On The Taming of the Shrew

"To kill a wife with kindness": The Assignment of Verbal Identity in William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew



Unlike the two other plays I have analyzed previously, The Taming of the Shrew does not have to do with the erosion of the power of a monarch; rather this play comically represents the process through which male authority is imposed on women in a marital relationship. Whereas a play like Richard II portrays a king who falls into decline after the breakdown of the structure of authority, Shrew focuses on the development of an authoritarian structure between husband and wife and shows how the woman is confined in the institutuion of marriage. Through the comedic presentation of a marriage made between a greedy husband and a protesting wife, Shakespeare shows his audience how a law-wielding husband transforms a shrewish woman into the model of a compliant wife. The essay examines the methods Petruchio uses to install his authority over a woman who resists all such attempts. Specifically, we willl examine the linguistic strategies Petruchio employs to assign Kate the stable identity of the tame wife. However, before we proceed with a reading of Shakespare's play, we will look at an important supplementary document from the sixteenth century, "An Homily on the State of Matrimony." Our examination of this document will open up the question that concern the notion of gender-identities and why the assignation of these identities, as conceptualized in the Elizabethan consciousness of Shakespare's day, led to the creation of martial relationships based on the power relations of dominance and subjugation.

The official doctrine of the Church of England, "An Homily on the State of Matrimony," reveals the organization of the ideological consciousness of Shakespare's time. It proscribes the woman's place in marriage in the following terms:

The husband ought to be the leader and author of love. For

the woman is a weak creature, not endued with the strength and constancy

of mind; therefore they be the sooner disquieted, and they be all the more

prone to all weak affections and dispositions of mind, more than men be;

and lighter they be, and more vain in their fantasies and opinions. She is

the weaker vessel, of a frail heart, inconstant, and with a word soon

stirred to wrath.

In this passage the writer declares that women are inferior to men - physically, emotionally and intellectually. As a direct result of their secondary status, it is the husband who must take the lead in governing the marriage, the success of which may be taken as a qualitative measure of the love the husband has for his wife. Taking Biblical scripture as direct evidence of this inferiority, the writer cites St. Paul, who declared that women "should be subject to their husbands, as to the Lord: for the husband is the head of women, as Christ is the head of the Church." In this way Paul draws an analogy between husband and wife and the characteristics of authority and submissiveness. The use of this analogy is a particularly effective parallelism for a writer who, as a government representative, wants to advocate the maintenance and preservation of the governing system. With the acceptance of the ideology promoted in this homily, the subjugation of the wife to the dominant husband becomes the model for the loyalty the ideal citizen is expected to show to the ruling authority.

Later on in this same essay, arguing that women ought to remain eternally conscious of their secondary status, the writer advocates the idea that women should dress themselves to display their "subjugation, shamefacedness and sobriety." The writer of this tract represents the position of women in English society as, essentially, one of subjugation to the authority of the male. In prescribing a relationship between husbands and wives based on these unequal positions, this document advocates the development of a code of legality that could serve as the adjudicatory basis for the marital relationship -- in reality, a code used by the husband to govern his wife. The idea that women are 'weaker vessels', fragile both in terms of physiognomy and psychology, will be a source of great humor in The Taming of the Shrew, as Petruchio uses his authority to reshape the very reality that Kate perceives.

Petruchio, a gentleman of Verona who is looking for a woman rich enough to be his wife, comes to the town of Padua to visit his friend Hortensio. Eager to help his friend, Hortensio tells Petruchio that Baptista Minola has an eligible daughter, Katherina, a woman who is "shrewd and froward...beyond all measure" [I.ii.87]. Motivated by his avarice, Petruchio is undeterred by this warning and resolves to marry her to ensure his financial security. Coming upon Baptista and his daughters, Petruchio declares his intentions to Katerina's father, who is at first skeptical that Petruchio can accomplish this feat. When the would-be couple first meet, Petruchio immediately displays the main tactic he will employ for this seduction, his facility with language. When Baptista's daughter first introduces herself as 'Katerina', Petruchio responds:

You lie, in faith, for you are called plain Kate,
And bonny Kate, and sometimes Kate the curst.
But Kate, the prettiest Kate in Christendom,
Kate of Kate-Hall, my super-dainty Kate,
For dainties are all cates, and therefore, Kate,
Take this of me, Kate of my consolation:
Hearing thy mildness praised in every town,
Thy virtues spoken of, and thy beauty sounded,
Yet not so deeply as to thee belongs,
Myself am moved to woo thee for my wife
[II.i.185-194].

