induction, ll. 1-4)

With the appearance of Petruchio and his man Grumio, where Grumio quibbles on the phrase ‘knock me here’ rather than knocking on Hortensio's door as Petruchio means him to, and Petruchio wrings Grumio's ears, the fighting continues, in verbal duels and actual hitting of the servants, as in Roman comedy. But here not only servants are beaten, and not only men do the beating. Both Petruchio and Kate, like Antipholus of Ephesus in Errors [The Comedy of Errors], are volatile figures, likely to fly into rages, to abuse and strike people. When Kate leads on stage her sister Bianca, Bianca with her hands tied, and when Kate strikes her, the audience laugh: already her furious temper has become a joke. And they laugh again when they learn how Hortensio came to look pale, and have ‘his head broke’:

BAPTISTA.
What, will my daughter prove a good musician?
HORTENSIO.
I think she'll sooner prove a soldier!
Iron may hold with her, but never lutes.
BAPTISTA.
Why then, thou canst not break her to the lute?
HORTENSIO.
Why no, for she hath broke the lute to me.

(II. i. 140-4)

Later Vincentio and Grumio will join Katherine and Petruchio in lashing about them. These stage versions of human aggression in full spate, all made enjoyable because causing no actual harm, offer a pleasure characteristic of farce.⁵ Inspired perhaps by this same uninhibited rage, and equally exhilarating, was the episode devised by Michael Bogdanov to begin his 1978 modern-dress Shrew where a Sly-like angry drunkard abused the usherette and finally demolished the set. Lorna Sage's review acclaimed it as ‘a euphoric ritual of liberation’.⁶

Some of this knockabout aggression happens offstage and is related in narrative set-pieces. One such is Gremio's account of Petruchio's ‘mad marriage’ to Katherine, where he calls for wine, throws the sops into the sexton's face, and ends up kissing the bride ‘with such a clamorous smack / That at the parting all the church did echo’ (III. ii. 168-9). And there is abundant onstage, farcical spectacle of a non-aggressive sort. Most memorable here is Petruchio's much-heralded arrival for the wedding, looking like ‘a very monster in apparel’ according to the servant Biondello (III. ii. 61-2). This is one of the most entertaining visual moments in Shakespearean comedy, equalled only by the appearance of the yellow-stockinged Malvolio, and not troubled by the embarrassment which attaches to him as a victim of a practical joke. Here a confident joker plays the fool. To Baptista and his family, Petruchio is an ‘eyesore’. With a concern for propriety that seems comically fussy in the face of Petruchio's nonchalance, they urge him to shed his ‘mad attire’, his ‘unreverent robes’ (III. ii. 102), and offer him clothes to change into. At Petruchio's country house his antics succeed one another with ever-growing pace. Dishes of food arrive only to be whisked away, bowls of water are spilt, servants beaten, the tailor and haberdasher appear, only to have their work ridiculed and dismissed. And more visual comedy is to come. When the real Vincentio comes face to face with the pretend Vincentio, the confused-identity joke that sustains The Comedy of Errors has a brief revival. Even in the final wager scene the staging heightens the farcical downfall of the confident Lucentio and Hortensio, as each wife is summoned in turn and neither appears, until Kate herself does, leading the other two, to everyone's astonishment except Petruchio's.

The verbal comedy of the play, though not attempting the emotional resonance of the later comedies, offers a range of effects, from wordplay to Katherine's waspishness, all appropriate to the predominantly farcical mode. Anyone who has worked on this play for performance soon discovers that there are many passages less immediately funny than Lucentio's irreverent advice to a lutenist, ‘Spit in the hole man, and tune again’. Biondello's virtuoso description of Petruchio and his horse presents no problem. The joke here does not depend on understanding all the individual words for the defects of the horse or its harness, but on their accumulation and alliteration: ‘stark spoiled with the staggers, begnawn with the bots’ (III. ii. 49-50). The miserable journey after the wedding, another traditional element in the folktale, is, as Grumio tells it, a comic tale of multiple disasters, enlivened by a version of the repeated interruption joke, with Grumio taking offence, and sulkily threatening not to continue: ‘Tell thou the tale. But hadst thou not crossed me, thou shouldst have heard how …’ (IV. i. 53 f.). Quibbling, as already mentioned, is rife, and aggressive, in this farcical comedy, whether between Katherine and Petruchio, Petruchio and his servants, or between the servants, Grumio and Curtis. In their initial bout, Katherine and Petruchio's duel of puns may make it hard for audiences today to keep up, but they cannot fail to sense the implications of its aggression, both ‘hostile and seductive’, in Molly Mahood's phrase,⁷ especially when Petruchio caps Kate's last line with ‘What, with my tongue in your tail?’ (II. i. 212).

