The Taming of the Shrew Multiple Choice Quiz | 20 Questions

Answer: a drunken Warwickshire tinker

It sometimes feels as though Shakespeare wrote this play - including its contentious title - primarily in order to offend the sensibilities of the twentieth-century politically-correct brigade. Right at the outset Sly describes himself as a "tinker" (not entirely a safe word to use in our own time), and even worse - as we learn from the scholar G.R.Hibbard - in Shakespeare's time at least "the distinction between beggars and tinkers was not a very sharp one, and both were proverbially noted for their fondness for ale". This apparently congenital drunk from the labouring classes is one of those types Shakespeare may be assumed often enough to have encountered at first hand in his native Warwickshire, but on the plus side he usually renders them in his plays with human warmth (or with "an infusion of tenderness", in Nevill Coghill's fine phrase). Discovered - having seen off the "hostess" - in a drunken stupor by an aristocratic hunting party, Sly is abducted by a whimsical Lord and his servants, dressed in rich clothes and persuaded that he is himself an aristocrat, that a servant boy in drag is his beautiful wife, and that a quite lengthy play, "The Taming of the Shrew", is about to be performed especially for his benefit. In this way the main drama is framed, and effectively distanced from our everyday lives: the editor of the New Cambridge edition, invoking the notion of "comedy as a kind of therapy", maintains that Sly can be seen by us as "a kind of Lord of Misrule presiding over a brief period of holiday from everyday conventions". "The very fact," adds the author of "The Rough Guide to Shakespeare", "that the taming plot is presented as a fit entertainment for a bewildered drunkard makes it hard to take in the soberest of terms."

This is the only time that Shakespeare employed the favourite Elizabethan device of an "induction" to introduce his main drama, and there has been much critical discussion as to why, having begun the Sly episode with such panache and apparent enthusiasm (the "induction" runs to eleven sparkling pages in my New Penguin edition of the play), the Bard seems quite quickly to have lost interest in it so that the drunken tinker only reappears briefly as a character once more in the main action and then is given nothing at all more to say, although he is still presumably expected passively to sit and watch the whole drama unfold to the end. Did the Bard write more for Sly and the Lord's retinue only for the passages to be lost? If only we knew more about this!

There does exist another play with a similar title and theme, published in quarto form in 1794. This play is evidently not by Shakespeare, although we cannot be sure whether it was written and performed before or after his. In it, the Sly character is retained until the last scene: several times he rouses himself from a drunken stupor to speak some lines and then puts the lid on the whole drama successfully with a final sally in which he vows to go home and "tame" his wife in the manner he has learned from the shrew-taming "hero", Petruccio. The critic Jonathan Bate thinks that the 1623 First Folio text of Shakespeare's Shrew", the only text we have, is probably quite seriously corrupt and that Sly should in fact stay watching from the balcony, occasionally engaging in dialogue with his companions, until the final scene; afterwards he will go home and discover that he has learned nothing about how to "tame" his wife: on the contrary, she will beat him, as usual. Perhaps, however, Shakespeare thought that his play stood well enough on its own merits to obviate the need for such a framing device to be continued to the end, or perhaps the company he was writing for could not spare three valuable actors (one of them a boy who could play women's parts) to sit on the balcony all that time impersonating Sly, his "lady wife" and the Lord when they were needed onstage.

Answer: scenes from ancient Roman mythology

Babbling on about "Marian Hacket, the fat ale-wife of Wincot" - according to some scholars, probably a real-life Warwickshire acquaintance of the young Shakespeare's - Sly is far too drunk to register any interest in the idea of looking at the Lord's art collection, but the pictures are lightly enough described, and the spirit of comedy is never far away. Still, there is a serious element in these pictures which - since Shakespeare did not forget that there were intellectuals in the galleries looking for cerebral stimulation as well as groundlings standing in the open-air "pit" in front of the stage content with ruder pleasures - we can easily enough relate to certain themes in the ensuing play that is about to be presented. The three classical subjects mentioned as portrayed in the pictures are those of Venus and Adonis, Jupiter and Io, and - the one most graphically described - Apollo and Daphne:

" ... Daphne roaming through a thorny wood,
Scratching her legs that one shall swear she bleeds,
And at that sight shall sad Apollo weep,
So workmanly the blood and tears are drawn."

The nymph Daphne was changed into a laurel tree to save her from being ravaged by the god Apollo, and it is the theme of metamorphosis, the constant changes effected physically in nature and psychologically upon humankind, that the pictures, as described, appear to conjure up. G.R.Hibbard insists that this idea "runs all through the play, and is closely related to the references to Ovid, which are many". There is every reason to believe that Shakespeare read the great Roman poet Ovid - author of "Metamorphoses", "Ars Amatoria" ("The Art of Love") and other well-known classics - assiduously and with great enthusiasm, both in Latin and in English translation. The first metamorphosis we see in Shakespeare's play, of course, is that of Sly himself, transformed in appearance from a ragged peasant to a powerful lord, and as he begins to ask himself if he really is such a personage there is a comical hint of pschychological transformation too (it is at this point in the "induction" that he almost imperceptibly switches from his homely countryman's prose to blank verse, the medium in Shakespeare of the high-born). Sly's apparent transformation prefigures that of numerous characters in "The Shrew" who are persuaded, as Hibbard observes, "to take on a fresh personality, and to assume a different role in life from that which they had previously".

Jonathan Bate thinks that as we watch Shakespeare's play "the Ovidian allusions, with their violent ends, remain to remind the audience that we can never be sure that all will end well". But they are also related to the theme of disguise (Jupiter disguised as a bull in order to ravish Io, for instance), and disguise is a key feature of "The Shrew"'s ensuing action which is multiplied so bewilderingly that the audience is encouraged to reflect on the possibility that no one at all can ever really be what he or she seems. The valuable Shmoop website takes the argument a little further by suggesting that in Shakespeare's play, physical disguises "are modes of deception that suggest all forms of transformation are temporary and not to be taken at face value". Sly, after all, whatever is supposed to have happened to him by the end of the performance, is unlikely - we might suppose - to be anything other than a bemused Warwickshire tinker when he wakes up again the following morning.

