"To Show Scorn Her Own Image": The Varieties of Education in "The Taming of the Shrew"

Abstract

Recent work on The Taming of the Shrew has contended that such problematic features of the play as the open-ended Sly framework, the interrelationships among the various subplots, Petruchio's treatment of Kate, and Kate's notorious final speech are illuminated by such themes as patriarchy, game-playing, and the Ovidian transformations that Shakespeare uses throughout this phase of his career.' However valid these approaches may be, the disparate themes, anomalies, and subplots of The Taming of the Shrew coalesce into a dramatic unity when framed by the broader Renaissance debate over education. To be sure, The Shrew is a romantic farce; it would be a mistake to reduce the play to a simple examination of the timeworn nature vs. nurture debate. But to approach The Shrew without considering Renaissance theories of education is analogous to approaching The Tempest without taking into account Renaissance beliefs concerning magic.2 I shall argue below that, while Renaissance education theorists vigorously debated the most efficient and effective means to impart literacy and numeracy, all sides agreed that education was a complex process of socialization. Through it, the student learns to acquiesce to the prevailing social hierarchies by internalizing the dominant value system and tempering those passions that threaten social order: namely, irascibility and concupiscence. Such self-mastery enables the student to accept his or her designated role in society.3 This theory of education undergirds The Shrew's Induction and the play-within-the-play. In the context of this theory, both the on-stage lord and his courtiers and Shakespeare's audience, ranging from groundlings to court wits, might have viewed Petruchio and Kate not only as a swaggering, patriarchal boor and an Amazonian icon, but also as exempla of the educative function of mimetic art. Groundlings and wits alike in the onand off-stage audiences would have seen Kate's tantrums as a mirror of their own lack of self-control, her transformation into a submissive wife as a reflection of their potential for Renaissance versions of educated civility, and Petruchio's roughand-tumble approach to courtship and marriage as exemplary of a pedagogy that might move them from incorrigibility to civility.4 Lucentio's and Hortensio's love-in-idleness and their wooing of