The Taming of the Shrew, a play I'm not supposed to love

“Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper, / Thy head, thy sovereign. […] Such duty as the subject owes the prince, / even such a woman oweth to her husband.”[1] Such says Kate to a group of young brides and their husbands, at the behest of her own husband at the end of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. These lines make us bristle. Women and men alike find Kate’s self-effacement troubling, if not outright offensive. We laugh at these lines, or scoff at them. We become outraged, or we become embarrassed for her. “Your husband is your sovereign”?! What kind of self-respecting woman would utter such things to other women, to other husbands, and to her own husband? How must she have been gaslit, abused, manipulated and controlled in order to extract such hyperbolic praise of her husband, not to mention such grovelling from herself. What brutal misogyny Kate has been forced to internalize. What self-loathing for her own dignity she has been subdued into accepting.

None of us want to take Kate at her word. We know better than she. We may not want to silence her – it would be wrong to silence a woman – but we are certainly going to hear only what we want to hear, whether by asserting that what she says here is merely the false-consciousness of a trapped woman, or that she is herself being cynical and bitter, compelled to utter hateful nonsense through force by her abuser. Or perhaps we feel that she is – poor thing – a defeated and crushed victim of her husband’s cruelty; what she utters must be understood as the capitulation of a woman forced to kneel before her abuser. The once proud Kate is humbled, brought low, forced to the bottom of a hierarchy which hates a strong woman. Kate is humiliated by the patriarchal system which controls her.

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What could be more difficult than teaching a child to be humble? Our culture focuses on instilling a due sense of self-esteem in the young, on teaching them self-confidence and a high degree of pride. Currently, messages of self-love are aimed at young girls in particular in an effort to compensate for what is understood to be injustices in our society. Self-affirmation is good, maybe our highest good. But how does one learn humility? Do we believe this is a quality worth teaching? And what is humility anyway? Do we see it, as the Google dictionary tells me, as “having a modest or low view of one’s own importance,” synonymous with “unassertiveness”? Or do we define it as, according to the OED, “The quality of being humble or having a lowly opinion of oneself; meekness, lowliness, humbleness: the opposite of pride or haughtiness. […] an act of self-abasement.”[2] These definitions suggest that humility is not something desirable, at least certainly not for the contemporary young girl and young woman (boys and cis-men are, perhaps, being taught something quite different about their own masculinity). Girls and women are to be tough, assertive, persistent, bold, fearless, fierce. “The future is female.” We are told to be proud. Fine. In that case, what pride? The OED lists eleven definitions for this word. “A high,” reads the first entry, “especially an excessively high, opinion of one’s own worth or importance which gives rise to a feeling or attitude of superiority over others; inordinate self-esteem”; “Arrogant, haughty, or overbearing behaviour, demeanour, or treatment of others.”[3] From these definitions, neither humility nor pride seem like particularly virtuous characteristics. Perhaps mediocrity is best after all.

I begin this essay on The Taming of the Shrew with a digression into humility and pride, and into our culture’s current reading and evaluation of these qualities, because Katherina, at the start of the play, clearly possesses excessive haughtiness, an inflated sense of herself, but at the close of the play, after she is humbled by her husband, she gains the kind of humility that comes with accurate self-knowledge. Of course, this reading of the play is currently and for obvious reasons not a popular one. Culturally, we don’t much like submissive women. But current interpretations of Kate’s taming overlook how very proud she is in the final act. Her speech to the two other new brides is given from a position of authority and confidence, and unless one does a certain amount of peevish violence to the text itself, putting ourselves in authority over it, we should take Kate’s hard-won wisdom seriously.

The paradox of the concluding scene that Kate’s accurate self-knowledge allows her to feel a rightful sense of pride and a genuine humility. As opposed to willful self-abasement, which is false-humility, and arrogance, which is haughtiness, Kate doffs her false persona for her true one. Rather than reinterpreting Kate as a woman who shares our ethical values, what happens if we take Kate at her word here? What if we see in her a woman of unbroken spirit and will who delights in being humble, and who is proud to be such a wife. Let’s suspend our predetermined dislike of Kate’s admiration for her husband and consider whether it is possible that Kate simply comports herself with dignity because she has gained an accurate sense of who she really is.

Current criticism of this play over the past thirty years strikes me as arrogant and haughty in its own way, as if we are ethically bound to find fault with Kate’s final speech to the other wives and – more importantly – to not take her at her word. Scholars and students see her in the position of a victim, one who is broken-spirited by the misogyny of Elizabethan England. And even critics who do not see a defeated Kate at the close still read into her final speech the triumph of The Patriarchy: she “resubmits herself […] to the ideas, in particular to ideas about herself, that are elaborated in and through a masculine logic.”[4] This “resubmission” is figured as itself a defeat. It is expressive of a now ubiquitous interpretation of historical texts in a way that sees every tension as a struggle against power that is doomed to fail. Subversion, but then containment. Authority always wins.[5] All of these readings of Taming themselves assert the primacy of The Patriarchy as the cultural tyranny that women can never escape. And so the narrative of female victimization is reinforced and entrenched in our thinking, as well as the idea of masculine power.  

