William Shakespeare: The Taming of the Shrew.
Performed at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Summer 2007.
Performed at the Michigan Shakespeare Festival, July 22, 2017.
In front of an alehouse on a heath—a wild place in a wild place—the indignant hostess confronts Christopher Sly. A tinker or itinerant pot-maker, Christopher Sly lives up to the reputation of his profession, then held to be an occupation for drunks. He doesn’t live up to either part of his name, except in the way he puns off the name of his family: “Let the world slide” (Induction i.5). But as to the rest, he is neither a providential nor a provident man. Not Christlike—innocent as a dove, prudent as a serpent—not Machiavellian—vulpine and lion-like— he could not be less a ruler than he is. Incapable of rule, including self-rule, he seemingly cannot be ruled, at least not by the poor Hostess, whom he refuses to pay for some ale glasses he broke. Unjust, a man who will not pay his debts, like all drunks he harbors too much anger as well as too much appetite in his soul. Aristotle might call him the the least political man imaginable, and therefore not fully a man at all, since man is the political animal.
A better ruler, called only “Lord,” chances by, with his retinue and his hunting dogs. [1] Seeing poor, passed-out Sly, he likens him to a swine but recognizes him as human, a “drunken man,” under the Circean spell of ale (Induction i.34). But as a true ruler, the Lord not only judges men aright, he knows what to do with them. Take him back to my home (out of the wild, back to civil society) and make him “forget himself” (which is indeed a favor, given the character of his ‘self’) (Induction i.38). Like a stage director in a play, the Lord directs his men to hang “his fairest chamber” with “all my wanton pictures”; “balm his foul head with warm distilled waters”; scent the air by burning “sweet wood”; when he awakes, have music ready, “a dulcet and heavenly sound” (Induction i.44-49). Sight, touch, smell, hearing: four of the five senses will ‘argue’ for a new identity; eroticism, especially, brings a man out of himself, redirects his thoughts to the loved one (or ones, as there is more than one wanton picture). The Lord does not appeal to Sly’s taste, inasmuch as it inclines to the taste of ale. Let that sleeping swine lie.
“If he chance speak”—show a telltale sign of humanness—tell him a noble lie (Induction i.50): Address him as His Honor, ask him for a command; will you wash yourself, will you dress yourself, and how? Tell him he is a hunter, a horseman, a husband whose lady “mourns at his disease,” which is lunacy—a dreamlike condition from which he has just now awakened (Induction i.60). “Do it kindly, gentle sirs”; kindly means naturally, as he must be called back to his true, human, nature by natural means (Induction i.64). The Lord induces his men to look at it as an amusement, “pastime passing excellent, / If it be husbanded with modesty” (Induction i.65-66). Husbandry or agriculture works with nature; modesty or moderation works with care. He instructs his page, Bartholomew, to dress as a woman and pretend to be Sly’s wife, and to tell him he’s been deathly ill for seven years. Later, one of the Lord’s servants more than doubles the number to fifteen. With fine comic timing, a troupe of actors arrives, looking for work, which the Lord is happy to give them, inviting them to join in with “some sport in hand / Where you cunning can insist me much” (Induction i.89-90). But above all he needs them to rule themselves throughout the stage business. Don’t act ‘out of character’ in my play, lest my stagecraft fail. “Haply my presence / May well abate the over-merry spleen, / Which otherwise would grow into extremes” (Induction i.34-36). The true ruler’s presence moderates the passions of those he rules, civilizes them. He rules by natural means (water, sweet smoke) and mostly by art (wanton pictures, music, a play); Sly is very far from being ready for a real and civil life. He needs a comprehensive moral education.
The Lord and his men carry out this plot. Awakened but far from ‘woke,’ the patient asserts his identity: “I am Christopher Sly; call not me ‘honor’ nor lordship” (Induction ii.5). Reverting to his favorite appetite, he swears he “never drank sack in my life,” sherry being a gentleman’s drink, unlike his preferred ale, the drink of the people (Induction ii.7). For food he wants salt beef. He even gives his lineage, far from aristocratic, dating back only so far as his father, plain Burton Heath, a name that suggests the wild and inhuman part of nature where Sly was found. Son Christopher has been something of a changeling—peddler by birth, cardmaker by “education,” a keeper of a tame bear “by transmutation,” and “by present profession a tinker” (Induction ii.16-19). “Score me up for the lying’st knave in Christendom,” English Christendom’s finest example of the Cretan liar (Induction ii.23-24). To this, the Lord adjures him to “Call home thy ancient thoughts from banishment, / And banish these abject lowly dreams” (Induction ii.29-30). He commands Apollonian music, the opposite of Dionysian drunkenness. With judgelike authority, the Lord proclaims “Thou art a lord, and nothing but a lord,” with “a lady far more beautiful/ Than any woman in this waning age” (Induction ii.59-61).
