SOURCE: Halio, Jay L. “The Induction as Clue in The Taming of the Shrew.” In “A Certain Text”: Close Readings and Textual Studies on Shakespeare and Others in Honor of Thomas Clayton, edited by Linda Anderson and Janis Lull, pp. 94-106. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002.

When in his otherwise excellent television production of The Taming of the Shrew for “The Shakespeare Plays,” the BBC producer, Jonathan Miller, decided to omit the induction, he erred. Although the induction in Shakespeare's play is only a part-frame, unlike its counterpart in The Taming of a Shrew (the quarto printed in 1594, about which more later), it provides an important clue to how we should understand the main action of the play proper, as close analysis of the induction and the Katherine-Petruccio plot reveals.¹

The induction opens as Christopher Sly, drunk, is thrown out of a tavern for refusing to pay for breaking some glasses. As the Hostess goes to call the headborough, or parish officer, Sly falls asleep. Horns sound, and a lord enters from hunting, but Sly does not awaken; he sleeps right through the entrance of the lord and his huntsmen. When the unnamed lord catches sight of the beggar, he decides to play a trick on Sly and make him believe that he is a lord himself and the others are his servants. He therefore orders his men to take Sly up and carry him off to bed in the lord's house, clothing him richly, putting rings on his fingers, and setting a banquet near him when he wakes. This done, the lord asks: “Would not the beggar then forget himself?” (Ind. 1.39).²

Before the huntsmen carry out his commands, the lord describes the scene further as he imagines it when Sly awakes in his new environment with servants in reverent obeisance. They must “Persuade him that he hath been lunatic” (61), that he truly is what he seems, and that his situation is not a dream. For the lord and the others this will be “pastime passing excellent” (65) if done properly without exaggeration. The First Huntsman agrees, saying, “My lord, I warrant you we will play our part / As he shall think by our true diligence / He is no less than what we say he is” (67-69). Sly is then carried out as trumpets sound and a troupe of traveling players enters. The lord thereupon decides to use the players to further the trick he is playing on Sly, but without letting the players in on the fact that it is a trick. For all they know, Sly truly is a lord, but one who has never heard a play. That will explain his odd behavior to the players, who agree not to take advantage of him but to contain themselves “Were he the veriest antic in the world” (99) when they perform before him.

The lord then continues to develop his scheme. He has Bartholomew, his page, dress as a lady and pretend to be Sly's wife, overcome with joy that her lord has been restored to health, “Who for this seven years hath esteemèd him / No better than a poor and loathsome beggar” (120-21). Note that the point of emphasis is Sly's restoration, not his transformation. His true self is the self we now see, not the old self he but “dreamt.” The lord is confident that his page “will well usurp the grace, / Voice, gait, and action of a gentlewoman” (129-30) and longs to hear him call the beggar “husband.” By the end of induction 1, then, several impersonations have been set afoot, all suggesting the ways that appearance may belie reality.

The second scene of the induction puts everything in motion, as Sly awakens and calls for “a pot of small ale” (Ind. 2.1). He is served obsequiously by those commanded to tend on him, who offer him sack instead of ale, conserves, and fine raiment. At first Sly rejects the epithets by which he is called and the dainties he is offered, much to his attendants' dismay. They fear he has fallen back into his fit, or humor, which makes his lady “mourn” and his servants “droop” (25-26). They assail him with further blandishments, offering to provide him with horses should he wish to hunt, hawks if he would prefer that sport, and other entertainments. The Second Servingman volunteers to fetch pictures, including some scenes from Ovid's Metamorphoses, continuing the theme of transformation. By treating Sly so royally, as if he truly is an aristocrat, the servants and their master convince Sly that what he seems to be he is. It is essentially the same technique that Petruccio uses in dealing with Katherine, only in that case, unlike Sly's, what he sees in her really is there. But it requires hard work, persistence, and devotion to bring it out.

