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Rising above the Bait: Kate's transformation from bear to falcon

It seems that no discussion of The Taming of the Shrew can do without addressing, explicitly or implicitly, the vexing issue of Katherine Minola’s obedience speech. This paper cannot do so either. Causally linked to the taming part, this speech provides a starting point for any critical understanding of the character of Petruchio and of the purpose of his actions. Structurally related (mainly by virtue of contrast) to the Sly framing device, it also holds important clues concerning the function of the tinker’s presence in the play. Critical attention to these three particularly ambiguous sections of The Taming of the Shrew (its induction, its middle part, and its conclusion) and to the characters prominent in them (Sly, Petruchio, and the tamed Katherine) has been persistent. It has yielded valuable insights into the possibilities of reading the play in various ways: as ‘‘a dark study of domestic abuse’’, as a farce deriding Elizabethan gender relations, or, most optimistically, as the dramatization of a process in which a ‘‘dysfunctional personality’’ is healed and transformed into a ‘‘fully human creature’’. Accordingly, Kate’s final delivery has been seen either as a tragic gesture of defeat completing an excessively brutal taming, as an extension of the jesting begun in the Sly episode, farcical itself and therefore not to be taken all too seriously, or as a cunning ironical performance proving the heroine’s verbal and social aptitude and asserting her autonomy in marriage. Shakespeare scholarship does not expressly favour any of these readings. In recent years it rather seems to have sought to synthesize them. Thus Carolyn Brown, for instance, contends that Kate’s soliloquy, though ironical, does not make