That arrests the man’s attention, begins to reform his self-knowledge. “Am I a lord and have I such a lady?” (Induction ii.66). Do I dream now or have I been dreaming? Surely, “I do not sleep: I see, I hear, I speak;/ I smell sweet savours, and I feel soft things” (Induction ii.68-69); with a boost from wishful thinking, his senses convince him, as planned, even as common sense could not—he having little of that to work with. He calls for ale again, but now only the weakest kind. The Lord’s men ignore that, instead bringing in his ‘wife,’ Bartholomew, who tells him the doctor has left instructions for her not to share his bed with him, lest his illness recur. The actors, whom the Lord encountered out on the heath, will cure his understandable melancholy at having his eros first aroused, then denied. They will stage a play, “The Taming of the Shrew.” This play-within-the-play will have its own play (or plays) within it, as the several levels of noble lies are arranged to lead not only a drunkard but all of Shakespeare’s audience (each of us likely drunk with some impediment to wisdom and the other virtues) to clear-eyed thoughts, through the senses but beyond them.
In the play we meet Lucentio (“Light”) and his servant Tranio. They have journeyed from Lombardy (specifically the city of Pisa, “renowned” for its “grave citizens”) (I.i.2). Lucentio would leave the home of a merchant father, foregoing citizenship for the liberal arts, the way to the philosophic life. “Here let us breathe, and haply institute/ A course of learned and ingenious studies” (I.i.8-9), especially the study of “Virtue and that part of philosophy” which “treats of happiness/ By virtue specially to be achiev’d” (I.i.18-20)—the philosophy found in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Ah, but as Tranio may know, the Ethics might lead to the Politics, or, if not to politics, then to Stoicism. “Let’s be no Stoics nor no stocks”—restraints—”I pray,/ Or so devote to Aristotle’s checks”—his moderation—”As Ovid be an outcast quite abjured” (I.i.31-33). Logic, yes; rhetoric, very well; “music and poesy” by all means; even mathematics and metaphysics (I.i.36): But ‘pray’ “Fall to them as you find your stomach serves you. / No profit grows where is no pleasure ta’en” (I.i.37-38). Epicurean Tranio has a mind rather like an American college student; he likes a curriculum with as many ‘electives’ as possible: “In brief, sir, study what you most affect,” what you want (I.i.40). If you would flee political life, select from Aristotle’s books as you please, but avoid the stern apoliticism of the Stoics and embrace the pleasurable apoliticism of the Epicureans. In Plautus’ play, Mostellaria, from which Shakespeare borrows him, Tranio is a clever slave, as indeed he is here: a man of wit, a fixer, but of ‘slavish’ character—low, pleasure-preferring, given to manipulating the low side of other souls, bending them to his own inclinations. “Gramercies, Tranio, well dost thou advise,” replies Lucentio, as he inclines toward becoming a genteel version of Sly (I.i.41).
An object for erotic desire enters immediately. A Paduan gentleman, Baptista Minola, has an apparently unmarriageable daughter, Katherine, “rough” and shrewish elder to studious, beautiful and modest Bianca. Hortensio and Gremio (the latter an unsuitable suitor, a comical old man exemplifying a stock figure in Italian comedy) would court Bianca, but Baptista will not marry his younger daughter until he finds a husband for undesirable Katherine. Upon seeing Bianca, Lucentio falls in love, too. He devises his own ‘play’ or plot to win her, proposing to present himself as a tutor in order to gain access to Bianca. Meanwhile, Tranio will assume Lucentio’s identity in Padua, a plausible imposture because faces alone don’t distinguish master from manservant. Nature makes no such distinction, at least physically; they can change clothes, even as a clothing change was part of the ‘play’ on Sly, and even as actors in plays change into their costumes, into their assumed identities—to sleep, perchance to dream, not of some Hell but of a person and of things outside their ordinary selves. And so, perhaps, to learn. Shakespeare himself served in his company as plotter, ruler, and player. And he learned as he went, from histories and light comedies to tragedies to The Tempest. Lucentio announces that he has another, undisclosed, purpose in his plotting, but does not say what it is.