Before long, then, Christopher Sly begins to believe that he is indeed a lord. Although still not sure whether he is dreaming now—or until now (68), he takes note of his surroundings and decides he certainly is a lord and not a tinker after all. At this point his servants exult that his wit is restored and he is himself again (76-77). “These fifteen years you have been in a dream,” one says (78)—which Sly accepts as true. He asks if while he slept he ever spoke of what he dreamt. The First Servingman replies:

O yes, my lord, but very idle words,
For though you lay here in this goodly chamber
Yet would you say ye were beaten out of door,
And rail upon the hostess of the house,
And say you would present her at the leet
Because she brought stone jugs and no sealed quarts.

(Ind. 2.82-87)

A good part of this alludes to the beginning of induction 1, of course, but it is made to seem a dream to Sly. All the people mentioned by name are also relegated to fictions “Which never were, nor no man ever saw” (95). Fully taken in, Sly gives thanks that he has now recovered.

Bartholomew the page enters here as Sly's wife, and the subterfuge continues. Randy Sly wants his wife to come directly to bed, but Bartholomew puts him off, saying that the physicians believe he should desist for yet a while, lest he fall into his former malady. Loath to relapse into his “dreams” again, Sly reluctantly agrees, when a messenger announces that the players, hearing of his recovery, have arrived “to play a pleasant comedy” (125) before him to help further his recovery. And so, summoning his “wife” to his side, Sly settles down to watch “The Taming of the Shrew.”

The induction thus presents enough clues both in the action and dialogue to suggest an approach to what goes on in the play proper or, if you will, the play within the play (although Shakespeare's version has no concluding frame).³ What the lord and his servants convince Sly of is that he has enacted his former identity—his dream—over a period of many years, and that he has now at last been restored to his true identity. We know, of course, from the opening lines of the induction, what Sly's true identity is. Although Shakespeare provides no counterpart to it in the main story of Kate and Petruccio, we may infer it from the action, from Petruccio's treatment of Katherine and her eventual emergence as a lovable—and well-loved—woman.

In this understanding of the play, Kate is not a shrew, though throughout much of the action she behaves as one. Her shrewishness is an assumed identity, like the role of a drunken tinker that the lord and his servants convince Sly he was playing earlier or that he dreamt he was. The absence of a concluding frame at the end suggests that Shakespeare, by not having Sly restored to his original self, wants us to forget that he has merely been the victim of a trick. That may also be the reason, also unlike A Shrew [The Taming of the Shrew], that no brief interludes appear to remind us that the transformed Sly is watching a play unfold before him, that it is all a game of mirrors. Shakespeare leaves Sly not as he originally appeared, but as a wealthy lord, not seen again, and probably not long on stage once the players begin their comedy.⁴ Possibly the actor who played Sly then returned as Kate. If so, the parallels would be even more compelling. Although doubling is not essential to make the point, it would establish it beyond question.

If Kate, then, is not really a shrew but impersonating one, her concluding speech becomes much more plausible and even acceptable. But why should she impersonate a shrew? Is she even conscious of the impersonation or, like Sly, has she somehow become convinced that her assumed personality is her real one? There is plenty in her experience, which the play dramatizes, to impose upon her that persona. A first child, she is not Baptista's favored daughter; Bianca is. Handsome though she may be, it is Bianca's beauty that is praised, and it is her sister, not Kate, who is wooed persistently by more than one man. Without becoming Freudian about this, we can see how such a situation might turn Katherine into an ill-tempered, angry wench—angry at her sister, her father, and men in general—despite her true nature. Might not she, like Beatrice in Shakespeare's later comedy, really want to be married, although pride prevents her from displaying her inmost feelings?⁵

If this analysis is correct—and some actors who have played Katherine on stage maintain that is just how they see the situation⁶—it places Petruccio in a different light. His role now becomes not a tamer as such, but someone who from the first insists that his future wife really is what he says she is:

… bonny Kate, and sometimes Kate the curst.
But Kate, the prettiest Kate in Christendom,
Kate of Kate Hall, my super-dainty Kate—
For dainties are all cates, and therefore ‘Kate’—
Take this of me, Kate of my consolation:
Hearing thy mildness praised in every town,
Thy virtues spoke of, and thy beauty sounded—
Yet not so deeply as to thee belongs—
Myself am moved to woo thee for my wife.