Answer: Padua

Lucentio's reference in his opening speech to "fair Padua, nursery of arts" is historically correct: the town, which also traditionally claims to be the most ancient of all North Italian cities, boasts the second-oldest university in Italy, founded in 1222 (and which for eighteen years that coincided almost exactly with the most intense period of Shakespeare's writing career, employed Galileo Galilei, no less, as a lecturer). Wikipedia reports how in the thirteenth century the institution outpaced its only Italian predecessor, Bologna, "to become a centre of early humanist researches with a first-hand knowledge of Roman poets that was unrivalled in Italy or beyond the Alps". Shakespeare was evidently well aware of this impressively august background to his distinctly irreverent and often slapstick farcical drama.

The dialogue in this scene is at first a little stilted since , in order to inform the audience of his intentions, Lucentio is telling his servant things that Tranio must already know:

"To see fair Padua, nursery of arts,
I am arriv'd for fruitful Lombardy,
The pleasant garden of great Italy...
...I have Pisa left
And am to Padua come as he that leaves
A shallow plash to plunge him in the deep."

Tranio says he approves of Lucentio's intentions but advises him to temper his studies with fun, symbolised by Ovid's licentious amatory verses:

"Let's be no stoics nor no stocks, I pray,
Or so devote to Aristotle's checks
As Ovid be an outcast quite abjur'd...
No profit grows where is no pleasure ta'en."

(Tranio knows that the more fun Lucentio has, the more fun his servants are likely to have too.) The dialogue is then interrupted by the entry of Baptista Minola, his two daughters, and two of his younger daughter's suitors; with their entry - "some show to welcome us to town", enthuses Tranio - the farcical elements in the Bard's plot begin to show themselves, and the ridiculous confusions and misunderstandings that Shakespeare found in the ancient Roman playwright Plautus, and unfailingly added to in his own comedies, start to be set in motion. (The subplot involving Bianca and her suitors, incidentally, is the only part of the play for which a direct literary source has been identified: a play called "Supposes" by the Bard's older contemporary George Gascoigne, which is itself based on "I Suppositi", an Italian comedy by Ariosto.)

Answer: Gremio

Venetians will no doubt have been a common sight in sixteenth-century Padua, since the town had been part of Venice's territory for two hundred years (and was to remain so for another two hundred), but it was the figure of the stereotypical Venetian pantaloon that Shakespeare must have known his audience would most relish. "To no motive did the comic tradition stick more tenaciously," writes H.B.Charlton, "than to this of the folly of old fools." A figure straight out of the Italian "commedia dell'arte", the pantaloon, as G.R.Hibbard reminds us, "was always portrayed as an old man, a Venetian by origin and dialect, and invariably appeared clad in tights, a red jacket, a long black sleeved gown, and black slippers" (of course, the modern Shakespeare director is under no obligation to follow the sartorial tradition: there are many other ways of drawing out the character's comic potential). This absurd figure - although in Shakespeare even he is not a complete caricature: he is given a few human touches - wants to marry the beautiful and much sought-after young heiress Bianca, Baptista's daughter. He already has one declared rival, the much younger, sprightlier and apparently more eligible man-about-town Hortensio; but as we watch the scene another rival appears before our eyes in the person of the newly-arrived visitor Lucentio, who falls for Bianca's charms at first sight.

The principal fly in the ointment for young Bianca's suitors is her older sister, Katherina - the "shrew" of the play's title - whom Minola has decreed must be married before her younger sibling, much to Gremio's and Hortensio's evident dismay. Katherina makes her presence felt on stage immediately, threatening Hortensio that she will "comb his noddle with a three-legg'd stool" and generally being as rude as possible to everybody in sight. When she has flounced offstage after her family, Hortensio hatches a plan with Gremio to try and procure a husband for the "curst shrew" in order to free up Bianca for marriageability. They exit in their turn, enabling the two unnoticed eavesdroppers to come out of hiding and discuss the charms of the younger sister ("I burn, I pine, I perish, Tranio," exclaims Lucentio, "If I achieve not this young modest girl)."

Having heard her father wish for good schoolmasters for Bianca, they decide to change clothes so that the servant will masquerade in town as his master in order to impress Lucentio's father's old friends, while Lucentio will disguise himself as a young schoolmaster in order to get into Bianca's presence and plead his love for her. (As he says, "We have not yet been seen in any house,/Nor can we be distinguish'd by our faces/For man or master.") To a second servant, Biondello, who suddenly appears on stage, Lucentio invents a cock-and-bull story about just having killed a stranger in the street and needing to disguise himself for this reason. The audience will have to stay pretty alert from now on if they are to follow all the swings and roundabouts of the ensuing action. It is too much for poor Sly, who now makes his last comment from his seat above the stage before disappearing forever from the Folio script: "'Tis a very excellent piece of work, madam lady. Would 'twere done!"

Answer: a wealthy one

Petruccio (I prefer the authentic Italian spelling of the name as it leaves us in no doubt as to how it should be pronounced) has just inherited his father's estate and is evidently eager to find, as quickly as possible, a suitably well-connected and well-off wife who can help him to run it. Hortensio opens his front door to find his old friend indulging in a slapstick routine with his obstreporous servant, Grumio, which culminates in the master wringing the wretched servant violently by the ears (this kind of stuff - straight out of Plautus and ancient Roman farce - always works a treat on stage even though, it has to be said, it seems childish beyond belief when one reads through it). Having restored calm, and discovered Petruccio's matrimonial intentions, Hortensio half-jokingly informs him of an eligible young woman "With wealth enough, and young and beauteous,/Brought up as best becomes a gentlewoman," but "intolerable curst" with a shrewish tongue. Clearly a man to relish a challenge, Petruccio asks her father's name and discovers it is none other than Minola, an old acquaintance of his late father's: he decides immediately to go and find him, with Hortensio accompanying him in order to try his luck with Bianca disguised as a music teacher, Petruccio providing him with an introduction and recommendation to her father.

On their way the two friends happen on Lucentio, also disguised as a schoolmaster, and old Gremio, who - having no idea that his young companion is really Lucentio - has agreed to pay him to woo Bianca on his (Gremio's) behalf, while Lucentio, of course, will be pleading only his own cause. The pantaloon, in other words, is paying good money to have his own love chances ruined ("O this woodcock, what an ass it is!" exclaims the quick-on-the-uptake Grumio to no one in particular, his words sufficiently cryptic to evade Gremio's understanding should he happen to overhear them.) Petruccio's intentions are announced to the company, to much consternation and tut-tutting although when it is apprehended that he might be about to do Bianca's suitors a mighty favour, Gremio is quickly persuaded by Petruccio's buddy Hortensio - "I promis'd we would be contributors/And bear his charge of wooing, whatsoe'er" - to pay the headstrong adventurer in order to encourage his success with the elder sister.

