The Taming of the Shrew
William Shakespeare (1593)
“A man bets he can break a woman's will and calls it love — and the play dares you to decide whether she breaks or whether she wins.”
At a Glance
Petruchio arrives in Padua seeking a wealthy wife and takes on Katherina, the sharp-tongued elder daughter of Baptista Minola, whom no man will marry. He starves her, deprives her of sleep, denies her new clothes, and insists the sun is the moon until she agrees with everything he says. Meanwhile her mild sister Bianca is courted by multiple suitors in disguise. Kate delivers a final speech urging wives to submit to their husbands — and 400 years of audiences have argued over whether she means it.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
The Taming of the Shrew is Shakespeare's most controversial play — and has been since its own era. John Fletcher wrote a sequel, The Tamer Tamed (c. 1611), in which Petruchio's second wife turns his methods against him, suggesting that even Jacobean audiences found the original's gender politics insufficient. The play has been adapted, revised, bowdlerized, and reimagined more than almost any other Shakespeare comedy. Cole Porter's Kiss Me, Kate (1948) remains one of the most successful Broadway musicals. Every generation has had to decide what to do with this play — produce it straight, ironize it, condemn it, or recognize that its ambiguity was always the point.
Diction Profile
Elizabethan blank verse and prose mixing high rhetoric with earthy wit; formal verse for public scenes, prose for servants and scheming, stichomythic verse for the Kate-Petruchio combat
High