Reducing Katerine to her nick-name, Petruchio refuses to grant her the dignity of her full name and her full status as a person; he repeats this truncated version of her name over and over and even makes a play on the name 'Kate' and its homonym, 'cates'. This is the first strategy Petruchio employs in taming this shrewish woman. By repeating her name several times, he attempts to project on her a series of fantasy-identities, illuminating a different dimension of her personality with each usage. With these novel reconfigurations of her name, Petruchio designates Kate as incorporating a multiplicity of characteristics, some of which are in striking opposition to one another. Paradoxically, Kate is at one plain and pretty, dainty and voluptuous, saintly and accursed. By showing off his penchant for linguistic play, Petruchio proposes a series of verbal identities, thereby creating a linguistic world where Kate's name passes through a series of repetitions in a process of continual transformation. This critic interprets Petruchio's speech as an attempt to cast a haze over Kate's perception of herself, clouding over her sense of linguistic equilibrium and undermining her faith in a stable self-identity. Returning to the "Homily on Marriage," one recalls that at this time it was a legitimate cultural practice to marginalize the woman's position in the world, restricting her knowledge of herself to such an extent that she was unable to do anything independently, even to dress as she liked. Knowing how the Elizabethan culture worked to repress women's sense of their own individuality, one can see how this speech, which calls for the expansion of female being to incorporate a great range of identities, is meant to appeal to Kate.

This attempt proves unsuccessful, as Kate refuses to be succumb to Petruchio's attempt to dominate her by poeticizing her name. As proof of the strength of her own linguistic faculties, Kate begins a war of words and engages in a verbal dialogue with Petruchio, a converstion in which their mutual verbal sparring leads to ribal puns that border on obscenity. This conversation ends with Kate striking Petruchio, something that would be, under the official doctrine of the Church of England, an act of treachery that would threaten to detabilize the structured system of gender-relations. After this verbal battle, Kate petitions her father not to carry through with her marriage to Petruchio, whom she believes to be "half lunatic, / A madcap ruffian and a swearing Jack" [II.i.289-90]. Not listening to his daughter's pleas, Baptista sets the wedding for the coming Sunday. Yet on the day of the wedding, to the distress of Katherine, Petruchio is nowhere to be found. As we learn from Biondello's description, when Petruichio finally arrives, he has dressed himself in the costume of a fool, and rode a dilapidated old horse [III.ii.42-67].

When Baptista questions whether he is going to marry Kate in such an ill-suited outfit, Petruchio responds, "To me she's married, not unto my clothes. / Could I repair what she will wear in me / As I can change these poor accouterments, / 'Twere well for Kate and better for myself" [III.ii.113-116]. Gremio relates how Petruchio continued to disturb the wedding ceremony with his unconventional behavior: when the priest asks him if he will accept Katherina as his wife, Petruchio responds with a blasphemous oath and when the shocked priest drops the Bible from his hands, he steps forward and knocks the priest down with his fist. Petruchio's irrational behavior continues into the wedding feast and Gremio sums up the whole scene, saying, "Such a mad marriage never was before" [III.ii.178]. The unpredictable Pretruchio announces his plans to depart immediately after the wedding and, when Katherina says, "...if you love me, stay," Petruchio responds, "Gremio, my horse !" [III.ii.199-200]. Not only has Petruchio forced Kate to marry him, he has also gained the upper hand, placing her at his beck and call by absenting himself from her presence. While making his departure, Petruchio claims Katherina to be his unequivocal possession: "She is my goods, my chattels; she is my house / My household stuff, my field, my barn, / My horse, my ox, my ass, my anything" [III.ii.226-229].

When the newlyweds begin their wedded life, Petruchio exaggerates this unpredictable, irrational behavior even further: he beats his servants, rejects the meals prepared for him and makes demands of everyone around him. Meanwhile, as the result of her husband's illogical actions, Kate has been reduced to an automaton, uncertain what to make of the realities of her own existence: "...she, poor soul, / Knows not which way to stand, to look, to speak, / And sits as one new-risen from a dream" [IV.1.171-173]. At the end of this scene, Petruchio appears before the audience and announces that his actions and the intractable persona he has displayed have all been tactical measures of his part. By taking on these characteristics, he will be able to position his own authority over Kate's independently-minded female self: "This is the way to kill a wife with kindness, / And thus I'll curb her mad and headstrong humor. / He that knows better how to tame a shrow, / Now let him speak: 'tis charity to show" [IV.i.195-198].

All of the incidents related above are only preparations for the next scene, wherein Petruchio forces Kate's will to bend, affirming her acceptance of his authority in a moment of transformation that redefines the relationship between husband and wife. This redefinition is symbolically represented in the scene where Petruchio irrationally proclaims the sun to be the moon: "Come on, a God's name, once more toward our father's. / Good Lord, how bright and goodly shines the moon !" [IV.v.1-2]. Finding fault with Petruchio's logic once again, Kate disagrees with his perception of the world, saying that the sun is not the moon just because he says it is. When Hortensio encourages Kate to agree with her husband, she decides to change her strategy. From now on, she decides that whatever Petruchio declares to be true, shall be true for her as well. However, a later incident illustrates the problems that Kate will encounter as a result of her agreement to this bargain where her intellectual abilities are subjugated to the reasoning powers of her husband.