Tranio, disguised as his master Lucentio, now appears asking for directions to Minola's house. Not - apart, of course, from Lucentio himself - recognising him, the assembled company suspect him of being another of Bianca's suitors, and he says nothing to disabuse them of this idea: in fact he encourages it ("What, this gentleman will out-talk us all!" complains Gremio). When it is explained to Tranio what he already very well knows, that success with Bianca is dependent on first finding a husband for Katherina, and further that Petruccio is that potential husband, he is very happy to agree (since it is not his own money he is promising, after all, but Lucentio's) to become yet another financial subscriber to Petruccio's wooing of Katherina. In fact he invites them to an impromptu dinner that very afternoon, to "quaff carouses to our mistress' health,/And do as adversaries do in law,/Strive mightily, but eat and drink as friends".

Answer: David Garrick

By all accounts, Garrick was one of the most electrifying actors of all time, and perhaps we shouldn't criticise him for adapting and sometimes rewriting the Bard's precious texts or for introducing his own gimmicks and props to every performance: this is the kind of thing which directors, and perhaps especially actor-directors, have always done. Petruccio's whip, as it happens (which Garrick reportedly first introduced in 1754) was a remarkably popular innovation with audiences, and with actors and directors too: Andrew Dickson, in "The Rough Guide to Shakespeare", informs us that "the prop would remain obligatory well into the twentieth century".

Two hundred years, and many productions of the play, down the line from Garrick, at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1978 Jonathan Pryce - without a whip - was rumbustiously memorable when he doubled as Sly and Petruccio. I saw this production, and I remember Pryce taking outrageous liberties with a number of Sly's lines. (The local newspaper, the Stratford Herald, indignant at Katherina's bored, listless and ironic delivery of her long final speech, wittily entitled its report of the production "The Shaming of the True".) A couple of years after this the one and only John Cleese, who had apparently never acted Shakespeare before, was persuaded by the director Jonathan Miller to take on Petruccio, opposite Sarah Badel's Katarina, for BBC television: I have been unable to track any videos of his performance but he received some excellent reviews for his sensitivity to the perceived complexities of the character's personality and behaviour. Another production I wish I'd seen was Phyllida Lloyd's at the Globe on London's Bankside in 2003, in which not only Petruccio, but the entire cast, was played by women: Andrew Dickson reports that "the violence of the play was largely dissipated and it emerged as less ideologically problematic and more and more an out-and-out comedy". Most of all, however, one would love to be transported back to an early 1590s performance by the Bard's own all-male troupe, an experience which would be likely to revolutionise our understanding, especially if it is true that - as the late Sir William Empson once surmised - the part of Katherina was probably played not by a young boy but by a fully-grown butch male actor!

This last consideration might lead one to reflect on the possibility that the very fact of female actors in the English theatre taking on women's parts, as they have done since the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, may have blurred whatever effect the Bard intended to convey when he wrote for an all-male cast, and that perhaps "The Shrew", because of its preoccupation with sexual politics, has suffered more from this than anything else in the canon. Certainly twentieth-century British actresses, even the best and brightest of them - Edith Evans, Peggy Ashcroft, Sybil Thorndike, Janet Suzman, Barbara Jefford, Vanessa Redgrave - all suffered adverse criticism of one kind or another from some quarters for their portrayals of Katherina, as though an entirely convincing performance of the part were a thing impossible. The apparently increasing tendency towards ironic interpretations of the taming theme in these actresses' performances, allied to the fact that their reviewers were predominantly male, may also have something to do with this. "Productions of the play," observes Ann Thompson in her sensible introduction to the New Cambridge edition, "have frequently attracted whatever thoughts were in the air on the perennially topical subjects of violence and sexual politics." Thompson sees the play "acting as a kind of litmus paper, picking up worried and embarrassed reactions from men who were probably just as committed to male supremacy as they take the play's hero to be, but whose methods of oppressing their women were less obvious and more socially acceptable." We even find, during the inter-war years, the prominent liberal academic Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch remarking, half-seriously it appears, that "one cannot help thinking a little wistfully that the Petruchian discipline had something to say for itself".

Answer: tongue

Before looking at the passage these lines come from in more detail, let us take a little time here to consider the character of Petruccio. Whoever plays the part must surely erupt onto the stage like an elemental force of nature, with all the appearance of amorality which that might entail. A Shakespearean character is created, first and foremost, by the the kind of language he speaks; and from the start Petruccio's hints at a kind of lyrical vitality that the other personages in the play can hardly match: "Such wind as scatters young men through the world/To seek their fortunes farther than at home," for instance. This quality rises to a climax in lines which seem to me to give a new lift to Marlovian blank verse and announce a new poetic voice in the Elizabethan theatre:

"Have I not in my time heard lions roar?
Have I not heard the sea, puff'd up with winds,
Rage like an angry boar chafed with sweat?
Have I not heard great ordnance in the field,
And heaven's artillery thunder in the skies?
Have I not in a pitched battle heard
Loud 'larums, neighing steeds, and trumpets' clang?
And do you tell me of a woman's tongue
That gives not half so great a blow to hear
As will a chestnut in a farmer's fire?"

This young man's characteristic behaviour is of a piece with the hyperbolical lyricism of the verse he is given to speak in passages like this. Professor Nevill Coghill, for one, was drawn to the character: Petruccio, he maintained, was "good-natured, vigorous, candid, humorous and likeable ... Though he is loud-mouthed and swaggering, he is not contemptible: to Kate he must have seemed her one hope of escape from that horrible family, against which she had developed the defensive technique of shrewishness; it is this which Petruccio is determined to break in her, not her spirit; and he chooses the method of practical joking to do so." In the view of another critic, Richard Hosley, "The main plot is animated ... not by the 'fabliau' tradition of beating a virago into submission but by the humanist tradition of inducing a spoiled young wife to mend her ways." Harold C. Goddard is of a similar mind when he remarks that "Petruccio's procedure at bottom shows insight, understanding, and even love. Those actors who equip him with a whip miss Shakespeare's man entirely. In principle, if not in the rougher details, he employs just the right method in the circumstances, and the end amply justifies his means." Petruccio has charmed all mid-twentieth century male critics at least, it seems: with the exception, that is, of H.B.Charlton, who sourly reminds us of the character's avowed mercenary motives and who believes that Petruccio "triumphs because he denies love ... he is a less complete man than any of his audience, and the world he knows is less than theirs".

