“Time shall unfold what plighted cunning hides.”
King Lear, I.i.120
Shakespeare, in his love of variations on a theme, depicted not only genuinely dutiful daughters but those who play that role. On first appearance, they are fair-spoken and subservient, to both fathers and suitors. But they soon reveal that “plighted cunning” hides manipulative, self-serving natures. Two plays that depict such daughters are otherwise markedly different in tone and depth: the early comedy The Taming of the Shrew and the majestic tragedy King Lear. In both plays, the fathers show preference to the hypocritical daughters and set down, by direct statement and implication, the public role that they want them to play. Both Baptista and Lear flatter themselves on being good fathers, and both see as the test of their effectiveness the daughter’s compliance with her prescribed role. Above all, each man values reputation and status and eschews any word or act that reflects badly on his public image. The shallowness of their outlook is revealed by the presence of a sister who is the favored daughter’s temperamental opposite. The disobedient daughter, disavowed and berated by her father, sees through her sister’s Good Girl guise. This doubling of sisters is striking: in most of Shakespeare’s plays, single daughters are the rule. The heroine’s confidante is typically a friend or a cousin; her sibling, if she has one, as in Hamlet and Twelfth Night, is a brother from whom she is separated by circumstances. The pairing of sisters, with its juxtaposition of opposites, provides a telling look at the father-daughter relationship. What becomes clear by the end of both comedy and tragedy is the cost to the father of misjudging his children and to the daughter of abusing his trust.
The sister plots in Shrew and Lear are mirror opposites in tone and structure. The former play is a rousing farce, the latter a bleak tragedy; the differences in the daughters’ motives and actions set the tone. In the comedy, the older sister is reportedly the unregenerate black sheep, causing her family public humiliation and herself insult and rejection. The younger sister, her father’s “pretty peat” [pet], seems to him and her many suitors the ideal woman: eloquent, modest, and pliable, a “treasure” whose possession enriches their status. Her name, Bianca, Italian for “white,” seems symbolic of the beauty and purity that all the men see in her. Only her rebellious sister, Kate, is aware of Bianca’s petty, vindictive side—the ugly features that the pretty mask conceals. At the play’s outset, Bianca’s accomplished enactment of the Good Girl role seems to destine her for all the happiness that her unconventional sister lacks. Her gullible father is the main enabler of this sustained performance. He basks in the good impression that she makes and determinedly distances himself from the fractious Kate, refusing all blame for her behavior and intent only on “rid[ding] the house of her” (I.i.141–42). It takes the intervention of another man, someone who values Kate enough to teach her self-control and empathy, to break this cycle. By the end of the play, we have had ample evidence of Bianca’s manipulativeness and Kate’s integrity. True to the comic tone, the conflicts have been temporarily resolved in multiple marriages. Baptista, however, remains largely oblivious to his daughters’ true natures: he has fixed Kate in the family stereotype of the shrew. But Bianca has begun to reveal, to husband and father, the claws and fangs beneath her white cloak.
In Lear, the sisters’ roles are reversed: the elder are the accomplished hypocrites and the younger a model of integrity. Again, it is the youngest whom the father “love[s] the most” (I.i.290). Such doting, Shakespeare implies, does not necessarily spoil the child. Cordelia is deserving of Lear’s favor. Like Bianca’s, her name is symbolic, but this time the label is apt: the root word of Cordelia means “heart,” suggestive of her compassion and unwavering devotion. The problem comes when the father posits a faulty image of ideal daughterhood, and the wily daughters use it to gain their own ends. In keeping with the play’s tragic tone, the central issue is not the mere quest for a suitable marriage partner but the struggle for political power. The factor of loyalty between wife and husband does occur, but the focus is on the bond between father and daughter. As in Shrew, a private scene involving the sincere and hypocritical sisters shows us their true natures. This time, however, the schemers seek not merely praise and a large dowry but their father’s title, wealth, and, eventually, his life. The honest daughter is excluded not only from the room but from the kingdom. The beset father suffers not just frustration and pique but exile and madness. Lear is granted a moment’s reconciliation with his faithful child, but only a moment’s. The ultimate price of his misjudgment will be the death of the daughter whose true worth he will come to acknowledge only when it is too late. His relationship with Cordelia, however, is matter for a later chapter. (See Chapter 6: “Daughters Who Forgive and Heal.”) This one will focus on daughters who masquerade as paragons and fathers who abet them in playing that role.
The Taming of the Shrew is broad farce from opening public spat to final raucous wager. At the same time, as in all of Shakespeare’s best comedies, the main characters are drawn in psychologically realistic terms. The relationship between the wealthy burgher, Baptista, and his strikingly different daughters is evident from their first appearance. Flanked by Kate and Bianca, he announces the ground rules for their accessibility to two suitors and anyone else who cares to listen. He offers either man “leave to court [Katherine] at [his] pleasure,” but restates his resolution “not to bestow [his] youngest daughter / Before [he has] a husband for the elder” (I.i.54, 40–41). The old father knows full well that the suitors, Hortensio and Gremio, have no interest in marrying “the shrew”—her type is specified in the cast list. Their predictable scorn of his offer only subjects her to ridicule, as she charges Baptista in her opening line: “Is it your will / To make a stale [laughing-stock] of me among these mates?” “Wonderful froward,” even “stark mad,” as she is, the suitors fear and disdain her. “No mates for you,” Hortensio says sententiously, “Unless you were of gentler, milder mold” (ll. 59–60). Kate reacts with greater refractoriness, threatening to smash his head and claiming that the idea of marrying is “not halfway to her heart” (l. 62). The scene has such an air of the pageant wagon or the auction block that an onlooker, the newly arrived Tranio, mistakes it for “some show” (l. 47) designed to amuse him and his young master, Lucentio. The show is, of course, at Kate’s expense.
Meanwhile, Bianca has been exhibiting the ideal of feminine decorum that the men exalt. Tranquil and quiet in the face of her sister’s tantrum, she seems to the love-struck Lucentio the epitome of “maid’s mild behavior and sobriety.” Her father, who does not hear this aside, is in full accord with the sentiment. Calling her “good Bianca,” he apologizes for having to separate her from her admirers and begs that it “not displease” her. He adds, “I will love thee none the less, my girl” (I.i.77). Kate hears this favoritism—she is not his “girl”—and reacts with a spiteful remark about Bianca as a “pretty peat” (spoiled papa’s pet) who is feigning sadness. Soon, Kate vows, she’ll see that her sister has good reason to weep. Bianca, breaking her silence at last, is inspired to heights of Good Girldom. First she urges Kate to be “content” with having caused her “discontent,” and then she turns to her father to profess obedience and industry:
Sir, to your pleasure humbly I subscribe.
My books and instruments shall be my company,
On them to look and practice by myself [ll. 81–83].
The smitten Lucentio whispers to Tranio that this is “Minerva speak[ing].”
Bianca does not leave immediately, however, but lingers to hear Hortensio and Gremio praise her and lament that she must be “mew[ed] up” in “penance” for her sister’s ill behavior. She also hears that sister subjected to such insults as “fiend of hell.” Baptista defends himself as a “very kind and liberal” father, one who will provide tutors for his daughters “in music, instruments, and poetry” and devote himself to their “good bringing-up.” Immediately, he makes clear which daughter he really means: “Katherina, you may stay, / For I have more to commune with Bianca” (I.i.100–01). He retreats into his house and the company of Bianca, abandoning Kate to more public humiliation. Kate refuses to be “appointed hours” and stalks off after him. Her anger thinly covers her hurt. Spoiled and unhappy, she would rather be berated than ignored. Her obnoxious behavior keeps escalating until she gets some acknowledgment.
Lucentio accuses Baptista of being a “cruel father” (I.i.182), but he is referring only to his seclusion of Bianca. He, like the other suitors, is oblivious to Baptista’s cruelty to his elder daughter. The father has succeeded in preserving his own reputation, as, in Hortensio’s words, “an affable and courteous gentleman” (I.ii.96) by exculpating himself from blame for Kate’s “scolding tongue” and sour temperament. Hortensio again states the party line: Baptista has, after all, given Kate all the advantages, “brought [her] up as best becomes a gentleman” (l. 85). Since, in spite of such supposedly benevolent treatment, she has become a pariah, the men blame her. In the public eye and before eligible suitors, Baptista has declared Kate a hopeless misfit. Hortensio underlines the message that the father has conveyed: he “suppos[es] it a thing impossible, / For those defects … before rehearsed / That ever Katherine should be wed” (ll. 120–22). Baptista has increased her humiliation by announcing his intention to use her younger sister’s popularity and his wealth to better the seemingly impossible odds. Thus, at the same time that he has declared Kate’s availability, he has jeopardized her one chance at the independence and status that only marriage could bring an Elizabethan gentlewoman.
The suitors stay behind to reiterate their scorn of her, though Hortensio reminds us that this is the marriage market, that Kate is the heiress to a fortune and there are men “would take her with all her faults, and money enough” (I.i.128). He and Gremio are in full accord with Baptista. They form a pact to find a suitor “that would thoroughly woo her, wed her, and bed her, and rid the house of her” (ll. 141–42). The lapse into prose underlines the crassness of their vow.
They go off, and Lucentio remains to pay starry-eyed tribute to Bianca, “that maid / Whose sudden sight thralled [his] wounded eye” (I.i.216–17). Cupid’s little arrow has done its work. He utters exalted clichés about her “coral lips” and “perfumed breath” and declares: “Sacred and sweet was all I saw in her” (my italics, ll. 171–73). Her “modest” behavior and her “beauty” seem to him, as to her father, absolutes.
