earticle

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This paper tries to read the power relation between gender and class in Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. Petruchio’s goal is to tame the shrew, Katherina into a submissive wife. Petruchio deprived Katherina of food and sleep, and then didn’t allow her to wear clothes for her social status as a gentlewoman. Secondly he controlled Katherina’s “scolding tongue” which makes her renown for shrew, “Katherina the curst”. By changing her name from “Katherina the curst” into “plain Kate”. He thought he could transform her identity. Ironically Petruchio’s linguistic maneuver opened the possibility that let Katherina speak in public by imitating Petruchio’s rhetoric. In the final scene of the wedding banquet, Katherina proved herself a loving wife, ideal model wife by imitating ideal wifely submission. Katherina’s long speech displays “the foolishness of the ideal of womanly behavior” enforced by patriarchal ideology. Her intentional parody reveals Petruchio’s failure to tame Katherina into a submissive wife. Katherina played her role as performance. Actually Katherina is a player because Shakespeare lets play-within-a-play. Taming of the shrew is the play within the Induction. Katherina is a player playing Katherina. Like switching a mask, persona, identity is not a fixed or original one, rather performative in the process.