Answer: she hits him over the head with his lute

The arrival of a motley crew of suitors at Minola's house is preceded by a second brief cameo glimpse of Katherina's characteristic behaviour as, having tied her younger sister's hands, she tries to bully her into revealing the name of her favourite suitor and ends up slapping her, just as her father enters the room in time to untie Bianca's hands and send her away out of immediate danger. Her sister, however, follows her out in a fury, whereupon my New Penguin Shakespeare edition of the play provides the following remarkably detailed stage direction:

[Enter Gremio, with Lucentio, disguised as Cambio, in the habit of a mean man; Petruccio, with Hortensio, disguised as Licio; and Tranio, disguised as Lucentio, with his boy, Biondello, bearing a lute and books.]

Baptista could be forgiven for appearing a little taken aback by the sudden appearance of this crowd, but Petruccio, as ever, takes the initiative and expresses his wish to pay court to Katherina, at the same time introducing his friend Hortensio as Licio, a clever young tutor "Cunning in music and the mathematics,/To instruct her fully in those sciences" (Hortensio's original plan was to tutor Bianca, not her sister, and the actor playing him is entitled to register acute dismay at this unwanted change of pupil). Gremio then presents Lucentio as Cambio, a tutor "cunning in Greek, Latin and other languages", and Tranio announces himself as Lucentio, another suitor for the hand of the "fair and virtuous" Bianca who has brought a lute and some books as gifts for her. The two would-be tutors are quickly sent off to begin their first lessons.

Baptista and Petruccio then get down to business discussing details of bequests and dowries, although the former is clearly nervous about likely shenanigans from his eldest daughter which could ruin everything. (Katherina's dowry is fixed at twenty thousand crowns, which one scholarly professor has discovered was "an extraordinary figure in the 1590s, about two and a half times the going portion even among the highest peerage", as if Minola is so desperate to get rid of his daughter that he is happy to pay her bridegroom almost anything to take her off his hands.) Petruccio, however - even though he has yet to meet his intended bride - expresses no qualms: "I am rough and woo not like a babe," he reassures his prospective father-in-law. He becomes even more enthusiastic when the hapless Hortensio appears with the broken lute draped around his neck "as in a pillory", peering forlornly through the instrument (Katherina's verdict, evidently, on the quality of his music tuition). "Now, by the world, it is a lusty wench," cries Petruccio,/I love her ten times more than e'er I did./O, how I long to have some chat with her!" He is soon to have his wish, and while he waits for her to appear he takes the opportunity to explain his rough wooing tactics to the audience:

"Save that she rail, why then I'll tell her plain
She sings as sweetly as a nightingale.
Say that she frown, I'll say she looks as clear
As morning roses newly wash'd with dew ...";

and so on, and so on.

Answer: False

[Petruccio] "Good morrow, Kate - for that's your name, I hear."
[Katherina] "Well have you heard, but something hard of hearing;
They call me Katherine that do talk of me."

It is true that her father, like all the other gentlemen in the play, address her as "Katherine", but Petruccio is having none of it:

"You lie, in faith, for you are call'd plain Kate,
And bonny Kate, and sometimes Kate the curst.
But Kate, the prettiest Kate in Christendom,
Kate of Kate Hall, my super-dainty Kate,
For dainties are all Kates, and therefore, Kate,
Take this of me, Kate of my consolation."

(This deliberate over-familiarity towards his intended bride on Petruccio's part has been echoed, rather comically perhaps, by many of the play's editors and critics, to the extent that Robert B. Heilman of the University of Washington, editor of the Signet Classic edition, lists her in the play's Dramatis Personae merely as "Kate, the shrew". Is this not one male editorial slur too many?)

This first meeting of the pair sets the sparkling tone for all their subsequent encounters. Their talk, enthuses Professor Park Honan, is "colloquial, earthy, often bawdy, sharp as a slap in the face, enriched by snippets from country folk-tales and legends"; and Edward Dowden in the nineteenth century remarked that "the characters of Katharina and Petruchio in particular are firmly and finely drawn, the scenes in which they appear, though infinitely amusing, never quite passing into downright farce".

As their bravura dialogue - "a conscious display of the rhetorical arts of grotesque description, farcical narrative, and inventive vituperation", G.R.Hibbard has called it - develops, Petruccio untruthfully insists that Katherina's father has consented to the match and a dowry fixed upon, "And will you, nill you, I will marry you/ ... For I am he am born to tame you, Kate,/And bring you from a wild Kate to a Kate/Conformable as other household Kates."

Upon Baptista's reappearance in the company of Gremio and Tranio, Petruccio lies brazenly to him that his daughter has agreed to everything in secret and it is all settled, in spite of her furious outburst to her parent:

"You have showed a tender fatherly regard
To wish me wed to one half lunatic,
A madcap ruffian and a swearing Jack,
That thinks with oaths to face the matter out."

Petruccio silences the other men's misgivings with a string of further untruths about Katherina's private professions of love for him, and the episode concludes with a ritual sealing of the match during which the lady remains silent (a silence which has been interpreted in several different ways) before her husband-to-be leads her away with the words "We will have rings, and things, and fine array,/And kiss me, Kate, we will be married o' Sunday."

Answer: a wasp

[Petruccio] "Come, come, you wasp! I'faith, you are too angry."
[Katherina] "If I be waspish, best beware my sting."
[Petruccio] "My remedy is then to pluck it out."
[Katherina] "Ay, if the fool could find it where it lies."
[Petruccio] "Who knows not where a wasp does wear his sting?"

And, of course, this leads on to a fairly predictable string of bawdy jokes. Shakespeare here has Petruccio and Katherina make use of a verse drama technique originating in ancient Greece which involves, in the words of the New Oxford Companion to Shakespeare, "dramatic dialogue in which two characters rapidly exchange single lines partly echoing one another's previous utterances". The accepted literary term for this dramatically arresting technique is "stichomythia", for which my google dictionary provides a slightly more detailed definition: "stichomythia: sequences of single alternating lines, or half-lines or two-line speeches [which are] given to alternating characters, [and which] typically feature repetition and antithesis". It is a fast-moving technique which, in the case of this scene, adds to the electricity of the occasion, and it goes on now for two-and-a-half pages of mutual insults and continual word-twisting laced with bawdy puns and other more or less dubious jokes, at the end of which Petruccio tries to take his intended wife in his arms (as we conjecture from her subsequent words) and she slaps him, whereupon he threatens to beat her if she does it again. Leaving aside the intellectuals in the galleries, it's a fair bet that most members of Shakespeare's original audiences will have had considerable difficulty in following every detail of the spoken dialogue in this part of the scene, although many of them will certainly have relished the bawdy jokes (as audiences still do today).

