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.”
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.
Firsts & Innovations
One of the first English plays to use a framing device (the Induction) to create a play-within-a-play that comments on its own themes of identity and performance
The first major dramatic treatment of wife-taming that is ambiguous enough to sustain both feminist and patriarchal readings — a structural innovation that keeps the play alive
An early example of what would become Shakespeare's signature technique: giving his most controversial argument to his most sympathetic character, forcing the audience to grapple with both
Cultural Impact
Cole Porter's Kiss Me, Kate (1948) adapted the play into one of the most celebrated musicals in Broadway history, reframing the gender conflict as backstage comedy
The play has become a central text in feminist literary criticism — from the 1960s onward, it has been used to teach about patriarchy, gender performance, and the politics of reading
Every major Shakespeare company must decide how to stage the play — and the decision reveals the company's politics as much as its aesthetics
The phrase 'taming the shrew' has entered common English as a metaphor for subduing a difficult woman — a usage the play simultaneously enables and critiques
10 Things I Hate About You (1999) modernized the plot for high-school audiences, making it one of the most recognizable Shakespeare adaptations in popular culture
Banned & Challenged
The Taming of the Shrew has been dropped from syllabi and challenged by educators who consider its gender politics too toxic to teach without extensive framing. Some theater companies have refused to produce it. Others have produced it specifically as a provocation — staging the taming as overt abuse to make the audience confront what the comedy normalizes. The play has not been formally banned in the way that books with racial or sexual content have, but it has been quietly removed from curricula more often than almost any other Shakespeare play.