This is to say that the Lord presents the changeling Sly with a play about changelings played by actors (themselves by definition changelings). The play will invite Sly to change, to reorient his soul, even as his condition has been changed for him by the Lord.
Veronese gentleman Petruchio and his servant Grumio (not to be confused with old man Gremio) have arrived in Padua to visit his “best beloved and approved friend,” Hortensio (I.ii.3). (The root of “Hortensio” means “garden”; there is perhaps a hint of apolitical Epicureanism in this university town.) His father having died, Petruchio seeks in Padua not the liberal arts but a fortune and a wife, preferably in the same person. Hortensio tells him he knows a prospect, unfortunately “shrewd and ill-favoured” (I.ii.58) but assuredly “rich, and very rich” (I.ii.61). As manly and thumotic as Lucentio is ardent and ‘intellectual,’ Petruchio replies that “wealth is the burden of my wooing dance” (I.ii.66). Therefore, “Be she as foul as was Florentius’ love” (an old hag who nonetheless turned into a beautiful woman, by magic), or “old as Sibyl,” or even “as curst and shrewd / As Socrates’ Xanthippe or a worse”—philosophy lingers in the background, even with Petruchio—all’s well that ends well, wellness being defined by him as wealth (I.ii.67-69). [2] He too has a plot: He will disguise himself as a music teacher to gain access to Baptista’s household, then take things from there.
Lucentio (having assumed his new identity as tutor “Cambio”) and Gremio pass by, discussing their own plots to win Bianca, overheard by the two friends. But Hortensio doesn’t know everything, as he assumes that Gremio really is Lucentio, and that he must be a rival to Petruchio for the hand of Katherine. Of course there’s no real conflict, as these suitors aim at different women. This becomes clear as Petruchio discourses on Katherine, “an irksome brawling scold” (I.ii.184) whom he nonetheless intends to woo: “Have I not in my time heard lions roar?” and the winds howl at sea, seen the “angry boar chafed with sweat” and “the great ordinance in the field,” indeed the greater “thunder in the sky” (I.ii.196-201)? Hunter (like the Lord), sailor and soldier, perhaps unfearful of Heaven’s lightning itself, why should Petruchio fear “a woman’s tongue” (I.ii.204)? He will proceed to vindicate his boast.
Lucentio’s servant Tranio enters, playing Lucentio, and proposes that he, Hortensio and old man Gremio, Bianca’s suitors, deal with one another “as adversaries do in law—/ Strive mightily, but eat and drink as friends” (I.ii.275-275). It is a fine proposal for a comedy, and also sets up Tranio’s two gulls for the deception needed to give his master the decisive edge in his contest to win the lady.
Baptista’s house is the setting for the beginning of Petruchio’s celebrated taming of Katherine, who’s been acting insufferably toward her father and Bianca. Suspecting her blameless sister of desiring Hortensio, rich old Gremio, or both, she strikes her; when Baptista reprimands her, she turns on him, accusing him of favoring Bianca and vowing revenge. Baptista’s deranged household thus consists of a weak father, a rebellious and unsisterly daughter, and a decent young woman who for now must suffer them both. Padua, a place of liberal learning, features serious deficiencies in at least one of its ruling families. Families being the foundation of cities, of political life, Padua may be a university town with a government problem.
The several suitors arrive, and Petruchio executes his strategy, which is to contradict Katherine at every turn. Goading her by calling her by the diminutive, ‘Kate,’ he taunts her by praising her as pleasant, gamesome, courteous, slow in speech, yet “sweet as springtime flowers” (II.i.239). With broad irony, he lauds “her princely gait” (II.i.252) and her likeness to the virgin goddess, Diana—the way of a princess ambitious for rule but unfit for it, an impediment to the continuation of her own family and therefore in contradiction with her own ambition. He turns to romantic language, the language of courtly love, into a vehicle of infuriating mockery. For once, the lady is at a loss for words, speech being the coin of politics. She can only sputter, as her father offers her hand in marriage. She recovers her speech sufficiently to protest to when her desperate father, objecting to this impending marriage to a man she judges a “half lunatic,” “mad-cap ruffian” and “swearing jack” (II.i.280-281). Her taming has just begun; Petruchio exits, off to Venice to buy wedding-clothes, but not before describing his betrothed as “temperate as the morn,” the virtue associated with wise rulership in the play’s Induction. As Caton observes [3], Petruchio proceeds with Katherine very much as the Lord did with Sly, in principle if not in practice: To tame the immoderate and unruly soul, he subjects it to the opposite of what it wants, contradicting it at every turn. Unlike the Lord, he does not do so gently, as it were behind the back of his ‘student.’ Public shaming, not private illusion, must be the way to amend a soul drunk not on ale but on the will to power.
