To Kill a Wife with Kindness: Early modern marriage in Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew

Abstract

This essay examines Shakespeare’s portrayal of marital issues in his play, The Tamingof the Shrew, particularly in light of the significant changes in attitudes towardsmarriage brought about by the Reformation. Old and brutal methods of wifediscipliningbegan to be frowned upon and replaced by new ideas presumably moresuited to a marriage of equals. These newfangled methods are demonstrated in the playby Petruccio, a boisterous gentleman who purports to know how to “kill a wife withkindness”. The fundamental question is whether the play condones or criticizes hismethods. The essay also examines the way in which his wife, Katherine, is treated as acommodity, sold to the first bidder who comes along in what was still a largelypatriarchal society, despite the fact that it was ruled by a female monarch. The conceptof the shrew will also be discussed alongside the notion that a harmonious and violencefree household was dependent on a woman’s submission to the husband. Lastly, thisessay looks for signs of violence and maltreatment within Petruccio’s seemingly gentletreatment, primarily by comparing the couple’s often erratic conduct to thepsychological behaviour pattern known as Stockholm Syndrome.