In another sense, it is very different, since we know that it is only a game and that the female victim is only an actor. And within the world of the play, the humiliation of Kate is more private than public. Furthermore, Petruchio’s actions are intended to be pre-emptive: unlike many of the women who were ritually punished for their behavior, she is not an unruly wife.

The starting point of the modern female spectator’s response to the play is likely to be Kate’s own emotion: rage. Why should a daughter submit to her father’s will? Why should women accept the way they are treated by men? In an influential feminist reading of Shakespeare, the critic Coppélia Kahn has no doubt about the play’s historical authenticity:

The overt force Petruchio wields over Kate by marrying her against her will in the first place and then by denying her every wish and comfort, by stamping, shouting, reducing her to exhaustion, etc., is but a farcical representation of the psychological realities of marriage in Elizabethan England, in which the husband’s will constantly, silently, and invisibly, through custom and conformity, suppressed the wife’s.4

Yet at the same time, she credits Shakespeare with the intelligence to see the irrationality of such behavior:

Shakespeare does not rest with showing that male supremacy in marriage denies woman’s humanity. In the most brilliant comic scene of the play [4.3], he goes on to demonstrate how it defies reason. Petruchio demands that Kate agree that the sun is the moon in order to force a final showdown. Having exhausted and humiliated her to the limit of his invention, he now wants her to know that he would go to any extreme to get the obedience he craves. Shakespeare implies here that male supremacy is ultimately based on such absurdities, for it insists that whatever a man says is right because he is a man, even if he happens to be wrong.5

The purpose of theater is not usually to endorse or to dissent from a moral position or a sociological phenomenon. It is to show—comically, tragically, farcically, thoughtfully—how human beings interact with each other. Shakespeare’s greatest resource is his language and what attracts him to Katherina as a character for realization on the stage is what attracts Petruchio to her: her lively language. How would his original audience have responded to that language? First and foremost, they would have enjoyed it and laughed with it. If they began to reflect upon it, they would have been pulled in contradictory directions. There may well have been an element perhaps of fear and loathing: “From the outset of Shakespeare’s play, Katherine’s threat to male authority is posed through language; it is perceived as such by others and is linked to a claim larger than shrewishness—witchcraft—through the constant allusions to Katherine’s kinship with the devil.”6 But equally, among the more sophisticated, there could have been a relish in the subversion of norms. Translating this into the language of modern feminist criticism,

Kate’s self-consciousness about the power of language, her punning and irony, and her techniques of linguistic masquerade, are strategies of italics.… Instead of figuring an essentialized woman’s speech, they deform language by subverting it, that is, by turning it inside out so that metaphors, puns, and other forms of wordplay manifest their veiled equivalences: the meaning of woman as treasure, of wooing as a civilized and acceptable disguise for sexual exploitation, of the objectification and exchange of women.7

Mastery of language was an extremely important idea in Shakespeare’s time. The pedagogy of Renaissance humanism was fundamentally concerned with the cultivation of the powers of speech and argument as the means of realizing our potential as rational beings. Within the play, Petruchio’s subduing and refinement of Kate operates in parallel to the purported efforts of the supposed tutors to teach the sisters classical literature and the art of the lute. “By learning to speak the pedagogue’s language of social and familial order, Kate shows herself to be a better student of standard humanist doctrine than her sister.”8

Paradoxically, there is a sense in which Petruchio liberates Kate from her own demons:

Petruchio directs Kate to the dark center of her psyche and dramatizes her fears so that she may recognize them. He shows her what she has become, not only by killing her in her own humour but also by presenting her with a dramatic image of her own emotional condition: he acts out for her the drama of her true self held in bondage by her tyrannical, violent self. What is internal … Petruchio makes external.9

Petruchio’s method is to suppose (and he is correct) or assume qualities in Katherina that no one else, possibly even the shrew herself, ever suspects. What he assumes as apparently false turns out to be startlingly true. His “treatment” is a steady unfolding of her really fine qualities: patience, practical good sense, a capacity for humor, and finally obedience, all of which she comes gradually to manifest in a spirit chastened but not subdued.10

The suggestion, then, is that beneath the surface of the brutal sex farce is a different story in which two intelligent but temperamental people learn how to live together. A variant on such an interpretation is to suggest that Petruchio’s “taming” may be an elaborate game:

The audience’s realization that Petruchio is game-playing, that he is posing behind the mask of a disorderly male shrew and is having considerable fun exploiting his role, is the key to a romantic reading of the play. Thus Kate is tamed not by Petruchio’s whip but by the discovery of her own imagination, for when she learns to recognize the sun for the moon and the moon for the dazzling sun she is discovering the liberating power of laughter and play.11

As a wife she submits, but as a player in the game she is now a full and skillful partner. Most important, she is helping to create her own role as an obedient spouse, and the process of creation gives her pleasure. Her obedience is not meekly accepted, but embraced and enjoyed.12

Like a good humanist husband, he has been his wife’s teacher; and like an actor, he has taught her to assume a new role. When Kate learns to mimic as well as he, these two easily transcend the roles and hierarchies that govern their world.13

By this account, Petruchio injects a dose of realism into the romantic ideas about love that comedy habitually perpetuates. It has been said that he

drags love out of heaven, and brings it down to earth. To the chivalrous, love is a state of worship; to him, it is a problem of wiving. Its object is not primarily a search for spiritual bliss in the contemplation of the beloved. It seeks merely a guarantee of domestic comfort.… A condition of this is, naturally, that he must be master of what is his own.