Critical interpretations

Question 1

John Fletcher’s The Woman’s Prize, or the Tamer Tamed (c. 1611)

Answer 1

concludes with the lesson that men ‘should not reign as Tyrants o’er their wives’ (Epilogue, I. 4).

Question 1

Friedman

Answer 1

‘a metadrama designed to confuse and later clarify the relation between social roles and theatricality’

Question 2

Korda

Answer 2

Katherina is, as Tranio nastily points out, a ‘commodity’, (I.1.332), something to be disposed of for profit - the prestige of having a lite in the family in exchange for hard cash.

Question 3

Garner - violence hunting and secuality.

Answer 3

Sexuality in the play is associated with “the violent, the predatory, the sadistic’

The play makes “obvious the association between hunting and the sexual chase.’

Question 4

Garner - male fantasy.

Answer 4

The male fantasy that the play defends against is the fear that a man will not be able to control his
woman.’

Question 5

Garner - domination

Answer 5

The play contains a ‘pervasive anxiety and need to dominate and subject’

Question 6

Garner - admirable qualities

Answer 6

‘One of Petrucio’s admirable qualities is that he has the good sense to see Kate’s passion and energy as attractive’

Question 7

Maguire - renaming of Kate - negative.

Answer 7

‘One may see in Petruchio’s renaming as Adamic dominion over independent creatures: the control
(diminution) of Katherina’s name anticipates the control (reduction) of her personality.’

Question 8

Maguire - renaming - positive.

Answer 8

Petruchio offers Katherine the opportunity to embrace a new identity through adopting a new name

Question 9

Maguire - sun and moon

Answer 9

‘She slyly reasserts the full for in the controversial sun/moon scene in which she sanctions Petruchio’s
right to rename everything’

Question 10

Boose - Kate the scold

Answer 10

Kate is the archetypal scold whose crime against society is her refusal to accept the so called natural
order of patriarchal hierarchy

Question 11

Bloom - popularity of the play

Answer 11

‘The perpetual popularity of the Shrew does not derive from male sadism in the audience but from the
sexual excitation of women and men alike’

Question 12

Bloom - rhetorical war

Answer 12

‘The rhetorical war begins as a mutual sexual provocation’

Question 13

Bloom - marriage ACT V

Answer 13

Act 5.1.122-30 ‘one would have to be tone deaf (or ideologically crazed) to not recognise in this a subtly
exquisite music of marriage at it’s happiest.’

Question 14

Bloom - Kate final speech

Answer 14

The ‘delicious irony’ of Kate’s final speech

Question 15

J.D Huston - Kate and Petruchio - First encounter.

Answer 15

The first encounter between kate and Petruchio = ‘nothing less than a psychological rape.’

Question 16

L. Pederson - Petruchio as a bully

Answer 16

“Petruchio consistently plays the role of a bully in his relationship with Kate, and it is, indeed, the means by which he transforms her from a quarrelsome shrew to a sweet-tempered and obedient wife.”

Question 17

George Bernard Shaw on Petruchio’s characterisation.

Answer 17

Describe’s Petruchio as a “coarse, thick-skinned, money hunter, who sets to work to tame his wife exactly as brutal people tame animals or children - that is, by breaking their spirit by domineering cruelty.”

Question 18

George Bernard Shaw on the last scene.

Answer 18

He desrcibed it as so “disgusting to modern sensibility” that “no man with any decency can sit it out in the company of a woman without being extremely ashamed of the lord-of-creation moral implied in the wager and the speech put into the woman’s own mouth.”