Is coercion of others consistent with a high grade of individuality?

Did Petruchio play the Tamer in a “Pickwickian sense” and the whole thing being a bit of acting, did Kate see through it, finally, and play her part too?

The use of finesse in the Play (see Introduction to the Play “First Folio Edition").

Does Shakespeare’s way of handling the characters and the process of taming materially differ from the way prevailing both in the crude folk tales and in “A Shrew?”

Does he suggest that in both Petruchio’s and Kate’s case they are merely bent upon their own individual emotions until closer relation makes them join forces?

What is the modern bearing of Shakespeare’s way of putting the story?

Partnership and co-operation versus autocratic rule:  Are the administrative advantages of the latter consonant with the good will and continual psychical development furthered by the former?

Does the intellectual advantage rest with the user of force or with the mind that accommodates itself to force by gaining its ends by stratagem and other indirect policies?

Is coercion as wise as persuasion which has no such penalties to pay?

LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST

Shakespeare makes us laugh in “Love’s Labour’s Lost” at the futility of the attempt of ascetic and academic men to shut out love and women from their schemes of life and study.

His early work in putting the past history of England into dramatic form may possibly have suggested to him to put more recent history on the stage by means of this Comedy.  Light as it is, the point of it is to satirize the monastic and exclusive element in current educational schemes.  Fictitious as the story is, it touches upon names and incidents belonging to actual history.  So familiar were these actual happenings of the day to his audience that it could especially enjoy these veiled allusions to them.

The main idea of the plot of the Comedy—­the “Academe,” was one that had a bearing upon various similarly named educational projects of that time in England.

One such scheme was drawn up about 1570, by Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Sir Walter Raleigh’s half-brother, for the “education of her Majeste’s Wardes and others the youths of nobility and gentlemen.”  This plan was, like Shakespeare’s arranged for a “three yeeres terme” (I, i, 20) and at the end of “every three years” some book was to be published which would represent the fruit of the Academy’s study during that period.  Merely the title of this scheme—­“Queen Elizabethes Achademy” may have suggested Shakespeare’s “Achademe” (I, i, 17).  Of course, however, both Gilbert’s and Shakespeare’s adoption of the name are examples of the appropriation by educational groups of the classic academes of the Philosophers of Athens and their student followers.  Another educational plan “for the bringing up in vertue and learning of the Queenes Majestis Wardes,” was devised by Sir Nicholas Bacon, in 1561.  Later, in the reign of James I, the establishment of the “Academe Royal” by Bolton, is an example of the early vogue of the name, which has since become familiar everywhere, for educational and learned institutions.