Source: "The Manning of the Haggard: or The Taming of the Shrew," in Essays in Literature, Vol. 1, No.2, Fall, 1974, pp. 149-65.

[Ranald suggests that in The Taming of the Shrew Shakespeare examines three types of marriage common in Elizabethan England. She contends that the play's falconry imagery is used to present the relationship of wife to husband as being similar to that between a falcon and its keeper. Petruchio uses the methods of hawk-taming, she argues, in order to bring Katherina under his control without breaking her spirit.]

The Taming of the Shrew is, in George Hibbard's phrase [in Tennessee studies in Language and Literature 2, 1946], "a play about marriage in Elizabethan England," and also unique in the Shakespearean comic canon in dealing with the behavior of husband and wife after the marriage ceremony. At the same time it also offers a distinctly subversive approach to an antifeminist...