(2.1.186-94)

As further evidence that Shakespeare presents a comedy of inversions, consider the subplot: the wooing of Bianca. Baptista's younger daughter appears as a sweet young thing, adorable to every man who sees her. Gremio, Lucentio, and Hortensio are all eager to marry her and engage in various sorts of subterfuge to win her. Lucentio even goes so far as to have his servant Tranio exchange identities with him—yet another instance of deceptive impersonation in the play. (Hortensio also dons a disguise for a time, and for the same purpose.) At the end, Lucentio wins out over Bianca's other suitors, but whom does he win? Sweet, adorable Bianca, or a rather shrewish young woman who refuses to obey her husband's command at the banquet when he summons her—and by her disobedience causes Lucentio to lose a hefty wager to Petruccio?⁷

But we are getting ahead of the story here. How does Petruccio succeed in getting Katherine to reveal her true self? With every good reason to be suspicious of him, Kate at first and for a relatively long while, dramatically speaking, opposes Petruccio and maintains her shrewish disposition. His “taming” consists of getting her to abandon that persona and become herself. The theme of discovering or becoming one's self appears elsewhere in Shakespeare, implicitly or explicitly, as in King Lear, when after a terrible education in suffering Lear finally learns that he is “a very foolish fond old man” (4.7.59); or at the end of The Tempest, when Gonzalo marvels at how Prospero has succeeded in helping others to find themselves “when no man was his own” (5.1.215).⁸ A similar process is at work here, as Petruccio patiently and persistently contrives to get his wife to become herself. For he has heard, he says to her father Baptista, of Katherine's “beauty and her wit, / Her affability and bashful modesty, / Her wondrous qualities and mild behaviour” (2.1.48-50), and that is why he wants to marry her.

We know that this is not altogether true. Petruccio earlier admits that he knows her father, but not Katherine (1.2.100-1). Moreover, from what else he says to his friend Hortensio when he arrives in Padua from Verona, he has come “to wive it wealthily in Padua” (1.2.74). He is not poor; he has crowns in his purse and goods at home, but he wants a wife (1.2.55-57). It does not matter to him what she looks like, how old she is, or what kind of disposition she sports; the dowry is all, or so he says (1.2.68-73). His friend tries to warn him about Katherine's temper, but Petruccio refuses to be dissuaded. “Thou know'st not gold's effect,” he says (1.2.92).

A rich wife may—or may not—be Petruccio's primary motive; in any case, little is made of this incentive afterwards, once he has seen Katherine.⁹ He tells Hortensio that he has experienced travails far worse than a woman's scolding tongue (198-209), and he soon becomes intent on demonstrating that Kate is not what she seems. His problem is to find a way to let the better qualities in her character emerge. The procedures he uses are ostensibly those of the animal tamer. Or are they? Their first encounter displays an abundance of wit on both sides. At one point, however, Katherine strikes Petruccio. Nothing fazed, he retorts that he will cuff her if she does that again, and they fall to further wit sallies, not to fisticuffs.¹⁰ Petruccio then changes his tactic when she tries to depart: “I find you passing gentle,” he says.

'Twas told me you were rough, and coy, and sullen,
And now I find report a very liar,
For thou art pleasant, gamesome, passing courteous,
But slow in speech, yet sweet as springtime flowers.
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,
But thou with mildness entertain'st thy wooers,
With gentle conference, soft and affable.

(2.1.237-46)

Kate has been none of those things in their preceding dialogue; but in saying she has been, Petruccio is not merely engaging in wishful thinking. Underneath her shrewish attitude he perceives a woman who may really have all the qualities that he attributes to her—as she in fact proves at the end of the play she does. But first he must win her confidence, initially by letting her know that he is privy to her game.¹¹ Later he has games of his own to play. For the present, he says:

          will you, nill you, I will marry you.
Now, Kate, I am a husband for your turn,
For by this light, whereby I see thy beauty—
Thy beauty that doth make me like thee well—
Thou must be married to no man but me. …

(265-69)

When her father enters to see how things are going, Petruccio states that all is well, but Katherine contradicts him. Nothing daunted, Petruccio counters with what he claims is the true situation:

Father, 'tis thus: yourself and all the world
That talked of her have talked amiss of her.
If she be curst, it is for policy,
For she's not froward, but modest as the dove.
She is not hot, but temperate as the morn.
For patience she will prove a second Grissel,
And Roman Lucrece for her chastity.

