SOURCE: Weller, Barry. “Induction and Inference: Theater, Transformation, and the Construction of Identity in The Taming of the Shrew.” In Creative Imitation: New Essays on Renaissance Literature in Honor of Thomas M. Green, edited by David Quint et al., pp. 297-329. Binghamton, N.Y.: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1992.

In the following essay, Weller examines Shakespeare's sources for The Taming of the Shrew, traces affinities between the play's induction scene and main plot, and highlights the play's themes of theatricality, shifting identity, and metamorphosis.

The title of The Taming of the Shrew both announces its major action and points to its concern with the shaping, or reshaping, of identity. This concern is echoed, repeated with a difference, and qualified in the subplot and induction of the comedy. The paradoxes of Katherina's conversion, of the shrew's “metamorphosis” into a wife, can best, perhaps only, be understood in...