The latter shows signs of frowardness and has to be lectured by Kate. The first half of Kate’s famous submission speech is spoken in the singular, addressed specifically to the widow and not to womankind in general: “Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper, / Thy head, thy sovereign: one that cares for thee.” The contextual irony of this is not always appreciated: in contradistinction to Kate’s prescriptions, in the particular marriage to which she is referring it will be the wife, the wealthy widow, who provides the “maintenance.” Hortensio will be spared the labors of a breadwinner. According to Kate, all a husband asks from a wife is love, good looks, and obedience; these are said to be “Too little payment for so great a debt.” But the audience knows that in this case the debt is all Hortensio’s. Besides, he has said earlier that he is no longer interested in woman’s traditional attribute of “beauteous looks”—all he wants is the money. Kate’s vision of obedience is made to look oddly irrelevant to the very marriage upon which she is offering advice.

Then there is Kate’s sister. Petruchio’s “taming school” is played off against the attempts by Lucentio and Hortensio to gain access to Bianca by disguising themselves as schoolmasters. In the scene in which Lucentio courts her in the guise of a Latin tutor, the woman gives as good as she gets. She is happy to flirt with her supposed teacher over Ovid’s erotic manual The Art of Love. This relationship offers a model of courtship and marriage built on mutual desire and consent. Bianca escapes her class of sixteenth-century woman’s usual fate of being married to a partner of the father’s choice, such as rich old Gremio. If anything, Bianca is the dominant partner at the end. She is not read a lecture by Kate, as the widow is, and she gets the better of her husband in their final onstage exchange. Like Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, she more than matches her man in the art of wordplay. One almost wonders if she would not be better matched with the pretended rather than the “real” Lucentio, that is to say the clever servant Tranio who oils the wheels of the plot and sometimes threatens to steal the show.

The double plot is a guarantee that, despite the subduing of Kate, the play is no uncomplicated apology for shrew-taming. But is Kate really subdued? Or is her submission all part of the game that she and Petruchio have been playing out? It is their marriage, not the other ones, that compels the theater audience. A woman with Kate’s energies would be bored by a conventional lover such as Lucentio. She and Petruchio are well matched because they are both of “choleric” temperament. Their fierce tempers are what make them attractive to each other and charismatic to us. They seem to know they are born for each other from the moment in their first private encounter when they share a joke about oral sex (“with my tongue in your tail”). “Where two raging fires meet together” there may not be an easy marriage, but there will certainly not be a dull match and a passive wife. In the twentieth century the roles seemed ready made for Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.

THE CRITICS DEBATE

What you have just read is one critical interpretation of the play. But there are many other possible answers to the awkward questions raised by its title, action, resolution, and framing, so for the sake of balance the remainder of this introduction will offer an overview of some of them.

The critical debate about The Taming of the Shrew begins at the end: is Kate’s notorious last speech delivered ironically? Is she genuinely tamed, or is she playing a game of her own, retaining her psychological independence? A related question concerns the play’s style. Is it a farce, a form in which we are not encouraged to take it very seriously when people are slapped around? Or is it a sophisticated social comedy, the ironic texture of which directs our attention to what one critic calls the social illness of a materialistic patriarchy?

Historically attuned commentators have related the play to contemporaneous debates about the nature and role of the sexes, and the disruption caused to society by unruly, “shrewish” or “scolding” women. In early modern England there was a criminalization of female unruliness. As Sir William Blackstone later explained in his Commentaries on the Laws of England,

A common scold, communis rixatrix, (for our law-Latin confines it to the feminine gender) is a public nuisance to her neighbourhood. For which offence she may be indicted; and, if convicted, shall be sentenced to be placed in a certain engine of correction called the trebucket, castigatory, or cucking stool, which in the Saxon language signifies the scolding stool; though now it is frequently corrupted into ducking stool, because the residue of the judgement is, that, when she is so placed therein, she shall be plunged in the water for her punishment.1

The equivalent punishment in Scotland was the “scold’s bridle,” a form of muzzle designed to stop the foul, gossipy, or malicious mouth of the woman. What is striking in this context, feminist critic Lynda Boose suggests, “is that the punishments meted out to women are much more frequently targeted at suppressing women’s speech than they are at controlling their sexual transgressions”: “the chief social offences seem to have been ‘scolding,’ ‘brawling,’ and dominating one’s husband. The veritable prototype of the female offender of this era seems to be … the woman marked out as a ‘scold’ or ‘shrew.’ ”2 Public humiliation as much as physical discomfort was the purpose of the “cucking”/“ducking” stool and the “scold’s bridle.” They were shaming devices: “The cucking of scolds was turned into a carnival experience, one that literally placed the woman’s body at the center of a mocking parade. Whenever local practicalities made it possible, her experience seems to have involved being ridden or carted through town.”3 The Skimmington Ride in Thomas Hardy’s novel The Mayor of Casterbridge (1884) is a late example of this practice.

The question, though, is how to relate the play to such customs. In one sense, a drama performed on the public stage is close kin to a mocking parade.