In the nonsense game that Petruchio devises to woo Kate, ‘with some spirit’ (II. i. 165), and tame her, the play's farcical invention reaches its height. Surpassing the tamer's traditional insistence that the wife accept whatever he says, Petruchio determines to misunderstand whatever Katherine says:

If she do bid me pack, I'll give her thanks,
As though she bid me stay by her a week.

(II. i. 173-4)

For the wider public, he modifies this device, claiming that he and Katherine have come to an agreement that she may keep up her old ways in public, but, he assures his hearers, though she continues ‘curst in company’, in private she hangs about his neck, giving him kiss on kiss. This announcement, not surprisingly, temporarily silences Kate. Pressing on with this strategy of confusion, he denies Kate food and rest but claims to be acting for her welfare. When he insists that Kate should call the sun the moon, and greet and embrace old Vincentio as a ‘Fair lovely maid’, nonsense is the only language he will permit. Then, in the most delightfully unexpected moment in the play, Kate too produces her own nonsense address: ‘Young budding virgin, fair and fresh and sweet’, only to have her husband correct her:

Why, how now, Kate! I hope thou art not mad.
This is a man—old, wrinkled, faded, withered—
And not a maiden, as thou say'st he is.

(IV. v. 42-4)

And the quick-witted Kate responds at once:

Pardon, old father, my mistaking eyes
That have been so bedazzled with the sun
That everything I look on seemeth green.

(IV.v.45-7)

Petruchio and Katherine are now, in Vincentio's view, a traveller and his ‘merry mistress’, the kind of couple who ‘like pleasant travellers’ might ‘break a jest / Upon the company [they] overtake’ (IV.v.72-3), and thus, without moral emphasis, the comedy establishes a new role for Kate to play through a shared joke.

It will by now be apparent that this defence of the pleasures of farce, of not especially ‘thoughtful laughter’,⁸ sidesteps the arguments of those who find it impossible to laugh at this play at all. For them, the situation of Petruchio's taming of Katherine is distasteful, indeed offensive, and this is made worse when Kate's last speech is taken as Shakespeare, or the play, advocating a notion of marriage based on the wife's submission. The dramatic context of the speech, including the contrasting subplot and Kate's relationship with Petruchio at this stage, provides reasons for a more equal view of marriage, as others have argued.⁹ Nevertheless, it must be admitted that uneasiness about what are seen as the play's gender assumptions goes back a long way. One might expect to find an advocate of women's rights such as Shaw writing that ‘the last scene is altogether disgusting to modern sensibility’,¹⁰ but, as Tori Haring-Smith's stage history reveals, remarks in the same vein began to appear in reviews in the nineteenth century, when Shakespeare's play returned to the stage, replacing Garrick's Catharine and Petruchio. Indeed, Garrick's own version, first performed in 1754, and its later derivatives, each aiming to suit the play to contemporary manners and attitudes, by rendering Petruchio more gentlemanly, and the play more polite, or at least even-handed, testify that ‘Shakespeare's choice of farce … to dramatize the clash of gender roles’¹¹ has ‘from the very beginning … been disturbing as well as enjoyable’.¹² With the passage of time, this challenging quality has seemed ever more troublesome. As J. C. Trewin wrote in 1949, ‘it takes much now to make the Shrew acceptable’.¹³ Though staged frequently throughout the twentieth century, it was rarely staged straight. Productions either made the play thoroughly farcical, with additional slapstick, or softened it with sentiment, so Petruchio and Katherine obviously fall in love at first sight, or introduced comic irony, as in Kate's winking before her last speech, this last strategy transforming the play, as Goddard put it, into an early version of Barrie's What Every Woman Knows: how to get her own way by making the man think he is getting his.¹⁴

