The Taming of the Shrew

The Taming of the Shrew opens with a merchant who will not let his younger daughter marry until someone takes the elder one off his hands. Bianca has suitors queuing at the door. Katherina has a temper that has become the local entertainment, and no offers at all.

Petruchio arrives looking for a rich wife and hears about Katherina's dowry before he hears anything else. He courts her by refusing to accept a word she says, marries her over her objection, and carries her off to a house where the food is sent back, the bed is left unmade and the clothes are rejected, all of it announced as devotion. Meanwhile Bianca's suitors disguise themselves as tutors and begin lying to everybody, including each other.

Shakespeare wrote the comedy early, in the 1590s, and framed it as a play performed for a drunk tinker who has been tricked into believing he is a lord. It draws on Italian comic types and on an older tradition of shrew-taming stories, but it complicates its sources: the tricks are cruel, they are done in daylight, and the play keeps showing the audience who is paying for them.

The comedy is fast and physical, built on disguise, mistaken identity and a courtship scene that is effectively a duel in verse. The difficulty is Katherina's last speech, a long public statement of wifely obedience, and every staging has to decide what she means by it. Nothing in the text settles the question.

That unresolved ending is a large part of why the play is still performed. It can be played as a romance, as a warning, or as a joke at the husband's expense, and the words do not change.