The Good Marriage of Katherine and Petruchio

Summary

Nowadays, The Taming of the Shrew is taken in its entirety, without mutilation, crude business with whips (imported by Kemble) or announcements of the embarrassing incompetence of the prentice Shakespeare. It is winning increasing praise, for the structure of its interlocking parts among other things, and is becoming understood as a fast-moving play about various kinds of romance and fulfilment in marriage.

Problems remain, of course, particularly with Katherine’s final speech: modern solutions making it a statement of contemporary doctrine, or of male fantasy, or of almost unbelievably sustained irony, do not any of them seem to suggest that there is much for Katherine and Petruchio to look forward to in marriage. The speech is a disappointment after the tender moment of ‘Nay, I will give thee a kiss’ (5.1.133) which suggested that something was coming with a lot of good feeling in it, an impression later supported by her having the wit to win Petruchio’s wager for him. Moreover, submission, as it is first, and strongly, presented in the play, in the Induction, scene 1, is denigration, a game played by pretended attendants; and wifely submission, shown even more strongly in the following scene, is sport by a page dressed as the sham wife of a ridiculously deceived ‘husband’. It is all a pastime, and false.