The Taming of the Shrew: ‘No Profit Grows Where No Pleasure Is taken’

Episode 133: 

The complications with dating the play and it’s relationship with a similar Elizabethan play

The sources for the play

A short summary of the play

The Christopher Sly framing device

Switching of roles in the play

The disguise motif

The motivations of the leading characters

The implication of the falconry images in the play

The Elizabethan idea of a proper wife and correct behaviour

Similarities with Elizabethan ‘wife taming’ ballads

The play as an inheritor of Roman comedy

The protagonists as stock characters

Katherine’s imbalance of the humours

Are Petruchio and Katherine a matched couple?

Do the three marriages resolve the play?

Does the play make a serious point about gender relationships in Elizabethan England?

The ‘difficult’ final speech by Katherine

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