Courtship is merely incidental to the attainment of this ease and settlement.14

Perhaps Kate, too, participates willingly and actively in the game. The submission speech has often been read in the light of this possibility:

Far from reiterating old platitudes about the inferiority of women, however, what Kate actually says reflects a number of humanist assumptions about an ideal marriage popularized by Tudor matrimonial reformers. If we wish to see a real vision of subjugated woman, we should turn to the parallel speech of Kate in the anonymous A Shrew … [who] recites a medieval argument about women’s moral inferiority.… Shakespeare makes no reference to moral inferiority in women. His emphasis instead is on reciprocity of duties in marriage, based on the complementary natures of man and woman.15

We cannot really take that speech at face value. Much of this comedy is an unspoken dialogue between Katherina and Petruchio; and we have to take her speech in the context of the whole play, not as a set-piece on the woman’s place. We should read Katherina’s final speech as the parallel, and answer, to Petruchio’s rhetoric. The mode of speech adopted by each is hyperbole.16

Kate’s “act” at the end is, therefore, far more ethical than Bianca’s “act” throughout the play, although both women pretend to be good. They do not simply exchange roles, for then Kate would appear as false as Bianca has been. Through the use of parodic speech, Shakespeare makes Kate shatter the façade of female hypocrisy that … Bianca put into practice.17

The very nature of Kate’s performance as performance suggests that she is offering herself to Petruchio not as his servant, as she claims, but as his equal in a select society … those who, because they know that man is an actor, freely choose and change their roles in order to avoid the narrow, imprisoning roles society would impose on them.18

The conclusion to be drawn from such a reading is that the very artfulness of game-playing—of theater—offers a form of release from the pressures of patriarchal, mercantile society:

The Taming of the Shrew does not fully resolve the marital problems raised in the play, nor does it resolve the problems of patriarchy raised by the shrew character and the plot that conventionally tamed her. Instead, it reasserts marital hierarchy parodically at the end and allows the shrew and her husband to escape from their mercantile world through art.19

The danger of reading Petruchio’s actions positively in this way is that one might find oneself glossing over the violence he threatens and performs. There is a long stage tradition of giving him a whip, which—unless one starts becoming very Freudian—is hardly conducive to the idea that Kate is complicit in everything that happens to her.

The questions of performance and role-playing raised by Kate’s final speech are often read in the light of the induction:

In The Taming of a Shrew … the Sly-narrative is not a prologue but an extended dramatic framework: Sly and his attendants are kept on stage more or less throughout, and are given several further comments on and interventions in the action of the play.20

The transformation of Christopher Sly from drunken lout to noble lord, a transformation only temporary and skin-deep, suggests that Kate’s switch from independence to subjection may also be deceptive and prepares us for the irony of the denouement.21

This emphasis on disguise and illusion is equally evident in the Bianca plot:

Bianca can play her role in a courtship, and her role in a business transaction, without revealing her true face. But the play … goes on for one scene after marriage, and Lucentio learns to his dismay what lay behind that romantic sweetness. On the other hand, Petruchio has been concerned with personality all along. The taming plot presents in a deeper, more psychological way ideas that are handled superficially and externally in the romantic plot. Education is one such idea.… Petruchio … really does teach Kate, and teaches her that inner order of which the music and the mathematics offered to Bianca are only a reflection.22

But it is above all the Sly framework that establishes a self-referential theatricality in which the status of the shrew-play as a play is enforced. The female characters in the play are boy-actors assuming a role, parodied and highlighted by the page playing Sly’s “wife.” Thus “in the induction, these relationships of power and gender, which in Elizabethan treatises, sermons, homilies, and behavioural handbooks were figured as natural and divinely ordained, are subverted by the metatheatrical foregrounding of such roles and relations as culturally constructed.”23 “Katherina’s mind is worked on by Petruchio as Sly’s is by the Lord, producing a similar sense of dislocation.… Finally she [too] acquires a new identity.”24

Every production of every Shakespeare play is different from every other. The very process of adaptation and reinterpretation is what keeps the work alive. Shakespeare’s endurance is dependent on cultural evolution in the light of new circumstances, new beliefs and values. But perhaps of all the plays The Taming of the Shrew is the one in which almost everything hangs on a few essential director’s and actor’s decisions: what to do about the induction, how to play the two sisters and the two courtships off against each other, how playful to make the taming, how sincere to make the submission.

ABOUT THE TEXT

Shakespeare endures through history. He illuminates later times as well as his own. He helps us to understand the human condition. But he cannot do this without a good text of the plays. Without editions there would be no Shakespeare. That is why every twenty years or so throughout the last three centuries there has been a major new edition of his complete works. One aspect of editing is the process of keeping the texts up to date—modernizing the spelling, punctuation and typography (though not, of course, the actual words), providing explanatory notes in the light of changing educational practices (a generation ago, most of Shakespeare’s classical and biblical allusions could be assumed to be generally understood, but now they can’t).

Because Shakespeare did not personally oversee the publication of his plays, with some plays there are major editorial difficulties. Decisions have to be made as to the relative authority of the early printed editions, the pocket format “Quartos” published in Shakespeare’s lifetime, and the elaborately produced “First Folio” text of 1623, the original “Complete Works” prepared for the press after his death by Shakespeare’s fellow-actors, the people who knew the plays better than anyone else. In the case of The Taming of the Shrew, there is no Quarto text, so all modern editions follow the Folio.

Scholars still debate the nature of the relationship between A pleasant conceited historie, called The taming of a shrew As it was sundry times acted by the Right honorable the Earle of Pembrook his seruants (1594) and Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew as published in the First Folio. The main action shares a similar plot line with parallel but sometimes differently named characters (Sly and Kate are the only names shared by the two plays; in A Shrew, Kate has two sisters not just one, and the setting is Athens rather than Padua). Four possibilities have been advanced:

1. Shakespeare used the previously existing A Shrew, which he did not write, as a source for The Shrew.
2. A Shrew is a reconstructed version of The Shrew; that is, what has sometimes been called a “Bad Quarto,” an attempt by actors (or conceivably a stenographer in the audience) to reconstruct the original play from memory and sell it.
3. Both versions were written legitimately by Shakespeare himself; that is, one of the plays, presumably A Shrew, is an earlier draft of the other.
4. The two plays are unrelated other than by the fact that they are independently derived from another play which is now lost. This is the so-called “Ur-Shrew” theory (in reference to the idea of an “Ur-Hamlet,” a lost play behind Shakespeare’s Hamlet).

(1) would be in accordance with his practice elsewhere (as when, for example, he used the anonymous King Leir as a source for King Lear) and with his early reputation as a patcher of other men’s plays.