Gremio and Tranio (as “Lucentio”) end the scene by arguing over which of them deserves Bianca, appealing to Baptista’s love of wealth by describing their riches, real and alleged, respectively. Tranio outbids Gremio, but now he needs to produce the rich father he claimed. The two self-announced suitors appeal to the father. The two secret suitors, the real Lucentio (as tutor “Cambio”) and Hortensio (calling himself “Litio,” playing the role of a music-master), will make their approaches to the daughter. Both men pass love notes to Bianca in the course of ‘teaching’ her. She prefers “Cambio,” who rightly strikes her as the truer man, beneath the disguise. Hortensio proves the accuracy of her judgment by immediately thinking of shifting his love to someone else.
Long before the actress-queen in Hamlet, Katherine shows herself a woman who protesteth too much, chafing at Petruchio’s absence after having tried to order him to go away. It is this hitherto well-submerged sense that she hasn’t been living well in her father’s household, that she somehow wants and needs a husband stronger than her father, that makes her curable, that will enable Petruchio’s strong medicine to work. When he arrives, disheveled, clever but unwise Tranio begs him to “see not your bride in these unreverent robes,” to “go to my chamber, put on clothes of mine” (III.ii.108-109). Petruchio is not a man to be ‘dressed’ by another, advised by a very clever but less prudent (and less manly) man. The lady will be marrying him, not “my clothes” (III.ii.113), he replies. What she sees will be what she gets. Tranio suspects method in this madness, which continues at the wedding, when Petruchio avers to be “master of what is mine own,” a wife who “is my goods, my chattels,” and “my house,” and indeed his household stuff, field, barn, horse, ox, ass—”my any thing” (III.ii.225-228). Because she is his own, however, the man of military valor will defend her as his own, against all comers: “Kate, I’ll buckler thee against a million” (III.ii.235). He rules her by virtue of his nature, not by the dubious virtue of ‘clothes,’ that is, of convention, changeable appearance. Moderate Bianca, who needs no such taming, remarks that her sister, “being mad herself,” has been “madly mated” (III.ii.240). Thumos has yielded to the superior thumos.
Nor is Petruchio done. The shrew has yielded, but perhaps not wholeheartedly—and if not wholeheartedly, then not for long. Reversing the tactic of the Lord, he takes Katherine from the city to the country. Sly is a human being ‘countrified’ by ale, a drunk passed out on the heath—in a ‘state of nature,’ as later writers would put it. He needs to be civilized gently, by means of seductive illusions, removed to civilization to live a noble lie for a time, in order to learn the truth about his real nature. Katherine, an uncivilized denizen of eminently civil, indeed liberal-artsy, Padua, needs not the gentle atmosphere she has learned to exploit but roughness, exposure to harsh truths, crushing defeat by someone who plays her own game better than she does. She needs exposure to a state of war. Petruchio abuses the servants; she pleads for them, thereby getting out of herself, as did Sly under the rule of the Lord. As one of the servants remarks, “He kills her in her own humor,” even as the Lord kills Sly with kindness (IV.i.169). Like Sly, she “sits as one new risen from a dream” (IV.i.170). In both cases, it is a dream induced in order to bring the patient back to reality. “Thus have I politicly begun my reign,” Petruchio replies (IV.i.172). Unlike Lucentio, like the Lord, Petruchio is a political man. But Caton is wrong to think that he is a Machiavellian one. [4] Petruchio rules her not as a tyrant, for his advantage alone, but for her own good. That is, he rules her as a parent rules a child, replacing her hapless father in founding a new household. “Amid this hurly I intend / That all is done in reverend care of her” (IV.i.187-188). Here he reveals his true nature; he had claimed to be interested only in a rich wife, but now we know he wants a good one. Right rule is a kind of practical wisdom: “He that knows better how to tame a shrew, / Now let him speak; ’tis charity to show” (IV.i.194-195). Like his near-namesake Petrarch, Petruchio knows how to address a woman. Courtly Petrarch shows how to address a gentlewoman; Petruchio shows how to address an ungentle and indeed unkind one.