The most radical transformations date from the 1970s, when the play became a vehicle for protest against the oppression of women, and human cruelty. Charles Marowitz saw The Shrew as brutal, sadistic, and the process of taming as a horrifying anticipation of ‘the modern technique for brainwashing’.¹⁵ Marowitz made his own version, in which scenes from Shakespeare, adapted and incorporating much new stage business—including the onstage rape of Katherine by Petruchio—alternate with a sequence of scenes presenting a contemporary parallel, in which a woman subjects a man to psychological torment. Once this version had been staged, in 1973, one commentator claims, ‘no-one could conscientiously claim the play for “fun”’.¹⁶ In Bogdanov's production five years later the taming plot was again brutal, but, as Bogdanov saw it, this was Shakespeare's own exposure of the cruelty to women inherent in patriarchal marriage. This was the production that led Michael Billington to ask

whether there is any reason to revive a play that seems totally offensive to our age and our society. My own feeling is that it should be put back firmly and squarely on the shelf. Bogdanov, like any intelligent man, clearly finds The Shrew a barbaric and disgusting play. Instead of softening its harsh edges like most recent directors, he has chosen to emphasise its moral and physical ugliness … I found [the production's] sheer brutality almost unbearable.¹⁷

Feminist criticism of the play in the last thirty years has been divided in its judgement of its sexual politics. Those voicing strong condemnation tend to align the taming plot with domestic violence, as currently understood, and see Kate as a battered wife, and her attachment to Petruchio as of the kind that hostages have been known to develop for their captors.¹⁸ Alternatively, and by implication equally damning, the play is seen in a context of early modern misogyny.¹⁹ One danger with such historically influenced studies is in moving between historical records and literary narratives as if between equivalents, and therefore underestimating the effect of dramatic conventions, and audiences' responses to them. We risk losing sight of such matters when we look into the remoter past, where all records are scarce. With contemporary films we are less likely to mistake a romantic comedy for a documentary.

In this attempt to rescue the play for laughter, I have turned to the comments of women who have played the role of Kate, rather than to the social history of scold's bridles, and cucking stools, and approached it as a reworking not of the extensive material now recovered on the suppression of unruly women, but of the shrew fable in the form of a play: the taming presented at the remove of dramatic fiction. As A. D. Nuttall reminds us in his discussion of why tragedy gives us pleasure, we know what we see is not real; it would be unbearable if it were. The suffering still moves us, but in a different way. In the case of a comedy, because we know what we see is not real, we let ourselves laugh. Those standing watching the ducking of scolds had an experience of a different order from those who went to the Theatre to see The Shrew. Jokes and comedies permit us to react to situations less seriously, less generously, less responsibly, perhaps, certainly differently from how we would in real life. There is no active cruelty in watching a comedy, but there is detachment from others' misfortunes.

Though early, and farcical, The Shrew is still a complex play, the deft interrelatedness of the plots setting up reflecting images of femininity, and weighing the conflicting claims of mutuality and inequality within the much-debated topic of early modern marriage. To enjoy the comedy is not to become complicit in the enjoyment of domestic violence: to claim that it is, is in itself an offensive notion, and insults those who are indeed victims. However, to laugh at Katherine it is necessary to acknowledge that the central female figure is a woman who has something to learn. To admit this does not amount to what Peter Berek calls ‘The Plain Man's Sexist Reading of the play’.²⁰ But it is asking a lot of some contemporary audiences, for whom all representations of women as mad or badly behaved are to be construed only in terms of misogyny and systemic oppression.²¹

