The Taming of the Shrew

Before any taming begins, a drunken tinker is hauled out of an alehouse and dressed in fine clothes, then told by a bored lord that he is a nobleman who dreamt fifteen years of being poor. The rest is entertainment laid on for him. Inside it, Petruchio arrives in Padua meaning to wive it wealthily, and finds Katherina, whose temper her father treats as an obstacle to clear before the pretty sister can marry. What he does to her is not courtship: he starves her and keeps her from sleep, contradicting her own eyes until she agrees the sun is the moon. And yet these two talk as no one in the play can, trading puns at a speed that leaves the room behind. The long speech Kate delivers at the end has been played as defeat, as irony, and as a joke shared by two people who have found their equal, and no production has ever settled it. Remember who is watching: a man persuaded, by costume and insistence alone, that he was never himself at all.