The taming of the shrew is almost the only one of Shakespeare’s comedies that has a regular plot, and downright moral.  It is full of bustle, animation, and rapidity of action.  It shows admirably how self-will is only to be got the better of by stronger will, and how one degree of ridiculous perversity is only to be driven out by another still greater.  Petruchio is a madman in his senses; a very honest fellow, who hardly speaks a word of truth, and succeeds in all his tricks and impostures.  He acts his assumed character to the life, with the most fantastical extravagance, with complete presence of mind, with untired animal spirits, and without a particle of ill humour from beginning to end.—­The situation of poor Katherine, worn out by his incessant persecutions, becomes at last almost as pitiable as it is ludicrous, and it is difficult to say which to admire most, the unaccountableness of his actions, or the unalterableness of his resolutions.  It is a character which most husbands ought to study, unless perhaps the very audacity of Petruchio’s attempt might alarm them more than his success would encourage them.  What a sound must the following speech carry to some married ears!

     Think you a little din can daunt my ears? 
     Have I not in my time heard lions roar? 
     Have I not heard the sea, puff’d up with winds,
     Rage like an angry boar, chafed with sweat? 
     Have I not heard great ordnance in the field? 
     And heav’n’s artillery thunder in the skies? 
     Have I not in a pitched battle heard
     Loud larums, neighing steeds, and trumpets clang? 
     And do you tell me of a woman’s tongue,
     That gives not half so great a blow to hear,
     As will a chestnut in a farmer’s fire?

Not all Petruchio’s rhetoric would persuade more than ’some dozen followers’ to be of this heretical way of thinking.  He unfolds his scheme for the Taming of the Shrew, on a principle of contradiction, thus: 

     I’ll woo her with some spirit when she comes. 
     Say that she rail, why then I’ll tell her plain
     She sings as sweetly as a nightingale;
     Say that she frown, I’ll say she looks as clear
     As morning roses newly wash’d with dew;
     Say she be mute, and will not speak a word,
     Then I’ll commend her volubility,
     And say she uttereth piercing eloquence: 
     If she do bid me pack, I’ll give her thanks,
     As tho’ she bid me stay by her a week;
     If she deny to wed, I’ll crave the day,
     When I shall ask the banns, and when be married.

He accordingly gains her consent to the match, by telling her father that he has got it; disappoints her by not returning at the time he has promised to wed her, and when he returns, creates no small consternation by the oddity of his dress and equipage.  This however is nothing to the astonishment excited by his madbrained behaviour at the marriage.  Here is the account of it by an eye-witness: