SOURCE: Kahn, Coppélia. “The Taming of the Shrew: Shakespeare's Mirror of Marriage.” Modern Language Studies 5, no. 1 (spring 1975): 88-102.

In the following essay, Kahn describes The Taming of the Shrew as a farce in which Katherine “subverts her husband's power without attempting to challenge it,” and argues that the play satirizes the concept of male supremacy in marriage.

The Taming of the Shrew depicts the subjection of a willful woman to the will of her husband. The literary antecedents of the heroine's character have long been acknowledged; Kate's shrill tongue, anger, and intransigence mark her as the conventional shrew. But the degree to which Petruchio's characterization is molded by a social, rather than a literary, stereotype has gone unnoticed. He is animated like a puppet by the idée fixe that a man must command absolute obedience from his wife. In effect, he embodies the prevailing system of...