The first indication of the real Bianca comes when she is out of public view, away from her doting male audience. Kate, exasperated at the goody-goody way that she has behaved, has tied her hands. Bianca is not cowed by this bullying. Her first words are in her usual morally superior vein: “Good sister, wrong me not, nor wrong yourself…. “ But immediately she drops sententiousness in favor of sarcasm, scorning the fetters as “gauds”—jewels. She threatens that if Kate does not free her, she will tear off all her clothes, down “to [her] petticoat” (II.i.5). She swears to fulfill this vow to “obey” Kate because she knows so well her “duty” to her “elders” (l. 7). The sarcastic tone, the mockery of her modest maiden persona, and the spiteful reminder of Kate’s age suggest Bianca’s true nature.
Her jabs work on Kate. She is clearly jealous and demands to know which of Bianca’s suitors she “love[s] best.” She adds, “See thou dissemble not,” suggesting that she does not see her sister as a bastion of sincerity. Bianca responds by insulting Kate again, and at her sorest point: she offers to “plead” to either Hortensio or Gremio to accept Kate, adding with feigned disingenuousness: “Is it for him you do envy me so?” (II.i.18). The dart has a sharp point: both suitors have just told Kate to her face that they find her repellent. Kate, who loathes these men and claims to scorn marriage, nevertheless envies Bianca her popularity. She also sees through her Good Girl mask. In other words, the sisters have each other’s numbers.
Into this spat steps Baptista, just at the moment when Kate “strikes her” (stage direction, II.i.22). All his sympathy is for the supposedly wronged innocent. He sees Bianca, bound and slapped, and makes no attempt to investigate the provocation for such treatment. “Poor girl, she weeps,” he wails, and he turns on Kate, calling her a “hilding of a devilish spirit”—an evil-tempered good-for-nothing—and demanding: “Why dost thou wrong her that did ne’er wrong thee? / When did she cross thee with a bitter word?” (ll. 27–28). If Kate were calmer, she could answer both questions with ample examples, but instead she acts out her rage in another tantrum. Irrationally, she claims that it is Bianca’s “silence” that “flout[s]” her, and she “flies after” her sister. This scene has been directed, rightly I think, so that Bianca, peeking around the shield of her father, makes faces at Kate, which he, of course, fails to notice. Kate cannot articulate how Bianca has provoked her because she is too humiliated and too hurt by her father’s blatant favoritism. She confronts Baptista with the bitter truth about her position in the family: “She is your treasure, she must have a husband; I must dance barefoot on her wedding day, / And for your love to her lead apes in hell” (ll. 32–33)—the old maid’s proverbial fate. The only bitter recourses she can envision are to “sit and weep” and to “find occasion for revenge” (l. 36)—depression or anger, both expressions of hurt. As usual, Baptista expresses no sympathy for this troubled daughter: “Was ever gentleman thus grieved as I?” (l. 37), he laments, his feelings entirely fixed on himself. Is it any wonder that this man has produced such self-centered children?
Alone with her suitors, Bianca reveals more of her true nature. Pretending to believe that the disguised Hortensio and Lucentio are genuine tutors, she first tells them categorically that she will not be subject to their authority: “I’ll not be tied to hours nor ’pointed times, / But learn my lessons as I please myself” (III.i.19–20). The peevish tone sounds tellingly like Kate’s. Bianca knows that the young men are using the disguise to evade her father’s prohibition, and she enjoys both flouting the old man’s authority and stringing them along. To Lucentio, her favorite, she gives a paradoxical message: “presume not … despair not.” Although she flirts so openly with him that Hortensio becomes suspicious, she relishes the double wooing. Bianca, unlike Kate, is a tease. Her parting words show her both playing the “sweet Bianca” role and leading the courtship dance with both partners at once:
Take it not unkindly, pray,
That I have been thus pleasant to you both [ll. 55–56].
Provocative, self-satisfied, and naughty, this is not the “young modest girl” of Lucentio’s romantic vision.
Nor is this the dutiful daughter of Baptista’s fixed illusion. Because Bianca takes care not to disrupt that convenient image, Baptista assumes that he will maintain the usual paternal prerogative of choosing her husband. He conducts a contest between the rivals for her hand, unashamed of the materialistic grounds for victory:
he of both
That can assure my daughter greatest dower
Shall have Bianca’s love [II.i.344–46].
Gremio, the “pantaloon,” is “outvied” (l. 387) by Tranio, the servant disguised as his master Lucentio. The rules require the “assurance” of the fabulous marriage portion he offers, even if the groom should die. “If not,” Baptista mandates, Bianca will be married to “signior Gremio.” The father, then, will accept either husband, the stranger or the old fool: for all his favoritism and his pretty speeches about the requirement of winning the bride’s love, he sees no need to consult her.
No matter. In Shrew, as in most comedies, youth is slyer than age. Bianca is more than a match for the father who has spoiled her. She has no qualms about deceiving him and eloping with a young man she barely knows. In fact, she has a better eye for the gold standard than the greedy old man, who is deceived into thinking that Tranio is the true Lucentio. In keeping with the comic mode, Bianca makes a fine match. But she does not go about it by kindly or decorous means. She could easily go straight to her father and plead the real Lucentio’s case. Instead, she chooses the speedier and more exciting means of having her way. With Tranio still playing his master’s role, the brash couple hire a traveling pedant to impersonate Vincentio. While they run off, he ensures that Baptista is distracted, “talking with the deceiving father of a deceitful son” (IV.iv.80–81) and “busied about a counterfeit assurance” (ll. 89–90). When they return from their elopement, Lucentio asks Baptista’s “pardon,” admitting, “I have made thy daughter mine / While counterfeit supposes bleared thine eyne” (V.i.105–06). The doggerel rhyme suggests his smugness. Baptista is infuriated into blustering prose: “But do you hear, sir? Have you married my daughter without asking my good will?” (ll. 122–23). But Lucentio is used to managing outraged fathers and, like Bianca, to having his own way. He reassures his bride, who “look[s] pale” at this first instance of her father’s disapproval, that, his own identity revealed, “thy father will not frown” (ll. 126–27). Lucentio is well aware of Baptista’s values. As the sole heir of a wealthy family, he is well qualified to meet the golden standard. Lucentio is also impervious to remorse. “Love wrought these miracles,” he announces grandly, and adds: “Happily I have arrived at the last / Unto the wished bower of my bliss” (ll. 115–16). But Shakespeare does not end the play with this rose-colored vision.
If the shallow Bianca were the female lead in Shrew, the play would not have held the stage for four centuries. It is, however, her troubled sister who is the focal character. As Kate perceives, her father neither understands nor loves her. Baptista is afraid of her, embarrassed by her, eager to get her off his hands. When a willing suitor, Petruchio, does come along, drawn first by the promise of a large dowry and second by the challenge of “taming” a woman whose “wildness” matches his own, her father is at first incredulous and then baldly eager. He is blunt about her unworthiness. “She is not for you, the more my grief” (64), he tells Petruchio. But when the bold young man persists, within minutes Baptista is clapping up a bargain with him. He claims that the betrothal can be finalized only when “her love” has been “well attained … for that is all in all” (II.i.128–29). In fact, as with Bianca, what he does is at odds with what he says.
The couple’s first meeting is a duel of barbs and bawdry. But when Baptista inquires about how things have gone, Petruchio replies with one barefaced lie after another. “How but well? How but well?” he demands. All Kate’s shrewishness, he maintains, has been feigned, and she is in truth “modest” and “temperate,” a model of “patience” and “chastity” (II.i.295–98). He concludes his account with a Big Lie: “we have ’greed so well together / That upon Sunday is the wedding day” (ll. 299–300). Kate, appalled, immediately denounces him as “a madcap ruffian … that thinks with oaths to face the matter out.” Then she turns her attack on the man who has left her open to this latest humiliation:
Call you me daughter? Now, I promise you
You have showed a tender fatherly regard
To wish me wed to one half lunatic… [ll. 287–89].
Her response to Petruchio’s assertion about their supposed wedding date is “I’ll see thee hanged on Sunday first” (l. 302). The chorus of taunting suitors thinks that she has won. But Petruchio responds with more absurd fabrication about the “kiss on kiss” she has given him and their private “bargain” that she will act shrewish only “in company.” Kate is shocked into silence, and Baptista quickly takes the stranger’s word over his daughter’s: “I know not what to say—but give me your hands. God send you joy. Petruchio, ’tis a match” (ll. 320–21). The lovers exit “severally” (separately), and the father stays behind with Bianca’s suitors to jest about the sudden turn of events. He is unequivocal about his motives, frankly using the mercantile metaphor for marriage: “I play a merchant’s part / And venture madly on a desperate mart.” He admits further: “The goal I seek is quiet in the match” (l. 332). So much for his claims of the supreme importance of winning his daughter’s heart.
Petruchio has promised to provide the trappings, at least, of respectability. He announces that he will travel to Venice “to buy apparel [for] the wedding day.” He wants to “be sure,” he claims, that “my Katherine” and he will “have rings and things and fine array” (II.i.324–25). Baptista can salve any qualms of conscience with the rationale that this suitor, however peremptory, is presentable and even caring. The wedding ceremony will destroy that pretense.
