The Taming of the Shrew Summary: Plot, Characters and Themes
What The Taming of the Shrew is about
Shakespeare wrote this comedy between 1590 and 1592. It opens with a trick. A nobleman finds a drunken tinker called Christopher Sly and persuades him that he is a lord himself. A play is then staged for Sly's entertainment. That play, set in Padua, is the story most people mean when they talk about The Taming of the Shrew. The framing device is usually called the induction, and it matters more than its length suggests, because everything that follows is presented as a performance put on to fool a man who has been fooled already.
Inside that play, Baptista Minola has two daughters. Bianca is mild and much admired, with suitors queuing up. Katherina is the elder, famously assertive and sharp-tongued, and the men of Padua have written her off as unmarriageable. Baptista has laid down a rule: Bianca cannot marry until Katherina does. So Bianca's suitors need to find Katherina a husband before they can start competing for the sister they actually want.
Petruchio arrives from Verona. His father has died, he has money and he is looking for a wife. His friend Hortensio points him at Katherina. Petruchio courts her by contradiction, treating every insult she throws as a compliment and every refusal as consent, and she agrees to marry him, partly because he is the only man who will trade blows with her verbally. The wedding is a public embarrassment. Petruchio turns up late, strikes the priest and drinks the communion wine, then takes Katherina away to his house in Verona against her will.
What follows is the "taming". Petruchio denies her food and clothing on the grounds that nothing is good enough for her. The meat is overcooked. The dress does not fit. The hat is out of fashion. He contradicts everything she says until she agrees with everything he says, however absurd. On the road back to Padua she agrees that the sun is the moon, and that an elderly man they meet is a young woman.
The subplot runs on disguise. Lucentio comes to Padua to study, falls for Bianca and dresses as a Latin tutor called Cambio to get near her, while his servant Tranio impersonates him in public. Hortensio does the same trick as a music tutor named Litio. Tranio, playing Lucentio, outbids Gremio for Bianca's hand and promises far more money than his master has, which means finding a stranger to impersonate Lucentio's father Vincentio and confirm the dowry. The real Vincentio then turns up.
The main characters
Katherina is the "shrew" of the title, the elder Minola daughter, known across Padua for her will and her tongue. Petruchio is the fortune-hunting gentleman from Verona who takes her on. Baptista is the father whose marriage rule drives the whole plot. Bianca is the younger sister, treated by everyone as the ideal woman. Lucentio, Hortensio and Gremio are her competing suitors, two of whom end up in costume as tutors. Tranio and Grumio are the servants, with Tranio doing the heaviest lifting in the deception. Vincentio is Lucentio's father, who arrives to find someone else wearing his name. Christopher Sly is the drunk in the induction, watching the whole thing.
The themes
Power inside marriage is the central subject, and the play states it in the bluntest terms available. Petruchio's methods are psychological and physical: sleep, food and clothing are all withheld, and reality itself is placed under his control. Whether the audience is meant to laugh, wince or both has been argued over for centuries.
Identity is the other engine. Almost nobody in Padua is who they claim to be. Sly thinks he is a lord. Lucentio is a tutor. Tranio is his master. A passing pedant is a father. The joke is that everyone's status, and much of their worth, turns out to be a costume.
Class and money run underneath the romance. Bianca is won by a bidding war, not a courtship. Dowries, estates and credit decide who marries whom. Love and property are discussed in the same breath throughout.
How it ends
Skip this paragraph if you want the ending fresh. The disguises collapse when the real Vincentio reaches Padua and is nearly arrested as an impostor. Lucentio appears with Bianca, whom he has secretly married, confesses everything, and both fathers forgive him. Hortensio marries a rich widow. At the final feast, the three husbands bet on whose wife is the most obedient. Each sends a servant to summon his wife. Only Katherina comes. She then fetches the other two women and delivers a long speech on why wives should submit to their husbands, winning Petruchio his wager. The speech is the most disputed passage in the play. Readers and directors take it as sincere, as ironic, or as the final move in a game the couple are now playing together.
Why it still matters
The question of whether the play is misogynistic has become the subject of considerable controversy, and that argument has kept it on stages rather than driving it off them. Few comedies invite such hostile reading and survive it. Its afterlife is enormous: Cole Porter's musical Kiss Me, Kate, the 1963 Western McLintock! with John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara, the 1967 film with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, the high-school comedy 10 Things I Hate About You in 1999 and Deliver Us from Eva in 2003, plus opera and ballet versions. It suits readers who want Shakespeare at his fastest and most farcical, and anyone interested in how an old comedy can become a modern argument.
