“No man with any decency of feeling can sit [The Taming of the Shrew] out in the company of a woman without being extremely ashamed of the lord-of-creation moral implied in the wager and the speech put into the woman’s own mouth.”
George Bernard Shaw. 1897.
“Being a play which invites rant and in places even demands it, The Shrew as naturally tempts the impersonator of Petruchio to unintelligible shouting and mouthing. Yet there is a delicacy in the man underlying his boisterousness throughout, which should be made to appear, and, allowed to appear, is certain to please. He has to tame this termagant bride of his, and he does it in action with a very harsh severity. But while he storms and raves among servants and tailors, showing off for her benefit, to her his speech remains courteous and restrained—well restrained and, with its ironical excess, elaborately courteous.”
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. From his Introduction to The Taming of the Shrew. 1928.
“In Kate, Shakespeare has imagined not merely a harridan who is incurable or a moral stepchild driven into a misconduct by mistreatment, but a difficult woman—a shrew, indeed—who combines willfulness with feelings that elicit sympathy, with imagination, and with a latent cooperativeness that can bring this war of the sexes to an honorable settlement. To have stuck to the main lines of farce, and yet to have got so much of the suprafarcical into farce—this is the achievement of The Taming of the Shrew, and the source of the pleasure that it has always given.”
Robert B. Heilman. “The Taming Untamed, or The Return of the Shrew.” 1966.
“It is Kate’s submission to him that makes Petruchio a man, finally and indisputably. This is the action toward which the whole plot drives, and if we consider its significance for Petruchio and his fellows, we realize that the myth of feminine weakness, which prescribes that women ought to or must inevitably submit to man’s superior authority, masks a contrary myth: that only a woman has the power to authenticate a man, by acknowledging him her master. In The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare reveals the dependency that underlies mastery, the strength behind submission.”
Coppelia Kahn. “Coming of Age: Marriage and Manhood in The Taming of the Shrew.” 1981.
“The Taming of the Shrew is unusually explicit about the financial stakes in Katherine’s marriage to Petruchio. If Shakespeare’s happy endings acknowledge the economic significance of marriage for the larger community, they also, more prominently, celebrate love between individuals—and the happiness resides in the overcoming of potential conflict between the public business or familial alliance and the private business of emotional and sexual compatibility.”
Lawrence Danson. Shakespeare’s Dramatic Genres. 2000.
“Is Petruchio manipulative? Yes. Does Katherine experience treatment unbecoming a gentleman’s daughter? Certainly. But Petruchio is still behaving better, by comparison, than his male counterparts in the wooing subplot, who consistently lie and misrepresent themselves to Bianca in an attempt to buy her hand. I am not suggesting, therefore, that Petruchio is an unblemished character, but rather that his unconventional behavior is designed to assist Katherine in breaking free from her father’s house and Padua in general, so that she may enter a marriage of mutual respect and equality.”
Corinne S. Abate. A Defense of Petruchio and Katherine. 2003.