Shakespeare's first effort in writing comedy was followed rather closely by three plays that established--with some hesitation--the direction that virtually all his later comic writing would follow. In The Taming of the Shrew (1593-94), The Two Gentleman of Verona (1594), and Love's Labor's Lost (1594-95) mature erotic and romantic relationships culminating in marriage occupy the focus in a way that makes the treatment accorded this area of experience in The Comedy of Errors seem perfunctory indeed. This trio of comedies prepares the way for the brilliant A Midsummer Night's Dream, written on the threshold of Shakespeare's ripest comic period.

It is not, to be sure, the case that Shakespeare simply and abruptly abandoned certain central concerns of The Comedy of Errors in moving on to later plays. A preoccupation with identity and character, for instance, continues throughout his writing of comedy. But after his first comic play these matters tend to be treated under the aspect of viable erotic relations, which are themselves viewed as the goal of human development and maturation. No longer do comic actions round toward the recovery of a previous state of affairs; instead, they push ahead to a future that, for all that it grows out of a past, we can imagine as discontinuous from it.

But neither is it the case that Shakespeare discovered the paradigm that we have come to think of as most characteristic of his comedies either at a stroke or in the course of some sure and unflinching progression. The three plays to be considered in this chapter, and particularly the first two, reveal a kind of tentativeness and uncertainty in the solutions they embrace, a tendency to explore in directions that would never be taken again in the roughly 10 years of Shakespeare's intensive writing of comedy for the stage. From the point of view of the mature comedies, there are some cul-de-sacs here; once having entered them there was little the playwright could do after encountering the dead end but back out and begin afresh. An important task of what follows will be to suggest some of the things he may have picked up on the way in and out.

The Taming of the Shrew is a most pertinent case in point. The story of the main plot, though it can cause a modern audience a good deal of uneasiness, would perhaps have surprised no one who first saw it in the early 1590s. One of Shakespeare's probable sources, an extant play called The Taming of a Shrew, is but one version of a common story concerning a willful woman brought to heel; the male fears that underlie such stories find expression even in folkways--the village procession, for example, aimed at ridiculing a shrewish wife (or the weak husband considered her victim) known as a skimmington. Such is the view from the ambient culture looking into the Shakespearean corpus, but if we shift our venue to the inside, The Taming of the Shrew begins to look more like an anomaly, something Shakespeare tried early on and then abandoned for good. For the central romantic relationship as it develops between Petruchio and Kate really reverses the emphases of what we must consider the typical relationship in Shakespeare's comedies, where the woman is ordinarily the preceptor (though she does her teaching in male disguise), the man the aberrant or foolish creature who must by some means be brought into line. "I found him under a tree, like a dropp'd acorn," Celia says of the moonstruck Orlando in As You Like It (III, ii, 234-35), making clear the assumed superiority of females to males, at least in the probationary period of the typical romantic comedy.

Instead of calling in question certain distinctions we normally take for granted, including the distinctions we habitually make between the sexes, Shakespeare was apparently content in The Taming of the Shrew merely to internalize the dominant patriarchal ideology of his world in order to confirm it in Petruchio's victory over his fractious wife. This ideology proclaims among other things the "natural" superiority of husband to wife, a hierarchy typically bolstered by analogies with other hierarchies more or less taken for granted and announced as the natural way of things: monarch over subject, aristocrat over commoner, human being over animal--this last, of course, enabling the title of Shakespeare's play.