Katherine is an unusual, even a unique, figure in Shakespearean comedy. Actors who have played Rosalind, Portia, and Viola find when they come to work on the role that she is surprisingly different, ‘not very profound or witty’, not in command of her situation, without Viola's lyricism or Beatrice's wit.²² Her role is closer to that of a dupe, who attracts attention because of some fault or foolishness, and becomes the target of what Renaissance comedy terms a ‘practice’, a plot designed to bring someone to ridicule. Petruchio's stratagem for taming Kate has similarities with such schemes. The audience knows that all that happens is part of Petruchio's plan, while Katherine knows none of this. Dupe plots typically have all the harshness of the practical joke, and show no mercy for the victim. In Shakespeare, their effect is usually softened by allowing the victim—Parolles, for instance—some escape or recovery from humiliation, or by the dupers being tricked too. Enjoyment of such practices in life and on the stage, in such thoroughgoing instances as in Volpone or The Silent Woman, requires a taste for a robust humour which, Keith Thomas and others have argued, flourished in early modern England, and which is summed up in Sir Philip Sidney's remark on comedy in his ‘Apology for Poetry’: ‘We laugh at deformed creatures.’ At a time when visiting madhouses was a London pastime, Sidney felt no need to qualify his remark.

On the evidence of the Duchess of York in Richard II and Paulina in The Winter's Tale, both talkative, forceful women, one might argue that Shakespeare plays treat the ‘railing wife’, in Hotspur's phrase, with unconventional generosity. Her independence and courage are recognised and respected. In The Shrew Kate is not seen so kindly at first. In her immediate circle she is a deformed creature, ‘curst and shrewd’, a ‘fiend of hell’, ‘a devil’. But though a target of abuse, and then the victim of Petruchio's deception, Kate is not just a dupe, nor Petruchio a duper. To him, the spirit behind her rage is attractive—‘Now, by the world, it is a lusty wench! … O how I long to have some chat with her’ (II. i. 156-8)—and his purpose is not to ridicule Kate, for his own enjoyment and ours, but to bring her out of her ‘humour’, following a comic pattern more typical of Jonson than Shakespeare. Aiming to make her ‘Conformable as other household Kates’ (II. i. 267), Petruchio manifests much more concern for the subject of his practice than is customarily shown by the duper. He does want to marry her, after all. But identifying her as needing to be tamed still consigns her to a position remote from the women who reign over the later comedies. In the final scenes, she has changed, and at this point those who can see Katherine as something other than Petruchio's victim perceive the end of a process long recognised as characteristic of Shakespearean comedy, that is, a transformation or self-discovery brought about by deception, disguise, or confusion. But the question remains: does this farcical comedy make it possible to laugh at the process that brings her to this point?

Christopher Sly is important here. The audience's engagement with Sly and his transformation distances their initial relation to Katherine. When they first see her and the rest of the players they are also observing Sly's naive reception of the ‘comonty’, and so their first impressions are marked by a greater than usual awareness of a performance, and a greater than usual degree of that detachment which is essential to comic effect. As a character in Zadie Smith's White Teeth puts it: ‘Pain + detachment=entertainment, sometimes.’ This distancing is reinforced by Lucentio and Tranio, who literally step aside to watch the first appearance of Kate and the rest. Lucentio is so smitten by Bianca he has eyes only for her, but Tranio sizes up Kate: ‘That wench is stark mad, or wonderful froward’ (I. i. 69). This initial view of the action prevents the audience getting too close to Kate and damps down any inclination to see her more sympathetically than Tranio does.

After Sly falls silent at the end of the first scene of The Shrew, the effect of distancing diminishes, and the individual comic figures should be more able to become engaging and affecting as well as laughable. However, the extremes of Kate's ‘wonderful froward’ behaviour that dominate the early scenes work to maintain the detachment. She shouts at her father, strikes Bianca, crowns Hortensio, and abuses and strikes Petruchio. When not on stage, her shrewishness is the main topic of conversation, so that Petruchio's apparent ignorance of it when he questions Baptista: ‘Pray have you not a daughter / Called Katherina, fair and virtuous?’ makes Baptista's cagey reply a joke: ‘I have a daughter, sir, called Katherina’ (II. i. 41-3). Kate's scolding is loud, unrelenting, predictable, and, for all these reasons, comic. At the end of the first scene Tranio asks Lucentio if he noticed Kate:

                                        Marked you not how her sister
Began to scold and raise up such a storm
That mortal ears might hardly endure the din?