(285-91)

“If she be curst, it is for policy.” What kind of “policy”? Commentators have not been very expansive on this point, some simply alluding to Kate's “Machiavellian” scheming with an ulterior motive in mind.¹² If Petruccio is right, as my analysis contends, Kate's behavior is designed to test the quality of the man who woos her, to be sure he understands and truly loves her, despite the unlovely and shrewish behavior she displays. She is not interested in any other kind of lover, such as her sister Bianca attracts.¹³

Before departing—he says to buy apparel in Venice for the wedding to be held the following Sunday—Petruccio claims that he and Kate have made a bargain. She will appear curst only in company; in private she dotes on him and has already demonstrated her love by hanging about his neck and showering many kisses on him. This is far from true, like his statement that he is going to Venice to buy clothes; but Petruccio is engaging in some “policy” of his own here. Nevertheless, he astonishes everyone present—Gremio and Tranio as well as Baptista—who accept what he says. Significantly, for the last 25 lines before they leave, Katherine is utterly silent, exiting at the same time as—and perhaps with—Petruccio.¹⁴

Petruccio does not return until his wedding day, and then he is deliberately late, keeping Katherine and everyone else anxiously waiting to go to church. Katherine is audibly and visibly upset: she claims she has not wanted this marriage in the first place, with good reason; for she still sees Petruccio merely as “a madbrain rudesby full of spleen, / Who wooed in haste and means to wed at leisure” (3.2.10-11). Unlike Petruccio, she requires more time to peer beneath the guises her husband assumes and see the real man. And so she rants and raves against him, but not once does she suggest breaking off the match, even as she exits weeping, ashamed of the treatment she now receives. But this is only the beginning. Since speaking gently to her has not worked as yet, Petruccio adopts a different tactic. Petruccio's strategy, or “policy,” from here on until near the end is to give Katherine a dose of her own medicine;¹⁵ or rather, a double dose, so that she can recover her senses at last.

Petruccio's outrageous appearance when he does finally appear for the wedding heralds further outrages, which commence during and immediately after the wedding.¹⁶ He behaves boorishly during the ceremony (3.3.21-55), refuses to partake of the wedding feast (58-76), hurries Katherine off on the journey home against her will (77-111), and upon arrival begins the turmoil that continues until they return again to Padua. If Katherine has been violent, for example in binding and beating her sister (2.1.1-30), it is nothing compared to how Petruccio treats his servants, beating and abusing them unconscionably, or so it appears (4.1.1-3, 106-53). Even before they arrive home, aghast at his stormy behavior en route, Katherine prays as one “that never prayed before” (4.1.70-71), according to Grumio, who has suffered along with her.

With this, Katherine's alteration to a milder disposition begins, and it continues as she pleads with Petruccio to be gentler and more forgiving to his servants (4.1.142, 154-55). Having thrown away the dinner prepared for them, Petruccio brings his wife to the bridal chamber without any dinner at all and, so his servant Curtis informs Grumio, there makes

                                                  a sermon of continency to her,
And rails, and swears, and rates, that she, poor soul,
Knows not which way to stand, to look, to speak,
And sits as one new risen from a dream.

(4.1.169-72)

The simile is very apt: Katherine is at last awakening from her dream, just as Christopher Sly is made to believe he is awakening from his dream. Only in this instance the awakening is not fantasy; it is real, though (again like Sly's awakening) it hardly seems so at first to Katherine. If Petruccio in his soliloquy at the end of the scene admits he is using techniques on Katherine, such as fasting and sleeplessness, that are used in training falcons, he insists nevertheless that he does all “in reverent care of her” (190) and concludes: “This is a way to kill a wife with kindness, / And thus I'll curb her mad and headstrong humour” (194-95). He calls it the taming of a shrew, but by this time the analogy to taming a hawk must be seen as simply that—an analogy. By showing Katherine what she might otherwise become without his help, he encourages her true self to emerge.