He soon teaches her how to beg, instead of her habitual commanding. He starves her body, taunting her by offering and then taking away both food and clothing. Enforced bodily suffering requires recourse to the mind, and indeed, as Petruchio instructs her, “‘Tis the mind that makes the body rich; / And as the sun breaks through the darkest clouds,/ So honour peereth in the meanest habit” (IV.iii.68-70). Her thumos, misdirected toward prideful libido dominandi, must be redirected toward the natural honor of a human being, founded in its distinctive nature, the capacity to reason. “O no, good Kate; neither art thou the worse/ For this poor furniture and mean array” (IV.iii.175-76). As with Sly, she must learn her true ‘identity,’ her nature, stripped of convention. When she continues to murmur in rebellion, Petruchio even ‘makes’ time stand still: “It shall be what o’clock I say it is” (IV.iii.191). (Newton supposes time a constant, but Petruchio anticipates Einstein.) He soon makes her call the sun the moon, and then the sun again. Like the Lord, he bends his patient’s perceptions of nature to his will, so as to break her ill-will, and by so doing bring her to see nature aright.
Back in the city, in front of Baptista’s house, Tranio finds in an elderly “Pedant” passing by the perfect type for the needed role of Vincentio, Lucentio’s ‘rich father.’ As a smart casting director, he gives the old fellow motivation, gulling him into believing that his life’s in danger, telling him that he must assume the role of Vincentio for safety’s sake. Pedants and the elderly alike tend to have timid souls. His master and Bianca plot elopement; this is the additional plot Lucentio had hinted at, earlier, as he deployed the decoy ‘Lucentio’ to distract Baptista’s attention from the doings of the real one with Baptista’s daughter. But his, their, plot takes a twist when his real father meets Petruchio along the road and learns from him of the impending marriage. The elopement proceeds, but the young marrieds must now return to Padua, and to their fathers, neither of whom is a happy man for the deceptions. Petruchio and his Kate (herself now openly in love) can now watch the show with amusement, as the quiet, seemingly docile couple have made themselves the center of controversy.
They all gather not at father Baptista’s house but at Lucentio’s; as the Bible and nature both command, the newly-married couple cleave to one another, form a new household. There, Lucentio can offer his guests hospitality, bring “our jarring notes” to “agree” (V.ii.1). “Feast with the best, and welcome to my house” (V.ii.8). (At last, Kate will be fed.) “Pray you, sit down; / For now we sit to chat as well as eat” (V.ii.10-11). This is the first time anyone in the play sits, comes to rest. To eat is to serve the body; to speak is to exercise the mind; the jarring notes of body and soul can now agree in the newly and rightly constituted household, where the newly and rightly constituted household of spirited Petruchio and Kate are welcome guests. When Baptista, Petruchio, Lucentio, and Hortensio (successfully married to a rich widow) make a playful bet on whose wife is the most obedient, Petruchio wins; Kate’s love of victory, redirected, can now contribute to a re-founded, better household than the one she left for marriage.
She makes her victory speech to the ladies, when commanded by Petruchio to “tell these headstrong women / What duty they owe their lords and husbands” (V.ii.135-136). This she proceeds to do, but not in her former way, by her once-characteristic habit of berating. She reasons with them. Her rhetoric depends upon an account of human nature. She teaches them that nature, shared by men and women, has also has differentiated them. She will prove a better Paduan lecturer than many a university prof, then and there, now and here.
“Unknit that threatening unkind brow” (V.ii.136). As always in Shakespeare “kind” means natural, as in grouping natural objects according to their kind, their species. Some parts of nature are also kind in our sense, but not all—as for example the heath from which the Lord rescued Sly. Why is a threatening brow unnatural in a wife? Kate offers four reasons: It wounds your husband, your rightful ruler; it blots your beauty; it ruins your “fame,” your reputation; it is neither “meet” nor “amiable” (V.ii.140-41). Like a dirty fountain, no one will drink from it. That is, if a wife will share a household with her husband, any attempt to inspire fear will fail, if he is a real man, the kind you want for a husband. Your way with him must go through attraction, through your beauty and your amiableness. You will be better off if respected by him, and by others; your honor, even the honor of your family, depends on it.