As part of his taming scheme, Petruchio has decided to put Kate through a series of trials designed to rid her of vanity, ill temper, and insensitivity. The method he adopts is to outshrew her, to act “curster than she” (III.ii.150). The humiliation and discomfort that he causes her and inflicts on others in her name are admittedly crude means for teaching empathy. But in this farcical world they work, not least because Petruchio has a keen sense of the carrot as well as the stick. At the same time that he torments Kate by acting out a caricature of her worst traits, he shows her an alternative to the “shrew” role in which others have cast her and she has acquiesced. He points out her “wondrous qualities,” including “beauty” and “wit” (II.i.48–50). If she can learn to cultivate “affability” and “mild behavior” as well, he reasons, she will be both happier and freer. His ultimate promise is that she will thereby win the love of the one man who is her equal in intelligence and will. Unlike her father and sister, Petruchio does not want to avoid and reject Kate. He relishes her quick tongue and high spirits. Their first meeting is a duel of wits, in which they trade barbs and share blank verse lines. When Kate, glaring at him, claims that she sees a “crab,” he demands, “Then show it me.” Not missing a beat, she completes the line: “Had I a glass, I would” (l. 235). Petruchio is unfazed. He not only matches her jab for jab but keeps raising the stakes, threatening violence and waxing bawdy when she tries her usual tactics of striking and shocking men into submission. He goes so far as to turn a pun on “tale” and “tail” into a shocked protest against her supposed proposition of fellatio: “What, with my tongue in your tail? / Nay, come again, good Kate, I am a gentleman” (ll. 220–21). Kate is outraged but she is also fascinated. In mid-battle, she asks, “Where did you study all this goodly speech?” (l. 264). Her tone is only half-sarcastic. Like Petruchio, she senses that she has at last met her match.
It is very important that Petruchio finds Kate attractive. He keeps complimenting her looks, calling her “straight and slender” (II.i.256), “the prettiest Kate in Christendom” (l. 187). Unlike the feckless suitors of Bianca, who tell Kate that she is unworthy of marriage, he boldly claims at their first meeting, “I am a husband for your turn.” He brushes aside her protests with the declaration: “I must and will have Katherine to my wife” (l. 282). The double verb reinforces his determination and, while it no doubt frustrates Kate, must also flatter her. The first man who has ever successfully opposed her has done so in the name of allying himself to her for life.
Petruchio is not only the lover but the parent-figure that Kate has lacked. Nowhere is that double role more evident than at their madcap wedding. Petruchio intends the next major round of his “taming” battle to be fought there. Kate, who claimed earlier that she wished never to marry, is dressed and ready, but the groom fails to appear. Baptista laments this stain on the family honor—“this shame of ours”—but expresses no sympathy for the abandoned bride. Kate, alert as always to her father’s callousness, counters, “No shame but mine.” First, she reminds him, she has been “forced / To give [her] hand opposed against [her]heart” to “a mad-brain rudesby…. Who wooed in haste and means to wed at leisure” (III.ii.8–11). Then she reveals the hurt that underlies this anger:
Now must the world point at poor Kate
And say, “Lo, there is mad Petruchio’s wife,
If it would please him come and marry her” [ll. 18–20].
The proud Katherine “poor Kate”?! Kate is admitting not only that she feels humiliated but that, for all her protests, she wants this marriage. She “exits, weeping”—again, a first. This sudden revelation of her vulnerability evokes an equally unprecedented show of sympathy from her father:
Go, girl, I cannot blame thee now to weep,
For such an injury would vex a very saint,
Much more a shrew of thy impatient humor [ll. 27–29].
Kate, having gone off, does not hear these words. But we are left to notice that Baptista’s pity does not alter his stereotyped view of her: she is not hurt but “vexed,” and still, inevitably, the “shrew.”
When news arrives that Petruchio is approaching, but in disgracefully ragged dress, Baptista’s first reaction is relief: “I am glad he’s come, howsoe’er he comes” (III.ii.70). The sight of his future son-in-law’s get-up, however, is beyond the old gentleman’s tolerance, and he pleads with him to “doff this habit,” which he calls “shame to your estate, / An eyesore to our solemn festival” (ll. 96–97). But Petruchio, as the clever Tranio surmises, “hath some meaning in this mad attire”—namely, to force Kate to look beyond the externals of propriety and reputation. He responds calmly, “To me she’s married, not unto my clothes” (l. 113), and goes off to seek his “lovely bride.” Baptista does not at this juncture stop the wedding, but merely follows, half stunned, half amused, to “see the event.”
The ceremony, as reported by Grumio, is a travesty, with Petruchio acting the “mad-brained bridegroom” with manic glee. He swears, strikes the priest, throws the “sops” from the wedding toast “in the sexton’s face,” and kisses the bride “with such a clamourous smack / That … all the church did echo” (III.ii.174–75). Kate “trembled and shook” and appeared “a lamb, a dove, a fool” compared to Petruchio. The scene, like those of Kate’s later torments at the hands of her tamer, is both funnier and more tolerable for being an “unscene,” reported rather than staged. Witnessing directly the sight of the priest being struck and Kate distraught would disrupt the comic tone.
Farce requires that the audience be reassured of the victim’s essential resilience. Like the cartoon cat that rises flattened from beneath the rock that has squashed him and, with a shake, resumes his former shape, Kate reenters and soon displays her old shrewish form. Petruchio’s next ploy is to refuse to stay for his own wedding banquet—this despite the family’s trouble and expense in “prepar[ing] great store of wedding cheer” (III.ii.182), and also despite earnest entreaties by friends, father-in-law, and, finally, Kate herself. He offers only the vaguest excuse for his haste, and he tantalizes Kate by pretending to reward her new humility with acquiescence: “I am content,” he pronounces grandly, but only, it turns out, that she “shall entreat [him] stay” (l. 198). He will leave, he tells her, “entreat me how you can.” This latest disappointment is too much for Kate, and she reverts to her usual methods of getting her way. She dismisses him: “The door is open, sir, there lies your way.” She herself, she declares, “will not go today / No, or tomorrow nor till I please myself” (ll. 206–08). Petruchio pleads with her not to “be angry”; she retorts, “I will be angry. What hast thou to do?” (ll. 211–12). Baptista, who with the rest of the company has witnessed this tantrum, says nothing. Whether he makes some gesture of protest at this point or Kate simply decides to aim at a familiar target, she snaps: “Father, be quiet, he shall stay my leisure.” She concludes with the lesson she has learned about the wages of compliance: “I see a woman may be made a fool / If she have not a spirit to resist” (ll. 216–17).
This is the showdown, and Gremio assumes from past experience that Kate has won: “Now it begins to work” (III.ii.214). Petruchio, however, knows that a man, too, must show “a spirit to resist,” especially against an adversary with a will as strong as Kate’s: her past conquests are standing right before him. He brings out his full battery of sticks and carrots. The crudest—and hardest for modern audiences to accept—is his relegation of the wife to a lower order: “She is my goods, my chattels … my ox, my ass, my everything.” Her tantrum is futile, he asserts flatly: “I will be master of what is mine own” (ll. 225–26). He also alludes to Kate’s vulnerability as a virgin about to consummate her marriage, urging the others: “Carouse full measure to her maidenhead” (l. 221). This crass comment also has a positive aspect: it underlines Petruchio’s attraction to Kate and reminds those present that, in marrying, she has raised her social status. However unconventional the wedding, she is now the wife of a well-to-do and bold gentleman. As such, she is under his protection. He takes advantage of that traditional concept to win the last round in the wedding bout: he orders the others to obey Kate’s “command” to go on with the banquet and swears that he will “buckler her against a million”—i.e., fight for her honor and safety against all comers. Drawing his sword and issuing orders to Grumio to support him, he carries her off in a melodramatic flourish. We may guess from Kate’s silence that she is too dumbfounded to protest. At the same time, for all the crudeness of his behavioral psychology, Petruchio has been teaching Kate hard lessons in self-control. He has also made her the focus of concern: instead of the peripheral, barely tolerated daughter, she has become the sought-after wife. If Petruchio were merely a bully and Kate a helpless victim—caricatures in which some recent critics have cast them—the play would not hold up. In this, as in all of Shakespeare’s most successful comedies, the key relationships are complex and convincing. The secret of Petruchio’s success is that he cares enough about Kate not to tolerate her hostile behavior, which has served in the past not to free her but to lock her into loveless isolation.
Her father’s reaction to the confrontation recalls the mold in which the family has cast Kate. He only comments wryly, “Nay, let them go, a couple of quiet ones” (III.ii.236). Like Gremio, he could “die with laughing” at this contretemps, and like Bianca, he believes that Kate has gotten the husband she deserves: “being mad herself, she’s madly mated.” He turns with relief to his favorite child and proposes that, since the wedding banquet is already laid, “Bianca take her sister’s room” and Lucentio (the disguised Tranio) “supply the bridegroom’s place” (ll. 245–46). It is a symbolic moment. This is the substitution that Baptista has long wished to make: the intractable daughter gone and the one he sees as “apt to learn and thankful for good turns” (II.i.165) in her place. But Baptista’s view of Bianca proves no more reliable than his opinion of Kate. Slyly, Shakespeare goes on to show how thoroughly the father has misjudged both his children.
