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Taming Of The Shrew Gender Roles Essay

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Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew illustrates the relationship between gender and authority while defining its imbalance as simple social construct, suggesting that gender, more or less, exists merely in association and connotation. In characterizing masculine and feminine personality without regard to physical sex, he in turn reveals the illusion gender-roles cast in assumption and stereotype. Doing so, Shakespeare writes to comment on the position of women in Elizabethan society and their faculty of power in general. Given that inequality and the institution of gender-identity still exist and that current culture still clings to it, it follows that themes expressed within the play still presently apply. As adaptation, BBC renovates in modern version the Taming of the Shrew and keeps with it Shakespeare’s original themes, altering several other aspects of it, taking away detail from which the original play capitalizes. Enough though, still remains to effectively portray Shakespeare’s work. It becomes evident that Petruchio decidedly woos Kate within the play just before their bantering scene, when he moves into soliloquy: “I will attend her here / And woo her with some spirit as she comes / Say that she rail, why then I’ll tell her plain / She sings as sweetly as a nightingale” (Shakespeare 2.1.169-172). For the remainder of his thought, Petruchio …show more content…

Prancing to Petruchio, Kate appears to mean what she says and truly believes it, as Petruchio verifies in the elevator afterwards (BBC). He tames her to the point of wholehearted respect, which she qualifies as mutual in front of her mother and

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