It is not altogether surprising that this situation, so unpalatable to the modern sensibility, has produced in recent years various kinds of palliative interpretation. One line of argument concedes the coercive, even cruel, elements of Petruchio's treatment of Kate, the draconian methods of his "taming-school" (IV.ii.54), but then points out that the kind of farce Shakespeare was writing typically involves reducing people to the status of things and manipulating them as such. Since farce always involves a distancing and stylizing of violence, since it encourages a certain anaesthetization of normal feeling on the part of its audience, we are liberated to laugh at a spectacle that under difference circumstances might disturb or even appall us. There is much in Shakespeare's text to suggest the validity of this approach, including the fact that some of the protagonists' most outrageous moments, like Kate's act of breaking the lute over Hortensio's head (II.i.148-59) or Petruchio's outlandish behavior at his wedding (III, ii, 157-79), are narrated by secondary characters rather than dramatized directly. Indeed, Grumio's account of the rough-and-tumble misadventures on the road to Petruchio's country house is rendered, ostensibly to protest Curtis's interruptions, in conditional sentences, which has the effect of further distancing what is already at a considerable remove from unmediated action: 

Such stylized distancing is at least indirectly related to another line of palliative argument, one that makes somewhat larger claims for the sophistication of dramatic technique in The Taming of the Shrew. In this case we are asked to believe that what Petruchio wants from Kate is not unquestioning submission and obedience but "play and mutuality," that Petruchio's aim is to get Kate to realize that shrewishness is not in one's nature, not some putative ingrained characteristic, but a role adopted according to a choice now forgotten as such and become "second nature." On this view the change Petruchio effects in Kate is not much different from the change Rosalind of As You Like It will later effect in Orlando or the one Viola in Twelfth Night will effect in both Orsino and Olivia. In all cases it is the preceptor's problem to try to get his or her subject to take a broader and more flexible view of the self, to come to the happy awareness that we have more choice about who we are and what we do than we had supposed, and that one's current mode of address to the world is hardly the only or inevitable one.

Again, as with the argument from the nature of farce, there is much in the text that can be taken to support such a stance. Repeatedly, whether self-consciously or naively, various characters treat Kate's ill-humor and outrageous behavior as if they were a matter of pretense, a put-on for whatever reason. Thus, in response to Kate's evidently unpalatable suggestion that Bianca favors the elderly Gremio among her suitors, the sister replies, "Is it for him you do envy me so? / Nay then you jest, and now I well perceive / You have but jested with me all this while" (II, i, 18-20). This may be the last resort of desperation (Kate has bound her sister's hands in an attempt to wring information from her), but it surely prefigures Petruchio's far more knowing way of slyly treating Kate's temper as if it were merely the face she shows the world and not at all an expression of her essential self. When Petruchio blandly announces that the wedding day is Sunday, and Kate snaps, "I'll see thee hang'd on Sunday first" (II, i, 299), Bianca's suitors and her father are understandably skeptical about Petruchio's success in wooing. But he is unshaken in his deadpan determination to deny the obvious facts of the matter:

The key phrase here, perhaps, is "I choose her for myself," for Petruchio means not only that he has chosen Kate as his wife but that he has chosen a version of her, a possible Kate, so to speak, more nearly conformable to heart's desire.

Hamlet, prince of Denmark, possibly the most theatrically preoccupied character in all of Shakespeare, advises his frail mother to "Assume a virtue, if you have it not":

The gist of Hamlet's advice, however arrogant it sounds in coming from a son to his mother, is perfectly valid: what begins as the pretense of virtuous behavior, its mere acting out, can become with time internalized and automatic, indistinguishable from native virtue indeed. Similarly, we may understand Petruchio's strategy as involving the thrusting of a role upon Kate that she will gradually learn to play to perfection, a process that is clearly prefigured in the "Induction" to The Taming of the Shrew, when the Lord arranges to have the role of aristocratic gentleman thrust upon Christopher Sly, who in turn begins to believe (although his belief is quite partial and clearly unstable) that unaccustomed luxury is his true lot in life, his memories of his life as a tinker the delusions of madness merely.