These problems are reveals in the same scene when, eager to corroborate her husband's perception of the world, Kate agrees with Petruchio when he declares an aged man to be a young maiden. Upon meeting Vincentio, Lucentio's father, Petruchio says, "Tell me, sweet Kate, and tell me truly too, / Hast thou ever beheld a fresher gentlewoman ?" [IV.v.28-29]. But the moment Kate affirms this false picture of reality and agrees to these obvious untruths, Petruchio corrects her and explains that this person is actually an old man. Kate replies, "Pardon, old father, my mistaking eyes / That hath been so bedazzled with the sun / That everything I look on seemeth green" [IV.v.44-46]. Although she had originally agreed with her husband's illogical propositions for the sake of propriety, this passage reveals Kate's entrapment in a system where she subjects her will to the dominance of her husband's wishes. What was a bargain made to ensure expediency has now become a constant that legislates her fundamental lack of power in the marriage, her disenfranchisement in the heirarchy of authority in gender-relations. In his linguistic revisions of the world, Petruchio attempts to promote his own authority over his wife, showing her that she can no longer rely on her own independent ability to perceive the world.

It is a question of some debate whether Shakespare intends us to see Kate's situation as indicative of an authrntic transformation where Kate has been 'bedazzled' by Petruchio's manipulation of the world or whether her individuality is still intact, preserved behind a screen of irony. Regardless of this distinction, it must be seen that her complicity with Petruchio's linguistic system indicates that she has been affected by her experience in a language-game played out under his rules; Kate comes to be confined in a linguistic reality dominated by a masculine-centered consciousness. This difference between these two linguistic systems, male and female, is created by Petruchio who, as a connoissuer of linguistic play, makes a series of irrational declarations with the intent to alter Kate's view of authority by subverting her sense of linguistic reality and replacing it with his own. According to Stephen W. Littlejohn, the complete sentence, a basic unit of human communication, contains illocutionary force "designed to fulfill an intention vis-a-vis another person." These are normative speech-acts which are designed to perform a function, such as giving information, making a promise, issuing an order, and giving advice. He also defines a second group of speech-acts, perloctionary acts, which are "speech-acts that involve an effect or a consequence the hearer." With these definitions in mind, one can see that Petruchio's use of language in his dialogue with Kate possesses perlocutionary force. In his declaration that the sun is the moon, or that an old man is a young virgin, he intends Kate to move into a different plan of existence altogether.

When Petruchio makes any of the statements described above, he forces Kate to subsume her being into a reality organized by the masculine consciousness; for this reason the speeched he makes are assigned the quality of perlocutionary communicative force. The deployment of these speech-acts has the effect that Petruchio's covetousness is rewarded, as Late turns out to be the most obedient wife, rather than the one who is most 'shrewish'. Through a series of perlocutionary speech-acts, he is able to invoke the male's legislative power of linguistic formation over Kate, subverting her rational experience of the world in order to inaugurate a new law, the male law that held dominance in Elizabethan society and throughout bourgeois Western civilization. Eager to possess Kate and become the possessor of her wealth, Petruchio radically re-defines her sense of equivalence between sign and object, delimiting her experience of the real through an inversion of oppositional structures of significance such as sun and moon, young and old, and virgin and patriarch.

In the larger cultural content, one can see here that the unequal balance of power between husband and wife, as codified in documents such as the 16th century homily on marriage, had significant effects on the status of womanhood. In the specific literary content of Shakespeare's drama, Petruchio's influence on the marital relationship determines the lignuistic and psychical formation of Kate, permitting the establishment of a mad logic where she is denied her fair rights and an equal ability to perceive through her own subjectivity. It is through his manipulation of the semiotic order of the world that Petruchio establishes his complete dominance over the linguistic realm, arranging the terms that represent the world according to his own private language-system. Here Shakespeare shows how the dominance of the male law transformed life into a chain of linguistic signs that could be manipulated by men, above and beyond the reach of women, who were then institutionalized within the constricting domain of a marriage between unequal partners. As we have seen, Petruchio assigns Kate a verbal identity by reinscribing her within language and reconfiguring the language-game that stabilizes her picture of the world. Although this play is a comedic presentation of the process where women are forced to abandon their individuality, Shakespares uses this dramatic action to criticize the unfair system of practices that were legitimized in English culture by documents such as the aforementioned Homily. It is important to keep in mind that this is a humorous portrayal of the process whereby a husband imposes on his wife a governing system where he stands at the center of her consciousness, her own authority having been displaced in deference to his greater 'stability' -- logically, linguistically and ideologically. These three features draw upon a common source of authority that keeps the woman sufficiently 'tame', the authority the male, which, in this case, is Petruchio himself.