Context, the Induction frame and the story
What you must know about the play's strange double structure and the Elizabethan world that produced it.
The Induction (this is the most important fact about the play): The Taming of the Shrew does NOT open with Kate and Petruchio. It opens with Christopher Sly, a drunken tinker thrown out of an alehouse. A passing Lord plays a practical joke: Sly is dressed in fine clothes, told he is a nobleman who has been mad for years, and sat down to watch a play 'performed' for his pleasure. That play is the 'taming' story. So everything that follows — Kate, Petruchio, the wooing, the submission — is staged for a drunkard who has been deceived about who he is.
This frame is destabilising on purpose. It asks the audience to remember that the 'taming' is a play, watched by someone whose own identity is a lie. Many productions cut the Induction entirely — and the play they produce is a different play. For Paper 3 you should treat the Induction as evidence in any argument about how seriously the 'taming' is meant to be taken.
The main story (Padua): Wealthy Baptista Minola has two daughters: Katherina ('Kate'), older, sharp-tongued and labelled a 'shrew', and Bianca, younger, gentler, and pursued by suitors. Baptista decrees that Bianca cannot marry until Kate does. To clear the way, Petruchio, newly arrived from Verona to 'wive it wealthily', undertakes to marry Kate and 'tame' her. He woos her in a fast, equal exchange of wit (2.1), arrives at the wedding outrageously dressed, drags Kate away, and at his country house deprives her of food, sleep and clothes until she echoes whatever he says — agreeing the sun is the moon (4.5). In Padua, Lucentio disguises himself as a tutor ('Cambio') to woo Bianca; a hired Pedant impersonates Lucentio's father. At the final banquet, the husbands bet on whose wife is most obedient, Kate alone returns when summoned, and delivers a long submission speech telling other wives to 'place your hands below your husband's foot'. Petruchio wins the wager.
Elizabethan contexts (use as a lens, not a list):
| Context | How it illuminates the play |
|---|---|
| Elizabethan marriage and coverture | A married woman legally became part of her husband's household — Petruchio's 'she is my goods, my chattels' (3.2) is the letter of contemporary law as much as personal cruelty |
| The 'shrew' as a stage tradition | The 'curst wife' was a stock comic figure; Shakespeare inherits it AND complicates it by giving Kate genuine intelligence |
| Source materials | The ballad 'A Merry Jest of a Shrewd and Curst Wife' (brutal taming); the anonymous play The Taming of A Shrew (1594). Shakespeare's version is recognisably softer than its sources |
| The Homily on Marriage and Elizabethan conduct books | Provide the official ideology of wifely submission that Kate's final speech ventriloquises — to the letter |
| Performance history (post-19th century) | Different productions read the speech radically differently (sincere / ironic / performed); productions are evidence for AO5 |
- Christopher Sly's Induction frames the entire taming plot as a play-within-a-play.
- Baptista forces Kate's marriage to clear the way for Bianca's suitors.
- Petruchio wins by depriving Kate of food, sleep and finery until she echoes him.
- Kate's final speech ventriloquises the official Elizabethan ideology of submission.
- Productions diverge sharply on whether the ending is sincere, ironic or performed.