Performing Marriage with a Difference: Wooing, Wedding, And Bedding in the Taming of the Shrew‪.‬

Even before the recent burgeoning of performance theory, The Taming of the Shrew was of great interest to critics interested in role-playing, identity, and theatricality. And because Kate's "taming" and her performative speech both take place in a play-within-a-play, Taming fostered a critical interest in the intersection between performance and gender long before the phrase "gender trouble" became commonplace. The recent debates about performance, culture, and theater sparked in part by Judith Butler suggest, however, that it is time to revisit our analysis of gender and performance in this play. Although there are a number of readings that have already investigated connections between patriarchy and performance in The Taming of the Shrew, critics can largely be grouped into two opposing camps: revisionist and antirevisionist. (1) First there are those who, reading the play as Kate's taming, see her role as reflective or constructive of early modern patriarchal hierarchies that contend that women must be subject to their husbands. (2) Because such readings argue that Kate's speech implies a straightforward acceptance of submission, they deny the play's ability to foster critiques of wifely subordination. Second, there are those who read Kate's final speech ironically, as an act or game. (3) The emphasis on play in these revisionist readings sometimes results in the near avoidance of the uncomfortable taming aspects of the play: Kate's game frees her from them. While the outcomes of these readings are very different, both seem to pretend that early modern patriarchal ideologies are unified and static: Kate submits or escapes subjection to them. And either way, these arguments implicitly suggest that the marriages performed in The Taming of the Shrew do not question or complicate gender hierarchies; rather, they applaud or escape them. In contrast, I suggest that the wooings, weddings, and banquets performed in The Taming of the Shrew do not merely enact an acceptance or rejection of the subjection of wives to their husbands. Rather, they dramatize a marriage that leaves Kate and Petruchio negotiating not only gender hierarchies but also love, sexuality, and parental demands. The Taming's particular reiteration of marriage enacts a series of negotiations for power, none of which results in a marriage based on simple domination and submission or perfect egalitarianism. By exaggerating husbandly dominance, for example, Petruchio's performance draws our attention not to the power inherent in such dominance but rather to its inefficacy. Thereby a conception of marriage that expects hierarchy and mutuality to coincide effortlessly is questioned. Kate emphasizes the room marriage leaves for maneuverability by enacting one that incorporates her wit and sexuality into her very performances of submission. Thus by thinking of marriage (and the female subjection it requires) as performative, we can read Kate's agency through her reiteration of the role of wife--a reiteration that stresses her reshaping of Petruchio and their marriage.