One of the most controversial and problematic of all of Shakespeare`s plays, The Taming of the Shrew is a typical Elizabethan domestic comedy written around 1592.
Petruchio, a gentleman of Verona, arrives in Padua and announces to his friends that `I come to wive it wealthily in Padua; If wealthily, then happily in Padua`.
He soon finds that a group of men keen to marry Bianca, the younger daughter of rich old Baptista, are frustrated by her elder, `shrewish` sister, Katherine.
There is much subsequent hilarity as Bianca`s suitors make a bet with Petruchio that he cannot `tame` and marry Katherine.
Despite Katherine`s protestations, Petruchio goes ahead with the match, using deliberately unorthodox behaviour to confuse Katherine (including a scene where he starves her), claiming that `this is the way to kill a wife with kindness`.
The play culminates with a scene of Katherine`s apparently spontaneous subjection to her husband`s will, where she places her hand beneath her husband`s foot, and tells the other wives present that `thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper`.
The play`s gratuitous scenes of women being abused and vilified in the name of `comedy` has made many directors and critics very uncomfortable with the play, and many feminist critics have condemned contemporary productions of the play as reproducing certain 16th-century stereotypes concerning women who speak out against male authority.
