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Scene Study prepares you to perform key scenes for your theater class or audition. We've got all the information you need for a great performance.
Excerpt from Act 5, Scene 2 Monologue: Katherine
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Understanding the Given Circumstances
- This scene takes place in Padua, at a banquet at Lucentio’s home. It is the last scene in the play, and the banquet is in honor of three recently married couples: Katherine and Petruchio; Katherine’s sister Bianca and Lucentio; and a wealthy widow and Petruchio’s friend Hortensio.
- Katherine, the “shrew” of the title, began this play as a brash, aggressive, and verbally cruel woman. Over the course of the play, she has been introduced, engaged, and married to Petruchio. Petruchio has taken it upon himself to “tame” Katherine, subjecting her to various kinds of torment in an effort to make her acquiesce to his will.
- Katherine’s longstanding reputation in Padua is of an ill-tempered woman. No one at the banquet believes that she could have changed from belligerent to demure. At the beginning of the scene, it appears that they might be right: she is nearly baited into fighting with the widow, but she resists.
- Katherine leaves the banquet for a moment before this speech and then enters when Petruchio bids her to and delivers this speech to the banquet’s attendees. Katherine does not necessarily know this, but her speech resolves a bet between her husband and another guest at the banquet: Has Katherine been “tamed”?
Blocking and Movement
In theater, blocking is the process of planning the actors’ physical movements and positions. Be sure to show respect and establish trust when working with scene partners. As you prepare to block this scene, ask yourself the following questions:
- This speech takes place in public, at a dinner party. How effectively does Katherine engage her audience? How confident is her public speech?
- Katherine directs her lines at various other characters, some men and some women. Which lines does she direct to where her husband sits, and which to her father, her brother-in-law, or other male guests? Which to her sister? Which to the widow?
- Katherine’s words are unequivocal in support of women holding an inferior position in the home. Does Katherine believe everything she is saying? How might the answer to that question affect the way she delivers the speech?
- Katherine finishes this speech by putting her hand at Petruchio’s feet, offering it for him to step on if he desires. How should this moment be staged? What does it say about Katherine? About Petruchio? About the portrayal of gender relationships?
Historical Context
The Taming of the Shrew is a play that is difficult to comprehend as comedy in a contemporary context. Katherine’s character arc, which culminates in this speech, is analogous to the housebreaking of an animal: her wildness is tamed by Petruchio, who bets on her as if she were a horse. This attitude would not have been out of place in Shakespeare’s time; a wife was, legally speaking, not much different from chattel property.
Is this comedy? If so, it is of the darkest possible variety. These prescribed and proscribed gender roles are enforced by economic means. The bet that induces this speech might be made outside of Katherine’s earshot, but the financial circumstances that define her world are well within her understanding. She was, in a legal sense, the property of her husband.
Katherine, at a minimum, espouses this view of herself with her words and outward behavior. She does not resist; she does not challenge Petruchio verbally or physically; she embraces a position of obedience and outward subjugation to her husband: “Such duty as the subject owes the prince / Even such a woman oweth to her husband.” Katherine chastises Bianca and the widow for not being obedient servants of their men. She is, in the sociopolitical sense, speaking a kind of truth. Without a husband, Katherine will be without a home, without food.
Petruchio has in part “tamed” her by denying her food and sleep. Without a husband, it becomes clear that her basic needs will not be met. Her speech makes reference to the way husbands provide for their wives, with the clear implication that women cannot do the same (for themselves or for their husbands) in the world of the play. The role of gender has an economic component.
Read an explanation of this speech to better understand it in terms of character development and dramatic structure.
Meaning in Heightened Language
Ask yourself the following questions when approaching this speech for performance.
- How does the rhythm of the pentameter inform the character’s thought process?
- Is the structure of Katherine’s speech comforting to her, or is it a kind of prison of language? How can performance bring out the tension between character and language or emphasize the comfort of structure?
- Occasionally rhyming couplets appear in this speech. How Katherine approaches these rhymes can convey meaning in different ways. For example, if Katherine overemphasizes those rhymes in a singsong way, it will have a different, more childlike, connotation than if she handles those rhymes more delicately. How do you think the heightened rhyming language should sound?
- Katherine chooses words that give an almost physical texture to the subjects she speaks about. For example, “peevish, sullen, sour” are adjectives that use sibilance in a particularly evocative way. How does assonance or alliteration convey meaning in other parts of the speech?
Full Act 5, Scene 2 Monologue: Katherine
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