Another well-known example of stichomythia in Shakespeare - and another quite lengthy sequence - occurs in "Richard III" between the future King Richard and Edward IV's widowed queen, Elizabeth. It is a highly tense and austere exchange, in keeping with the play's dour and tragic theme, whereas "The Shrew"'s extended altercation between Petruccio and Katherina is light-hearted and funny, as befits a comedy. This is then almost immediately followed by the "bidding for Bianca" episode, superintended by Baptista, in which Tranio and old Gremio first prepare for the action by indulging in a quick burst of stichomythia of their own, almost as if it were a parody of what has gone before, and as if to concentrate their minds on the matter in hand:

[Gremio] "Youngling, thou can'st not love so dear as I."
[Tranio] "Greybeard, thy love doth freeze."
[Gremio] "But thine doth fry.
Skipper, stand back, 'tis age that nourisheth."
[Tranio] "But youth in ladies' eyes that flourisheth."

Answer: Tranio wins, provided his father can guarantee his offer

The attitude of all three men on stage to the process of bidding for Bianca appears to reduce the status of the prospective young bride to that of a fine-looking beast in a cattle market, although the hyperbole of the whole scene encourages us to enjoy the rich comedy of the occasion rather than to reflect on more serious issues relating to the treatment of women. The American critic Maynard Mack (my "scholarly professor" of a few questions back) suggests that in this hilarious scene "the enormous traffic in heiresses in the 1590s is being spoofed", and also recalls a modern production he once saw in which the bidding has reached such dizzy heights "that Baptista's computer blows up". In the excitement of the moment, both suitors seriously risk exhausting their credit (Tranio, of course, is secretly bidding everything on his master's behalf, not on his own): in Mack's summary, "Gremio bids for Bianca with an argosy and Tranio/Lucentio replies with a whole merchant fleet plus its escort". Having silenced his rival with his spurious munificence, Tranio now suddenly bethinks himself that he will have to find a fake father to guarantee his offer, otherwise the lovely Bianca will revert to the old pantaloon Gremio by default. If he can manage this, Bianca (without having her permission asked, of course) will be duly delivered as bride to Tranio/Lucentio just one week after her sister's wedding to Petruccio.

We pass immediately to the distinctly farcical scene involving Bianca and her two disguised would-be tutors. Some commentators have found the episodes involving Bianca inferior (Dowden even doubted whether they were by Shakespeare), but in fact they are fast and concise, essential to the plot, and often - as in this scene, featuring the snide and snarling rivalry between the two mock tutors - extremely entertaining. After Lucentio (as Cambio) and Hortensio (as Licio) have quarrelled acrimoniously about which of them should be given priority, the lady decides the issue for them and they affect, while secretly giving her avowals of their love, to test her knowledge of Latin poetry and music respectively, both tutors speaking as quietly as possible in order not to arouse the other's suspicions. In the Latin lesson, Lucentio falsely "construes" a passage from Ovid's collection of amatory poems "Heroides", whereupon his jealous rival attempts to win the day under the pretext of elucidating for his pupil the mysteries of the medieval hexachord and the musical "gamut". Ann Thompson observes that Shakespeare is able here "to set up a contrast between the spurious education of Bianca, who could not learn anything from these pretenders even if she wanted to, and the less conventional but more effective education of Katherina".

During these phoney lessons Bianca - revealing herself to us as being less than the "whiter-than-white" paragon that her name suggests - appears in her coquettish way to favour "Cambio" over "Licio", and the latter, who has become deeply suspicious of his upstart rival (whom he believes to be a mere menial) is about to go off and confide his suspicions to the real servant, Tranio, whom he thinks is Lucentio. In a later scene he does indeed bring the latter to eavesdrop on another "tutorial" involving Bianca and "Cambio", in which all doubt is removed. The disgusted Hortensio immediately revokes his claim to Bianca (and Tranio, of course, is quite happy to do the same), whereupon Hortensio instantaneously remembers a "wealthy widow" of his acquaintance who will happily marry him, it seems, at the drop of a hat. The sudden arrival into the plot of this new character, who appears only in the play's final scene (and whom the critic Richard Hosley wittily designates a "madonna ex machina") has led some commentators to conclude that the part of Hortensio was rather badly botched during revisions made by the Bard during the later stages of the play's composition.

Answer: he is paralytically drunk

Petruccio arrives, as boisterous and energetic as ever - certainly as far from "paralytic" as it is possible to be - but very scruffily dressed and extremely late. Katherina has been reduced to tears by the thought that after all the excitement of a sudden marriage, she is going to be stood up after all, and Baptista has also betrayed his nervousness (no doubt for his own selfish reasons rather than for his daughter's sake), but after his initial relief at seeing the bridegroom he expresses disgust with his wildly inappropriate dress sense. Petruccio, however, dismisses these objections: "To me she's married," he says, "not unto my clothes," and rushes off to find his "lovely bride" and take her off to church with him with no further delay.

The wedding takes place offstage, and is telescoped into just a couple of minutes of stage time - during which Lucentio and Tranio discuss their continued need to find an elderly man to pose as Lucentio's father - before Gremio rushes onstage to give an outraged, gossipy account of how the church ceremony has gone: apparently Petruccio swore at the priest, cuffed him, and then called for wine:

"'A health!' quoth he, as if
He had been aboard, carousing to his mates
After a storm; quaff'd off the muscadel,
And threw the sops all in the sexton's face ...".

He then "took the bride about the neck/And kiss'd her lips with such a clamorous smack/That at the parting all the church did echo". Gremio's conclusion is that the bridegroom is even madder than the bride. Ann Thompson - thinking of Sly again - remarks that "despite the Paduan setting ... [the] ... marriage seems to take place in a world of country courtship practices and sports (hunting, falconry) readily accessible to a Warwickshire tinker". Petruccio a little later in the play explicitly likens his courtship strategy to the taming of a hawk.

