Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, and literary
devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.
Disguise
Disguise figures prominently in The Taming of
the Shrew: Sly dresses as a lord, Lucentio dresses as a
Latin tutor, Tranio dresses as Lucentio, Hortensio dresses as a
music tutor, and the pedant dresses as Vincentio. These disguises
enable the characters to transgress barriers in social position
and class, and, for a time, each of them is successful. The play
thus poses the question of whether clothes make the man—that is,
whether a person can change his or her role by putting on new clothes.
The ultimate answer is no, of course. In The Taming of the
Shrew, society involves a web of antecedents that are always
able to uncover one’s true nature, no matter how differently one
wishes to portray oneself. Tranio, disguised as Lucentio, needs
only to bump into Vincentio, and his true identity surfaces. As Petruchio
implies on his wedding day, a garment is simply a garment, and the
person beneath remains the same no matter what disguise is worn.
Domestication
The motif of domestication is broadcasted in the play’s
title by the word “taming.” A great part of the action consists
of Petruchio’s attempts to cure Katherine of her antisocial hostility.
Katherine is thus frequently referred to as a wild animal that must
be domesticated. Petruchio considers himself, and the other men
consider him, to be a tamer who must train his wife, and most of
the men secretly suspect at first that her wild nature will prove
too much for him. After the wedding, Petruchio and Katherine’s relationship
becomes increasingly defined by the rhetoric of domestication. Petruchio speaks
of training her like a “falcon” and plans to “kill a wife with kindness.”
Hortensio even conceives of Petruchio’s house as a place where other
men may learn how to domesticate women, calling it a “taming-school.”
Fathers and Their Children
The several father/child relationships in the play—Baptista/Bianca, Baptista/Katherine,
Vincentio/Lucentio—focus on parents dealing with children of marriageable
age and concerned with making good matches for them. Even the sham
father/son relationship between the disguised pedant and the disguised
Tranio portrays a father attempting to make a match for his son,
as the pedant attempts to negotiate Tranio’s marriage to Bianca.
Through the recurrence of this motif, Shakespeare shows the broader
social ramifications of the institution of marriage. Marriage does
not merely concern the future bride and groom, but many other people
as well, especially parents, who, in a sense, transfer their responsibility
for their children onto the new spouses.