Katherine's education continues in the episodes with the haberdasher and the tailor on the journey back to Padua for Bianca's wedding. Her milder disposition is sorely tried when, starving for food, she is confronted in 4.3 by Grumio, who offers her a variety of dishes, but only teases her. Exasperated beyond endurance, she sends him away with a beating (31-35). This is the old Kate yet. Petruccio continues the torment, with somewhat better success, as Katherine behaves more gently to him, at least at first, even though he also teases her, not only with food, but with the apparel he proposes and then disposes of violently. By the time the tailor arrives with a gown for her, she has very little to say when Petruccio disparages the workmanship and the workman, too (86-163).

Katherine is learning, however, slowly but surely, to control her own temper as she witnesses the excesses of her husband's. She therefore no longer demurs when he says they will sojourn to Padua in “honest, mean habiliments”:

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.

(168, 170-72)

Petruccio piles on analogies, the point behind all of them being that appearances are deceiving. Perhaps Katherine begins here to glimpse what he is up to and, looking inward, to see what she herself has been up to. Or perhaps not, for she still contradicts her husband. As a result, he puts off their journey until she is more agreeable to what he says, no matter what he says (185-93).

When they finally get going, the beginning is not very auspicious. Katherine again refuses to accept Petruccio's outrageous insistence that the sun is the moon (4.6.2-10), but under Hortensio's urging she yields and becomes more compliant. Some critics maintain that at last Katherine has caught on to Petruccio's game and is willing to play along with it, and they may be right.¹⁷ Whatever the case, from here on—as in her greeting of Vincentio as the young maid Petruccio first calls him, and then reversing herself after Petruccio does (28-50)—Kate the shrew vanishes and Kate the loving wife assumes her rightful position. She recognizes at last Petruccio's deep care of her and with that recognition her need to behave shrewishly disappears. When they arrive in Padua, Petruccio tests her once more before they go in to the banquet, by asking her to give him a kiss—right there in the street. Appalled at first by this outlandish request—kissing in public is just not done by respectable people—Katherine soon yields (5.1.132-41). True, she does so under threat of returning home again, but the threat does not have to be repeated. Thanks also to Petruccio's tutelage, Katherine has learned that conventions are merely that—conventions¹⁸—and far more important is the affection she shares with her husband whom, very significantly in this context, she addresses as “love” (139).

The banquet scene, the last one in the play, has aroused much controversy, centering on Katherine's long speech on marriage directed to Bianca and the widow. I do not wish to enter that controversy here, as it is not directly relevant to the argument I have been presenting, except to say that Katherine's shrewishness is no longer anywhere in evidence. Her true self has emerged in all its lovely glory, at least as Petruccio sees it, much to the dismay and expense of those other husbands whose wives refuse obedience. In her speech Katherine comments both indirectly and directly on her past behavior, as when she says:

A woman moved is like a fountain troubled,
Muddy, ill-seeming, thick, bereft of beauty. …

(5.2.147-48)

A few lines later, she confesses her earlier faults, which amount to a self-deception:

My mind hath been as big as one of yours,
My heart as great, my reason haply more,
To bandy word for word and frown for frown;
But now I see our lances are but straws,
Our strength as weak, our weakness past compare,
That seeming to be most which we indeed least are.

