As a modern audience, we must be conscious of the society in which Shakespeare wrote The Taming of the Shrew. The main part is set in Padua, a city in northern Italy. In the eyes of Elizabethan England, Italy was a desirable country of beautiful, materialistic nature and living. Thus it became a popular setting for Shakespeare and his contemporaries for plays involving deceit, money, beautiful women, or anything involving such shallow pleasures – but noticeably always at a distance from England itself. The play employs a similar literary technique that Shakespeare applied to many of his plays – that is to either separate the audience from the setting to such an extent that the occurrences within the play can be utterly exentuated whilst at the same time genuinely believed. Take Twelfth Night, for instance; the action takes place in Illyria, an invented country supposedly on the Adriatic coast. Though Illyria looks a lot like Elizabethan England, the pretence issue!
d with invention allows for the ridiculous. The same applies with A Midsummer Nights Dream; set mostly in forests behind Athens, where the main characters are tricked and put under spells by fairies. The idea of the audience enjoying the contents whilst
. . .
The banquet is celebrating the three recent marriages in Padua: Petruchio with Kate (or Katharina), Lucentio with Bianca (Kate’s sister), and Hortensio with a widow. She does not resist Petruchio forever, eventually subjugating herself to him, in spite of all her previous forswearing of marriage. The former set in the English countryside, and consists of the first two scenes, called the “Induction”. (The importance of the widow being unnamed is relevant to play though not to the essay, yet it does stress the minor role, which both she and her husband plays- acting much as background and conversation support and their behaviour as normality to which much abnormal behaviour can be compared). The audience may be tempted to feel some pity for Kate, though as the Lucentio points out in the last line of the play, she had, in the end, allowed herself to be tamed: “’Tis a wonder, by your leave, she will be tam’d so” (190). It was considered only when conformation to theses specifics resided, that a marriage would be successful. It is this change in character that Shakespeare had to encourage the possibility of, towards his audience.
Both Petruchio and Katharina are happy, and both contextual and written reasoning can be found to support the concept that Kate truly believed her silioque, that Petruchio had indeed tamed the shrew. At the beginning of the play, Kate is far from Padua’s most eligible maid. Unlike many love stories, Shakespeare deals, more realistically, with the proper dispositions that a man and woman might arrive at in order to find a more peaceful, if not perfect, union. It is abhorrent to a certain kind of feminist criticism - Kate advocates total subservience to the husband, and within her speech metaphorically and euphemistically portrays the man as the woman’s lord, king, governor, life, keeper, head, and sovereign. In the modern world, this view of marriage would be unacceptable. only having their wildest imaginations as to the settings is reinforced within The Taming of the Shrew: it having an ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ play. Though her father, Baptista, has promised a substantial dowry to both her and her sister, he has made things increasingly difficult by deciding that Kate must marry before Bianca. Petruchio had a hard battle to ‘win-over’ Kate, but he was wise and careful in doing so; he fought until he was convinced she truly allowed herself to be obedient in married life.
Approximate Word count =
1409
Approximate Pages =
6 (250 words per page double spaced)
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