Five-minute digest
The Taming of the Shrew
Summary
The Taming of the Shrew is a play within a play. In the Induction, the drunken tinker Christopher Sly is thrown out of an alehouse and falls asleep on the heath. A Lord returning from hunting has him carried to his house, dressed in fine clothes and told that he is a nobleman who has been out of his wits for fifteen years; a page disguised as his wife sits beside him, and travelling players perform a comedy said to be prescribed by his doctors for his melancholy. That comedy is the rest of the play, and Sly is heard from only once more, at the end of the first scene. In Padua, the rich Baptista Minola will not let suitors court his gentle younger daughter, Bianca, until her sharp-tongued elder sister, Katherina, is married. Lucentio, a young student from Pisa, falls in love with Bianca at first sight and changes places with his servant Tranio, disguising himself as Cambio, a schoolmaster, to get into the house; the old suitor Gremio and Petruchio's friend Hortensio, disguised as the music master Licio, compete for her too. Petruchio of Verona arrives, announces that he has come to marry wealthily, and agrees to woo Katherina for her dowry. Their first meeting is a duel of puns; he tells her that he will marry her whatever she says and fixes the wedding for Sunday. He arrives late to the church in ragged clothes on a broken-down horse, behaves outrageously during the service, and carries Kate away before the wedding feast. At his country house he refuses her food on the pretext that the meat is burnt and unwholesome, keeps her awake by complaining of the bed, and sends away the cap and gown made for her, all in the name of loving care. On the road back to Padua he calls the sun the moon, and Kate, giving up the contest, agrees to call it whatever he likes and greets old Vincentio as a budding young maiden at his word. In Padua, Lucentio secretly marries Bianca, Tranio's false Vincentio is exposed when the real father arrives, and all is forgiven. At the wedding feast the three husbands, Petruchio, Lucentio and Hortensio, who has married a wealthy widow, wager on whose wife will come first when called. Bianca and the Widow send excuses; Kate comes at once, fetches the others, and delivers a long speech on a wife's duty to the husband who labours for her, ending with the offer to place her hand beneath his foot. Petruchio kisses her and wins the wager. The play was probably written in the early 1590s and was first printed in the First Folio of 1623.
Top Lessons
The tongue and the heart
Kate's anger is spoken anger: she says her tongue must tell her heart's anger or her heart will break. Petruchio answers words with louder words until she learns to play his game. The play is fascinated by how speech can wound, win and change a person.
Inner worth over outward show
Petruchio arrives at his wedding in rags and sends away Kate's fine gown, arguing that the mind makes the body rich and honour shows through mean clothing. The Bianca plot, all disguise and swapped clothes, shows the opposite danger: people taken for what they wear.
Marriage as mutual duty
Kate's last speech grounds a wife's obedience in the husband's duty to labour, endure danger and care for her. Whether audiences hear it as sincere, ironic or as a private game between the couple, it sets marriage within an order of reciprocal obligations rather than mere preference.
The frame of Christopher Sly
The whole comedy is performed for a drunk who has been persuaded he is a lord. Sly's transformation by clothes and flattery mirrors the play's other changes of identity and reminds the audience that they are watching a story.
Verified Quotes
“Seeing too much sadness hath congeal’d your blood, And melancholy is the nurse of frenzy”
Frequently cited
“I come to wive it wealthily in Padua; If wealthily, then happily in Padua.”
Frequently cited
“If I be waspish, best beware my sting.”
Frequently cited
“This is a way to kill a wife with kindness”
“My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, Or else my heart, concealing it, will break”
“For ’tis the mind that makes the body rich; And as the sun breaks through the darkest clouds, So honour peereth in the meanest habit.”
“Then, God be bless’d, it is the blessed sun; But sun it is not when you say it is not, And the moon changes even as your mind.”
Frequently cited
“Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper, Thy head, thy sovereign; one that cares for thee”
Medical Lens
The play's medical interest lies in its humoral vocabulary. The Induction offers a small piece of Elizabethan therapeutics: Sly is told he has been lunatic for fifteen years and that his physicians, judging that sadness has congealed his blood and that melancholy nurses frenzy, prescribe a comedy, since mirth was thought to lengthen life. In Act 4 Petruchio withholds roast meat on the ground that burnt meat engenders choler in people who are already choleric, and Grumio teases Kate with dishes he fears are too choleric, a joke that depends on the period's dietary medicine. Petruchio's method of breaking Kate by hunger and wakefulness is borrowed from the falconer's practice of watching a hawk, not from medicine. Sly's drunkenness frames the whole action. Any modern reading of Kate's temper as a disorder would be anachronistic; the play treats it as a humour to be tempered.
- Induction, Scene 2
The Lord's servants persuade Sly that he has been mad for fifteen years, mention his physicians' orders, and announce a comedy as a remedy for melancholy.
- Act 4, Scene 1
Petruchio throws out the supper as burnt meat that engenders choler, then explains in soliloquy his plan to keep Kate hungry and sleepless like an untrained hawk.
- Act 4, Scene 3
Grumio offers the starving Kate one dish after another and withdraws each as too choleric.