(I. i. 162-4)

For Sarah Badel, Kate in the BBC TV production, these lines were a built-in stage direction: ‘She has to go that far, she has to be extreme to justify what's said about her. She is impossible. She's driving them all mad.’ Kate was a woman, as she put it, not ‘living in her head at all’.²³ Though the 1987 RSC Katherine of Fiona Shaw was unhappy in her ‘raging’, Shaw said she could imagine a Kate who enjoys behaving as badly as she does. And the audience enjoys her rages. Indeed, a Kate ‘not living in her head’, or, in Shaw's phrase, ‘spiralling out of control’, as in the Bianca scene, demonstrates the pleasures of that unrepressed hostility which Freud detects in his category of ‘tendentious’ jokes.²⁴ Kate is ‘possess'd with a fury’.²⁵ Whatever happens she will reply with verbal or physical aggression, so she makes a perfect illustration of that ‘mechanical behaviour’ which, in Bergson's analysis, is essentially what makes us laugh: laughter is ‘a social gesture at what fails the requirements of elasticity and sociability’; consistency such as Kate's itself becomes laughable: ‘if I wait for it to occur and it occurs when I expect it then involuntarily I laugh’.²⁶ Though the American critic Wylie Sypher declared Bergson's essay valuable but insufficient, in that it fails to accommodate much of Shakespeare's comedy,²⁷ Bergson's central notion of human automatism fits Katherine remarkably neatly, and this is one measure of how unusual a Shakespearean figure she is.

All this is not to deny that, as Germaine Greer and others have noted, Kate's situation offers a psychological explanation for her fury. With her own lack of suitors blocking the marriage of her younger, mild-mannered sister, she opts out and becomes unmanageable, a scold.²⁸ When Petruchio arrives, she rages at him, but not at marriage itself. In this she differs from Beatrice who in her defence against unwanted suitors feigns to take a stand against all men and marriage. Kate resents bitterly the prospect of dancing barefoot at her younger sister's wedding, a practice that enacted the stigma attached to the unmarried and therefore unsocialised woman,²⁹ along with being condemned in the harsh proverb to lead apes in hell (instead of her children in heaven). Beatrice, more poised, and more confident perhaps, makes jokes about being sent by St Peter up from hell to sit with the bachelors in heaven. Though Katherine rejects her one and only suitor, sarcastically praising Baptista's ‘fatherly regard’ in wishing her ‘wed to one half lunatic, / A mad-cap ruffian and a swearing Jack’ (II. i. 275-6), she is ready for the wedding. About this, as about other significant moments, Katherine says nothing—as the women who have played her remark. Reduced to silence by Petruchio's outrageousness at the end of their first scene, and at other times left without words for no apparent reason, her feelings are not allowed to disturb the farcical comic tone. Kate rages when Petruchio does not arrive on time for the wedding, and though she exits weeping, her father's sympathy turns the moment into an involuntary joke against her:

Go, girl. I cannot blame thee now to weep
For such an injury would vex a very saint,
Much more a shrew of thy impatient humour.

(III. i. 27-9)

When Petruchio insists on their leaving without a wedding feast she is again, and now with obvious justification, angry, but her resistance is still emphatically comic, ‘more petulant than persuasive’, as Fiona Shaw put it:³⁰

KATHERINA.
Nay then,
Do what thou canst, I will not go today!
No, nor tomorrow—not till I please myself.
The door is open, sir, there lies your way;
You may be jogging whiles your boots are green.
For me, I'll not be gone till I please myself.
'Tis like you'll prove a jolly surly groom
That take it on you at the first so roundly.
PETRUCHIO.
O Kate, content thee; prithee be not angry.
KATHERINA.
I will be angry. What hast thou to do?
—Father, be quiet. He shall stay my leisure.

(III. ii. 196-206)

At ‘Father be quiet’ one editor comments: ‘Baptista has not spoken but perhaps he is about to’.³¹ No actor would choose to play the line like that, and miss the laugh at Katherine's lashing out, yet again, at a silent father. But since Katherine's constant rage, however ridiculously excessive, at this moment especially but also earlier, has a cause, her ‘impatient humour’ is not essential, but of the surface. Bergson again has just the phrase for it: ‘Something mechanical encrusted on the living.’³² She may change.

