Line #13 WMG/TheTamingOfTheShrew


1	[[WMG: Kate represents Queen Elizabeth I and Bianca represents Queen Mary.]]
2	Elizabeth was shrewish, whereas Mary was docile (at least in their personal life).
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4	[[WMG: The play is pro-shrew.]]
5	This is a relatively recent theory, or at least recent to be spoken in public, since being pro-shrew back when this play was socially unacceptable. In the final scene, Kate the zealous shrew is portrayed as a superior wife to the docile Bianca and widow.
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7	Related theory:
8	[[WMG: Kate wins.]]
9	She's only pretending to be docile in the end. It's plain when her submissive act begins on the ride to her father's that she has undergone no gradual change of personality or slow breaking of spirit but abruptly grits her teeth and starts agreeing with Petruchio's ridiculous whims just to get what she wants. There's been plenty of scholarly debate on this one.
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11	[[WMG: The scene with Katarina tying up Bianca was intentional {{Fanservice}}.]]
12	* Not really; both Kate and Bianca would have been played by teenage boys. Unless you're into that, I guess.
13	** “Never let a good crossdressing joke go to waste" could well have been Shakespeare's live motto...
14	** Any LGBT person, straight women and cross dressing fan who wouldn’t normally want to see this kind of play but were dragged to it deserved something enjoyable. Shakespeare knew this so he got the two pretty teenage boys who played the sisters to do some (PG-13) Yaoi related stuff for their entertainment.
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16	[[WMG: Kate is truly in love with Petruchio and truly wanted a husband all along.]]
17	In the beginning, she's angry and jealous over her sister having multiple suitors and having none of her own. Later, she seems genuinely distressed when it looks like Petruchio isn't going to show up to their wedding (if she was really being forced into marrying him against her will, it hardly makes sense that she would rant about his absence instead of breathing a sigh of relief). This, of course, requires the interpretation that she wanted a tough-manly-man who wasn't afraid of her, which supports the theory that the play is pro-shrew for implying real men are attracted to shrews.
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19	[[WMG: The moral of the play is: Real men don't beat their wives!]]
20	A skilled husband doesn't need to resort to beating to control his wife, no matter how shrewish he is.
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22	[[WMG: Kate's personality never really changed.]]
23	Her shrewishness was an act all along. She put on a disagreeable {{Jerkass}} facade because any man who couldn't deal with an assertive wife wasn't worthy of her. Once Petruchio proved he was man enough to take it and respond in kind, she dropped the mask and became the perfect wife.
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25	[[WMG: An alternate moral: [[HiddenDepths First impressions can be deceiving.]]]]
26	Kate, the "shrew" whom no one likes, ends up lecturing the sweet and "perfect" Bianca on what it means to be a good wife after Bianca turns out to be surprisingly disobedient and assertive toward her husband.
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28	[[WMG: Somebody lost the ending to ''Theatre/TheTamingOfTheShrew''.]]
29	Originally, it cleared up [[WhatHappenedToTheMouse what happened to Sly]].
30	* That is actually what happened. Shakespeare snipped out the original ending, in which Sly, confident that he knows 'How to Tame a Shrew', goes to practice Petruchio's method on his wife [[LaserGuidedKarma and gets sorely beaten for it]]. This was probably cut because [[ExecutiveMeddling Shakespeare's creditors doubted there was a market for a women-sympathetic ending.]]
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32	[[WMG:The ending was "dictated" by the era's equivalent of the "Hayes Code"]]
33	* Back in the days of the Hayes Code, you could geta way with a lot, if only you had your story end the "right" way. You could talk about crime, or homosexuality, or drugs, as long as the gays were either "[[CureYourGays cured]]" or "[[BuryYourGays dead]]", [[CantGetAwayWithNuthin the crime did not pay]] and [[DrugsAreBad the drugs were evil]]. Maybe this was the same, either the MoralGuardians or [[ExecutiveMeddling his financiers]] said to Shakespeare "You cannot write a story where the shrew wins", so he made a memorable story of a shrew and tacked on an ending about which he felt the same way most modern audiences feel today: Like it's been tacked onto a story that has a totally different tone in the rest.

Context WMG / TheTamingOfTheShrew