“Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, 5.2.125-26”   By Ervin Beck, Explicator; Fall 1998, pages 8-11

Katherine's encomium to wives at the end of The Taming of the Shrew is initiated by Petruchio's command:

Katherine, that cap of yours becomes you not.

Off with that bauble, throw it underfoot (V, ii, 125-26).

Katherine's plucking her cap off her head, throwing it to the floor, and possibly even stomping on it make up a crucial, symbolic event, although its theological significance seems to have passed unnoticed. Traditionally seen as a final sign of Katherine's conditioned subservience, Petruchio's telling Katherine to remove her cap may instead be a sign that he thereby liberates her from subordination to him.

Critics usually see in the discarded cap merely a variation of act 4, scene 3, where Petruchio withholds from Kate the Haberdasher's cap that she covets. By logical extension, then, in act 5 Kate's obedience to Petruchio's "impossibly humiliating demand" shows that "she has learned the pointlessness of such selfish stubbornness." By conflating both cap scenes in such a formalist manner, even a New Historicist like Stephen Greenblatt arrives at a similar single-minded conclusion in his discussion of Shakespeare's use of the "fetishism of costume" to communicate "what can be said, thought, felt in this culture" (57). He, too, says that Kate's discarding of her cap "demonstrates [Petruchio's] authority" over his "tamed wife" (58).

Whether or not the actual physical cap in act 5 is the one the haberdasher offered in act 3, the meaning of "cap" in Kate and Petruchio's relationship has changed or expanded since the symbol was first introduced into the discourse of the play. In act 3, the cap raises the issue of who will decide which cap Kate will wear. But in act 5, the issue is the much larger theological issue of whether Kate needs to wear any cap at all.

As a visual preface to Kate's sermon to wives, the cap in act 5 embodies St. Paul's discussion of Christian headship in 1 Corinthians 11.3-15: "But I would have you know, that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of every woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God. Every man praying or prophesying, having his head covered, dishonoureth his head. But every woman that prayeth or prophesieth with her head uncovered dishonoureth her head. . . . " King James Version)

That well-established association is spoken to in "A Homily of the State of Matrimony" published in 1563 for reading in Anglican churches in The Second Tome of Homilies by Archbishop Matthew Parker, Bishop James Pilkington, Rachard Taverner, and others. After discussing proper wifely obedience, the homily continues: "This [obedience] let the wife have ever in mind, the rather admonished thereby by the apparel of her head, whereby is signified, that she is under covert or obedience of her husband. And . . . that apparel is of nature so appointed to declare her subjection [to her husband]. . . . For if it be not lawful for the woman to have her head bare, but to bear thereon the sign of her power wheresoever she goeth, more is it required that she declare the thing that is meant thereby. And therefore these ancient women of the old world called their husbands lords, and showed them reverence in obeying them" (177).

This conventional value given to the woman's head covering raises the intriguing possibility that by telling Kate to discard her cap Petruchio is actually freeing Kate from patriarchal subservience to him and creating a relationship of mutuality rather than hierarchy. Kate is now at liberty to do and say what she wants.

Just as Kate's encomium begins with a symbolic action initiated by Petruchio, so it concludes with another equally symbolic action initiated by Kate. That is, of course, her offer to place her hands under her husband's foot as token of her full submission to him. Speaking first to the Widow and Bianca she says: "And place your hands below your husband's foot, In token of which duty, if he please, My hand is ready, may it do him ease " (V,ii,181-83). This speech has been used to support opposite interpretations of the play. If Kate indeed places her hands under Petruchio's foot, then patriarchal dominance is confirmed. Most critics, however, have assumed that Petruchio does not allow Kate to do so. Her speech is, after all, only an offer. And Petruchio responds to the offer, not by asking her to humiliate herself, but by asking her to kiss him--"Come on, and kiss me, Kate" (184)--which emphasizes mutual affection rather than servile devotion.

Just as Petruchio is testing Kate in this scene--by seeing what she is like when given freedom in the marital relationship--so Kate can be seen as testing Petruchio with her final offer to place her hands under his feet: Does he really mean that she now has the liberty to be what and who she wants to be? If so, then he will reject or ignore her offer, treat her as an equal--and the play concludes in a satisfactorily "romantic" manner. Meanwhile, during her speech and the final other lines, Kate's symbolic cap has lain on the floor--perhaps even kicked around a bit--as a mute reminder of the bondage from which she is now free.

The objections to so oversimplified an interpretation are, of course, obvious. It is Petruchio, after all, who has permitted--even commanded--Kate to reject this symbol of masculine authority. And her obedience to him in doffing the cap is fully in keeping with the successful conditioning of Kate that he has engineered in the preceding scenes.

Yet Kate's speech is so eloquently persuasive that it seems to come from the heart. And the symbolic actions that frame it help us believe in the freedom and sincerity with which Kate delivers it.

Relating Kate's cap to the 1 Corinthians text does not simplify the ending; in fact, it renders its possibilities more complex. It may show that Shakespeare is working within a conventional view of male and female relationships that is as old as the Wife of Bath's tale in Chaucer: What does a woman want most of all? Sovereignty. What does she do as soon as she obtains sovereignty? Yield to the wishes of her husband--because she loves him.

That may be merely male wish fulfillment, again, and it certainly does not match what feminist critics today regard as good gender relationships. But it helps establish a kind of mutuality in marriage that is usually present in Shakespeare's romantic comedies and it makes a disputed comedy even more teasingly complex.