67 pages • 2 hours read
William ShakespeareThe Taming of the Shrew
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1593A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
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Falcons and Falconry
When men in this play muse on women’s behavior, they often compare women to hawks or falcons—powerful, dangerous birds that can nevertheless learn to hunt with humans.
There’s something both complimentary and insulting about this comparison. Take Petruchio’s line about Katherine as he develops his plan to “tame” her: “My falcon now is sharp and passing empty, / And, till she stoop, she must not be full-gorged” (4.1.190-91). He’s at once suggesting that Katherine’s temper will one day make her an admirable hunting bird, full of fight—and thinking of her in the same terms he’d think of a pet, an animal he possesses. Just because this pet is valuable, beautiful, and excitingly wild doesn’t mean it isn’t a little bit less than human.
Images of falconry thus gesture at the complicated place women held in the Elizabethan world. On one hand, a falcon is a beautiful and expensive treasure. On the other, it’s not an equal, it’s a possession—one that needs to be broken, bent to its tamer’s will.
Disguise
Characters scramble around in more or less explicit disguises throughout the play. Lucentio becomes a Latin tutor; Tranio becomes Lucentio; Christopher Sly becomes a noble lord; Petruchio becomes a raving lunatic, dressed in “a new hat and an old jerkin, a pair of old breeches thrice turned, a pair of boots that have been candle-cases, one buckled, another laced” (3.2.42-43). In all these instances, the disguise is accepted as reality with very little fuss.
The ease and success with which identities are adopted and discarded in this play suggests that, in the famous words of another Shakespeare character, “all the world’s a stage.” Even people who aren’t obviously disguised are, in their own ways, performing; take Bianca, who conceals her sharp and calculating mind under the disguise of a virtuous young maiden. The play’s use of disguise suggests that identity is considerably less stable and straightforward than we prefer to believe.
Choler
Choler—one of the four humors traditionally said to govern people’s health and temperament—plays a major role in The Taming of the Shrew. Choler was associated with a fiery, angry temperament—precisely Katherine’s problem, in the eyes of the world around her. For instance, Petruchio denies Katherine a roast he claims is burned on the excuse that “it engenders choler, planteth anger, / And better ’twere that both of us did fast / (Since of ourselves, ourselves are choleric)” (4.1.171-74). While Petruchio is being willfully obnoxious here, his reasoning reflects Renaissance ideas about the humors: foods and behaviors were all supposed to influence the balance of these mysterious fluids.
The frequent references to choler suggest that the problem with Katherine’s temperament isn’t that she’s angry but that she’s imbalanced—and in being imbalanced, she throws off the balance of society. Katherine’s eventual pleasure in playing along with Petruchio suggests that, while this view might in some ways be shortsighted or limiting, it’s not altogether wrong: Katherine doesn’t like being constantly enraged any more than the people around her enjoy ducking flying lutes.
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