KAHN,
Coppélia. Coming of age: marriage and manhood in Romeo and Juliet and the
taming of the shrew. In: Man’s estate:
masculine identity in Shakespeare. London: University of California Press,
1981. p.104-118.
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By Profª. Drª. Bárbara de Fátima.
Shakespeare described his male character, Petruchio,
the tamer of his wife, Kate, giving him the precious tools to achieve his main
intentions: money, power, ambition. He spends the whole play trying to tame her
using non-human techniques, mechanisms which
cannot be applied even to irrational animals. Everything is against Kate. Her
father accepts her marriage to Petruchio because he has financial interests.
Kate is, before marriage, a product of parental irresponsibility and stupidity.
She is unkind, bad-tempered, sharp-tongued, and non-affective. Here, she
represents the outlaw feminine principle. Petruchio is violent, tyrant
(mechanical taskmaster and he has the financial power). But at the end of the
play Kate becomes a product of marital power and love, that is, docile, polite,
and kind. Here she represents the inlaw feminine principle. Petruchio was
conquered by his wife’s love and submission.
According to the play, we notice that Kate is a free
woman, neither speaking about the chains of marriage nor the punishment that
Petruchio brings up to her. Her freedom comes from the linguistic feature; her
emancipation becomes greater and greater through the language spoken by her,
the tone which is used a symbol to her ironical performance. It brings to her
husband’s admiration and love.
She dominated her husband using her language, her
inner feelings showed through her speech and her words called Petruchio’s
attention to her as a human being. It sounds to him as subordination, but it
isn’t. Her speech shows authority and wisdom, qualities which are supposed to
be masculine. It sounds as the changing of rebel to conformist, but it isn’t.
The fantasy which is present in Petruchio’s mind
blinds him to see what really is in Kates’s mind; he becomes from victorious
tamer to a complacent master. Petruchio’s performance describes the presence of
the feminine’s weakness’ myth: only the woman
has the power to subordinate a man, by transforming him her tamer.
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