He rushes in again now with his retinue and drops a new bombshell on the assembled wedding party by informing them that he and Katherina must go home immediately, without joining in any of the lavishly assembled celebrations that have been prepared for them. Katherina protests feistily against this - and quite reasonably, too, one might think - but Petruccio simply will not take no for an answer. Perhaps fortified by the church wine, he defends his rights over his wife in Old Testament terms:

"I will be master of what is mine own.
She is my goods, my chattels; she is my house,
My household stuff, my field, my barn,
My horse, my ox, my ass, my anything."

Whilst authority for this attitude can be found in various parts of the Bible, it is doubtful whether Shakespeare's original audiences would necessarily have unanimously subscribed to it, let alone modern ones. But we are still in the world of farce and fairy tale, at least to some extent, and this is part of Petruccio's strategy of "taming" his troublesome wife - in fact, he has hardly started yet, as the subsequent scenes will show. At any rate, he has his way again and the wedded couple go off at once, to the amused comments of Bianca - "being mad herself, she's madly mated" - and Gremio - "I warrant him, Petruccio is Kated."

Answer: his company in bed

The arduous journey through the cold and muddy Italian countryside is described to the home-based servant Curtis by Grumio, who has been sent on ahead to ensure that everything is in order by the time his master and mistress arrive. The tale of the journey is told in Grumio's distinctively humorous fashion, and the interchange with Curtis inevitably involves a boxing of the latter's ears for good measure. (The first actor to play Curtis must have been an unusually short chap, since there are many cruel jokes here about his diminutive size.) There are many servants on call, and the house's organisation appears to be excellent, but when Petruccio arrives with his exhausted bride he is clearly in a mood to find fault with everything. When supper is brought in he pretends it is burnt and dry and hurls both dishes and food at his bewildered menials, heedless of Katherina's protests:

"I tell thee, Kate, 'twas burnt and dried away,
And I expressly am forbid to touch it,
For it engenders choler, planteth anger;
And better 'twere that both of us did fast,
Since of ourselves, ourselves are choleric,
Than feed it with such over-roasted flesh."

Having decided that nothing will be eaten that evening, Petruccio escorts Katherina to the bedroom, where - overheard by Curtis - he "rails, and swears, and rates, that she, poor soul,/Knows not which way to stand, to look, to speak,/And sits as one new-risen from a dream". The assembled servants scarper upon the sudden re-entry of their master, who now - alone on the stage - confides to the audience his nocturnal tactics:

"As with the meat, some undeserved fault
I'll find about the making of the bed,
And here I'll fling the pillow, there the bolster,
This way the coverlet, another way the sheet ...
She shall watch all night,
And if she chance to nod I'll rail and brawl,
And with the clamour keep her still awake."

One imagines him nodding and winking with the colluding (or perhaps partly non-colluding) audience as he adds ironically, "This is a way to kill a wife with kindness". There is no mention here of sexual activity, which adds to the fairy-tale feeling of the developing narrative: everything on the bridegroom's part at this stage appears to be pretence and falsity, and nothing but his bride's feelings are real. Her troubles are set to continue the next morning, when she will be deprived of food again, and of new clothes too.

Answer: a tailor

The episode involving a tailor and a haberdasher comes the following morning, after Katherina has been cheated of breakfast, first by Grumio's insufferable clowning and then by Petruccio's appeal to his perennial sidekick Hortensio (who has by now materialised as a house guest) to eat everything up before the lady can get to it. One can well imagine Shakespeare's groundlings hooting with delight at the following episode involving the poor tailor, whose role turns out to be one of public humiliation by Petruccio; the scene is played out with such loving attention to detail that one guesses tailors must have been fair game for an Elizabethan audience, as they undoubtedly were later in nineteenth-century English folklore ("A tailor is but the ninth part of a man," according to one popular song of the latter time.) Katherina likes the cap offered to her by the haberdasher very much, but her husband insists that it "was moulded on a porringer" and dismisses the man, whereupon it is the tailor's turn. "I never saw a better-fashion'd gown," enthuses Katherina, but when the tailor contradicts Petruccio's interpretation of her words the master lets off a ferocious stream of vituperation at him:

" ... Thou liest, thou thread, thou thimble,
Thou yard, three-quarters, half-yard, quarter, nail,
Thou flea, thou nit, thou winter-cricket thou!
Brav'd in mine own house with a skein of thread!
Away, thou rag, thou quantity, thou remnant ... "

The tailor continues to argue his corner as forcefully as he dares, but when the mischievous Grumio decides to join in the argument on his master's side, the poor man cannot compete - although as he is leaving Hortensio promises to pay his bills quietly the following day.

Answer: that strangers from Mantua discovered in town will be put to death

This new character, who appears to be a Mantuan merchant although for some reason he is referred to throughout as a "Pedant" in the Folio speech-headings, has been spotted by Biondello as a gullible-looking fool who can easily be persuaded by Tranio to impersonate Lucentio's father, in order to sign Bianca's marriage contract and vouch for the staggering offer made for her hand by Tranio on Lucentio's behalf. "Tranio," says H.B.Charlton, "is straight from Plautus and from Terence, still practising his customary role of beguiling the old folks in the interests of their amorous sons and daughters." In fact, such lengths does the ingenious servant go to in order to fulfil this role that one begins to gain the impression that he is doing it more for sheer fun than for any other reason and that a good deal of the lying and deceit he practises may not even be necessary to his purposes. At any rate, the "Pedant" is easily convinced by Tranio's story - the idea for which appears to have been stolen from the Bard's earlier play, "The Comedy of Errors" - that war has suddenly broken out between his city and Padua, and that his life is in great danger: fortunately, by impersonating Tranio/Lucentio's father, who is from Pisa, and ratifying his supposed son's marriage contract, he will be able to escape detection.

Baptista is completely taken in by this ruse, and - his eyes blinded perhaps by money bills - seems to take quite a shine to the fake "Vincentio", whereupon they set off together to Lucentio's house to settle everything. Meanwhile, the real Lucentio is getting ready to marry Bianca secretly at St Luke's church, the idea being that once they are truly married the real Vincentio, who is expected in town imminently, will be unlikely to want to annul the agreement. (Biondello's comment on such a quickfire marriage is gnomic: "I knew a wench married in an afternoon as she went to the garden for parsley to stuff a rabbit.")

