TTOFS - Revision Flashcards
AO2 example
Shakespeare shapes this ‘history’ using different comic styles familiar to his audience. The intrigues of the subplot are typical of the comedia dell’arte and its focus on lovers’ attempts to outwit the older generation. The taming plot is linked to farce and folk-song. However, he probes the limits of both to ask some sharp questions.
AO1 example
Shakespeare sets the story of ‘The Taming of the Shrew’ in the framework of the Induction. This means that we are always aware that we are watching what Bartholomew calls ‘a kind of history’. This metatheatrical approach implicitly invites us to think about and judge what we are watching.
AO3 example
Renaissance society was patriarchal. However, there was much debate around marriage and theatre offered a natural arena in which issues could be explored. For instance, Katherina’s offer to place her hand beneath Petruchio’s foot would recall the marriage service in use previously, and might well provoke a debate.
AO4 example
Joh Fletcher’s play ‘The Tamer Tamed’ continues Petruchio’s story. It makes references to Shakespeare’s play and gives them a new twist: for example, the heroine, Maria, adopts Petruchio’s metaphor for the taming process, that of hawking, but declares herself a ‘free haggard’. This not only indicates the popularity of the original play but suggests a desire on the part of the audience to engage with the issues it raises.
AO5
Critics such as Graham Holderness suggest the play went through many revisions in Shakespeare’s lifetime and was part of an ongoing ‘marriage debate’. The many shifts of identity (in Bartholomew’s case, even gender) in the play makes us constantly aware that labels such as ‘husband’, ‘wife’, ‘wooer’ and even ‘shrew’ and ‘tamer’ do not sum up a whole person, but are roles to be assumed, enjoyed, or questioned
Political context
The rise of the merchant classes (like Baptista) and corresponding shifts in attitudes to women. His exploitation of his marketable daughter, Bianca, as a trophy wife who will show off her husband’s wealth rather than be a productive worker.
Literary context
Use of an Italian setting and comedia dell’arte conventions to explore romance in a deliberately artificial way (e.g. the opening of Act I is rather stilted to show that this is a play-within-a-play). Contrast with the anti-romantic approach of Petruchio.
Religious context
Protestant ideas about ‘companionate marriage’. The virtue of loving fidelity makes it important that women have some say in the choice of partner. Women nevertheless expected to vow to ‘obey’ their husbands. Katherina’s final speech sums up some of the new religious teaching of the period about marriage.
Scientific context
Science of the period still shared the assumptions of classical Greek writers such as Aristotle about the biological inferiority of women. As Katherina points out in Act V, they are ‘soft and weak and smooth’, unlike men, who are physically and morally stronger.
Cultural context
Folk tales about ‘shrew’-taming and their impact on the play - the audience probably expects the wager scene in Act V.
The festivals that Sly alludes to in the Induction are a temporary disruption of the social order, like comedy itself.