Yet we should remember that in historical research you’re likely to find what you are looking for. What most scholars have been looking for in recent years is, as feminist scholar Phyllis Rackin rightly points out, “a history of men’s anxiety in the face of female power, of women’s disempowerment, and of outright misogyny.”[6] As a result of this myopic view of the past, now more than ever our efforts to emancipate ourselves from what we see as the repressive conditions of the past have given rise to what Christopher Lasch describes as “a ‘cultural revolution’ that reproduces the worst features of the collapsing civilization it claims to criticize.”[7] We are drawing attention to women’s disempowerment, and as result are perpetuating a narrative of female weakness.

What I want to submit[8] here is a reading of The Taming of the Shrew that sees Katherina, Kate, as a character who becomes a free individual through true humility and through true pride precisely because she becomes obedient to her role as a woman and a wife. Further, I want to suggest that rather than read Petruchio as a brutal and domineering master, we see him as generous and loving precisely because he, too, submits to his role as man and husband. In the end, what I’m suggesting is that hierarchy is not synonymous with tyranny. And that through submission to their social roles, Kate and Petruchio transcend mere social customs to become master and mistress of themselves and each other. What happens as a result of this is that they are not anxious, or haughty, or excessively self-abased, but very happy.

There is no doubt that at the start of the play Kate is roundly condemned by the men of the town. The insults about her that go uncontested by her father reveal her marginalized and despised social position and would seem to give weight to criticism’s assessment of the oppressive, indeed, the cruel, patriarchal systems that dominated women and the lower classes alike. And yet it seems an absurdist reading of the play to assume that the farcical pantaloon Gremio, or the weak-willed Hortensio should stand as representatives of masculine authority. “No mates for you,” says Hortensio, “Unless you were of a gentler, milder mould” (1.1.59-60). To which Katherina replies,

I’faith, sir, you shall never need to fear;

Iwis it is not halfway to her heart.

But if it were, doubt not her care should be

To comb your noddle with a three-legged stool.

And paint your face, and use you like a fool.[9]

“From all such devils,” says Hortensio, “good Lord deliver us!” “And me too,” says Gremio, “good Lord!”[10] We can’t possibly take Hortensio and Gremio seriously here, can we? Kate is a “devil” because she threatens to comb their heads with a stool? The joke is on the pearl-clutching men of this scene who are afraid of such a silly threat. Comb my hair with the legs of a stool? “Good Lord!” Where is a Victorian fainting couch when you need one?

And yet a survey of criticism tells me that the fact that Kate is called a “devil” must have initiated a series of associations in Shakespeare’s audience that connected the men’s fear of Kate to witch-hunts, and to the dangers of female use of language, to male anxiety about female power, which then justified their oppression of women, and any number of other injustices and “otherings” against women. What recent criticism does not mention is the fact that these lines are an unambiguous instance of the comically weak men in Kate’s town. Only a perverse reading of the text that itself works to reinforce the hegemony of “The Patriarchy” would take Gremio’s and Hortensio’s insults of Kate seriously. These men are no threat, and their fear of Kate serves only to elicit some measure of audience sympathy for her, not because she is dominated and oppressed, but rather because her anger is justified seeing as the field of Paduan bachelors is so pathetic. Swipe left, Kate.

As for Baptista, Kate’s father, he comes off far less like a domineering patriarch, and more like a bumbling dad who has genuinely no idea how to provide for his elder daughter. This is, after all, a patriarchal society, which means not simply that men controlled women, but that fathers had the responsibility to establish their children in financial and social security. To this end, the ‘90s teen rom-com 10 Things I Hate About You, which is a modern retelling of Taming, gets the character of Baptista right: here is a father who, in raising teenage daughters on his own, is so far out of his depth it’s laughable. The father in 10 Things comes off as deeply loving, but hopelessly ill-equipped for the task of handling teenage girls. To read this opening scene as an instance of the men of Padua as exerting any measure of power over Kate is itself hilarious. She is combative precisely because she finds no worthy adversary.

— Dear Readers, thank you for reading, and for your patience over the summer months. I was very busy minding children on vacation, and of course very happily adjusting to my own new role as wife. What follows is a closer look at Kate’s pride in herself that grows rather than becomes diminished through her admiration of her husband.