ACT V
SCENE i
The various disguisings reach their chaotic climax, with Lucentio’s real father Vincentio being especially confused by someone (the Pedant) impersonating him. Petruchio remarks, “Why, this is flat knavery, to take upon you another man’s name” (V.i.33-34). The real Vincentio sees Tranio disguised in Lucentio’s finery and insists he knows Tranio: his father is a sail-maker in Bergamo (V.i.69-70)! Despite Bergamo being a “provincial inland town” and scholars demeaning Shakespeare’s knowledge of Italy, this is another instance of Shakespeare’s “repeated ability to toss out accurate, offhand minutiae on Renaissance Italy” (Farina 75; Roe 112). Undisguisings follow and the Bianca/Lucentio plot is resolved in a marriage match. A high point amid all this is Lucentio declaring, “Love wrought these miracles” (V.i.124). (And everyone is satisfied?! A fraud was perpetuated for how long on Baptista, for example?)
Kate and Petruchio look on this spectacle and Petruchio issues another command: “kiss me, Kate” (V.i.143) — hence the atrocious musical which, notwithstanding, does include the song “Brush Up Your Shakespeare.” Kate is reluctant, Petruchio threatens that they’ll leave town, and Kate explains that she’s just embarrassed, being in the street, in public. The difference between public and private becomes a key but usually ignored issue; we’ll never see these two in private again. But she acquiesces about the kiss, and he says, “Is not this well?” (V.i.149). They seem to demonstrate true affection towards each other here, and some critics try to say that Kate will be the tamer vs. the tamed. The true situation will be kept under cover: women can lord it over men so long as men think they’re in charge. But, c’mon: is this all in the end really about power dynamics?
SCENE ii
At a feast for Lucentio and Bianca (and Hortensio and “his widow”), Petruchio is subtly critical of self-indulgent, complacent, Paduan life: “Nothing but sit and sit, and eat and eat!” (V.ii.12; cf. 14). Baptista doesn’t detect the criticism and celebrates that “Padua affords” all this. The “Widow” is persistently snippy to Kate. Note that Widow has no name — in fact, she’s still called “Widow” even now! Why does this make perfect sense in Paduan society? And, what does it says about Hortensio’s life that his wife is known as “Widow”?!
With Baptista telling Petruchio that he has “the veriest shrew of all” (V.ii.65), Petruchio puts forth a contest regarding wifely obedience and the men place their bets — “a wager about wifely obedience entered upon by characters who believe that the risks and dangers of courtship are past, so that they may now take pleasure in their newly married condition, as masters (and mistresses) of their own lives, no longer beholden to parents or other authority figures” (Garber 65). Lucentio sends for Bianca, who refuses to come.
It is not really surprising that sweet Bianca doesn’t come. Why should she? She has spent her whole life being sweet Bianca, and simpering and exuding charm, for only one purpose — to catch a man…. Well, her catching days are over, at least for a while, and now she means to relax. Wouldn’t anyone after a lifetime of work? The same for the widow, doubly, since she has had to work a second time to catch a second husband. (Asimov 463)
Hortensio “entreats” his wife to come, but she also refuses: also, “she bids you come to her” (V.ii.96).
All present are surprised that Katherina not only comes to Petruchio’s summons, but also then agrees to drag the other two women in. Kate pontificates at some length on the duties of the wife to her husband:
Fie, fie! unknit that threatening unkind brow,
And dart not scornful glances from those eyes,
To wound thy lord, thy king, thy governor:
It blots thy beauty as frosts do bite the meads,
Confounds thy fame as whirlwinds shake fair buds,
And in no sense is meet or amiable.
A woman mov’d is like a fountain troubled,
Muddy, ill-seeming, thick, bereft of beauty;
And while it is so, none so dry or thirsty
Will deign to sip or touch one drop of it.
Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,
Thy head, thy sovereign; one that cares for thee,
And for thy maintenance commits his body
To painful labor both by sea and land,
To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,
Whilst thou liest warm at home, secure and safe;
And craves no other tribute at thy hands
But love, fair looks and true obedience;
Too little payment for so great a debt.
Such duty as the subject owes the prince
Even such a woman oweth to her husband;
And when she is froward, peevish, sullen, sour,
And not obedient to his honest will,
What is she but a foul contending rebel
And graceless traitor to her loving lord?
I am ashamed that women are so simple
To offer war where they should kneel for peace;
Or seek for rule, supremacy and sway,
When they are bound to serve, love and obey.
Why are our bodies soft and weak and smooth,
Unapt to toil and trouble in the world,
But that our soft conditions and our hearts
Should well agree with our external parts?
Come, come, you froward and unable worms!
My mind hath been as big as one of yours,
My heart as great, my reason haply more,
To bandy word for word and frown for frown;
But now I see our lances are but straws,
Our strength as weak, our weakness past compare,
That seeming to be most which we indeed least are.
Then vail your stomachs, for it is no boot,
And place your hands below your husband’s foot:
In token of which duty, if he please,
My hand is ready; may it do him ease.
