Bartholomew, disguise himself as a woman to play the part of Sly's wife and instructs Bartholomew to act excited when Sly wakes up out of supposed dementia. The nobleman also hires a troupe of traveling players to perform a play—which happens to beShrew—for Sly.

From the start, the audience is let into the joke on Sly's status that Sly is clueless about. We are thus anticipating Sly's reaction when he wakes up. More than this, however, Shakespeare establishes his central themes early on: he suggests that class and gender are roles we play, and that the outward "dressing" of how we behave and are perceived in public is not necessarily who we are inside. Finally, in setting up the core play as a play within a play, Shakespeare winks broadly at his audience, essentially calling into question the play's premise: is it not a fantasy, he asks—a fiction—to think that a woman can be tamed? Who is the joke really on, Sly or the audience?

Well, there are several to choose from, however for me, one of the most amusing elements is our first introduction to the "shrew" of the title, and how she estabilishes her shrew-like status with an excellent berating of Hortensio and Gremio after they are told that none may wed the meek and mild Bianca until Katharina be married. Note what Katharina says to Hortensio, for example:

But if it were, doubt not her care should be

To comb your noddle with a three-legged stool,

And paint your face, and use you like a fool.

This clearly sets the stage for the amusing antics that will happen as Lucentio is desperate to find someone who can marry this "demon" and "harpy," as she is described respectively by other men. Katharina's ability to insult and play the shrew gives us a real laugh as she berates the various men that surround her and gives us a real sense of anticipation as we wait and see what Petruchio will do with her.

Act 5 scene 1 plays like a standard farce with its focus on mistaken identity. A pedant (a schoolmaster) from Mantua is pretending to be Vincentio to protect himself during his time in Padua because he has been told there is a war going on between the two cities. By this point in the play, he is still committed to the deception. He maintains it even when the real Vincentio appears.

Vincentio and the pedant's reactions create much humor, which the latter insulting the former in humorous ways. For example, when Vincentio asks if the pedant is Lucentio's father, the pedant replies, "Ay sir; so his mother says, if I may believe her," a statement which offends the honor of both Vincentio and his wife. The servant Biondello continues to play along with this deception, and creates a subversive strand of humor. He defies the usual class norms of this society, where masters were perfectly within their rights to beat their servants. Further subversion comes from Tranio dressing up as his own master.

All of these mistaken identities and false claims pile up in this scene. The comedy largely comes from the characters trying to assert who they are or trying to untangle who is who. By the end of the scene, all of this confusion is resolved and social order is re-established.