Kate is unique among Shakespeare’s rebellious daughters in that she does marry her father’s choice of suitor against her will. She also grows to value her husband for reasons that the old man could never perceive. What Baptista sees in Petruchio, besides his willingness to court a harridan, is his eligibility. He has the pedigree and the independent means to qualify for Kate’s hand. He is “Antonio’s son, / A man well known throughout all Italy” (II.i.68–69). Baptista, pleased by the late gentleman’s reputation, pronounces Petruchio “welcome for his sake.” As Antonio’s only heir, the son has “crowns in [his] purse … and goods at home” (I.ii.55). Even so, Petruchio’s initial motive for marriage is financial gain, as he boasts on his arrival: “I come to wive it wealthily in Padua—/ If wealthily then happily in Padua” (ll. 73–74). He claims that he would marry even a diseased “old trot with ne’er a tooth in her head … so wealth comes withal.” Yet this crass materialism proves largely bravado—chest beating before his fellow suitors. Once he meets Kate, the attraction of her wit and beauty and the challenge of subduing so formidable an opponent become his major incentives. While Bianca is eluding her father’s vigilance, Petruchio is subjecting Kate to his own. By the end of the play, the younger daughter’s shrewish side has been revealed, while the older has been transformed into a composed and affectionate being.
After the wedding, Petruchio devises more taming methods. Through a combination of deprivation to Kate and cruelty to underlings, he continues his scheme of acting “more shrew than she” (III.i.74). Bereft of food, sleep, and conjugal rights, Kate experiences physical suffering and the terrors of someone else’s violent temper for the first time in her coddled life. As Petruchio intends, the treatment causes her to move beyond egotism to empathy. After crawling out from “under her horse,” which has fallen on her in a “miry … place,” she “wade[s] through the dirt” not to complain but to intercede for the servant Grumio. Petruchio has pretended to blame him for the mishap and is beating him. When, back at the manse, the master berates and strikes the servants, Kate pleads, “I pray you, husband, be not so disquiet” (l. 155).
Shakespeare uses several means to soften the effects of this cruelty and to assure that the play remains comic. First, as in the wedding scene, he places the most painful episodes, such as Kate’s fall from the horse, off-stage. Second, he provides amused commentators on Petruchio’s actions at every stage: the servants, who note wryly that he “kills her in her own humor” (IV.i.167); Hortensio, who observes Petruchio’s feigned tyranny towards the tailor and the haberdasher; and both the principals in the taming. Between ploys, Petruchio soliloquizes on his scheme to “curb [Kate’s] mad and headstrong humor” and on his main pretense, that “all is done in reverent care of her” (l. 191). Thus, he makes the audience his confidants and silent accomplices. He also subjects himself to the deprivations along with his victim. The 1992 Royal Shakespeare Company production, rather than showing Petruchio effortlessly in control, got hilarious mileage out of emphasizing the cost to the weary tamer of sacrificing his own food, sleep, and tranquility. Finally, although Kate is at first overwhelmed by the force of Petruchio’s methods and “sits as one new-risen from a dream,” she is far from broken.
In her tête-à-tête with the servant Grumio, Kate makes clear that she understands exactly what Petruchio is putting her through:
…I, who never knew how to entreat,
Nor ever needed that I should entreat,
Am starved for meat, giddy for lack of sleep,
With oaths kept waking and with brawling fed [IV.iii.7–10].
She makes clear, too, that she understands his method: “that which spites me more than all these wants, / He does it in the name of perfect love.” This is no naive victim, crushed by abuse and baffled by her persecutor’s aims, as some have argued. Kate knows Petruchio’s game, and she still has plenty of fight left to oppose it, as Grumio soon finds. When he continues to taunt her, she “beats him” (stage direction, l. 31) and curses “all the pack of you / That triumph thus upon my misery” (ll. 33–34).
But Petruchio does more than simply make Kate suffer. He also keeps teaching her alternatives to tantrums as ways of asserting her will. Albeit crudely, he also teaches her manners. For example, he insists that she thank him before he will serve her the meat he has brought: “The poorest service is repaid with thanks” (IV.iii.45) he says sententiously—and then orders Hortensio sotto voce to “Eat it all up” (l. 50) before Kate can touch it. Petruchio knows that Kate, although subdued, is far from tamed. When the haberdasher arrives with the new cap that he has ordered for her, he pretends to be displeased with it. She protests; he says that she cannot have it until she is “gentle.” Driven beyond her slender patience, Kate has another outburst:
I am no child, no babe….
My tongue will tell the anger of my heart
Or else my heart, concealing it, will break [ll. 74, 77–78].
She makes the mistake of taking the spoiled child’s stance: “I like the cap, / And I will have it or I will have none”—the perfect opening for Petruchio to toss it away. The same kind of scene takes place with the gown that Petruchio has ordered, with him pretending to be displeased and abusing the tailor for incompetence, while telling Hortensio in an aside to “see the tailor paid.” Although his announced purpose was to “return [Kate] unto [her] father’s house” in style, wearing her new finery, and “revel it as bravely as the best” (IV.iii.53–54), he deprives her of that salve to her ego. Instead, he subjects her to another sermon on the insignificance of fine clothes and insists that she make the visit “even in these honest mean habiliments.” “For ’tis the mind that makes the body rich” (ll. 167–69), he pronounces. Petruchio is determined to teach Kate humility, by main force if necessary.
The other lessons that Kate must learn take place on the long-delayed journey to her old home. One is the importance of maintaining a sense of humor—abetting rather than opposing Petruchio in his practical jokes. The first jest is his insistence that the sun is the moon. After trying her usual ploy of direct opposition, Kate joins in the game and teases back:
…be it the moon or sun or what you please.
An if you please to call it a rush candle,
Henceforth I vow it shall be so for me [IV.v.13–15].
The absurdity escalates when they meet old Vincentio, and Petruchio insists that he is a “fair lovely maid.” This time Kate passes the humor test, embracing him as a “young budding virgin, fair and fresh and sweet” (l. 36), and thus topping Petruchio’s claim with hyperbole. When he shifts tactics, berating her rudeness and expressing the hope that she is “not mad,” Kate does not miss a beat. She apologizes prettily to the old man for her “mad mistaking” (l. 48). Vincentio takes the prank well and accepts the couple’s invitation to travel with them to Padua. The newlyweds have arrived at a nearly complete sympathy of minds.
One more test of Kate’s compliance remains. Having arrived home in Padua and witnessed Bianca’s declaration of marriage, Petruchio demands that Kate give him a kiss if he is to remain for a visit. Kate is shocked: “What, in the midst of the street?” she demands. He asks if she is “ashamed of [him].” Kate relents: “Nay, I will give thee a kiss. Now pray thee, love, stay” (V.i.133, 136). This new Kate has reassured him of her affection, and she has entreated him. In turn, Petruchio softens his demeanor towards her. He makes a public declaration of his love, calling his bride “my sweet Kate.” It is Bianca’s old epithet, a preview of the plot’s final ironic twist: the Shrew and the Good Girl are about to show that they are sisters indeed.
The final scene gives us the wedding banquet at last—officially, Bianca and Lucentio’s but also in essence Kate and Petruchio’s and, for good comic measure, Hortensio and the widow’s. It begins with a pretty speech by the new groom in tribute to his “fair Bianca” and a “welcome to [his] house” (V.iii.4, 8) for the other couples. The scene seems at first a resumption of old roles: Petruchio complaining and provoking controversy, Kate exchanging barbs with the company. But this time she is using her wit, mostly against the widow, in defense of her new husband and in protest to her reputation as a shrew. Petruchio does not oppose but supports her efforts, albeit crudely: “a hundred marks my Kate does put her down” (l. 35). Baptista does not notice the change in Kate and continues to mock Petruchio’s choice of wife: “I think thou hast the veriest shrew of all” (l. 64), he gloats.
Bianca, a silent onlooker during the other women’s duel of wit, speaks up at the end. Having achieved the desirable husband and the married status that she sought, Bianca drops her mask of the mild and innocent maid. Her first words are a bawdy pun about cuckoldry, which provokes a wry comment from her new father-in-law: “Ay, mistress bride, hath that awakened you?” Unperturbed, she retorts, “Ay, but not frighted me; therefore, I’ll sleep again” (V.ii.42–43). She rouses herself from that bored daze to spar with her new brother-in-law: “Am I your bird?” she challenges Petruchio. If so, she taunts, he can “pursue” her; she is going to “shift [her] bush” (ll. 46–47)—the same bawdy allusion to the female sex organ that Celia makes in As You Like It. Sharp-tongued and petulant, this is the Bianca that we have seen in private but that she has heretofore taken care to conceal from father and suitors.
The grooms, meanwhile, decide to wager on their wives’ obedience—their willingness to appear when summoned. Baptista, deaf as ever to his daughters’ voices, is still so confident of Bianca that he vows to pay half Lucentio’s stake, an offer that the proud bridegroom rejects. Both Bianca and the widow, however, refuse to come, the latter rightly surmising that the men “have some goodly jest in hand.” Kate alone responds, pleasing her father so much that he doubles her dowry on the spot. He declares that “she is changed as she had never been” and therefore merits “another dowry to another daughter” (V.ii.119–20). Petruchio predicts that her altered character bodes “peace” and “love” and “quiet” life (l. 113)—not only desirable but mutual qualities in any marriage.
Another part of his credo, however, sounds highly objectionable to a modern audience: the insistence that marriage be based on the husband’s “awful rule and right supremacy” (V.ii.114). In the controversial final vignette, Kate enters, driving the other wives before her as Petruchio has bidden her to do, and gives her now infamous speech on wifely duty. Her husband, she tells each woman, is “thy lord, thy life, thy keeper, / Thy head, thy sovereign” (ll. 151–52). His “painful labor” is given for her “maintenance” and she must in turn grant him “love, fair looks, and true obedience,” all of which are “too little payment for so great a debt” (ll. 153, 159). The uncompromising tone and outdated tenets of this harangue are understandably distasteful to modern couples: the husband is no longer the only one to “watch the night in storms” while the wife stays “warm at home, secure and safe.” With the upsurge of women’s athletics, female bodies are not typically “soft and weak and smooth” (l. 170). And any woman with an ounce of self-esteem would take offense at being called an “unable worm” (l. 174). Certainly Kate goes too far in presenting her case.
