The Analysis And Interpretation Of The Taming Of The Shrew
Can Taming of the Shrew be named a comedy? Can a play in which the main character is tortured by sleep deprivation, starvation, humiliation, mockery of the logic and common sense be called a comedy? Certainly, Catherine is not an angel. She is quite rude in conversations, as she ties her sister’s hands and extorts her lover’s name and puts a lute on the teacher’s head. However, none of the victims does not directly depend on Catherine and can easily avoid contact with her. Often, it is the way it comes: everybody runs away leaving her alone. Donna’s words are relevant: “You scream, because the world cannot hear you”. What else should the girl who is going to be married to the richer merchant and whose price is discussed shamelessly do?
Trading value of Catherine, of course, is not high, because nobody needs a quarrelsome wife. In addition, Catherine is hurt by constant comparisons to her younger sister - clever, beautiful, decent and humble. The true face of sisters will be revealed later. Surprisingly, Catherine desires to get married. She is not like Beatrice who can proudly announce that she will remain a spinster with no care. Catherine is driven into a corner: she is alienated in her father’s house, nobody likes her and everyone laughs at her. Moreover, one can get an impression that Catherine snaps at the limit of strength: her wit is not as easy as Beatrice’s. However, she is not clever or artistic enough to pretend and bargain for an appropriate husband, as her sister will do later.
Therefore, she approaches the first comer - Petruchio who is a rascal. He has money, but his spiritual qualities are lacking. With his first appearance on the stage, the audience learns that Petruchio, first of all, can easy dismiss his hands with those who are weaker than him (the servants), that, secondly, he hunts for a wealthy bride, and, thirdly, that he is able to manipulate people. Thus, this is what Catherine’s husband looks like. He quickly negotiates with her father and begins the “taming”, which was already described briefly. It passes clearly according to the rules of breaking the will of a man. In addition to physical torture, the apotheosis of this action is the scene when Petruchio forces Katherine to call the sun the moon, and then immediately changes his mind and rebukes, calling her blind. In the play the “taming” is fast, as it lasts a week, but going beyond the conventions of the theater, one can imagine how it would be held in reality: day after day, hour after hour. Naturally, as a result, Catherine suffers something similar to the Stockholm Syndrome as the consequence of such violence. She loses orientation due to the fact that she has been repeatedly denied her own opinion. She is afraid of the new sentence and is ready to do anything to prevent it. She has only one landmark - her husband, just because she has been systematically deprived of all other support. It can even be supposed that she has feelings towards her torturer.
It is curious to compare how other women behave in the situation of total control over the individual. Catherine’s younger sister Bianca, is probably smarter than her sister, because she is able to pretend to be skillfully choosing a compliant husband from a number of admirers, and after the wedding she is starting to reveal her character. Another heroine, “the widow”, gets remarried. She appears at the end of the play and also demonstrates the same “feminine wiles” in a compressed form. Both Bianca and the widow do not concede in the sharpness of language to Catherine as it suddenly appears in the last scene. Moreover, Catherine cannot understand the widow’s hints. There are different interpretations of the final speech, in which Catherine urges wives to obey their husbands. Catherine pretends to be really staying true to her principles. Personally, I read the text without seeing other people’s interpretations and believe that in fact her will is broken by Petruchio and she at least repeats his words. Perhaps she has not reached such understanding of her own role and the role of a woman in general, as too little time has been devoted to her in a play for global rethinking of reality. However, it is a speech without any hints or crossed fingers behind the back. Thus, “taming” which occurs in the play is a totally broken will of a living person.