(175-80)

She ends with a plea to them to follow her in offering to place her hand beneath her husband's foot, a relic of ancient ceremony symbolizing a wife's submission to her husband.¹⁹ Whether Kate actually does so, prostrating herself in the process as in the old custom, is doubtful: no stage direction indicates such an action, and Petruccio immediately praises her and asks for a kiss (185). The play ends as her husband summons Katherine to bed, their marriage at last to be consummated, fittingly now, at the culminating moment of Kate's rebirth or recovery of her self.²⁰

Notes

1. In his chapter on The Taming of the Shrew in The Meaning of Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), Harold C. Goddard also sees the induction as an important clue to understanding the play within the play, although he focuses on Sly's relation to Petruccio and not his relation to Katherine, as I do. Other critics also point to the importance of the induction in alerting audiences to inverted identities and impostures in the play. See, e.g., Frances E. Dolan, ed., The Taming of the Shrew: Texts and Contexts (Boston: Bedford Books, 1996), 6-8. Jonathan Miller, who both directed and produced the BBC presentation, justified omission of the induction as a means of emphasizing the seriousness of the play and allowing it to “come on straight” (cited by Henry Fenwick in “The Production,” The Taming of the Shrew [London: British Broadcasting Co., 1980], 18).

2. All quotations are from William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), unless otherwise stated.

3. For a different analysis of the significance of the induction, one that contrasts civilized and uncivilized behavior, see Camille Wells Slights, “The Raw and the Cooked,” JEGP [Journal of English and Germanic Philology] 88 (1989): 168-89.

4. Goddard, Meaning of Shakespeare, 73, argues that the concluding frame is really unnecessary; it would be like explaining a joke, that is, blatantly pointing out the relation between Sly and Petruccio, drunkards and lovers, lunatics and lovers. Goddard does not comment on the interludes found in A Shrew.

5. Ibid., 69. Goddard also makes the point about Katherine's position in the family, Baptista's treatment of her as compared to her sister, and her natural reaction. He contends, as I do, that Katherine's shrewishness is superficial, not congenital, and later (71) sees her as anticipating Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing. Compare Fiona Shaw's similar comments on Katherine's behavior in Carol Rutter, Clamorous Voices: Shakespeare's Women Today, ed. Faith Evans (New York: Routledge, 1989), 6. Shaw played Kate in the Royal Shakespeare Company's production in 1987, also directed by Jonathan Miller. The two love plots in The Shrew parallel those in Much Ado in other ways as well; for example, the contrast between Bianca and her insipid suitors and Petruccio's love for Katherine parallels the contrast between the shallowness of Claudio and Hero's relationship and the disguised but profounder love between Benedict and Beatrice.

6. For example, in reply to a question, Amanda Harris, who played Katherine in the Royal Shakespeare Company's 1993 production, said as much in an open forum at the Shakespeare Centre in Stratford-upon-Avon during the play's run.

7. Compare Susan Penhaligon's comments on Bianca, whom she played in the BBC production: “I wanted to make as much as I could of Bianca and I realised that she is as strong as Kate but had probably dealt with the family situation better than Kate; she'd learned to get her own way by smiling, by being a bit sweeter, but in the fight scene she fights just as hard! … Bianca sees this goodlooking guy and decides that's what she wants, but once she's married to him she's going to be the boss. She turns out to be the shrew and she'll treat him very badly” (the BBC edition, 21).

8. See Rolf Soellner, Shakespeare's Patterns of Self-Knowledge (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1972). Although Soellner does not treat The Shrew in detail, compare his analysis in chapter 4: “The Comedy of Errors: Losing and Finding Oneself,” 62-77. In “Shakespeare's Romantic Shrew,” Shakespeare Quarterly 11 (1960): 351-56, Charles Brooks compares Adriana and Kate. Compare also Fiona Shaw's comment: “After a while, when people are calling you a shrew, you start living the name. … So by the time we meet [Kate] she is somebody whose identity is linked to her behaviour” (Clamorous Voices, 8).

9. Compare Slights, “The Raw,” 178: “We know that, although Petruchio decided to marry Kate sight unseen because she was rich, when he meets her he in fact responds to the actual woman.”

10. For an analysis of this scene that emphasizes game-playing, see Marianne Novy, Love's Argument (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 47-49. Compare Slights, “The Raw,” 177-78, who argues that Petruccio wins the contest of wit.

