Context
About the Author
William Shakespeare (1564–1616) was born in Stratford-upon-Avon to a glove-maker who served on the town council, married Anne Hathaway at eighteen, and by his late twenties had relocated to London and begun making a name as a working playwright. The Taming of the Shrew belongs to this early London period — the years when Shakespeare was still figuring out what a comedy written for the public stage could actually do. He was not yet the playwright who would write Hamlet or King Lear. He was a young pro in a crowded market, stitching together borrowed plots with an ear for what would play to a paying audience.
That context matters because Shrew is a craftsman's play, not a masterpiece of mature vision. It is an experiment in fusing three different things — a rough folk-tale about wife-taming, an imported Italian intrigue comedy, and a framing device about a deluded drunkard — into a single evening's entertainment. Shakespeare would get better at this kind of fusion; Twelfth Night and As You Like It are what happens when he has learned to blend registers without the seams showing. In Shrew, the seams are visible, and part of the play's strange energy comes from feeling a dramatist still working out how to make disparate parts speak to each other.
Placed within Shakespeare's early comedies — likely composed around 1590–92, roughly contemporaneous with The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Comedy of Errors — Shrew reveals a playwright preoccupied with performance, disguise, and the social scripts that govern courtship. Errors works out the mechanics of mistaken identity with Plautine precision; Two Gentlemen tries out a heroine in boys' clothes; Shrew pushes further by staging disguise as the very medium through which marriage is negotiated. Nearly every character in Padua is pretending to be someone else, and the play treats this less as farce-engine and more as a claim about how courtship actually works. The Kate–Petruchio marriage is not a deviation from the play's disguise logic. It is its purest expression — two people playing increasingly extreme roles at each other until the role hardens into something else.
Biographically, the temptation to read Shakespeare's own marriage into the play — Anne Hathaway was eight years his senior, and their courtship was hurried by her pregnancy — is mostly a dead end. What does bear on the play is Shakespeare's professional situation. He was writing inside a theatrical economy that rewarded rewriting rival companies' successful shows, and Shrew is in conversation with the anonymous The Taming of a Shrew, a near-contemporary play covering similar ground. Whether his version came first, second, or in dialogue with a shared source is still debated. Either way, Shakespeare was doing in 1591 what he would do for the rest of his career: taking raw material everyone in the audience already half-knew, and finding the angle that made it his.
Historical Background
Shrew was written for an England in which marriage was, legally and economically, a property transfer. A bride's dowry moved from her father to her husband, and under the common-law doctrine of coverture — which Shakespeare's audience understood without needing it explained — a married woman's legal personhood was effectively absorbed into her husband's. She could not own property in her own name, could not sign a contract independently, and had no standing to sue. When Baptista stands in front of his house auctioning Bianca to the highest bidder, or when Petruchio declares Kate "my goods, my chattels," these are not dramatic exaggerations. They are the marriage market in its everyday legal language. The play's first audiences laughed at the volume, not the premise.
The sources Shakespeare drew on make the cultural logic even clearer. The taming plot comes from a tradition of folk-tales and ballads in which a shrewish wife is beaten, humiliated, or starved into obedience — crude material that Shrew markedly softens by replacing physical violence with psychological pressure. The Bianca subplot is lifted, with real craft, from George Gascoigne's Supposes (1566), itself a translation of Ariosto's Italian comedy I Suppositi (1509), which gave Shakespeare the machinery of disguised tutors, swapped masters and servants, and a counterfeit father. And behind Shrew sits the anonymous The Taming of a Shrew — a play either Shakespeare knew directly, drew from a shared source with, or possibly wrote an early draft of. A Shrew closes its Sly frame at the end; Shakespeare's version famously does not.
The patriarchal household the play depicts was not merely custom — it was doctrine, reinforced from the pulpit. Elizabethan congregations regularly heard the Homily of the State of Matrimony, a sermon authorized for reading in parish churches, which instructed wives that "ye wives, be ye in subjection to obey your own husbands." Kate's final speech sits inside this rhetorical tradition so precisely that some of its phrasing tracks the Homily almost line for line. That resemblance is what makes the speech so hard to pin down: read straight, it is orthodox doctrine; read ironically, it is orthodox doctrine performed with such fluency that the fluency itself becomes the joke. Shakespeare's audience would have heard the resonance either way, and the play's refusal to signal which hearing is correct is a feature of the writing, not an accident of it.
The reception history of Shrew is a small cultural barometer. For most of its first two centuries, the play was popular but uneasy — audiences preferred David Garrick's 1754 adaptation Catharine and Petruchio, which trimmed the subplot, cut the Sly frame, and softened the edges. The Victorians kept staging it; George Bernard Shaw, writing in the 1890s, called the final speech "altogether disgusting to modern sensibility." John Fletcher had already written a sequel of sorts in Shakespeare's own lifetime — The Woman's Prize, or The Tamer Tamed (c. 1611) — in which Petruchio's second wife tames him. The twentieth century turned Shrew into source material for softer artifacts: Cole Porter's 1948 musical Kiss Me, Kate, which frames the play as a backstage romance between two quarreling actors, and Gil Junger's 1999 film 10 Things I Hate About You, which transplants the premise to a Seattle high school and quietly deletes the taming altogether. Contemporary stagings tend to split along the interpretive lines the text itself opens up: some lean into sincere submission as a tragedy of patriarchy, others play the final speech as ironic performance, and a growing number read Kate and Petruchio as collaborators who have discovered a private language the rest of Padua cannot hear. None of these readings is imposed. All of them are in the play.