In an effort to reconcile the speech to modern sensibilities, recent productions tend to distort the text in one of two ways. Either they dismiss its import by treating it as sarcasm or they present it with vocal inflections and blocking that show Kate as helpless and broken. The first ignores the context of the speech. Although Kate’s tone may be exaggeratedly compliant, her thesis is meant to be taken at face value. The women whom she is addressing have, after all, just behaved to their new husbands as the “contending rebel[s]” and “graceless traitor[s]” (V.ii.164–65) that she is preaching against. Bianca has been especially cutting. She upbraids Lucentio for his pointless summons: “Fie, what a foolish duty call you this?” When he protests that she has caused him to lose money by wagering on her obedience, she counters: “The more fool you for laying on my duty” (ll. 130–34). Although the charge has grounds, this affront in public and on her wedding day is hardly tactful or considerate. In fact, Bianca is acting “peevish, sullen, sour”—the very traits that the reformed Kate counsels against. She already sounds nearly as bored and frustrated as Kate was at the play’s outset, with little prospect of finding in her husband a match for her will. Coddled and paraded by her foolish father, Bianca has gone from willing conspirator in the Good Girl masquerade to incipient shrew. Her pretense has yielded her the image but not the substance of a happy marriage. In deceiving her father, she has also beguiled herself. Reading Kate’s advice to the other women as sarcasm makes nonsense of the text.
Other productions take Kate’s tone literally but show her as exhausted and bedraggled, broken by Petruchio’s treatment into a dazed puppet of his views. That reading gives the play a bleakly pessimistic ending and turns exhilarating farce into pathos. More balanced productions have stayed truer to Shakespeare’s text. Kate ends her encomium with a self-denigrating pronouncement that to “do [her husband] ease,” a wife should be ready “to place your hands below your husband’s foot.” She offers herself as a model: “My hand is ready” (V.ii.182–84). If Petruchio were a brute, he would take her up on it. Instead, he acknowledges her as an equal and a mate: “Come and kiss me, Kate” (l. 185). Before the father and suitors who have insulted and rejected her, he claims her as a desirable wife. Together, they have achieved a social and emotional triumph. “Come, Kate, we’ll to bed,” he says, reminding us that the honeymoon is yet to take place. Petruchio gets in a last dig at Lucentio: “’Twas I won the wager, though you hit the white” (l. 191)—i.e., the supposed bulls-eye, “fair” Bianca. Then they go off, arm in arm, leaving the rest to “wonder.”
Shakespeare himself outgrew Kate’s categorical manifesto. Five years later, when he wrote his comic masterpiece on sparring couples, Much Ado About Nothing, he would end the duel of wit and will more equitably: the groom’s only means of coping with his still-quipping bride is to “stop [her] mouth” with a kiss. But the earlier play, for all its crudeness, continues to hold the stage. Its popularity is due not only to its sparkle and quick pace but to its depth of human understanding. Petruchio treats Kate with the cunning of a behavioral psychologist. He shows her that she need not be obstreperous to get attention, that wit can be a more effective weapon than coercion, that compassion can be a sign of strength, that she is someone capable of attracting and giving love. He, not Baptista, is the knowing father figure in the play.
Lear in his maddened state poses the play’s central question about fatherhood: “Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?” (III.vi.75–76). He is referring to the cruelty of his elder daughters, Goneril and Regan, to whom he had ceded his rights in his kingdom. In this play, it is they who begin by playing the Good Girl role, while the youngest sister, Cordelia, refuses to make a pretense of love and obedience. The stakes are much higher than in Shrew, the prizes not dowries but kingdoms and the costs not pride and decorum but sanity and survival.
Bianca offends simply by evading her father’s authority, and for an end of which he ultimately approves. But Lear’s feigning daughters subject him to dire proofs of their opposition: insults, quarrels, exile, and, finally, open warfare. By mid-play, they have cast him out onto the heath in a raging storm and begun a battle to the death against the combined forces of father and younger sister. They defy not merely social norms but the natural order, destroying the “holy cords” (II.ii.69) that bind parent and child, human beings and God. Their conduct is condemned as “unnatural” by every virtuous character in the play. “Shrew” would be too mild a metaphor for such women; they are repeatedly reviled as “monster” and “devil.” The Fool, Lear’s jester and externalized conscience, comments wryly: “I marvel what kin thou and thy daughters are” (I.iv.173). Lear professes amazement that one father could produce such “different issues” as Gloucester’s sons and his elder daughters. He is particularly puzzled because Goneril and Regan, unlike Edmund, have been “got between lawful sheets.” He is obsessed with their “filial ingratitude” toward, as he describes himself to them, the “old kind father” whose “frank heart gave all” (III.iv.20). But a closer look at Lear’s relationship with his children calls into question that self-flattering description and makes clear “what kin” Goneril and Regan are to him.
The play begins with a fairy tale situation: a king creates a public test of his children’s mettle. He calls an audience to announce that he will divide his kingdom among his three daughters, the most “opulent” third (I.i.86) going to the one who says she “doth love [him] most” (l. 51). Granted that Lear is an old man weary of the burdens of office and that his daughters are young and capable. What is wrong with his plan? In a word, it ignores the realities of human nature. The king claims that his motives are altruistic—to forestall “future strife” over the division of power and land. He wishes only, he says, “To strike all cares and business from our age, / Conferring them on younger strengths, while we / Unburdened crawl toward death” (ll. 39–41). But the royal “we” and the melodramatic tone suggest Lear’s penchant for self-aggrandizement. He may be tired of the responsibilities of kingship, but he loves the trappings. He reveals that attitude when he specifies the conditions of his legacy: “Only we still retain / The name and all th’addition to a king,” including a company of “an hundred knights” (ll. 133–36) to serve him. He does not, in other words, mean to bestow this gift and retire, but to remain on the scene to bask in his former glory. This would be a formula for strife even in the most amicable of family enterprises. An additional proof of Lear’s obtuseness is that he cedes power to children whom he should know would never willingly share it, with him or with one another.
The test that he devises virtually guarantees hypocrisy. Each daughter must publicly profess love for the father who dangles power and property before her as the rewards for saying what he wants to hear. Goneril, the eldest and so the first to respond, gushes the series of required hyperboles: she loves her father “dearer than eyesight, space, and liberty.” In case that list is not enough to satisfy his vanity, she covers any possible omission with the claim that hers is “a love that makes breath poor and speech unable” (I.i.56, 60). The ploy works on Lear, who doles out “shadowy forests,” “plenteous rivers,” and “wide-skirted meads” to Goneril, her husband the Duke of Albany, and their “issue.” Regan, who has been listening intently to this exchange, professes herself “made of that same mettle as my sister.” Goneril, she claims, has “name[d] my very deed of love”—then, to top that performance, she adds, “only she comes too short” (ll. 71–72). These statements will echo ironically through the torments that the sisters later visit on their gullible benefactor. For the moment, however, he gobbles up the honeyed words and gives Regan an “ample third of our fair kingdom,” of equal “space, validity, and pleasure” (ll. 80–81) to Goneril’s portion.
Were this episode presented in isolation, we would have little cause to blame Lear for his credulity. Goneril and Regan’s words, while excessive, seem appropriately formal in the context of the grand royal audience. Shakespeare provides, however, three means by which we can gauge their sincerity: the contrasting response of the third daughter, Cordelia; the outraged protest of the loyal counselor, the Earl of Kent; and the cynical commentary of Goneril and Regan themselves in the tête-à-tête that follows the big public scene. All exemplify one of the dramatist’s favorite techniques—juxtaposition—for implying the contrast between what is said and what is shown.
The most important of these means for judging Goneril and Regan’s sincerity is Cordelia’s reaction. Her first line, delivered as an aside, is a vow to “love and be silent” (I.i.62). When the old king turns to her expectantly and asks, “What can you say to draw / A third more opulent than your sisters?” she takes him literally and says “Nothing” (ll. 85–87). For that motive—to win a richer prize than her sisters—Cordelia will not speak. With a willfulness that we are soon to see she has learned from Lear, she refuses to bend: “I love your Majesty / According to my bond, no more nor less,” she asserts. She reminds him of what that “bond” means: he has “begot,” “bred,” and “loved” her; she, in turn, will “obey,” “love,” and “most honor” him (ll. 96–98). This bare statement does not satisfy the vain old man. Cordelia could have anticipated as much, but she stubbornly sticks to her principles: to eschew the “still-soliciting eye” and “tongue” that have won her sisters favor.
Technically, Cordelia is right, as the staunch Kent assures her. Candor, in fact, will emerge as one of the play’s predominant values. In the final speech, Edgar, the long-suffering heir to the throne, urges that the great charge to the survivors of all this tragedy must be to “Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say” (V.iii.163). But another value that the play embraces, compassion, is in short supply in the opening scene. Cordelia does not show much empathy—or even tact. Perhaps she is so revolted by her sisters’ “glib and oily art” (I.i.224) and her father’s vanity that, with adolescent self-righteousness, she refuses to play their game. Cordelia must, though, be aware of Lear’s vulnerability, especially in this moment of public exposure. She, his “joy,” whom he has openly favored in the past, has mortified him. He confesses his anguish to Kent and the assembled company: “I loved her most, and thought to set my rest / On her kind nursery” (ll. 123–24). But as Lear will state later, his macho creed dictates that showing pain is both unkingly and unmanly. He covers his hurt with a burst of fury, depicting himself as a “dragon,” breathing the fire of his “wrath” (l. 122).
