Essay on Critical Analysis of The Taming of the Shrew is published for informational purposes only. The free papers are not written by our writers, they are contributed by users, so we are not responsible for the content of this free sample paper. If you want to buy a quality Essay on Essay on Critical Analysis of The Taming of the Shrew at affordable prices please use our essay writing services offered by EssayEmpire.

The Taming of the Shrew has received a great deal of critical commentary and, because of its subject matter, that commentary has reflected trends over the years. The central idea of the play is the taming of a shrewish woman, a concept that became less favorably received over the course of the twentieth century. Thus gender roles and the analysis of the play's two main characters has been the subject of much criticism. The play is complex, however, lending itself to commentary on its themes, imagery, and even debate as to whether or not the play is a farce.

Numerous critics have weighed in on the play's treatment of gender roles: that is, what it has to say about socially accepted definitions of appropriate male and female behavior. In the end, Kate has apparently come round to the socially accepted definition, giving a long speech proclaiming the rightness of male dominance and female submissiveness. Until fairly recently, few people challenged this view of the play. In fact, the play knew centuries of popularity with audiences who found Petruchio's taming of Katherine both inoffensive and amusing.

Critics' examinations of various aspects of the play have led to no consensus as to the play's attitude toward gender roles. A number of critics continue to maintain that the play ultimately accepts and reinforces male dominance of women. In ''Bad'' Shakespeare: Revaluations of the Shakespeare Canon, Shirley Nelson Garner exposes what she sees as a misogynistic, or woman-hating, overtone of the play. Garner explains that even if a teacher offers an ''ingenious reading'' of the play, students will quite likely see through it. She adds, ''They will know in their hearts that--at the least--there is something wrong with the way Kate is treated. And they will be right.'' Later in her treatment of the play, Garner notes, ''The central joke in The Taming of the Shrew is directed against a woman. The play seems written to please a misogynist audience.'' Many of these critics also argue, however, that while accepting male dominance, the play emphasizes the need for mutual affection, cooperation, and partnership in marriage. Another view maintains that Katherine's final speech should be read ironically, with the implication that she will pretend to defer to Petruchio in public while ruling the household in private. Yet other commentators argue that the play ultimately undermines male dominance of women by showing this dominance to be artificial and illogical. Directors of modern productions of The Taming of the Shrew have also offered a wide variety of interpretations of this issue. In fact, in her Introduction to Cambridge University Press's edition of the play, Ann Thompson remarks:

Throughout its stage history The Taming of the Shrew has probably received fewer completely straight performances than any other Shakespearean play of comparable popularity on the stage. The apparently unrelieved ethic of male supremacy has proved unpalatable, and generation after generation of producers and directors have altered and adapted the text in more or less flagrant ways in order to soften the ending.

Subsequently, many critics have sought to defend The Taming of the Shrew against charges of sexism by contending that the play takes a tongue-in-cheek view of traditional gender roles. The idea is that Katherine's submission is not to be taken seriously. In this view, the audience is meant to perceive that Katherine will dominate the marriage by allowing Petruchio an outward show of mastery. More recently, several commentators have suggested that the play ultimately undermines conventional social and gender roles. Many critics, however, reject an ironic reading of Petruchio's subduing of Katherine.

The prevalence of animal imagery in The Taming of the Shrew, particularly imagery having to do with falconry and hunting, has been interpreted in various ways. Margaret Loftus Ranald in Essays in Literature finds this imagery very revealing. She notes that ''Petruchio rejoices in Kate's faults. She will be a haggard worth the taming, a good hawk for his hand.'' Ranald explores this theme fully, concluding:

The hawking imagery carries more weight than the mere suggestion that wives and falcons are more tractable when half starved. Its real value lies in emphasizing the fact that the taming of a wild, mature falcon aims at achieving mutual respect between bird and keeper.

