Gender Roles In The Taming Of The Shrew
In spite of Katherine’s reluctance to wed Petruchio, the audience are met with a supposedly well suited match. When Katherine interacts with Hortensio in Act 1, we see her joy in the play of words; ‘Is it your will / To make stale of me amongst these mates?’. Her play on the word ‘stale’, meaning both ‘laughingstock’ and ‘prostitute’ is not perceived by Hortensio, instead her bantering is met with his rejection and damning of her. This is just one of many times that Katherine is simply incomprehensible to the other characters. This is then heightened by Katherine hitting Bianca, Katherine begins by enquiring as to which suitor Bianca loves most. Bianca, believing that Katherine is mocking or playing with her attempts to play along yet Katherine
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Yet, simultaneously, the play also seems to counteract that movement by continuing to restrict women’s choices as well as their voice. Katherine is given the stage at the end of the play and has many lines to which she addresses the other characters and the audience. However, we cannot decipher with whose voice she is talking. It seems as though Shakespeare is doing many things at once. He is elevating the modern woman within the confounds of entertainment, and after all, this is a play for the benefit of Christopher Sly. In addition to this he is acknowledging the role of the men in Katherine’s life. The neglectful manner of her father who, despite giving her an exemplary education for the time, neglects her emotionally and fails to install self-discipline in her, thus leading her to Petruchio, a man who allures her the same way he would train an animal. We must decipher whether the play is prescriptive or descriptive; or whether it is both, an acknowledgment of the ways in which men fail women and the ways in which they can help women to grow. As Stephen Greenblatt says, “Shakespeare’s language and themes are caught up, like the medium itself, in unsettling repetitions, committed to the shifting aesthetic assumptions and historical imperatives, that govern a living
Yet, simultaneously, the play also seems to counteract that movement by continuing to restrict women’s choices as well as their voice. Katherine is given the stage at the end of the play and has many lines to which she addresses the other characters and the audience. However, we cannot decipher with whose voice she is talking. It seems as though Shakespeare is doing many things at once. He is elevating the modern woman within the confounds of entertainment, and after all, this is a play for the benefit of Christopher Sly. In addition to this he is acknowledging the role of the men in Katherine’s life. The neglectful manner of her father who, despite giving her an exemplary education for the time, neglects her emotionally and fails to install self-discipline in her, thus leading her to Petruchio, a man who allures her the same way he would train an animal. We must decipher whether the play is prescriptive or descriptive; or whether it is both, an acknowledgment of the ways in which men fail women and the ways in which they can help women to grow. As Stephen Greenblatt says, “Shakespeare’s language and themes are caught up, like the medium itself, in unsettling repetitions, committed to the shifting aesthetic assumptions and historical imperatives, that govern a living