SOURCE: “Patriarchy, Pedagogy, and the Divided Self in The Taming of the Shrew,” in University of Toronto Quarterly, Vol. 60, No. 4, Summer, 1991, pp. 417-34.

In the following essay, Sirluck argues that The Taming of the Shrew satirizes Elizabethan patriarchal society.

Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew has been read and directed in a variety of ways. It has been seen as a rollicking comic flyting match between a resourceful suitor and a dangerous man-hater.¹ Some productions have encouraged the idea that Katharina secretly longs for a man too strong for her, one who can awaken her true feminine nature. A more contemporary form of this view has recently been championed by Ralph Berry, who perceives Katharina's reluctance in marrying Petruchio as merely ‘ostensible,’ and sees a romantic ‘union of hearts and minds,’ once negotiations ‘between the principals’ have been completed in a spirit of ‘robust materialism.’² Feminists like Juliet...