Side by side with the strategy of treating Kate as if her behavior were already mild and harmonious Petruchio also does an exemplary impersonation of an outrageous nonconformist, providing Kate with a hyperbolic parody of her own refractory ways. His cobbled-together costume (III, ii, 43-63), his bizarre behavior at the wedding ceremony (III.ii.157-82), and certainly his impatient cantankerousness later on at his house in the country (IV.i, IV.iii) all seem directed at mirroring Kate's own excesses and persuading her to abandon them, to adopt a mode of behavior governed by "modesty," a key term in this play in that it refers both to a social virtue and to an artistic one, the kind of disciplined control the Lord of the "Induction" has in mind when he warns the players about a failure of their "modesties" (Ind., i, 94). But both of Petruchio's strategies are at bottom thoroughly theatrical, and they form the centerpiece of a play that is preoccupied with the changes, the substitutions, the crossings and dissolutions of otherwise well-established boundaries that become possible in theatricalized situations.  Indeed, so eager was Shakespeare, apparently, to imbue The Taming of the Shrew with the plasticity of the theatrical that he included instances of dubious necessity, at least as far as the manifold plots and schemes of the play are concerned. We may wonder, for instance, why the servant Tranio must assume the identity of his master Lucentio, and further why, having taken on his master's role, he must woo Bianca in concert with his master who is disguised as Cambio. "If thou ask me why," says Lucentio, "Sufficeth my reasons are both good and weighty" (I, i, 247-48). We may suspect that his reasons are Shakespeare's and have to do with generating further instances of personal substitution and interchange.

Thus we may choose to see stubbornly rooted positions in Taming of the Shrew happily dissolved in playfulness and theatricality, the world shifting giddily, forming and reforming, as various characters conjure it in imaginative language. There is a delightful exuberance in Tranio "get[ting] a sire" (II, i, 411), that is, finding an older man to impersonate Vincentio to Tranio's own impersonation of Lucentio. In his punning on get as "procure" and as "beget" Tranio stirs into life the youth's comic fantasy of simply reinventing an older generation to meet the needs of the younger. Such play is clearly related to Petruchio's strategy of treating Kate as if she were already an ideal woman, and Petruchio himself is, of course, the play's past master of improvisation, one who invents and reinvents the world as the situation requires, whose every move reminds us of the techniques of the theater, whether he "thinks with oaths to face the matter out" (II, i, 289), or feeds Kate "with the very name of meat" (IV, iii, 32)--the only way, after all, characters in a play are ever fed.

But even after noting all the abundant examples of exuberant, self-conscious theatricality on the part of both characters and playwright we shall still be forced to admit that Kate's conversion from shrewishness rests as much on threats and coercion as it does on discovering the joy of playful mutuality. Even a view of the play as generous and sympathetic as that put forth by Marianne L. Novy cannot quite eliminate all taint to violence in Petruchio's bearing toward Kate, and when Novy remarks of the celebrated IV,v that Petruchio "claims the moon is shining, not the sun, and refuses to continue the trip unless [Kate] agrees," we can only object that Petruchio does something more than refuse to continue the trip. Indeed, he threatens a return to the "taming-school" with its physical deprivations of food and sleep. We cannot speak of a progression from farce to a higher form of comedy here, simply because the farcical threat of violence continues as a way of guaranteeing the pretense of something more refined. And the language that Kate is here bullied into speaking is hardly "determined by her relationship with Petruchio," except insofar as he is threatener, she threatened. We cannot have play and reciprocity on the one hand and coercion on the other. Coerced play is no play at all but at best the appearance of play.

Critical discussions about The Taming of the Shrew will doubtless continue to culminate in interpretations of the fifth scene of the fourth act, as well as of Kate's final speech concerning the duty of wives. In each case there will be debate about the tone of Kate's language in particular, how we are to "take" it, what we suppose the speaker's relation to her words to be. Perhaps no argument about these matters can ever be knockdown or final, but it seems certain that the concluding exhortation concerning the duty of wives can never entirely escape the shadow of coercion and be truly read as a virtuoso performance, part of an intimate and fluid game that Petruchio has succeeded in teaching Kate to play. In the final analysis The Taming of the Shrew seems not so much to achieve playful mutuality as to gesture toward it.