The ostensible reason for summoning Cordelia had been to allow her suitors, the Duke of Burgundy and the King of France, to decide their rivalry for her hand. In the presence of these suitors and the entire court, Lear strips her of her dowry, reputation, and his “benison” (I.i.265) and banishes her from the kingdom forever. So sudden and extreme is his reaction that the suitors are stunned and Cordelia is forced to plead that Lear assure them that “no vicious blot, murder,… no unchaste action” (ll. 227–28) of hers has provoked this punishment. Lear is unbending in his rejection, and he cruelly uses the imagery of the marriage market to underscore her humiliation: Now that Cordelia is no longer “dear” (meaning both cherished and expensive) to him, “her price is fallen”; she is “Dowered with our curse, and strangered with our oath” (ll. 196–97, 204). Cordelia tells him that she is “glad” she lacks her sisters’ hypocrisy, “though not to have it / Hath lost me in your liking.” The old man’s response is uncompromisingly vain: “Better thou / Hast not been born than not to have pleased me better” (ll. 232–34). Burgundy is so put off by the rescinding of the marriage contract that he cedes his claim to France, who gallantly takes up Cordelia’s cause and Lear’s metaphor to express her intrinsic worth: “She is herself a dowry” (l. 241). Before this final judgment, the loyal Kent, too, has expressed his shock and begged the king to “check / This hideous rashness” (ll. 150–51). His reward is to precede Cordelia in banishment.
The confrontation ends with Cordelia stripped of all honor and position, relegated to the protection of a husband she barely knows. The audience may still be wondering if she might have misjudged her sisters. In fact, students reading the play for the first time are often puzzled by her stubborn silence and by the ferocity of Kent’s outrage. The final episode before her departure leaves no doubt that she, and not Lear, has read Goneril and Regan right. Alone with them, Cordelia says candidly that she sees through their mask of benevolence: “I know you what you are,” though, being a “sister,” she is “most loath to name [their] faults” (I.i.269–71). Her one request to them is for the welfare of Lear: “Love well our father.” Reluctantly, she “commit[s] him” to their “professed bosoms” (l. 272)—hearts that express but do not feel love. She adds sarcastically that if she could, she would wish him in “a better place” (l. 274). Just before his own summary dismissal, Kent expressed the same doubt about the distance between Goneril and Regan’s “words of love” and their “deeds.” Neither he nor Cordelia accuses them outright nor quarrels: both recognize that the sisters are the ones in power now. In any case, Goneril and Regan are impervious to criticism. They dismiss Cordelia with haughty remarks about her “scanted obedience.” Cordelia is not deceived: “Time shall unfold what plighted cunning hides” (l. 280), she predicts, and goes off with her new lord. She will never see her sisters again.
Goneril and Regan remain behind to comment and scheme. Letting their hair down at last—indicated textually by their lapse into prose—they agree that their father is a fool. He has always been “rash,” even at “the best and soundest of his time” (I.i.294), Goneril clucks. Regan agrees that his latest decisions result from “the infirmity of age,” but adds, “yet he hath ever but slenderly known himself” (ll. 292–93). His show of preference for them and his lavish bequests do not earn their trust or respect. In fact, they see his rejection of Cordelia as unnatural and self-destructive: “He always loved our sister most,” Goneril says, matter-of-factly confirming Lear’s own statements. She adds that his decision to “cast [Cordelia] off” is a gross proof of “poor judgment” (ll. 290–91). Any sibling jealousy that Goneril may have felt once has been converted to scorn and ruthlessness. She has not expected favor from her father; having received it, she recognizes the manipulativeness behind the gift and is not appeased. In fact, both she and Regan immediately suspect that they may be the next victims of Lear’s rashness. Regan suggests that they “think further” about the turn of events. Goneril, older and harder, counters: “We must do something, and i’ th’ heat” (l. 306, my italics).
What Goneril does is to renege on her agreement to host Lear and his retinue of knights in the royal style to which he has been accustomed. She blames the king for her breach, complaining to her steward that the knights “grow riotous” and the “idle old man” censures her for “every trifle”(I.iii.6, 16, 7). Showing some of her father’s temper, Goneril vows, “I’ll not endure it” (l. 15). She orders her obsequious steward, Oswald, and his “fellows” to slight the royal party: “I’d have it come to question” (l. 13), she declares. Lear, meanwhile, has begun to perceive “a most faint neglect” (I.iv.65) in his treatment, but he has been reluctant to see it as a sign of “unkindness” (l. 67). In Shakespeare’s day, “kind” meant “natural” as well as “compassionate”: it is one of the words that echoes through the play. Lear, having been unkind in both senses himself, does not trust his own judgment of others’ kindness. He cannot stand to hear that his Fool has “much pined away” at Cordelia’s exile: “No more of that,” he orders. “I have noted it well” (ll. 71–72). He has been used to denying painful feelings, attacking the messenger and taking refuge in his privilege and rank. Now that that fortress is gone, he begins to question the very identity he had thought was his. When Oswald insults him, Lear demands angrily: “Who am I?” The steward responds insolently: “My lady’s father” (ll. 75–76). The disguised Kent is there to trip up the underling and reassert the old king’s sense of hierarchy. “I thank thee, fellow,” Lear says. “Thou serv’st me, and I’ll love thee” (l. 83). That is the status quo that Lear has always taken for granted. But his feeling of reassurance is transient. The Fool enters to remind his old master that his world and his complacent self-concept have changed irredeemably.
Thus, Lear arrives at one of the central questions of this restlessly questioning play: Who am I? Is identity founded on rank? Office? Relationship? Or is it something intrinsic? How does it change with changes in circumstance? The king, the Fool tells him wryly, is as much a fool as his own jester: “All thy other titles thou hast given away; that thou wast born with” (I.iv.142). Continuing to address the king in the familiar second person, the Fool offers proof: “Thou … mad’st thy daughters thy mothers … gav’st them the rod, and put’st down thine own breeches” (ll. 164–65). He goes a step further and claims: “I am better than thou art now; I am a fool, thou art nothing” (ll. 184–85). The Fool sugarcoats all this bitter truth-telling with jests and colloquialisms. His use of the familiar “you” is a mark of the special privilege granted his office: as the king’s “all-licensed fool” (l. 191), he is free to say anything to his royal master and not be charged with treason. (Jesters were assumed to be too simple-minded and powerless to be taken seriously.) Naturally, Goneril loathes him and, as the Fool notes, would have him “whipped for speaking true” (l. 174). Candor, loyalty, perspicacity, all of which the Fool has in abundance, are her enemies. She silences him with threats and turns on her father, accusing him of keeping knights “so disordered” by “epicurism and lust” that they are turning her “graced palace” into “a tavern or brothel” (ll. 232–35).
How credible is Goneril’s accusation? The one knight who has a speaking role in this scene addresses Lear with eloquence and respect. Goneril’s other charge, “you strike my people,” a reference to Kent’s chastisement of Oswald, is clearly exaggerated. Lear’s opposing view seems more persuasive: that his soldiers are “men of choice and rarest parts, / That all particulars of duty know” (I.iv.254–55). Yet his reaction to Goneril’s accusation is so extreme that it repels sympathy for him. He is stunned into questioning her identity and, again, his own: “Are you our daughter?” he demands, and then: “Does any here know me? This is not Lear … Who is it that can tell me who I am?” The Fool replies cuttingly: “Lear’s shadow” (ll. 216, 220–21)—the shade of the powerful old sovereign.
Thwarted, Lear reacts with his old means of exerting his will: flying into a rage at the person opposing him. He calls Goneril a “degenerate bastard” (I.iv.244), and bestows on her a “father’s curse” of the most vindictive sort. He invokes the goddess nature to “Dry up in her the organs of increase” and “convey sterility into her womb.” Or “if she must teem”—the word suggests bestial procreation—to bear a child “of spleen,” so malevolent that it is a “torment to her” (I.iv.270–74). Rather than “honor her,” he prays that the child will “turn all her mother’s pains and benefits / To laughter and contempt” (ll. 277–78). Clearly, this is Lear’s view of his own treatment at Goneril’s hands, and he flings at her his famous charge of filial betrayal: “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth / It is to have a thankless child” (ll. 279–80).
Goneril reacts to Lear’s fury with grim composure. Clearly, she has witnessed this mood before. She assures her shocked husband, the kindly Duke of Albany, that this is only her father’s “dotage” speaking. She is no more moved when, defeated, Lear breaks down and laments the “hot tears” that he cannot hold back and admits “I am ashamed / That thou hast power to shake my manhood thus” (I.iv.287–88). In his impotence, he vows pathetically to “resume” his former royal “shape.” Abruptly, he realizes his “folly” in rejecting Cordelia for her “most small fault.” “I did her wrong,” he says, the non sequitur suggesting the suddenness of his remorse. Yet, in spite of this momentary insight, Lear is as given to rashness as ever. He rushes off to seek solace from Regan, whom he is “sure is kind and comfortable” (l. 297).