Images having to do with clothing and various forms of entertainment also figure prominently in The Taming of the Shrew. Norman Sanders in Renaissance Papers points out that while the domestic realm reveals the social implications of Katherine's temperament, ''it is by sartorial imagery that she is shown the personal [implications]. For clothes can be a measure of either the inward man or of the deception he practices on others or on himself.'' Sanders adds that at the end of the play, it is Katherine's cap that Petruchio tells her to throw down, and that this is ''a symbol of her new realization of what she has been but is no longer.''

Many different interpretations of Katherine's character have been put forward both on the stage and by the critics. One popular view sees Katherine as a miserable and maladjusted woman at the beginning of the play who by its end has been transformed into a happy wife who has learned to accept joyfully her appointed role in society. A number of other critics see Katherine's true character as loving and amenable. Others see her as a forerunner of Shakespeare's later, more attractively drawn comic heroines, such as Rosalind in As You Like It and Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing. Like them, these critics point out, Katherine possess a keen wit, a passionate nature, and a strong will.

A rather different interpretation also common on the stage is that Katherine is not really tamed at all. Rather, she learns to humor Petruchio's need to feel that he is in control; she plays the obedient wife in public so as to exercise control at home. In an article for Modern Language Studies, Coppelia Kahn describes the last scene as one in which Petruchio finally achieves lordship over his wife and is seen as a superior husband compared to his peers. She adds that Shakespeare ''just makes it clear to us, through the contextual irony of Kate's last speech, that her husband is deluded.'' In Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Harold Bloom analyzes the moment in which Katherine agrees with Petruchio that the moon is the sun. He asserts, ''From this moment on, Kate firmly rules while endlessly protesting her obedience to the delighted Petruchio, a marvelous Shakespearean reversal of Petruchio's earlier strategy of proclaiming Kate's mildness even as she raged on.''

A key question in interpreting The Taming of the Shrew is whether Shakespeare presents Petruchio as an admirable character or as an offensive one. Closely related is the matter of his motives for wanting to marry Katherine and his goals in taming her. Productions of the play have differed widely in their answers to these questions, as have the critics' opinions. Many writers point to Petruchio's energy, imagination, and firmness of purpose as qualities that make him an attractive character. Petruchio's violent and willful behavior is not limited to the taming process, but is demonstrated in the play well before he meets Katherine. Petruchio, they argue, is even more shrewish than Katherine, but his behavior is considered acceptable and even praiseworthy because he is a man.

Petruchio's motives have also been the subject of critical debate. While some critics see Petruchio as a strong-willed man smitten with a woman who is strong enough to be his mate, others see him as little more than a bully. In Shakespeare's Comic Sequence, author Kenneth Muir reminds readers that by his own admission, Petruchio is seeking a wealthy wife. Muir adds that Petruchio's ''method of taming Katherine is that of a bully.'' Muir lists the ways Petruchio tames Katherine, including using his physical strength, humiliating her at her wedding, forcing her to leave her wedding feast, starving her into submission, forcing her to say untrue things, and betting on her. Muir concludes, ''A high-spirited girl has been tamed by brutal and shameful methods into accepting slavery.'' Bloom comments on how the process of taming Katherine worsens Petruchio's character. He points to ''their shared, quite violent forms of expression, which Petruchio 'cures' at the high cost of augmenting his own boisterousness to an extreme where it can hardly be distinguished from a paranoid mania.''

As fascinating asKatherine and Petruchio are individually, the issue of their love for each other proves equally intriguing. George R. Hibbard in Shakespearean Essays concludes that the two enjoy a happy, healthy marriage. He explains, ''It is their knowledge of, and their trust in, each other, which have grown out of experience, that give this pair such an advantage over the other two pairs at the end of the play.'' Hibbard notes that Hortensio and his widow, and Lucentio and Bianca, do not even know each other, not yet having had the chance to build love and trust. He sees in the play Shakespeare's distaste for arranged marriages. He writes, ''The play's disapproval of the arrangedmatch, in which no account is taken of the feelings of the principals, could not be plainer.'' Critics such as Ruth Nevo make the argument that Katherine is truly in love with Petruchio. Nevo writes in Comic Transformation in Shakespeare:

That Kate is in love by Act V, is, I believe, what the play invites us to perceive. And indeed she may well be. The man she has married has humour and high spirits, intuition, patience, self-command, and masterly intelligence; and there is more than merely a homily for Elizabethan wives in her famous speech.

