Is it possible to stage Katherinas final speech as bringing the play to a suitable closure
As a modern audience, we must be conscious of the society in which Shakespeare wrote The Taming of the Shrew. The main part is set in Padua, a city in northern Italy. In the eyes of Elizabethan England, Italy was a desirable country of beautiful, materialistic nature and living. Thus it became a popular setting for Shakespeare and his contemporaries for plays involving deceit, money, beautiful women, or anything involving such shallow pleasures - but noticeably always at a distance from England itself. The play employs a similar literary technique that Shakespeare applied to many of his plays - that is to either separate the audience from the setting to such an extent that the occurrences within the play can be utterly exentuated whilst at the same time genuinely believed. Take Twelfth Night, for instance; the action takes place in Illyria, an invented country supposedly on the Adriatic coast. Though Illyria looks a lot like Elizabethan England, the pretence issued with! invention allows for the ridiculous. The same applies with A Midsummer Nights Dream; set mostly in forests behind Athens, where the main characters are tricked and put under spells by fairies. The idea of the audience enjoying the contents whilst on
The above quotation suggests that Petruchio's ideals of marriage consists of the complete suppression of the will of the wife ("right supremacy"). The audience may be tempted to feel some pity for Kate, though as the Lucentio points out in the last line of the play, she had, in the end, allowed herself to be tamed: "'Tis a wonder, by your leave, she will be tam'd so" (190). But that our soft conditions and our hearts Kate goes on from this elevation of masculinity, to state how women "oweth" their husbands, and incredibly, after being an archetypal feminist for the entire play, proclaims "I am asham'd that women are so simple". In the modern world, this view of marriage would be unacceptable. But, as stated, definition by gender roles was taken for granted; men were considered as the stronger; women as the weaker. It was considered only when conformation to theses specifics resided, that a marriage would be successful. And the way that Petruchio succeeded in causing Katharina, unaided, to champion the ideas within her diatribe, seems to evoke the feeling that The Taming of the Shrew, can be interpreted as a play highlighting the unfortunate tragic-but-true psychological control that men can exert over women, not necessarily that of a love found in unexpected places. Petruchio manages to create a situation where his success in finding the most subservient wife is highlighted and congratulated by himself. He infact, understandably, considers the relationship to be ideal: "Marry, peace it bodes, and love, and quiet life, And, to be short, what not that's sweet and happy." Kate's speech at the end of the play has been the focus of much interpretation through centuries of study. It is abhorrent to a certain kind of feminist criticism - Kate advocates total subservience to the husband, and within her speech metaphorically and euphemistically portrays the man as the woman's lord, king, governor, life, keeper, head, and sovereign. She also goes on to stereotype women as physically weak, and then suggests that they should make their personality mild to match:
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1408
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)
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