In the face of this new torrent, Goneril remains coldly self-possessed. She tells Albany that her father’s slights are imaginary, and that his wrath, backed by the armed knights, is dangerous to them. “I know his heart,” she claims, and cautions her husband against his “milky gentleness” (I.iv.321, 332) toward the king. “Well, you may go too far,” he objects. She snaps back, “Safer than trust too far” (l. 319), completing the blank verse line and getting the last word.
Distrust is a natural response to so temperamental and arrogant a father. In this new crisis, Lear obstinately maintains the rigid stance that has already caused him pain and loss. He has convinced himself that Regan loves him and will side with him against Goneril, whom he pictures as a “vulture” attacking him with “sharp-toothed unkindness” (II.iv.130). He makes this accusation to Regan herself in spite of his shock at finding the messenger that he has sent ahead, the disguised Kent, locked in the stocks at her palace. This form of punishment was usually reserved for “basest and contemned wretches” (II.ii.138), and is thus a marked show of disrespect to Lear. At first, the old king refuses to believe that Regan and Cornwall are responsible; then he goes to the other extreme of hyperbolic denouncement: “’Tis worse than murder” (II.iv.22), he proclaims. Regan insults him further by sending flimsy excuses for failing to greet him, and Lear angrily demands: “The King would speak with Cornwall. The dear father / Would with his daughter speak” (ll. 96–97, italics mine). When Regan finally appears, he tries by various means to force her to honor these former titles. Instead, she repeats Goneril’s charges about “the riots of [his] followers” and says cuttingly that, as he is “old,” he “should be ruled” (ll. 141–43). She urges him to ask forgiveness of Goneril. Lear’s response is a bitter parody of that entreaty:
Dear daughter, I confess that I am old. [Kneels.]
Age is unnecessary. On my knees I beg
That you’ll vouchsafe me raiment, bed, and food [ll. 149–51].
Regan calls these “unsightly tricks” and when he persists in cursing Goneril, she predicts: “So you will wish on me when the rash mood is on” (l. 164).
Lear responds by reminding her of her obligations to him, in the form of a description of his ideal daughter. But the comparison he makes is designed to deepen the sibling rivalry he has always fostered:
’Tis not in thee
To grudge my pleasure, to cut off my train,
To bandy hasty words, to scant my sizes,…
Thou better knowest
The offices of nature, bond of childhood,
Effects of courtesy, dues of gratitude….
Thy half o’ th’ kingdom hast thou not forgot,
Wherein I thee endowed [II.iv.168–76].
Lear is committing his old mistakes: making service to his pride and comfort the test of love, and measuring love in quantitative and material terms. Not surprisingly, the sisters join hands, and forces, against him.
Goneril dismisses his perception of things: “All’s not offense that indiscretion finds / And dotage terms so” (II.iv.191–92). Regan adds with sarcastic solicitousness: “I pray you father, being weak, seem so.” Lear is again shocked: “I gave you all,” he protests, and Regan, not missing a beat, completes his line: “and in good time you gave it” (l. 245). Determinedly rational and composed, the daughters ignore his humiliation and anguish and engage in a game of reducing his knightly complement by halves. The old man tries to intercede. Although he begs Goneril “O reason not the need”—the necessity to his self-esteem of retaining his train—he continues to gauge love quantitatively. Since Regan will allow him only twenty-five retainers, he will return to Goneril after all. Her offer of fifty doubles Regan’s and so, he reasons, equals “twice her love” (l. 255). This conclusion takes no account of the poisonous words that have passed between him and his elder daughter.
Predictably, Goneril rejects the proposal, and the sisters take turns stripping Lear of all his remaining knights. His mood veers crazily between grief and rage. He begins mildly, saying sadly to Goneril: “I will not trouble thee, my child: farewell. / We’ll meet no more, no more see one another” (II.iv.214–15). But within two lines, he is denouncing her as not his “flesh and blood” but “rather a disease that’s in my flesh.” He gets more graphic, calling her “a boil, a plague sore … in my corrupted blood” (ll. 216–20). Like so many of Shakespeare’s failed fathers, Lear sees his daughters not as separate entities but as aspects of his self, now tainted.
In keeping with this patriarchal mindset, Lear is haunted by the paranoid conviction that daughters who reject him so cruelly cannot be legitimate. Their mother (who presumably has long been dead) must have been “an adulteress,” he accuses, and he calls on the gods to “divorce me from their mother’s tomb” (II.iv.126–27). Later, on the heath, he will be obsessed with “lust” as the essential source of moral corruption. Recent readings that see this preoccupation as evidence of incest, however, distort the text. Jane Smiley’s novel A Thousand Acres, a reconception of Lear’s kingdom as a modern Iowa farm dynasty, goes so far as to depict both Goneril and Regan as innocent victims of their father’s sexual abuse. There is no evidence in the play of father-daughter incest, a relationship that Shakespeare did not hesitate to make explicit, and to condemn, in Pericles. Lear is overbearing and chauvinistic, but perfectly willing to sanction and support his daughters’ marriages.
The more likely explanation for Lear’s revulsion toward lust is that he blames his passion for his late wife for creating such treacherous daughters. In fact, the one actually illegitimate child in the play, Edmund, does betray his father. But he at least repents in the end and feels remorse toward both the father and the brother that he has wronged. Goneril and Regan undergo no such softening. Perhaps their rigidity is a reflection of their father’s. As we have seen in his earlier confrontation with his daughters, Lear despises his own grief, and its expression in tears, which he scornfully calls “women’s weapons, water drops.” He prays instead that the gods “touch [him] with noble anger” (II.iv.271–72). In Lear’s chauvinistic conception, women cry, men take revenge. But he senses that the cost of so rigid a schematization may be self-destruction: before he will let himself “weep,” he vows that his heart “Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws” (ll. 279–81). Although he has threatened to bring on his daughters “the terrors of the earth,” the emptiness of the decree is clear even to him. Lear himself is the main victim of his helpless rage. He rushes off into the storm crying, “I shall go mad!”
Goneril and Regan stay behind to close the gates against their father and to rationalize their rejection. “The house is [too] little” to accommodate “the old man and his people,” Regan begins. Goneril adds that the “blame” is all his, and Regan joins her on this moral high horse, saying sententiously “to willful men / The injuries that they themselves procure / Must be their schoolmasters” (II.iv.297–99). Their indifference and complacency are chilling. Still, were Goneril and Regan to stop at this show of defiance, they might merit the largest share of the audience’s sympathy. It is Lear, after all, who has given them a model of vanity, obstinacy, and ruthlessness. He has stinted his love, favoring their sister and making any show of affection conditional. When they displease him, he curses them and their progeny. They have learned to emulate him all too well. Goneril emerges as the soldier, Regan the sovereign overlord; both are supreme politicians. Cordelia, in contrast, has not learned the means to power. Her essential qualities, compassion and loyalty, let her see beneath Lear’s vain, stern surface to the feeling man, and she finds the means to help him recover, through gentle example rather than ruthless imposition of will, his better self. (For that account, and his bittersweet reconciliation with Cordelia, see Chapter 6: “Daughters Who Forgive and Heal.”) But although Cordelia rescues her father’s spirit, she cannot save his or her own life. Her sisters are much more adept in the ways of the world. Goneril and Regan’s subsequent treatment of Lear, as well as of Gloucester and Albany, however, undermines any identification with their cause. By the play’s end, we are moved to agree with the old king’s self-pitying cry: “I am a man more sinned against than sinning” (III.ii.59–60).
What do the sisters do? Abandon their father to a fierce storm on a heath so barren that “for many miles about / There’s scarce a bush” (II.iv.296–97). Conspire to destroy his supporters, including the brave old Earl of Gloucester. Wage war against both father and younger sister, eventually imprisoning and, in effect, executing both. This is typical dynastic war, some have argued, brought on by Lear’s short-sightedness. Yes, but the manner in which the sisters conduct it is ruthless to the point of sadism. For all his arrogance and insensitivity, Lear has never done them physical harm. In fact, he has provided well for their social and material needs. Proof of their essential barbarity is that once he has been defeated and is no longer their target, they turn on one another. Each has the same ambitions: to be sole ruler of Britain with the handsome young Edmund Gloucester as her consort. In the struggle, the sisters show no more mercy for one another than they have for their other kin. Like the gingham dog and the calico cat in the nursery rhyme, they eat each other up.
Early on, the sisters recognize their essential similarity. As noted above, Regan says in her opening speech, “I am made of that self mettle as my sister” (I.i.69), and Goneril, citing Lear’s supposed faults as a houseguest, describes Regan as someone “whose mind and mine I know in that are one” (I.iii.15). Their bond stays intact while Cornwall is alive to partner Regan and while the sisters conspire against their father. At first, Goneril, the elder, leads and Regan follows. But during the torture of Gloucester, Regan shows her own capacity for authority and cruelty. Although her husband does the actual blinding, it is Regan who “plucks his beard” (stage direction, III.vii.34), a gross insult, urges Cornwall to put out both the old man’s eyes, and kills the horrified servant who attempts to intervene. Throughout, her tone is ruthless and mocking. In mid-blinding, she says sarcastically, “One side [of Gloucester’s face] will mock another. Th’other, too” (l. 71). Afterwards, she orders: “Go thrust him out of gates, and let him smell / His way to Dover” (ll. 93–94). Never does Regan show mercy or remorse. In fact, she later calls the decision to let Gloucester live “great ignorance” (IV.iv.9) because of the sympathy he invites wherever he goes.