Petruchio sets out to make her do so. From the start he has told Katherine to her face that he was born to tame her and bring her ‘from a wild Kate to a Kate / Conformable as other household Kates’ (II. i. 266-7). This idea seems crudely patronising, and the notion of Petruchio as psychotherapist, ‘subtle Dr Petruchio’,³³ has been detected hovering uneasily over the play, gaining reinforcement perhaps by the long association with the play of Jonathan Miller, the English theatre's only medically qualified director. Shakespearean characters who set out to teach people a lesson and change them for their own good, as Edgar does his father, or Duke Vincentio Isabella, for instance, are likely to prove unpopular with audiences today. Petruchio's own analogy for what he does, in his soliloquy when his scheme is well under way, is to ‘man his haggard’, to train his falcon, an arduous business for both the tamer and his highly valued hawk. If the play's human version of this process is to be enjoyable, and above all, if we are to laugh at Kate, it is crucial to admit that Kate needs to change, rather than that society needs to change to accommodate her. Contemporary stage versions of the play, inspired perhaps by social models of disability in which there are no disabled people, just a disabled society, or where Kate is a victim of patriarchy, made mad and bad by her oppression, are doomed to be unfunny, and indeed brutal.

For those who don't feel compelled to speak of Petruchio as an offensive, would-be apologist for domestic violence, there is much to enjoy in the taming scenes, beginning with the outrageousness of Petruchio's own pretended shrewish behaviour (‘he is more shrew than she’, IV. i. 63), his switching from fury to solicitous affection (‘Will you give thanks, sweet Kate, or else shall I?’, IV. i. 129), and the sheer inventiveness of his speech. As for Katherine herself, her frustration and desperation at this stage remain comic because of her resilience. Though presented by post-1970s critics and directors as brainwashed, broken, or tamed, she is not silenced, nor is her spirit crushed. That would make her situation too painful for laughter. Breaking its spirit was not the aim of training a hawk.³⁴ Petruchio's servants pity the ‘poor soul’ and report that when she and Petruchio go to their bridal chamber, only for him to read her a sermon on continence, she

Knows not which way to stand, to look, to speak,
And sits as one new-risen from a dream.

(IV. i. 156-7)

But the Kate the audience sees continues her vehement protests:

Why, sir, I trust I may have leave to speak,
And speak I will. I am no child, no babe.

(IV. iii. 73-4)

Petruchio pays no attention to these words and continues deliberately to misunderstand her, but she is not cowed, and never afraid of Petruchio. The spirit he admired in her attack on Hortensio survives for the return journey, when she is still correcting Petruchio, telling him the hour is not seven but two, the sun is not the moon. And when she does finally capitulate, prompted by Hortensio, ‘Says as he says, or we shall never go’ (IV. v. 11), her concession is poised and crisply ironic:

PETRUCHIO.
I say it is the moon.
KATERINA.
                                                                                                    I know it is the moon.
PETRUCHIO.
Nay then you lie, it is the blessèd sun.
KATERINA.
Then God be blessed, it is the blessèd sun.
But sun it is not, when you say it is not,
And the moon changes even as your mind.
What you will have it named, even that it is,
And so it shall be so for Katherine.

(IV. v. 16-22)

And, with the arrival of Vincentio, as has now been frequently acknowledged, Petruchio's commanding and her obeying becomes a language game they play together. Hortensio sees Petruchio as victor over Kate, ‘The field is won’, but what Petruchio himself seems to say is that Kate has found herself, ‘Thus the bowl should run / And not unluckily against the bias’ (IV. v. 25). Recent players of Kate certainly understand the moment in these terms. For Paola Dionisotti, Kate in Bogdanov's production, Kate makes a discovery:

I can go further in this game than you … She picks up the images of the sun and moon and intensifies them. She dances with them. … She has finally discovered that it is a game, and that they can play it together.³⁵

The encounter with Vincentio radiates a sense of elation, as if Kate's remark that everything she looks on ‘seemeth green’ had an all-encompassing resonance of the new, fresh, and young. Good humour and ‘merriment’ prevail, first with the ‘pleasant travellers’ pretended ‘mad mistaking’, and then with Petruchio announcing Lucentio's marriage, speaking warmly of Bianca's ‘good esteem’, and Vincentio's ‘honest son’. Even the cautious Hortensio now takes courage, convinced he may safely marry his widow, and that he knows how to deal with a shrew, his confidence already setting up the table-turning of the last scene.

