Book
The Taming of the Shrew
First published 1623
Baptista Minola will not allow his younger daughter Bianca to marry until a husband is found for her outspoken elder sister Katherina. Petruchio accepts the challenge and begins a courtship built on contradiction, spectacle and deliberate control, while Bianca’s suitors use disguises to compete for access to her.
The two marriage plots expose different forms of bargaining within wealthy households. Katherina and Petruchio’s relationship has generated sharply different interpretations because the comedy makes domination, performance and mutual testing difficult to separate. Set in an imagined Italian social world, the play centres on marriage as both a private relationship and an economic arrangement shaped by family authority.
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