Submission and Subversion: Reading Kate in Shrew

Introduction

The Taming of the Shrew, written by William Shakespeare and first performed around 1590–1592, is a comedy that dramatizes the courtship and marriage of the fiercely resistant Katherina Minola and the calculating Petruchio of Verona. On its surface, the play stages a straightforward story of domestic conquest: a "shrew" is broken through psychological manipulation, social pressure, and deliberate deprivation until she delivers a lengthy speech endorsing wifely submission. Yet the mechanics of that conquest are too elaborate, too theatrical, and too self-aware to be read as simple celebration. This essay argues that Shakespeare uses the taming plot not to endorse patriarchal authority but to expose its performance as a kind of theater — a fiction that both Petruchio and Katherina ultimately agree to enact together, with Katherina's final submission functioning as calculated irony rather than genuine surrender. The play's induction, Katherina's psychological arc, the theatrical structure of the taming itself, and the closing speech all point toward a heroine who retains agency precisely because she understands the game being played.

The Induction as Interpretive Frame

The Induction — the framing device featuring the tinker Christopher Sly — is the single most important structural signal Shakespeare provides for how to read everything that follows. In it, a lord and his servants convince a drunken vagabond that he is actually a nobleman who has suffered from amnesia, staging a theatrical illusion so convincing that Sly momentarily accepts an entirely false identity. This miniature drama of imposed identity is not incidental. It announces the play's central preoccupation: the degree to which selfhood, status, and gender roles are performances that can be scripted, rehearsed, and pressed upon a subject from outside. Through Greenblatt's new historicism — reading texts within the power structures of their moment — this induction can be understood as Shakespeare's commentary on the Elizabethan theater of social identity itself, in which aristocratic authority routinely shaped the self-presentation of those beneath it. The lord's manipulation of Sly mirrors Petruchio's manipulation of Katherina almost exactly: both figures deploy material control (food, clothing, language) to rewrite another person's sense of reality. By placing this framing device before the main plot, Shakespeare invites the audience to watch the taming of Katherina with the same skeptical awareness they bring to the taming of Sly. If Sly's noble identity is transparent fiction, the audience is primed to question how much of Katherina's "tamed" identity is equally constructed. The Induction does not resolve the play's gender politics; it makes those politics legible as politics — as a set of power relations dressed up as nature.

Scholars working in the new historicist tradition have noted the significance of the Sly frame in generating interpretive instability. Viewed through Greenblatt's new historicism, the play becomes less a transparent endorsement of Renaissance gender hierarchy and more an examination of how that hierarchy perpetuates itself through theatrical and domestic performance. The lord who stages Sly's transformation never stops being aware of the fiction; and the question the Induction plants in the audience's mind is whether Petruchio is similarly self-aware — and, more importantly, whether Katherina is.

Katherina's Resistance as Rational Response

Before any taming can occur, the play carefully establishes Katherina's world, and that world makes her anger entirely intelligible. Katherina is the elder daughter of Baptista Minola, a wealthy Paduan merchant who openly prefers her younger sister Bianca and makes that preference humiliatingly public. Bianca is surrounded by suitors; Katherina is offered to any man willing to take her, framed as an obstacle to Bianca's more desirable marriage prospects. Her "shrewishness" — her sharp tongue, her physical outbursts, her refusal to perform femininity pleasantly — is presented from the outset as a response to a social situation in which she has almost no legitimate power. She cannot choose her own husband, cannot control her father's favoritism, and cannot silence the suitors who mock her. Her anger is the only currency she has.

This reading of Katherina's opening behavior as rational rather than pathological is important because it shapes how the taming itself must be understood. If Katherina's resistance is not a personality defect but a coherent (if extreme) response to a demeaning social position, then her eventual acquiescence cannot be explained purely as psychological defeat. Something more complex must be happening. As Frye's archetypal framework suggests, Shakespearean comedy characteristically moves its protagonists through a period of social disruption toward a new, reconstituted community — but that movement often requires the protagonist to negotiate, not simply surrender. Katherina's arc fits this pattern: she moves not from "shrew" to "obedient wife" in some simple linear way, but from isolated, powerless anger to a position in which she holds genuine social leverage, possessing a husband who respects her wit and a public role that even Bianca and the Widow cannot match by the play's end.

The Taming as Theater

The taming scenes at Petruchio's country house are the most theatrically self-conscious sequences in the play, and they are the core of this essay's argument. Petruchio does not tame Katherina through brute force. He tames her through performance — through a sustained, deliberate parody of her own shrewishness. He arrives late to the wedding, dresses outrageously, behaves with the erratic aggression that everyone has attributed to Katherina herself, and then, once they are in his house, systematically denies her food, sleep, and suitable clothing — always under the pretext that nothing is good enough for her. His servants are berated for faults they did not commit. Meat is flung aside as insufficiently cooked. The hat Katherina genuinely wants is dismissed as ugly. Crucially, Petruchio frames every deprivation as an act of love and care: he is protecting her from bad food, from an unworthy hat, from exhaustion. He mirrors the world's treatment of Katherina back at her with the ideological justification inverted.

What makes this sequence significant is that it is explicitly theatrical: Petruchio delivers a soliloquy — a direct address to the audience — in which he compares himself to a falconer training a hawk and announces his method in advance. He is not reacting; he is executing a dramatically ironic script. The audience knows the plan. This self-disclosure changes everything. A taming presented as spontaneous masculine will would be oppressive in a relatively uncomplicated way. A taming presented as a consciously theatrical strategy invites the audience to watch for the moment when Katherina grasps the strategy — and the play provides that moment. On the road back to Padua, Petruchio insists that the sun is the moon; Katherina initially resists, then abruptly agrees, and then goes further, applying the logic to an old man they meet on the road, addressing him as a young woman. This is not capitulation. It is comprehension. Katherina has understood the game, accepted its terms, and is now playing it herself — with a wit and flexibility that exceeds mere compliance.

