I must begin by confessing that I’ve never seen The Taming of the Shrew and only have read most of it. What I have seen performed is the 1953 movie Kiss Me Kate. It’s very funny and I highly recommend it, by the way. Anyway, it motivated me to look into the actual play by Shakespeare, and it’s a rather extraordinary one. It’s very hard to know what to make of it.

The first thing to note about the play is that it’s a comedy. But it’s not merely a comedy, it’s an utterly absurd comedy. So it’s not necessarily the case that it is possible to make anything of it; part of the comedy may be that it is nonsensical.

The play begins with a very strange framing story, where a tinker by the name of Christopher Sly is drunk and a Lord notices him and has his servants play a practical joke on Sly that he is, in fact, a lord who for the last seven years has been affected by a madness, thinking he is a tinker. Then a troupe of players happens by the lord has the troupe of players put on the main play for him. We never heard of Christopher Sly or the lord again. The framing story is simply dropped after the introduction.

There is a main plot and a sub-plot in the play-within-a-play (which I will henceforth just refer to as the play, since that’s what it really is). The main plot is about Petruchio and Katherine (the titular Shrew). The sub-plot is about Katherine’s younger sister Bianca and her suitors. I say main plot and sub-plot, but the latter takes up about as much time as the former. It also involves various suitors pretending to be tutors and a servant pretending to be a suitor and, frankly, it’s so absurd I have a hard time keeping track of it.

All of this is the context for the taming of the shrew to which the title refers. It seems unlikely that we’re meant to take it seriously. For all that, though, there does seem to be a mildly realistic foundation to the absurdity.

When Katherine is called a shrew, this has nothing to do with different time periods having different ideas of decorum or it being considered, in Shakespeare’s time, immodest for a woman to speak her mind. Kate is an outright bully. She ties up and beats her younger sister out of jealousy (she claims that as her motivation) and physically attacks her music teacher for daring to try to correct her fingering on the lute. She is sharp-tongued in the sense of gratuitously insulting people. Her behavior would not be acceptable in any culture, in any time period. (Imagine a stereotypical Marines drill instructor, except with everyone, not just recruits.)

Petruchio is not a virtuous character, but he is, at least, polite to his social equals. And he is cunning. Moreover, he takes a liking to Katherine precisely because she has a powerful personality. The “taming” of Katherine is, perhaps, an apt metaphor, because her behavior is outright antisocial (in modern times it would be criminal). What it consists of is where there seems to be a minor element of truth underlying the absurd humor: Kate becomes content when she finally finds a man who she can’t intimidate. It is true that women do not, as a rule, like a husband who they can easily overpower. (For those who are young: that’s not because marriage is a Nietzschean power struggle, it’s because life is difficult and a man who can be easily overpowered can be easily hurt by accident when a woman is concentrating on other things, such as caring for young children, and feminine instincts don’t protect against this. The reverse is not nearly so important, since masculine instincts do include being gentle to the mother of his children, though even there, only so much; males do not usually want a wife so delicate relative to their force of personality that they can easily hurt her by accident, either.)

It is often said that when it comes to husbands and wives, opposites attract. This is true of many qualities, but certainly not of all qualities. You tend to find “assortive mating” (i.e. similarities attracting) in things like education, social status, and intelligence. A truth underlying the absurd humor of The Taming of the Shrew is that you also find assortive mating with force of personality. People with big, forceful personalities tend to get along better with a husband or wife who also has a big, forceful personality. When it comes to what two human beings get along well, there are no absolutes. But this is a trend you readily see.

The Taming of the Shrew seems to take this then turn it up to eleven.

But it should be remembered that it is an absurd play, and should not be taken too seriously.