The play's comic trajectory closes with the triumph of Katherine and Petruchio as a couple. Their new-found harmony is dramatised in two scenes, much as that of Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado [Much Ado About Nothing], the first brief and intimate, ending with the kiss in the street, the second, in the social setting of Lucentio's wedding feast. A feast and a wager, the final elements in a tale of wife-taming, offer the successful husband the opportunity to show off his docile, obedient wife. But what is played out here first is the victory of the rebels, a joint victory of the frank and unconventional over the shallow, deceitful and conventional.³⁶ Baptista and his friends have all through the play enjoyed themselves at the expense of the ‘couple of quiet ones’ and found much amusement in the thought that they deserve each other:

LUCENTIO.
Mistress, what's your opinion of your sister?
BIANCA.
That being mad herself, she's madly mated.
GREMIO.
I warrant him, Petruchio is Kated.

(III. ii. 232-4)

Now it is the turn of Petruchio and Katherine, and of the audience, to laugh at all of them. Petruchio, who is already fidgeting, ‘Nothing but sit and sit, and eat and eat!’ (V. ii. 12), livens up the proceedings by provocatively suggesting that Kate is kind. Hortensio and the Widow think they have an easy target in mocking that idea and begin sniping at Petruchio's chance of married happiness. Petruchio immediately turns the gibe back on to Hortensio. Katherine, loyally and ably, backs up Petruchio, forcing the widow to defend her sneer: ‘“He that is giddy thinks the world turns round.” I pray you tell me what you meant by that’ (ll. 26-7). Kate is here Petruchio's wife but, in turning on the widow, still her forceful self.

The staging of the wager, with the two wives' refusals, first

Sir, my mistress sends you word
That she is busy, and she cannot come

(V. ii. 80-1)

and then

She says you have some goodly jest in hand.
She will not come. She bids you come to her

(V. ii. 91-2)

makes Katherine's appearance a comic coup de théâtre. With her father acknowledging that ‘she is changed, as she had never been’ (l. 115), and the others either busy ridiculing her obedience or bickering among themselves, Kate, at Petruchio's request, begins her speech rebuking ‘these headstrong women’ (l. 130), recognising the mutual obligations of marriage, and recommending the role of graceful submission. As she does so, however, she dominates the stage, witty, emotionally alert, and eloquent, and also still girding at the ‘froward and unable worms’ (l. 169). When she speaks of the beauty of the amiable wife, her language moves into an elevated register, the speech's ‘pure rhythms’, Fiona Shaw suggests, marking this as her own speech, not one Petruchio has taught her. She is perhaps self-taught, not so much ‘cured’ as having learned from her experience, proving that she is not so old but that she may learn. As we laugh at Orlando writing poems and hanging them on trees, or at Romeo's lover's melancholy, so in the more farcical and more mercantile world of this play we can surely allow ourselves to laugh at the earlier Kate, reasonably confident that our laughter is not merely an ‘entrenched social attitude’.³⁷

Notes

1. Stephen Potter, The Sense of Humour (1954; Harmondsworth 1964) p. 35. Quotations from Shakespeare follow The Riverside Shakespeare, gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston 1974), except for The Taming of the Shrew, where the edition followed is Ann Thompson's New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge 1984).

2. William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespear's Plays (London 1944) p. 341.

3. Robert Y. Turner, Shakespeare's Apprenticeship (Chicago 1974) p. 167, quoted in Russ Mcdonald, ‘Fear of Farce’, in Maurice Charney (ed.), ‘Bad’ Shakespeare: Revaluations of the Shakespeare Canon (Cranbury, NJ 1988) pp. 77-90: 89.

4. ‘As You Like It and Twelfth Night: Shakespeare's Sense of an Ending’, in Shakespearian Comedy, Stratford upon Avon Studies 14 (London 1972) p. 163.