It almost seems in the theatre that the procuring of the fake Vincentio, irrespective of any function it has in the plot, is effected mainly because of Tranio's wish to enjoy the sight of the two "fathers" confronting each other, as they will do in a slightly later scene, when the previously meek and amiable "Pedant", fired up by the necessity to dissemble (as he thinks) in order to save his own life, is transformed into a ferocious mountebank who demands that the real Vincentio be peremptorily taken away to prison as a dangerous madman. In this episode, in fact, the "Pedant" gives the performance of his life (if one can say this about a fictional character impersonating another fictional character while taking part in a play-within-a-play). It is one of the most hilarious episodes in the whole drama - but we anticipate.

Answer: the sun and the moon

They had argued previously about the time of day before setting out, with Petruccio refusing to start the journey until his wife stopped contradicting him when he made ludicrous assertions about it. Now, seeing the sun he calls it the moon, and when Katherina cannot restrain herself from contradicting him again, he threatens to call the horses back and return home. It is worth noticing here that Katherina, for all the indignities and torments she has been suffering, has not lost her spirit or her sense of humour when she says:

"Forward, I pray, since we have come so far,
And 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 ...
But sun it is not, when you say it is not,
And the moon changes even as your mind."

They then encounter Vincentio, Lucentio's father, also travelling towards Padua to meet his son. At this point Petruccio's taming strategy becomes positively embarrassing, as he hails the venerable gentleman with the unexpected words "Good morrow, gentle mistress, where away?" and invites his wife to embrace the stranger "for her beauty's sake". She duly addresses the stranger as "Fair budding virgin, fresh and fair and sweet" and is then mocked by her husband for doing so. Mercifully, Shakespeare cuts this somewhat toe-curling scene off short soon afterwards as Vincentio agrees to accompany the eccentric couple on the final part of their journey to Padua.

Having arrived there, the pair are soon back on stage to witness the burlesque episode of the two "Vincentios" referred to earlier, which is brought to a head by the arrival of the newly-married Lucentio and Bianca, who throw themselves on their respective fathers' mercy and ask forgiveness for their extravagant trail of deceit. (At this point in the Folio text there occurs the amusing stage direction for the suddenly exposed plotters: "Exit Biondello, Tranio and Pedant as fast as may be".) Baptista seems at first a trifle unwilling to show mercy towards his errant daughter and son-in-law (whom he has hitherto known as the pedant Cambio), but Vincentio assures his flustered counterpart that he will make it worth his while, and as the scene ends it seems apparent that a "happy-ever-after" conclusion to the drama is imminent, in line with what Richard Holsey calls "the romantic-comedy principle ... that true lovers should proceed to marry whom they like, without regard for their parents' wishes". Katherina - who now for the first time in the play addresses Petruccio as "love" (does this mean she is now really in love with him?), even agrees to kiss him in the street, to avoid further trouble from him. Andrew Dickson maintains that "a didactic and brutal folk tale" has now become "something infinitely richer, and the relationship ... suggests that love can blossom from the most unlikely of ingredients".

Answer: False

Up to this point there has been great psychological acuity in the development of Katherina's metamorphosis from "shrew" to wife: her silences, her ironic interventions and asides, her openness to the possibility of fun, have been entirely convincing. It is also very much worth emphasising that she suffers entirely alone: as Ann Thompson points out, "she is the only Shakespearean comic heroine without a female friend at any point in the play" (and like Petruccio apparently, she has no mother). As for her "shrewishness", many twentieth-century critics have taken a sympathetic line on it, broadly based though it may be on what Andrew Dickson calls "the misogynistic archetype of the shrewish woman [which] crops up repeatedly in oral story-telling ... [for] ... tales about taming apparently difficult wives were a staple of the early modern world". G.R.Hibbard believes that Katherina is "in a revolt against the society she is living in ...

Her shrewishness is a role she has adopted in self-defence, and it disappears when she eventually meets a man who can not only stand up to her but also appreciates her for what she is and responds to the challenge she offers". Nevill Coghill, referring to her initial "shrewish" behaviour, also sees Katherina as "a girl of spirit, forced to endure a father who is ready to sell his daughter to the highest bidder ... and who has made a favourite of her sly little sister".

He asks rhetorically what choice she has "but to show her disdainful temper if she is to keep her self-respect". Various commentators have similarly interpreted Petruccio's rough wooing techniques as bringing out their victim's latent good qualities: the "taming" stratagem, argues Maynard Mack, is "more than an entertaining stage device ... it ... reflects love's genuine creative power, which can on occasion make the loved one grow to match the dream"; and Hibbard agrees that "Katherina ... ultimately becomes the person that Petruchio has deliberately 'supposed' her to be, and, through his clever speeches of admiration for qualities in her that no one else can recognise, has put it in her head that she ought to be and wants to be."

Answer: Petruccio

Petruccio, who "would fain be doing", is quick to complain about the sudden dullness of inaction around the place: "Nothing but sit and sit, and eat and eat!" - but he soon perks up when his own wife and Hortensio's feisty "widow" start metaphorically sharpening their claws on each other. These two eventually exit in Bianca's company, whereupon the idea of a wager is brought up: the three husbands will each in turn summon their wives to return to the table, and the winner will be the one whose command is obeyed first. Biondello is sent in turn to summon Bianca and the widow, but they both refuse to come when requested, and we may feel that their independent spirit is justified and augurs well for their future as wives with a realistic say in their husbands' behaviour. Grumio is then despatched to command Katherina, and she appears immediately, thereby winning the wager for her husband. She is ordered peremptorily by her husband to fetch in the other two ladies, which she obediently does. (The possibly inebriated Baptista is so carried away by the transformation in his daughter's behaviour that he now magnanimously adds another twenty thousand crowns to Petruccio's dowry.) From this moment it seems to me that the perceived message of Shakespeare's wife-taming story becomes distinctly murky, as the witty young woman of previous scenes is suddenly transmogrified into the intoner of a dull, humourless homily to the greater glory of husbands everywhere:

"Such duty as the subject owes the prince,
Even such a woman oweth to her husband,
And when she is froward, peevish, sullen, sour,
And not obedient to his honest will
What is she but a foul contending rebel
And graceless traitor to her loving lord?"

