Feminine Performance in The Taming of the Shrew: Final Speech and Missing Soliloquy

Abstract

atherine’s final speech in The Taming of The Shrew has long been a critical lightning rod. Most contemporary scholarship avoids reading the speech straight, as a sincere exhortation to wifely submission, and instead takes it to be an ironic performance of some kind. Nevertheless, the nature of this performance, its precise audience, and its overall relation to what Katherine holds in the inner space she elsewhere terms her “heart” (4.3.80) remain open questions. Several recent readings have detected a kind of freedom and authority,