Regan defies the Elizabethan conventions of feminine behavior. Not only does she not turn away from the violence, she relishes it. The servant, also ignoring the conventions of his station, tells her, “If you did wear a beard upon your chin, / I’d shake it in this quarrel” (III.vii.76–77). Regan responds to this reproach to by asserting masculine prerogatives. Demanding her husband’s sword, she “runs at [the servant] behind” and stabs him in the back. Before he dies, he manages to wound his master mortally. Cornwall asks for Regan’s arm to aid him as he staggers. The text gives her no lines at this point, and some productions have shown her turning her back on her dying husband. In any case, she does not mourn Cornwall long.
Goneril, too, sees kindness as weakness and especially despises it in men. When we next see her, she has joined league with Edmund. She openly expresses scorn for her “mild husband” and the “cowish terror of his spirit” in refusing to join the war against Lear. She frankly offers herself to the young man, giving him a kiss and her “favor” to wear in battle. He responds with the morbid pledge, “Yours in the ranks of death” (IV.ii.25). After his exit, she muses lasciviously, “O the difference of man and man. To thee a woman’s services are due. / My fool usurps my body” (ll. 27–28).
Albany enters, transformed by outrage at the sisters’ “vile offenses” to “a father, and a gracious aged man” (IV.ii.47, 41). He calls them “tigers, not daughters” and flings insults at his wife, calling her “barbarous” and “degenerate,” a “monster” and a “devil.” Albany longs “to dislocate and tear / [Her] flesh and bones,” but says that her “woman’s shape” shields her (ll. 65–67). Like the servant with Regan, he upholds the chivalric code even in the face of her defiance of it. For Goneril, as for Regan, that attitude is a matter for scorn. She calls him “a moral fool,” a “milk-livered man, / That bears a cheek for blows, a head for wrongs” (ll. 58, 50–51). For his “manhood,” she gives a Bronx cheer—“mew!” (l. 68). She, not Albany, will lead her forces in the upcoming battle. Although all the good characters in the play—Gloucester, Kent, Cordelia, and Edgar as well as Albany—take the side of the king, Goneril and Regan remain staunch in their determination to defeat him. As Albany tells her: “Wisdom and goodness to the vile seem vile; / Filths savor but themselves” (ll. 38–39). The villains’ forces win, but their league does not last beyond the initial conspiracy. Victory achieved and the spoils at issue, the vicious pack begins to “prey on itself, / Like monsters of the deep” (ll. 49–50).
The main prize in contention is Edmund himself. Hearing of Cornwall’s death, Goneril wastes no time in grief for her brother-in-law or pity for her newly widowed sister. Immediately, she concludes that since Edmund is “with her [Regan],” her sister will pursue him and bring Goneril’s castles in the air tumbling down “upon [her own] hateful life” (IV.ii.86). This is one of the only hints that Goneril gives of the desperation and despair that fuel her drive to power. Possessing Edmund is even more important to her than military victory. Recklessly, she records her feelings in a letter that she sends by messenger into the precarious heat of battle. In it, she begs Edmund to “deliver” her from “the loathed warmth” of Albany’s bed by “cut[ting] him off” (IV.vi.262, 259). She signs the letter “Your (wife I would say) affectionate servant.” When Edgar intercepts the missive and shows it to Albany, it becomes a key piece of material evidence against the conspirators. Goneril feels neither remorse nor shame. In an aside that she utters just before the final conflict, she fairly hisses her single-minded determination: “I had rather lose the battle than that sister / Should loosen him and me” (V.i.18–19).
Regan is equally jealous and equally determined to have exclusive rights to Edmund’s favors. As Goneril has surmised, she does not mourn Cornwall’s loss. At her next appearance, she is attempting to bribe Oswald into revealing Goneril’s feelings. “I know your lady does not love her husband,” she tells him, and notes that she has seen the “most speaking looks” that have passed between her and Edmund. About her own situation, she is matter-of-fact: “My lord is dead, Edmund and I have talked, / And more convenient is he for my hand / Than for your lady’s” (IV.v.30–32). Oswald refuses to “Let [her] unseal the letter” he is carrying—the one that Edgar will later intercept. So Regan orders him to report her feelings to Edmund, adding that should he meet “that blind traitor” Gloucester, he should kill him, since “Where he arrives he moves / All hearts against us” (ll. 10–11).
Like Goneril, Edmund, and all of Shakespeare’s most skillful evildoers, Regan recognizes benevolent qualities but scorns them. They see altruism, empathy, and loyalty as alien and ridiculous, worth heeding only to manipulate the gullible. Their own feelings are cruder and fiercer: lust, jealousy, and violence are inextricably linked, as both the brothers Gloucester assert in their different ways. Edgar, having intercepted Goneril’s letter, labels her and Edmund “murderous lechers” (IV.vi.270). Edmund, in soliloquy, muses on the sisters’ duel over him: “Each jealous of the other, as the stung / Are of the adder” (V.i.56–57). Ruthless and unscrupulous, he concludes that “Neither can be enjoyed / If both remain alive” (ll. 58–59) and decides to let them battle it out, in a cat fight to the death.
Regan takes her case directly to the object of her passion, demanding to know if he has “found [Albany’s] way to the forfended place”—Goneril’s bed. Edmund pretends to be shocked at the thought, and, when she persists, swears by his “honor” that he has not. In a grim echo of Goneril’s vow, Regan tells him, “I never shall endure her” (V.iii.15). The military battle won, her tactics shift from wheedling to bribery. Before the gathered victors, Regan proposes:
Take thou my soldiers, prisoners, patrimony;
Dispose of them, of me; the walls is thine.
Witness the world that I create thee here
My lord and master [ll. 75–78].
Immediately Goneril undercuts the romantic tone with lewd innuendo: “Mean you to enjoy him?” This before her husband, who provides sardonic commentary on the distasteful scene. He informs Regan that Goneril, “this gilded serpent,” is already engaged to Edmund, and so he, “her husband,” must “contradict” Regan’s proposed marriage banns. “If you will marry,” he says sarcastically, “make your loves to me. / My lady is bespoke” (ll. 88–89). Goneril remains brash and cool. “An interlude!” (a comic episode) she interjects. What she alone knows is that she has already defeated Regan: her weapon, poison. As the disguised Edgar appears to answer Edmund’s challenge, Regan mutters that she feels “sick, o sick!” Goneril comments sotto voce, “If not, I’ll ne’er trust medicine” (l. 96). The sister who was once her ally has become her victim.
Edgar’s challenge to Edmund applies equally to Goneril:
Thou art a traitor,
False to the gods, thy brother, and thy father….
A most toad-spotted traitor [V.iii.134–35].
In fact, the list of Goneril’s victims is incomplete. We will discover shortly that it included her younger sister, too. The dying Edmund confesses that he and Goneril devised the insidious plot to hang Cordelia, whom they have arrested, in order to make her murder appear a suicide.
Goneril’s last ploy, her final act of “plighted cunning,” is against herself. Edmund’s defeat makes her furious. Instead of comforting her wounded lover, she berates him for his foolishness in meeting “an unknown opposite,” which “th’law of war” had not demanded. “Thou art not vanquished / But cozened and beguiled” (V.iii.154–55), she charges. When Albany confronts her with her clandestine letter to her paramour, she rejects the rule of law that she has just invoked: “the laws are mine, not thine.” She defies him and everyone else: “Who can arraign me for’t?” (ll. 159–60). He persists, and she eschews all further human contact. “Ask me not what I know,” she says, and rushes off. Her last line echoes that of another remorseless villain, Iago.
Albany knows Goneril’s moods, and orders: “Go after her. She’s desperate. Govern her.” But he himself stays behind to manage the political business at hand. He has long since ceased sympathizing with the woman he once loved. Within minutes a messenger appears holding a “bloody knife,” which he has just pulled “hot” and “smok[ing]” from Goneril’s “heart.” Albany pronounces her grim epitaph: “This judgment of the heavens, that makes us tremble, / Touches us not with pity” (V.iii.232–33).
It is left to Edmund to pay morbid tribute to the sisters’ desperate resolve:
Yet Edmund was beloved.
The one the other poisoned for my sake,
And after slew herself [V.iii.240–42].
He sums up their sordid bond: “I was contracted to them both. All three / Now marry in an instant” (ll. 229–30). It is a menage-à-trois in perpetuity that both sisters would loathe: a No Exit hell of eternal jealousy. As Cordelia early predicted, “Time” has revealed what “plighted cunning” hid.
And the “cause in nature that ma[de] these hard hearts”? Certainly Lear is not faultless. He is far from the innocent victim he portrays himself as when he asks this disingenuous question. Advertently or not, he has trained Goneril and Regan in egotism and arrogance and ceded them the power to impose their wills. Yet the lengths to which the false daughters take their grievances against him are repellent and the effects dire. As Albany predicts, having cut themselves off from their “material sap,” Goneril and Regan “wither” (IV.ii.34–35). They end by losing everything that once gave them pleasure and security.
The Taming of the Shrew ends with the false daughter revealed as an incipient shrew, petulant and rather bored with the marriage that she has manipulated father and suitors to achieve. But true to the comic mode, her marriage upholds the social order and affirms the family bond. The ritual of the wedding banquet signals Bianca’s central place in the community. In the tragedy, the false sisters are revealed as “monsters.” They break the bonds of humane sympathy and destroy the natural order and, in the process, cast themselves out of the human circle. Their end does not merit even the dignity of a funeral. They drop and are carted off, unmourned and reviled. We watching this bloody spectacle are, like Albany, moved to awe but not to pity. Making war on her father, the daughter destroys both him and herself.