SOURCE: “Ideology and Resistance in The Taming of the Shrew,” in Anxious Pleasures: Shakespearean Comedy and the Nation-State, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995, pp. 151-69.

In the excerpt below, Hall discusses Petruchio's manipulation of Kate's self-identity.

We have already considered the first of Shakespeare's comedies to make a major use of the traditional comic “wooing debate.” In the discussion of Love's Labour's Lost in Chapter 5, I was concerned to relate the euphoric pleasures of wit in that comedy with the underlying political anxieties of the culture of the court, namely its need to reaffirm a commitment to the patriarchal order against the proliferation of signs that it also depends upon. Wit, as a seductive power operating through language, is the site of deep anxieties over the loss of a center, of the self or of the realm.

In the two chapters of this section, I turn to the other...