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Kate’s Final Speech from the Taming of the Shrew
The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare is a comedic play about men and women in Elizabethan society who are playing parts and are pretending to be everything but what they really are in order to marry and continue the current social order.
The two major females Kate and Bianca, represent the proper role of a woman and the improper shrew of a woman. These were really the primary choices for an Elizabethan woman. Bianca is everything an Elizabethan woman should be. She is modest, chaste, fragile, beautiful, and obedient.
A woman is beauty itself and “no scornful glances” (137) should be given to your husband. They “blot thy beauty.” It “confounds thy fame.” It is not amiable.” (136–141). A woman was beauty, submission, and loyalty. She was property, a possession belonging to one man or another through out her life.
Or according to the standards of the day, that’s what she should be. She should “Kneel for peace.” With bodies “soft, weak, (and) smooth,” (165) women are “bound to serve, love, and obey” (164). Bianca is all of these things, or at least she gives the appearance that she is all of these things. Bianca is an amiable proper woman. Kate is not.
Kate is everything a proper woman shouldn’t be. She has chosen a role so far from proper that she is considered to be a shrew, and by the very definition she is an animal rather than a human being. The shrew is “froward, peevish, sullen, sour, disobedient, foul contending, (and) graceless” (157–160).
She is curst. She is an evil of the devil rather than the angel on a pedestal that a woman should be. She has beauty, but it doesn’t matter. She isn’t playing the part that goes with it. She is willful, disobedient and talkative. She is public, active, and decidedly defiant. She is not a proper Elizabethan woman.
While Kate recognizes that the woman’s role is a part to be played, she refuses to play it. She takes on the role of shrew and finds that it is also a part. It doesn’t quite fit her either, but it is the only other choice she can choose from. This choice leaves her almost as frustrated as the role of the proper woman would have left her.
Kate’s Final Speech is spoken after the men and women have been married and are having a…