The sun-and-moon scene (Act 4, Scene 5) is the pivot of the entire play because it marks the moment when Katherina stops being the object of a performance and becomes a co-performer. She does not simply say what Petruchio wants; she improvises, embellishes, and adds her own flourishes. The Shakespearean text gives her the greater imaginative energy in that exchange. She has learned, in other words, what Petruchio already knew: that social reality is a negotiated performance, and that mastery of performance confers power within it.

The Final Speech and the Problem of Irony

No element of The Taming of the Shrew has generated more critical controversy than Katherina's closing speech in Act 5, Scene 2. It is long, elaborate, and unambiguous in its surface content: wives should submit to their husbands as subjects submit to their prince; a woman's soft body signals a soft duty; the husband is lord, life, keeper, king, and sovereign. If read straight, it is among the most complete expressions of Renaissance patriarchal ideology in Shakespeare's work. Bianca and the Widow — women who have been performing conventional femininity all along — refuse to come when their husbands call, while Katherina, the former shrew, delivers a lecture on submission. The irony is almost too neat.

A Counterargument: The Limits of the Ironic Reading

The interpretive crux is whether Katherina means it. Three positions are possible. First, she has been genuinely broken and means every word — a reading that makes the play a disturbing endorsement of coercive behavior. Second, she is performing submission for a public audience while privately understanding it as performance — a reading supported by the theatrical architecture of the play. Third, Shakespeare leaves the question deliberately open, making the speech a site of unresolvable ambiguity. This essay commits to the second reading, for reasons rooted in the text itself. Katherina delivers this speech in front of an audience that has just wagered on their wives' obedience. She wins Petruchio a hundred crowns. The speech is not a private moment of spiritual conversion; it is a performance staged before spectators for material gain. Her language — so polished, so rhetorically elaborate — does not sound like a broken woman. It sounds like a woman who has mastered rhetoric and is deploying it strategically. Viewed through Frye's archetypal criticism, this is the comedic heroine's characteristic move: apparent submission that actually consolidates social position.

Moreover, the dynamics between Katherina and Petruchio throughout Act 5 suggest genuine partnership rather than domination. Petruchio asks; Katherina complies; but she does so on her own terms, with her own theatrical flair. The kiss Petruchio requests in the street (Act 5, Scene 1) is initially refused, then granted — and it is granted in a way that reads as choice, not coercion. By the final scene, the two appear aligned in a private understanding that the other couples — Bianca and Lucentio, Hortensio and the Widow — conspicuously lack. Bianca, who spent the entire play performing innocence, reveals a sharp and dismissive tongue the moment she is safely married. Katherina, by contrast, has moved toward transparency and strategic self-mastery.

The argument that Katherina's final submission is ironic performance rather than genuine capitulation is compelling, but a serious alternative reading demands acknowledgment. A number of scholars and directors have argued that the ironic interpretation is itself a form of wishful thinking — a modern audience's discomfort with genuine patriarchal ideology projected backward onto a text that does not fully support it. On this view, the play does celebrate Petruchio's taming, the methods he uses are endorsed rather than satirized, and Katherina's closing speech is meant to be taken at face value as the play's moral resolution. The comedy's happy ending, in this reading, is structurally dependent on the shrew being genuinely tamed; if she is merely pretending, the comedy's social reconciliation is hollow.

This counter-reading has real force. The Induction's Sly frame, after all, is never formally closed in the received text — Sly simply disappears, and the main plot proceeds as if the theatrical fiction has become reality. If the frame collapses in this way, the ironic distance it provides also collapses. Furthermore, the deprivation scenes — sleep denial, food withdrawal, the deliberate confusion of perception — are not playful in their staging. Petruchio's methods have a genuinely coercive texture that a purely theatrical reading risks underplaying.

Conclusion

The Taming of the Shrew resists easy verdict. It is neither a straightforward celebration of patriarchal authority nor a proto-feminist manifesto accidentally inserted into an Elizabethan comedy. What it is, more precisely, is a play that takes the theater of gender seriously — that understands social identity, marital roles, and gendered behavior as performances that can be learned, manipulated, and strategically deployed. The Induction establishes this framework. The taming scenes execute it. And Katherina's closing speech, read in the context of the play's theatrical self-awareness, confirms it. She does not surrender; she scripts her own role in a drama that now serves her interests as much as Petruchio's.

That reading does not neutralize the play's genuine tension. The methods Petruchio uses — deprivation, gaslighting, deliberate confusion — are coercive, and a production that ignores this will miss the play's darkness. But the tension between coercive method and the agency that Katherina ultimately exercises is precisely what makes the play worth sustained attention. Shakespeare gives his "shrew" the best lines, the sharpest wit, and the most elaborately written speech in the play's final act. That is not the portrait of a woman defeated. It is the portrait of a woman who has learned to win on terrain she did not choose — and who wins with unmistakable intelligence.

For students of English Renaissance theatre, The Taming of the Shrew remains one of Shakespeare's most provocative explorations of the relationship between power and performance. Its continuing life in adaptation — on stage and screen, in feminist revisions and traditional productions — testifies to the richness of its interpretive openings. Audiences and critics continue to argue over Katherina because Shakespeare built the argument into the play. That productive instability is the play's greatest achievement.