In The Taming of the Shrew, marriage is nothing personal; it’s strictly business. The inhabitants of Shakespeare’s Padua treat marriage as commerce, a ruthless game of mergers and acquisitions. The wealthy Baptista Minola disposes of his daughters like subsidiaries: Katherina is a “fretting” (depreciating) “commodity,” and the higher-valued Bianca a “prize.” After maneuvering to find a buyer for Katherina, he holds an auction for Bianca, declaring that whoever “can assure my daughter greatest dower shall have my Bianca’s love.” This cult of commerce equates love with money, poisoning any chance of honest love. This same culture brands Katherina as a “shrew” and a “devil” for refusing to go along with this heartless system of matchmaking. Watching her sister Bianca fashion herself into a false, sellable image of love to fulfill men’s expectations, Katherina rages at the complete absence of genuine love from the Paduan concept of marriage. Corroded by anger, she can barely speak to her family and neighbors.
This is more than just the stuff of plays; in Shakespeare’s time, marriage really was a business. “Love nowadays for money is sold,” went a 1625 ballad, and indeed marriage functioned as the most important way for wealth to travel between families. A woman’s family was expected to provide a dowry of money and household goods (known as “moveables” or “chattels”), which immediately became the property of the man she married. The Duchess of Newcastle protested in 1664 that daughters were “but branches which by marriage are broken off from the root from whence they sprang, and ingrafted into the stock of the other family, so that daughters are to be accounted but as movable goods or furnitures that wear out.” And as late as the eighteenth century, laws in Europe prohibited men under 25 and women under 21 from marrying without their parents’ consent, allowing wealthy families an easy means to control their assets.
But in Shakespeare’s England, love was beginning to do battle with business. “Some parents greatly abuse their authority, while they sell their children to others for to be married for worldly gain and lucre, even as the grazier selleth his oxen to the butcher to be slain,” wrote the preacher Thomas Becon in 1560. Not only was popular sentiment turning against arranged marriage, but English laws also began to take the financial needs of the wife into consideration. Many English marriage contracts guaranteed “jointure,” the right of the wife to inherit her husband’s estate after his death instead of losing it all to the closest male heir. These contracts strongly resembled those of joint stock companies, business partnerships to which each partner contributes capital. The obsession with jointure (also known as “widowhood”) in The Taming of the Shrew hints that Shakespeare is introducing English attitudes to his money-hungry Italian characters.
Petruchio, though an outsider to Padua, also starts out with the marriage-as-business mentality: “I come to wive it wealthily in Padua.” But as soon as he meets Katherina, the two begin a stormy journey toward a more honest, English-style marriage. First, however, he must deprogram her from the Paduan cult of commerce. He sees that despite her hatred for the love-destroying materialism of Padua, life there has made her deeply materialistic. So he marries her and takes her out of Padua as quickly as possible. He deliberately demolishes the wedding traditions by ridiculing the commodities that seem to make up the wedding: the clothes, presents and parties.
With Katherina removed from the destructive environment of Padua, Petruchio begins his systematic “taming” of her, a series of brutal but (to his mind) necessary steps to cure her of her rage and build their relationship: he refuses to let her sleep or eat until she thanks him; he screams and curses worse than she ever could; and he withholds beautiful clothing from her, insisting that “’tis the mind that makes the body rich.”
Not until Petruchio has purged Katherina’s consuming anger and materialism is she ready to rejoin society, and to partner with him in marriage. He compares the process to falconry, the ancient art of training a wild bird to cooperate with a human in hunting. “The trick is not to take freedom away from the bird,” the American falconer Steve Layman has said, “but rather to get the bird to see the advantages of the relationship with the falconer.” Throughout, Petruchio declares his expectations openly to Katherina, informing her of all the benefits and drawbacks of being his wife. Her final declaration that “such duty as the subject owes the prince, even such a woman oweth to her husband” seems repulsive to a modern understanding of marriage. But this common analogy of Shakespeare’s time contains a two-way promise: just as a prince must protect his subjects in order to earn their loyalty, so a husband must provide for his wife in order to earn her allegiance. In this clearly delineated partnership, each partner can rely on the other.
The relationship between Katherina and Petruchio is violent, uneasy and intimate, but above all honest, a far cry from the fraudulent business practices employed in the pursuit of Bianca. Lucentio and Bianca fell in love in disguise, and so they find themselves married to strangers. After the “counterfeit supposes” under which they wooed are removed, they must confront an unfamiliar reality. The Paduans view the unusual arrangement between Katherina and Petruchio as “a wonder,” because they are used to marriage as a hostile takeover, a shady business deal. To Katherina and Petruchio, marriage must be a good-faith negotiation.
—Akiva Fox, Literary Associate