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.”
Language 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
Syntax Profile
The play operates on two syntactic tracks. Petruchio and Kate speak in rapid, matched verse — stichomythia, shared lines, picked-up puns — the syntax of intellectual equals. The servants and suitors speak in looser prose or more conventional verse. Kate's final speech breaks from both: it is sustained, formal, rhetorical, building in long subordinated periods — the syntax of public argument, not personal combat. The shift from one syntax to the other IS the taming, whether you read it as growth or as loss.
Figurative Language
High — the play is saturated with animal imagery (falcons, hawks, haggards, horses, wasps), domestic property imagery (goods, chattels, household stuff), and performance imagery (costumes, disguises, plays-within-plays). The animal imagery clusters around Kate; the property imagery clusters around marriage; the performance imagery is everywhere, because everything in this play is a show.
Era-Specific Language
A woman considered quarrelsome, bad-tempered, or domineering — the era's label for female defiance. Not a neutral term: it carries legal and social consequences.
Shrewish, ill-tempered — applied exclusively to women. The male equivalent (forceful, commanding) was simply called 'manly.'
The deliberate breaking of an animal's will through deprivation and conditioning — applied to wife-training in period falconry metaphors without irony.
Property settled on a wife in the event of her husband's death — the financial negotiation that constituted marriage as an economic transaction.
In falconry, when a hawk descends to the lure — Petruchio's metaphor for Kate's submission. The term carries both the hawk's obedience and the trainer's power.
Willful, difficult, contrary — another label for female independence that the period coded as a character defect rather than a trait.
How Characters Speak — Class & Identity
Petruchio
Forceful, flexible verse — he can speak in elaborate rhetoric (the lion-roaring speech), rapid wit (the duel with Kate), crude comedy (the wedding chaos), and controlled manipulation (the falconry soliloquy). He code-switches more fluidly than any other character.
A man of genuine intelligence and social range who deploys language as a tool. His fluency across registers is his power — and it is what makes him dangerous, because he can frame anything in any way.
Katherina (Kate)
Sharp, reactive, improvisational verse early — full of interruptions, insults, and physical energy. The final speech shifts to sustained, formal, rhetorical verse. Whether this is growth or loss is the play's central question.
Kate's early language is the speech of resistance — quick, defensive, attacking. Her final language is the speech of authority — measured, structured, commanding. She has moved from reactive power to proactive performance. The question is whether the performance is hers or Petruchio's.
Bianca
Mild, brief, decorously simple verse — the speech of a 'good' woman. But after marriage, she speaks with sharper edges and refuses her husband's summons.
Bianca's meekness was a performance for the marriage market. Once she has secured her position, the mask slips. Her linguistic shift is the play's most economical proof that all female identity in this world is performance.
Grumio
Comic prose full of malapropisms, puns, and deliberate misunderstandings. He taunts Kate with food descriptions while she starves.
Servant language as both comedy and complicity. Grumio's jokes ease the audience's discomfort with the taming — and that easing is itself part of the mechanism.
Baptista
Measured, mercantile verse — the language of negotiation. He discusses his daughters' marriages the way he would discuss trade goods.
The father who reduces his children to commodities speaks in the register of commerce. His verse is competent, practical, and devoid of feeling — the language of a man for whom daughters are assets.
Narrator's Voice
The play has no narrator, but the Induction creates a quasi-narrator in the Lord who orchestrates Sly's deception. By framing the entire play as a performance for a dupe, Shakespeare embeds a commentary layer: everything that follows is explicitly theater, explicitly constructed, explicitly designed to entertain someone who cannot tell fiction from reality. The audience is Sly.
Tone Progression
Induction
Earthy, comic, philosophically loaded
A practical joke that carries the play's thesis: identity is costume. Sly's transformation from tinker to lord is funny and devastating.
Acts I-II
Witty, combative, energetic
The Kate-Petruchio duel crackles with verbal energy. The Bianca subplot is light farce. Comedy of courtship at its most electric.
Act III
Grotesque, uneasy
The wedding is funny and cruel in equal measure. Petruchio's property speech pushes the comedy toward something darker.
Act IV
Dark, claustrophobic, ambiguous
The taming sequences are uncomfortable by design. The falconry soliloquy removes any doubt about Petruchio's method. The sun-moon scene offers the first possibility of mutual understanding — or confirms submission.
Act V
Triumphant and unsettled — simultaneously
Kate's speech is the play's emotional climax, but its meaning is unresolved. The audience leaves exhilarated or disturbed, and the best productions achieve both.
Stylistic Comparisons
- Much Ado About Nothing — Beatrice and Benedick also duel verbally, but their surrender is mutual and voluntary. Kate's is ambiguous.
- Othello — another play about a man reshaping a woman's reality. Iago manipulates Othello; Petruchio manipulates Kate. The methods are recognizably similar; the outcomes diverge.
- The Tamer Tamed (John Fletcher, 1611) — Fletcher's sequel in which Petruchio's second wife tames HIM. The Jacobean era found this play's resolution insufficient and wrote a corrective.
Key Vocabulary from This Book
Notable words used in this text — click to see full definitions