11. Sarah Badel, who plays Kate in the BBC production, says: “I think she's driven by fear—the overriding fear of being an old maid. … Then when she does meet a man who is for her there's the fear of the feelings he produces in her for the first time in her life. Something's got to give. … Petruchio is the only man who shows her what she's like. He is the man who stands in front of her and she goes Whack! across the face and he says, OK, but if you do it again you'll get Whack! from me: She's at liberty to do it again—he can take anything she cares to dish out, and therefore she's safe for the first time in her life. He doesn't in the least enjoy the fisticuffs but in her screams and howls and exhibitions she's making of herself he sees what others don't and he has to get through all that because he loves her” (BBC edition, 25). Compare Brooks, “Shakespeare's Romantic Shrew,” 352: Kate “is determined to be nobody's fool, and her tongue is her best defense. … She can never be bound in marriage to an inferior man for whom her sense of her own worth would allow her to feel only contempt, for the inferior men are easily scared away; she can be submissive and happy only with a man who proves to have a superior mind and spirit.”

12. See, for example, H. J. Oliver's note to his edition of the play in the Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 150; David Bevington's in The Complete Works, 4th ed. (New York: Longman, 1997), 126; and Dolan's in her edition, 83.

13. As an indication of Katherine's real feelings about men, see her speech at 2.1.31-36, where she fears she may have to dance barefoot at her sister's wedding—the proverbial fate of an elder sister when a younger marries first—and then lead apes in hell—the proverbial fate of an old maid (Oliver). Compare Fiona Shaw, in Clamorous Voices, 10: “Kate talks a lot about marriage and seems to want to get married, but she wouldn't marry those snot-rags Gremio and Hortensio, Bianca's suitors, and she knows they wouldn't marry her either. But you've got to believe that she's not mad, that she would marry someone who was marriageable.” On Petruccio's tactics, see Goddard's analysis, Meaning of Shakespeare, 70.

14. Modern editions include an addition to the original stage direction, “severally” or “separately.” But what warrant is there for this addition? The Folio reads simply “Exit Petruchio and Katherine.” For an analysis of the wooing in this scene and confirmation that Kate's silence lends consent, see Ann Jennalie Cook, Making a Match: Courtship in Shakespeare and His Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 169-70.

15. Compare Bianca's comment: “That being mad herself she's madly mated”; to which Gremio responds, “I warrant him, Petruccio is Kated” (3.3.116-17).

16. As Fiona Shaw says, Petruccio's costume “should be monstrous, insulting, threatening—and a mirror for Kate to see herself in” (Clamorous Voices, 12).

17. See Novy, Love's Argument, 54: “now Kate seems more like a partner in the game rather than an object used in it,” and Dolan, Texts and Contexts, 31. Compare Hortensio's remark: “Petruccio, go thy ways. The field is won” (4.6.24).

18. See Slights, “The Raw,” 181-83, for Petruccio's handling of conventions and what it teaches Kate.

19. See Lynda Boose, “The Comic Contract and Portia's Golden Ring,” Shakespeare Studies 20 (1988): 245. Boose comments on the ancient practice, which also involved a wife prostrating herself before her husband, as found in an annotated copy of the Sarum Manual. Although the practice had been banished years earlier, superseded by the ceremony in the Book of Common Prayer, which prohibited it, the ritual was probably still observed at some times and places, since ritual is notoriously resistant to change. In any case, Shakespeare's audience would have recognized Katherine's offer as an allusion to church ceremony, however anachronistically. Boose further notes that when the husband raised his wife from her prone position, it may have dramatized her symbolic rebirth into a new identity. Boose also comments that the “missing bracket” of the Sly Frame is not necessary, for reasons quite different from those I have proposed: “in a world constructed around patriarchal marriage, Kate's concession is the mediator required for success of the social, and hence also the comic, bond” (ibid.).

20. Cook, Making a Match, 172, comments: “The marriage remains unconsummated for a week, nightly lectures on chastity substituting for a proper bedding.” Compare Coppélia Kahn's comment on the ending (Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981], 114): “Shakespeare wants to make us feel that Kate has not been bought or sold, but has given herself out of love.”