(V.ii.142-185)
Everyone is astounded, including us in the audience! The standard interpretation is that maybe in this case, Shakespeare is of his age instead of for all time (Wells 51), and discussions of the play tend to try to apologize by insisting on its earliness in the canon. But is Shakespeare himself buying into what he has Kate saying here: “the wholly un-Shakespearean doctrine of male superiority, a view which there is not the slightest evidence elsewhere Shakespeare ever held” (Goddard, I 68)? [Shakespeare “clearly preferred his women characters to his men” (Bloom 35). “Shakespeare’s heroines are, if anything, wiser, more capable, and better than his heroes” (Asimov 458).]
This ending of the play is easy to (mis)interpret in the most superficial manner, which makes it easy for Elizabethan as well as most modern lunkheads to go home after the play and live with themselves. Even George Bernard Shaw, whose misanthropy I normally cheer, claimed about the final scene that “No man with any decency of feeling can sit it out in the company of a woman without being extremely ashamed of the lord-of-creation moral implied in the wager and the speech put into the woman’s own mouth” (qtd. in Wells 52). But what has really happened? “We may note that Petruchio does not in fact demand this act of physical humbling, but — quite the contrary — greets the whole speech, and the whole performance, with an audience member’s praise, a tone of easy, familiar equality” (Garber 70).
Note, for example, that in the end Kate is still bullying Bianca, but now with social, male approval on her side. Meanwhile, Bianca belies the truth in a late line to husband criticizing his bet: “The more fool you for laying on my duty” (V.ii.129) — essentially, you’re an idiot if you think you can trust me! Bianca is not “white.” Bianca is the real shrew.
Another twist: “Such duty as the subject owes the prince / Even such a woman oweth to her husband”? Who is “the Prince” at this time? Queen Elizabeth. There’s an auto-deconstruction.
Furthermore, Kate is neither broken nor cowering at the end, and Petruchio is not coming off like a crude bullying caveman. Like bearbaiting, this “taming” can be a brutal spectacle. But perhaps “Kate’s journey can be seen as a process that brings her to a full realization of her potentialities as a woman rather than as a process of brainwashing, crushing her into cowed submission” (Wells 51). Consider not so much the words — who cares what Paduans want to hear by this point? It’s 7:00; it’s 2:00. It’s the sun; it’s the moon. Big deal — but the dramatic effect Kate is able to create now, “the confident control of language that she demonstrates” (Wells 51). She’s learned something about her potentialities and the power of being, if not heard, at least not immediately dismissed. The speech is concerned with defining the proper relationship in marriage, as in Comedy of Errors, and it all sounds dismally traditional, but really, Kate “is advising women how to rule absolutely, while feigning obedience” (Bloom 33). The speech is redundant and hyperbolically submissive. There’s “a secret language or code now fully shared by Kate and Petruchio” (Bloom 35). The relationship has gone underground and we don’t know what really goes on between them now. It concludes with harmonious synthesis, but it has celebrated defiance and rebellion. Perhaps what Petruchio does to Kate, Shakespeare does to his audience (?). “Their final shared reality is a kind of conspiracy against the rest of us” (Bloom 29), “a secret language or code now fully shared by Kate and Petruchio” (35).
Has Kate been trained how to “behave”? Or how to “act”?
What will the various marriages be like for each of the couples? Do you agree with a recent critic who insists that Kate and Petruchio will be the happiest married couple in Shakespeare? Before Henry V and The Merchant of Venice, “it is The Taming of the Shrew that is possibly the most striking example among his early works of his love of so contriving a play that it should mean, to those who might choose to take it so, the precise opposite of what he knew it would mean to the multitude” (Goddard, I 68).
LOST ENDING?
This play omits the return of the frame. Is it that a page was missing when the materials were collected for the First Folio? That Shakespeare “grew impatient with the outer frame as merely serving to get in his way and he dropped it” (Asimov 451)? Is it that Sly’s “disenchantment necessarily would be cruel” (Bloom 28).
The other version of the play, The Taming of A Shrew, ends with Christopher Sly going off to apply the lessons learned to his own shrew of a wife. He is told, “your wife will thrash you for dreaming here tonight.” He responds:
Will she? I know now how to tame a shrew!
I dreamt upon it all this night till now,
And thou hast waked me out of the best dream
That ever I had in my life.
And since I have been taught to tame a shrew
I’ll home to my wife and tame her too.
(Q)Would this be just too anticlimactic “and would disturb the mutual triumph of Kate and Petruchio, who rather clearly are going to be the happiest married couple in Shakespeare” (Bloom 28)? So perhaps Shakespeare cancelled this ending? Or is it that finally there is no Sly at the end because “It would be altogether too much like explaining the joke” (Goddard, I 73)? (Remember: the huntsman’s lines about dogs in the Induction may have been a clue — the best dog picks out the dullest scent. Have we?)
The Taming of the Shrew, Act by Act
The Taming of the Shrew Act II
The Taming of the Shrew Act III
The Taming of the Shrew Act IV
The Taming of the Shrew Act V