5. In direct opposition to the original audience's expectations of the taming fable, Petruchio never strikes Katherine, nor (according to the text) does he use or brandish a whip, as became customary in 19th-c. performances. The whip is first recorded in the prompt book for J. P. Kemble's Petruchio on 13 Mar. 1788. See Tori Haring-Smith, From Farce to Metadrama: A Stage History of The Taming of the Shrew, 1594-1983 (Westport, Conn. 1985) p. 24.

6. Quoted in Haring-Smith, From Farce to Metadrama, p. 118.

7. Shakespeare's Wordplay (1957; London 1968) p. 30.

8. George Meredith, ‘An Essay on Comedy’, in Wylie Sypher (ed.), Comedy (New York 1956) p. 47: ‘the true test of comedy is that it shall awaken thoughtful laughter’.

9. For instance, Marianne Novy, Love's Argument (Chapel Hill, NC 1984) pp. 58-61, and Brian Morris's introduction to The Taming of the Shrew, Arden Shakespeare (London 1981) pp. 143-9.

10. Shaw on Shakespeare, ed. Edwin Wilson (1961; Harmondsworth 1969) p. 198, quoted in Shrew, ed. Morris, p. 144.

11. Peter Berek, ‘Text, Gender, and Genre in The Taming of the Shrew’, in Charney (ed.), ‘Bad’ Shakespeare, pp. 91-104: 92.

12. Introduction to Shrew, ed. Thompson, p. 17.

13. Quoted in Haring-Smith, From Farce to Metadrama, p. 136.

14. H. C. Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, 2 vols. (Chicago 1951) i. 68.

15. The Shrew: Freely Adapted from Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew (London 1975) p. 20.

16. Penny Gay, As She Likes It: Shakespeare's Unruly Women (London 1994) p. 103.

17. Guardian, 5 May 1978, quoted ibid., p. 107. More recent productions in this vein include Gale Edwards's for the RSC in 1995, reviewed at length by Peter Holland, Shakespeare Survey, 49 (1996) pp. 255-7.

18. Emily Detmer, ‘Civilizing Subordination: Domestic Violence and The Taming of the Shrew’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 4/3 (1997), pp. 273-92: 284-5.

19. Frances Dolan, The Taming of the Shrew: Texts and Contexts (Boston 1996), for instance, presents evidence of brutal ‘spousal conflict’.

20. Berek, ‘Text, Gender, and Genre’, p. 91.

21. For a similar argument, see Shirley Nelson Garner, ‘The Taming of the Shrew: Inside or Outside of the Joke?’, in Charney (ed.), ‘Bad’ Shakespeare, pp. 105-19: ‘The central joke … is directed against a woman. The play seems written to please a misogynist audience, especially men gratified by sexually sadistic pleasures’ (p. 106).

22. Quoting Fiona Shaw, in Carol Rutter, Clamorous Voices: Shakespeare's Women Today (London 1988) p. 4; and Sarah Badel, quoted in Henry Fenwick, ‘The Production’, in The Taming of the Shrew, The BBC TV Shakespeare (London 1980), pp. 17-26: 24.

23. Fenwick, ‘The Production’, p. 24.

24. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (Harmondsworth 1976) pp. 144-7.

25. Benedict's description of Beatrice (Much Ado About Nothing, I. i. 191) better fits Kate.

26. Henry Bergson, ‘Laughter’, in Sypher, ibid., pp. 73 and 81.

27. Appendix entitled ‘The Meanings of Comedy’, ibid., p. 210.

28. Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (1970; Frogmore, St Albans 1971), p. 208.

29. See Camilla Wells Slights, Shakespeare's Comic Commonwealths (Toronto 1993) p. 49.

30. Rutter, Clamorous Voices, p. 14.

31. Thompson, note on III. ii. 206.

32. Bergson, ‘Laughter’, p. 84.

33. Ruth Nevo, Comic Transformations in Shakespeare (London 1980) pp. 48-9; for taming as therapy, see also Rutter, Clamorous Voices, p. 6.

34. Thompson, note on IV. i. 161.

35. Rutter, Clamorous Voices, p. 20.

36. For Sinead Cusack, ‘Katherine and Petruchio were rebels and would remain rebels forever’: ibid., p. 21.

37. Gay, As She Likes It, p. 107.