This is, of course, entirely in line with the orthodox Christian doctrine of St Paul: "Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church." (KJV) We may well wonder, though, what all this poker-faced solemnity is doing rounding off a riotous comedy such as the one we have just been watching. The difficulty appears to lie partly in the sudden abandonment of psychological plausibility, and although I have more than once seen brave attempts by actresses to play this final speech ironically or satirically, it has never rung true: Ann Thompson is surely right to insist that "Katherina's final speech is simply too long and too serious to be buried under a welter of comic business, and has even been thrown uncomfortably into relief by such attempts". A.P.Rossiter brings up the notion of the late medieval Morality play tradition, with its "devices and expectations" that can bypass psychological verisimilitude: "'The Taming of the Shrew' is made to end with a 'legend for good women' and a homily put into Katherine's reformed mouth." But this is Shakespeare, and we do not expect him to end a farcical comedy with a humourless homily!

Answer: that Fletcher thought he was a better writer than Shakespeare

Professor Park Honan (the author, by the way, of the quotation in my quiz introduction) believes that Shakespeare in "The Shrew" "opens a Pandora's box, and his view of his materials is ambiguous and unresolved". Honan thinks that the Bard as he wrote this play was in two minds about the morality of men's "ownership" of women, but whether or not this is the case it is evident that Fletcher, Shakespeare's sometime collaborator in "Henry VIII" and "The Two Noble Kinsmen", wanted to steer a different course in his ostensibly more woman-friendly sequel, "The Woman's Prize, or "The Tamer Tam'd", in which an older Petruccio, now a widower, remarries and is given a hefty taste of his own violent medicine by his second wife. G.R.Hibbard remarks that "the appearance of Fletcher's play is not only a testimony to the popularity of Shakespeare's, but also adds weight to the view that 'The Taming of the Shrew' was, among other things, a contribution to the great debate about women and marriage".

Fletcher, of course, was no Shakespeare, and his play lacks the depth and sophistication of "The Shrew", but having looked over it it seems to me that the vengeful second wife of his creation bears in some respects a passing resemblance to Katherina's polar opposite, her sweetly manipulative little sister Bianca. Shakespeare's Bianca is an interesting character in her own right: Hibbard observes that in "The Shrew" the two sisters both end up giving "exactly the opposite impression from that which they made at the beginning", in that "Bianca, who appears at first to be gentle, modest and submissive, proves to be a difficult and self-willed wife; while Katherina, who begins by being self-willed, shrewish and intolerable, becomes a model of wifely obedience and duty." The critic even goes so far as to characterise Bianca as "an accomplished minx", adding that she "is in complete command of the situation, and she remains so, because she has realised that in the society she lives in deception is a woman's most effective weapon". (Harold C. Goddard is under no illusions about Bianca either: she has, he says, "to the casual eye all the outer marks of modesty and sweetness, but to a discerning one all the inner marks of a spoiled pet".) Considering the male-dominated society she lives in, however, it is surely harsh to blame Bianca for her devious tricks and tactics, and there will perhaps have been both men and women in the original Elizabethan audience who will have sympathised (or empathised) with her too. Of modern critics, Jonathan Bate in particular very much approves of her behaviour. It is always worth reminding ourselves, though, that the pert boy actors who will have first played the role are likely to have indulged in such a riot of farcical stage business that questions of sympathy for the character are scarcely likely to have figured largely in the minds of many audience members.

Answer: George Bernard Shaw

"No man with any decency of feeling," Shaw added for good measure, "can sit it 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." Shaw was far from being alone in his view of the play in general and of the last scene in particular: "Ugly and barbarous ... confused, prosaic and tedious ... totally offensive ... barbaric and disgusting ... a delinquent farce." All of this, and worse, has been said about Shakespeare's controversial "Shrew"; and in 1978 the Guardian's chief drama critic even called for the play to be banned from the stage for its perceived violent attitude towards women. When G.R.Hibbard defends the play by arguing that "what, in another context, might well appear cruel, outrageous or offensive is transformed into comic exuberance by a linguistic virtuosity that delights in the exercise of its own powers", he might attract considerable agreement if he is speaking of the play up to its final scene, but "comic exuberance" is surely difficult to find in Katherina's ostensibly solemn long speech at the end.

The play and its ending have been quite stoutly defended in other quarters, though, by women critics as well as by men. The gambling motif is common in medieval folklore, as Ann Thompson reminds us: "The fact," she says, "that in the folk-tale versions the shrew-taming story always comes to its climax when the husbands wager on their wives' obedience must have been partly responsible for the large number of references to sporting, gaming and gambling throughout the play. These metaphors," she adds, can help to make Petruchio's cruelty acceptable by making it seem limited and conventionalised." A defence of Petruccio's behaviour is mounted, too - perhaps a little surprisingly - by the pioneering feminist Germaine Greer, who claims that the play "is not a knockabout farce of wife-battering, but the cunning adaptation of a folk-motif to show the forging of a partnership between equals ... [Petruccio] ... chooses Kate as he would a horse, for her high mettle, and he must use at least as much intelligence and energy in bringing her to trust him, and to accept the bargain he offers, as he would in breaking a horse". Such sympathetic readings of the "taming" motif could be seen as typical of what Ann Thompson herself identifies as a certain "softening" in interpretation of the play in recent decades in order to bring it more into line with the work of "a Shakespeare whom we would prefer to see as a liberal humanitarian".

The American Harold C. Goddard goes further than most in his defence of "The Shrew", which he thinks "is possibly the most striking example among [Shakespeare's] early works of his love of so contriving a play that it should mean, to those who might choose to take it so, the precise opposite of what he knew it would mean to the multitude". Goddard believes that Katherina's last speech is to be taken ironically by those enlightened individuals in the know, that "the woman [i.e. Katherina] can lord it over the man so long as she allows him to think he is lording it over her", and that this disposes of "the wholly un-Shakespearean doctrine of male superiority, a view which there is not the slightest evidence elsewhere Shakespeare ever held". Such a reading might be countered by Stevie Davies's contention, which I found on wikipedia, that people responding to the play have been "dominated by feelings of unease and embarrassment, accompanied by the desire to prove that Shakespeare cannot have meant what he seems to be saying, and that therefore he cannot really be saying it". If it is the world as it is which offends us, suggests Ann Thompson, then perhaps Shakespeare "was rather more comfortable in that world than we might like him to have been." Thompson concludes by recommending that "The Shrew" can no longer be taken as a "straightforward comedy" but should be redesignated a "problem play". An alternative viewpoint might be to characterise it as a riotous comedy with an unobtrusively serious undertow which somehow brings the whole edifice of the drama crashing down at the very end: individual readers and audience members will, as ever, have to decide for themselves.