At the college level, the essay treats the speech as a text whose meaning cannot be read off the page — it is fixed only in performance, and every performance is an interpretation. A strong thesis acknowledges that the play deliberately withholds a Kate soliloquy that would settle the question, and reads that withholding as structurally meaningful. Close reading of the speech's rhetoric helps: Kate uses conditional and hypothetical constructions ("And when she is froward, peevish, sullen, sour"), abstract political analogy ("Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper, / Thy head, thy sovereign"), and an argument from natural weakness ("Our strength as weak, our weakness past compare") that reads more like a set-piece oration than a private confession. Strong essays will note that the speech's form — orderly, scholastic, exceeding the request — is evidence in itself.

The counterargument worth taking seriously is the historicist one. Shakespeare's audience heard homilies from the Book of Homilies about wifely obedience that sound almost identical to Kate's speech, and nothing in the text flags irony in a way an Elizabethan audience would have caught. Good essays will refuse both the naive sincere reading ("she's been broken") and the modern wishful-thinking reading ("it's all a wink") and ask instead what kind of speech act the lines perform within the play's economy of wagers: Kate delivers a speech worth one hundred crowns to her husband while publicly humiliating Bianca and the Widow. Whether she means the words or not, the act of delivering them wins Petruchio the bet and reasserts her social standing. That ambiguity — between belief, performance, and strategic alliance — is where the strongest essays live.

A college-level version of this essay engages with textual history. The anonymous source play A Shrew closes its frame: Sly reappears, declares he has "dreamt the bravest dream," and vows to go tame his own wife. Shakespeare's version either lost that ending or deliberately omitted it, and the scholarly consensus is unsettled. A rigorous essay does not need to decide which it is — the argument can instead be about the effect of the missing frame on reception. In A Shrew, the taming is safely contained as a dream Sly will carry home; in Shakespeare, there is no return to the outer frame, which means the play never gets the cushion of being "just a play." The ideology Kate is taught is not quarantined inside Sly's fantasy. It is released into the audience's world.

The stronger essays will pair this observation with attention to the play's obsession with theatricality at every level. Everyone is performing: Lucentio as Cambio, Tranio as Lucentio, Hortensio as Licio, the Pedant as Vincentio, Sly as a lord. Petruchio's taming method is itself a performance — he arrives at the wedding dressed in rags "To me she's married, not unto my clothes," he calls Vincentio a "young budding virgin," he stages fits of rage at servants as a tutorial in rage for Kate. If the whole play is a lesson in how identity is produced by acting, then the open frame signals that the lesson has no off-switch. The performance continues after the curtain because no one ever ends it. That's a thesis strong enough to carry a full essay.

A college-level argument distinguishes between what the characters believe about the market and what the play shows us about it. The characters treat the market as natural — Baptista calls himself a merchant making "a desperate mart" without apology, and Tranio's bidding war against Gremio is played for laughs. But the play undercuts its own comic framing with Kate's first line in Act 1: "I pray you, sir, is it your will / To make a stale of me amongst these mates?" The word "stale" means both laughingstock and prostitute, and it diagnoses the transaction with uncomfortable precision. A sharp essay will argue that Shakespeare gives the most accurate analysis of the marriage market to the character the market is grinding up.

To push the argument further, compare the two marriages. Bianca, the idealized bride, turns out in Act 5 to be a wife who refuses her husband's summons and costs him a hundred crowns; her compliance in courtship was another transaction, dressed up in Latin and music-tutor disguises. Kate, who protested the market openly, wins the wager. The play's final joke, if the speech is played ironically, is that the "obedient" wife was always the shrewd one, and the "shrew" was always the wife with the clearer view of what was being bought and sold. Whether Shakespeare endorses the system or critiques it depends on how cleanly the final speech resolves — which, as the play insists, it never does.

Push past that thesis and the real argument becomes about language as terrain rather than as content. Petruchio's tactic is epistemic, not rhetorical: he insists on a counter-reality ("Twas told me you were rough, and coy, and sullen, / And now I find report a very liar") and refuses to grant Kate's words their ordinary meaning. A strong essay will argue that this is not victory through better wit — Kate's wit matches his — but victory through controlling the frame. Kate says true things; Petruchio responds as if she said the opposite; gradually, the social world around them treats his version as the accurate one. That is the mechanism of the taming, and it is specifically linguistic.

The essay gets most interesting at the sun-and-moon moment. When Kate says, "be it moon, or sun, or what you please; / And if you please to call it a rush-candle, / Henceforth I vow it shall be so for me," she has either broken or learned. If she has learned, she has grasped that the rules of the game are not about telling the truth but about committing to the frame Petruchio sets. Her speech to Vincentio — "Young budding virgin, fair and fresh and sweet" — is Kate's first deliberate use of the Petruchian move, and the fact that she does it with what looks like pleasure is the textual hinge on which the whole "private game" reading turns. A nuanced thesis acknowledges that the play teaches Kate a tool of linguistic power, and leaves unanswered whether she has been subjugated by it or inducted into it.

A sophisticated essay resists the easy irony of "the obedient sister is actually the free one" and instead asks what freedom means within the play's tight economy of performance. Neither sister is free in any modern sense — both are daughters in a marriage market, both are wives under coverture, both are bound by the same laws. The question is which sister has found a usable position within those constraints. Bianca's Act 1 pose of docility is strategic — she flatters her suitors, controls her tutors, and elopes when the arrangement suits her — but it requires her to maintain the performance indefinitely. When she drops it at the banquet, her husband is publicly humiliated and her social capital collapses in a single scene. The pose was her freedom, and she loses both at once.

Kate's arc moves the opposite direction. She begins the play with no performance — she says what she means, and everyone calls her a devil for it. By Act 5, she has acquired the performance Bianca started with, but with an awareness Bianca never shows. She delivers the speech Petruchio needs, wins him the wager, and exits leading him to bed ("Come, Kate, we'll to bed"). The strongest essays will argue that Shakespeare has quietly reversed the sisters' positions: Bianca ends the play trapped in a marriage where her strategic compliance has failed, while Kate ends it in a marriage where her performed compliance has earned her a voice that the room, however uncomfortably, listens to. Whether that counts as freedom is the essay's final question — and the one Shakespeare refuses to answer for us.

Part of the challenge is that every production is an argument about the play, and every argument leaves textual evidence on the cutting-room floor. A director who stages Kate's speech ironically has to explain the historically sincere readings the Elizabethan audience would have brought; a director who stages it sincerely has to explain the sun-and-moon scene, where Kate clearly demonstrates the ability to say absurd things with a straight face. A nuanced essay acknowledges what your staging has to suppress, not just what it foregrounds.

Consider also what the missing Induction frame means for a modern director. Many productions add an invented close — Sly reappears, or the actors step out of character, or the set visibly breaks down — specifically because the unclosed frame is intolerable in a contemporary theater where the audience has no shared doctrinal expectation of wifely obedience to fall back on. A director who restores such an ending is making an argument that the play cannot work for modern audiences without that distancing device; a director who refuses the addition is arguing that the discomfort is the point. The best essays will treat the staging question as inseparable from the interpretive one, and will use specific textual moments — Petruchio's "Why, there's a wench! Come on, and kiss me, Kate," the kneeling, the offered hand beneath the foot — as the places where the director's argument either lands or falls apart. Name the productions you are responding to if you know them. Directing Shakespeare is always an argument with the productions that came before.