Properly, your husband is your sovereign, but both a gentle and a kind one, one who “cares for thee” (V.ii.147). He does this by committing his body to “painful labor both by sea and land” (V.ii.147). You stay “warm at home secure and safe” (V.ii.151). In justice, you owe in return for his care “love, fair looks, and true obedience,” the duties a subject owes his prince (V.ii.153). Why so? To disobey “his honest will” makes the wife a “graceless traitor to her loving lord” (V.ii.158-160). But why are these sharply distinct ‘roles’—our own contemporary term suggests playacting—natural? By nature, women’s bodies are “soft and weak and smooth,” ill-fitted for painful labor both by sea and land, at least in comparison to the bodies of men. Undermine your husband and you weaken his ability to defend you and the household you share with him. The bodies of women are fitted for living in soft conditions, not for “toil and trouble in the world (V.ii.166). Our hearts should be correspondingly soft, Kate urges—harmonized with those of caring husbands, as the Apollonian music heard by Sly might do to his shrewish, unruly soul. Therefore, she reasonably concludes, wives should curb their willfulness and do their own natural duty, even as husbands do theirs.
“Why, there’s a wench!” Petruchio rightly exclaims (V.ii.180). He commands a kiss, and receives one. “We’ll to bed” (V.ii.184), as their marriage is now of a kind as may prove a just, natural, secure foundation for a family.
As for his brother-in-law Lucentio, in victory Petruchio can be magnanimous, great-souled: ‘Twas I who won the wager, though you hit the white”—punning on Bianca’s name—and “being a winner, God give you good night!” (V.ii.186). Whereas thumotic Petruchio presents the matter in terms of victory, Lucentio presents it in terms of thought: “‘Tis a wonder, by your leave, she will be tam’d so.” Philosophy begins in wonder. Lucentio came to Padua to study philosophy, the crown of the liberal arts. Tranio has failed to side-track him. Lucentio needs the example of his spirited, shrew-taming friend to spur him to philosophy, away from a slack epicureanism. Fortunately, his own wife will need no taming, so the young Socrates, if that is what he proves, will have no Xanthippe to harass him. In forming an alliance, and by forming it at Lucentio’s house, Petruchio and his new friend will strengthen the city or cities in which they live. They have formed an alliance between philosophic reason, practical reason, and spiritedness that mirrors not only a well-ordered regime but a well-ordered soul.
What can ale-soaked Sly learn from this play? He can learn how to order his soul rightly He can learn to tame his inner shrew, the anger that lies beneath his drunkenness, the anger that must have made his soul drunk before he touched a drop of the brew. He can learn to get out of his own passions and appetites, away from his longtime identity, aspire to self-rule instead of self-indulgence, make a change that puts an end to his changeling ways. Although men and women have very different ways, by nature, as human beings they struggle with the same anger, the same libido dominandi, while remaining capable of the same capacities to reason and to love, justly and wisely. There is the foundation, in families, for good cities. If Sly heeds the lesson, he will no longer let the world slide, but join in the task of ruling it well, if only by ceasing to be unruly.
Notes
- See Hiram Caton: “On the Induction of The Taming of the Shrew.” Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, Volume 3, Number 1, Summer 1972, 53.
- Florentius appears in the Wyf of Bath’s Tale, a tale about the proper nature of a wife. A young knight and “lusty bachelor” in King Arthur’s court, Florentius rapes a maid and faces death by beheading. Arthur’s wife, Guinevere, calls the king to an act of just mercy: He consents to her ‘plot,’ that Florentius will have a year and a day to discover “what thing is it that women moost desiren.” Florentius goes on the quest, but eventually despairs, as some women tell him they want riches, others honor, or “jolynesse,” or “riche array,” or “lust abedde,” or flattery, or attention, or “bisynesse,” or freedom (meaning to do as they like). And so on. Near the end of his period of reprieve, he comes upon more than two dozen ladies dancing in the forest, ‘in nature,’ who vanish, leaving behind an “old wyf,” foul as she can be—worse than the much-married Wyf of Bath herself. She agrees to tell him the answer to the queen’s question, in exchange for his promise to grant her a wish. The answer, he will tell Guinevere, is “Wommen desire to have sovereynetee / And for to been in maistrie him above.” All women, or at least “worldly women,” harbor this libido dominandi, which Katherine exhibits openly. In exchange for this answer, which Guinevere approves as the correct one (Arthur acceded to it in granting her original request), the old wife demands marriage to Florentius. Understandably, the young knight resists, at which point the old wife offers him another bargain: You can have me “foul and old” but true and humble or young and fair and take your chances. Having now learned what women really want, Florentius leaves the decision up to her: She rewards him by changing into a woman both “fair and good.” They seal their marriage with a kiss, as indeed Petruchio and Kate will do, at the end of the play.
- Caton op. cit., 53.
- Ibid. 57-58. Both the Lord and Petruchio aim at the good of the one they govern, not simply at their own good, as does Machiavelli’s prince.
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