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.”
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The Taming of the Shrew
William Shakespeare (1593) · 75pages · Renaissance · 4 AP appearances
Summary
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.
Why It 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 ...
Themes & Motifs
Diction & Style
Register: 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
Narrator: The play has no narrator, but the Induction creates a quasi-narrator in the Lord who orchestrates Sly's deception. By...
Figurative Language: High
Historical Context
Elizabethan England, 1590s — a society in transition between medieval and early modern conceptions of marriage, gender, and property: The Taming of the Shrew was written in a period that held two contradictory beliefs simultaneously: that women should submit to male authority absolutely, and that the most powerful person in the c...
Key Characters
Talking Points
- The Induction shows Christopher Sly being made into a lord by changing his clothes and his context. How does this frame prepare you to read Kate's transformation? If identity can be imposed on Sly, what does that say about the identity imposed on Kate?
- Kate's final speech is 44 lines of sustained argument for wifely submission — far longer and more extreme than anything Petruchio has asked for. Is the excess itself evidence of sincerity or irony? Would a truly broken woman over-perform this much?
- Petruchio compares himself to a falconer training a hawk: 'My falcon now is sharp and passing empty, / And till she stoop she must not be full-gorged.' What does it mean that Shakespeare gives this metaphor as a soliloquy — private truth spoken directly to the audience?
- Bianca, the 'obedient' sister, refuses her husband's summons in the final scene. Kate, the 'shrew,' obeys. What does this reversal tell us about the reliability of the labels 'shrew' and 'obedient wife'?
- Petruchio starves Kate, deprives her of sleep, and denies her clothing — all while claiming these are acts of love. How does framing cruelty as care make it more effective than open aggression?
Notable Quotes
“I am Christophero Sly; call not me honour nor lordship.”
“Have I not in my time heard lions roar?”
“No mates for you, / Unless you were of gentler, milder mould.”
Why Read This
Because this is the play that will make you argue with your classmates, your teacher, and yourself — and that argument is the entire point. Kate's final speech cannot be read without taking a position, and every position you take reveals something...