Rhyme’s Voices: Hearing Gender in The Taming of the Shrew

Abstract:This essay takes a new approach to The Taming of the Shrew by reading the gender of its rhymes. The argument of the essay is threefold: (1) that William Shakespeare’s gendered rhymes in The Taming of the Shrew are his contribution to a broader development in 1590s versification, the importation and consolidation of the terms “masculine rhyme” and “feminine rhyme” into the English language; (2) that the play’s gendered rhymes are important to its troubling notions of gender (with the word troubling acting as both adjective and verb); and (3) that the particularly gendered voices of the actors performing the play would have been important, in turn, to the gendering of its rhymes. On this final point the essay considers the relationship between the play’s feminine rhymes and the boy actors who voiced them, thinking about how the affordances (or the apparent limitations) of the boy actors’ voices chime with the play’s gendered rhyme—to such an extent that the voice of the boy actor playing Katherine becomes a metatheatrical feature of the drama, a site of apprenticeship in which the ending of the play comes to trouble itself as well as its auditors.