One of my New Year’s commitments was to reread Shakespeare’s corpus. I began today with his provocative The Taming of the Shrew.
The plot hearkens back to both folk tales and Biblical parables. Its premise? A beautiful younger daughter (Bianca) with many suitors can’t get married until her shrewish older sister (Katherine/Kate) gets hitched. Enter Petruchio. He commences to tame Kate, and the play ends with Kate telling her fellow wives, “My hand is ready; may it do him [Petruchio] ease.”
Criticism of the play is frequently polemical. Words like “ideology,” “patriarchy,” “sexuality,” “archaic,” “fantasy,” and “dominance” often appear. Given the play’s highly-charged content–a strong-willed woman succumbs to her husband’s will–critics can either decry the system represented in the play or insist that Shakespeare ironically undercuts the plot.
The one Christian reading of the play I found (by Dale G. Priest) allegorizes the play as a story of Christian conversion: “Kate is now able to experience the joys of responsible freedom rather than the misery and bondage of the self-centered will.”
The play comedically arcs from wrath to grace, and its subject is ethical. My hypothesis is that the idol the play destroys is one of marriage as natural, labor-free intimacy. Marriage requires work, which does not necessarily mean that the grace of a happy marriage is earned. Like salvation, the result of marriage follows from rather than occasioning grace. Petruchio, the husband, receives grace in the play’s final scene just as much as Kate, the titular shrew. He has not deserved Kate’s devotion, yet he receives it. They both had to count the cost of marriage: economically and emotionally. They do so as partners.
Experiments in Criticism 