The Taming of the Shrew

The Taming of the Shrew is an early comedy in which the fortune-hunter Petruchio marries the sharp-tongued Katherina and sets out to 'tame' her, while suitors in disguise compete for her sister Bianca.

Main characters

• Katherina (Kate), elder daughter of Baptista
• Petruchio, a gentleman of Verona
• Bianca, Katherina's sister
• Baptista Minola, a rich gentleman of Padua
• Lucentio, Hortensio and Gremio, suitors to Bianca
• Tranio and Grumio, servants
• Christopher Sly, a drunken tinker (in the Induction)

Plot summary

This summary gives away the ending.

The play opens with an Induction: a lord finds the drunken tinker Christopher Sly asleep outside an alehouse and, as a joke, persuades him he is a nobleman who has lost his memory. A company of players then performs the main story for him.

In Padua, Baptista will not let his gentle younger daughter Bianca marry until the fiery Katherina is wed. Petruchio arrives looking for a rich wife and agrees to court Katherina. He marries her, turns up to the wedding in outlandish clothes, and at his country house denies her food and sleep while pretending it is all for her own good. Meanwhile Lucentio wins Bianca by disguising himself as her tutor. At a final wedding feast, the husbands bet on whose wife is most obedient, and Katherina astonishes everyone with a long speech on a wife's duty to her husband.

Themes

• Marriage as a social and financial arrangement
• Power, obedience and performance
• Disguise and role-playing
• Illusion and theatre (the Sly frame)

Famous lines

If I be waspish, best beware my sting.

Katherina, Act 2 Scene 1

Kiss me, Kate, we will be married o' Sunday.

Petruchio, Act 2 Scene 1

More in our collection of famous Shakespeare quotes.

Sources

The Sly frame echoes a tale from the Arabian Nights tradition; the Bianca plot comes from George Gascoigne's comedy Supposes (1566), itself a translation of Ariosto. A related play, The Taming of a Shrew, was printed in 1594; its exact relationship to Shakespeare's version is still argued over.

On stage and screen

Katherina's final speech has made the play one of Shakespeare's most debated. Productions have played it straight, as irony, or as a private game between two equals. It inspired Cole Porter's musical Kiss Me, Kate (1948) and the teen film 10 Things I Hate About You (1999).

See where The Taming of the Shrew sits in Shakespeare's career on the timeline, or read about the playhouses it was written for.