ENGL 215 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Cucking Stool, George Bernard Shaw, Petruchio
5 May 2019
School
Department
Course
Professor
Engl 215 Jan 12th
Taming of the Shrew Title Meaning
• Shrew = bitch
• Kate = shrew
• Shrew: a person, (now only a woman) given to railing or scolding or other perverse or
malignant behaviour.
• Froward = someone who counters what is demanded.
• Tame: to bring under the control or into the service of man.
• Domesticate: to make domestic, to attach to home and its duties.
• Scold: to quarrel noisily, to brawl, to rail at or wrangle with someone. To use volent or
unseemly language.
• There are lots of devices from Shakespeare’s time created to stop women from talking
too much – virtually torture devices shaped like helmets with a tongue insert.
• Cucking stool: tie women to a chair and dunk them in the water. Meant as a public
spectacle, humiliation.
Sports + Games in Taming of the Shrew
• Hunting with dogs at the beginning
• Starving his hawk to make it behave and plans to do the same with Kate - Hawking
• Betting on which wife will come first when the husbands call for them
• Making the pedant think he’s a lord
The Inductions
• Tricking Sly into thinking he’s a lord
• Sly denies it at first but eventually accepts it
• Still speaks and acts like a peasant ex. orders cheap ale, calls his wife ‘madam wife’
• Relevance to the rest of the play:
• Theme of disguise
• Theme of sporting and games
• Sly, like Kate, goes along with it for his own good
• Sly is unsuccesful at performing his role at lord hints that people can’t be forced into
performing the roles that they’re assigned. He never truly becomes a lord (like Kate
could never).
• Sly’s wife introduces the idea of marriage
• The induction also has a man threatening to tame a woman (the servant dressed as the
wife by the actual lord)
• “Madam undress you and come to bed” – extra funny back then because all the roles
were played by men
• We don’t hear from Sly at the end of the play
• In other interpretations ex. “The Taming of a Shrew”, Sly is carried back out to the
gutter at the end of the play. Sly learns from the play how to tame his own wife.
