“
The opposition between women who are people and women who
are something less does not only rest in the vague contrast between
the women of the comedies and the women of the tragedies. There
are more explicit examples of women who may earn love, like Helena who pursued
her husband through military brothels to marriage and honour in
All’s Well, and women who must lose it through inertia and gormlessness,
like Cressida. In The Taming of the Shrew Shakespeare contrasted
two types in order to present a theory of marriage which is
demonstrated by the explicit valuation of both kinds of wooing in
the last scene. Kate is a woman striving for her own existence in a
world where she is a stale, a decoy to be bid for against her sister’s
higher market value, so she opts out by becoming unmanageable,
a scold. Bianca has found the women’s way of guile and feigned
gentleness to pay better dividends: she woos for herself under false
colours, manipulating her father and her suitors in a perilous game
which could end in her ruin. Kate courts ruin in a different way, but she has the uncommon good fortune to find Petruchio who is man
enough to know what he wants and how to get it. He wants her
spirit and her energy because he wants a wife worth keeping. He
tames her like he might a hawk or a high-mettled horse, and she
rewards him with strong sexual love and fierce loyalty. Lucentio
finds himself saddled with a cold, disloyal woman, who has no objection
to humiliating him in public. The submission of a woman
like Kate is genuine and exciting because she has something to lay
down, her virgin pride and individuality: Bianca is the soul of duplicity,
married without earnestness or good-will. Kate’s speech at the
close of the play is the greatest defence of Christian monogamy ever
written. It rests upon the role of a husband as protector and friend,
and it is valid because Kate has a man who is capable of being both,
for Petruchio is both gentle and strong (it is a vile distortion of the
play to have him strike her ever). The message is probably twofold:
only Kates make good wives, and then only to Petruchios; for the
rest, their cake is dough.
”
”