Because of the complexity of the issues surrounding characterization, motivation, and true resolution, critics have not reached a consensus on whether The Taming of the Shrew is a farce or not. Harold C. Goddard in The Meaning of Shakespeare contends that ''the play within the play is given a simplification and exaggeration that bring its main plot to the edge of farce, while its minor plot, the story of Bianca's wooers, goes quite over that edge.'' Kahn writes, ''In making Kate react almost automatically to the contradictory kinds of treatment Petruchio administers . . . Shakespeare molds her to the needs of the farce.'' Kahn adds that Shakespeare's use of farce in this play is intended to reveal a failing in Petruchio: ''It . . . pushes us to see this wish for dominance as a childish dream of omnipotence. In short, the farce portrays Petruchio's manliness as infantile.'' H. J. Oliver categorizes the play as a farce, but notes the realism in its portrayal of the problems of marriage at the time, ''not as it appeared in the romances of the day, but as it was in Shakespeare's England.'' In his Introduction to The Taming of the Shrew, Oliver contends that Katherine is too sympathetic a character to be farcical: ''It is as if Shakespeare set out to write a farce about taming a shrew but had hardly begun before he asked himself what mightmake a woman shrewish anyway--and found his first answer in her home background.'' Oliver concludes, ''We sympathize with Katherine--and as soon as we do, farce becomes impossible.'' Garner accuses those who interpret the play as farcical of trying to find a way to keep the play in good standing, despite its depiction of women. She writes that efforts to see it as farcical or ironic are intended to ''separate Shakespeare from [the play's] misogynist attitudes, to keep him as nearly unblemished as possible.''

References:

Bloom, Harold, ''The Taming of the Shrew,'' in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Riverhead Books, 1998, pp. 516-45.

Garner, Shirley Nelson, ''The Taming of the Shrew: Inside or Outside of the Joke?,'' in ''Bad'' Shakespeare: Revaluations of the Shakespeare Canon, edited by Maurice Charney, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1988, pp. 105-19.

Goddard, Harold C., '''The Taming of the Shrew,''' in The Meaning of Shakespeare, University of Chicago Press, 1951, pp. 68-73.

Hibbard, George R., '''The Taming of the Shrew': A Social Comedy,'' in Shakespearean Essays, edited by Alwin Thaler and Norman Sanders, University of Tennessee Press, 1964, pp. 15-28.

Kahn, Coppelia, '''The Taming of the Shrew': Shakespeare's Mirror of Marriage,'' in Modern Language Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1, Spring 1975, pp. 88-102.

Muir, Kenneth, ''The Taming of the Shrew,'' in Shakespeare's Comic Sequence, Barnes & Noble, 1979, pp. 22-8.

Nevo, Ruth, ''Kate of Kate Hall,'' in Comic Transformations in Shakespeare, Methuen, 1980, pp. 37-52.

Oliver, H. J., ''Introduction,'' in The Taming of the Shrew, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1982, pp. 1-75.

Ranald, Margaret Loftus, ''The Manning of the Haggard: or The Taming of the Shrew,'' in Essays in Literature, Vol. 1, No. 2, Fall 1974, pp. 149-65.

Sanders, Norman, ''Themes and Imagery in The Taming of the Shrew,'' in Renaissance Papers, April 1963, pp. 63-72.

Shakespeare, William, The Taming of the Shrew, 2nd series, edited by Brian Morris, Arden Shakespeare, 1982.

Thompson, Ann, ''Introduction,'' in The Taming of the Shrew, Cambridge University Press, 1984, pp. 1-41.

Free essays are not written to satisfy your specific instructions. You can order a term paper, research paper or custom TOPIC at our site which offers professional essay writing services. Get your high quality custom paper at relatively cheap prices. EssayEmpire is the best solution for those who seek help in essay writing related to TOPIC and other relevant topics.