Background
The play belongs to a period comedy tradition that often treated marriage as a social arrangement. Modern readers and productions debate its treatment of gender and consent, and the ending changes significantly with performance choices.
Reading notes
- Pay attention to who controls the terms of each exchange and how control is displayed.
- Compare Katherina’s public speeches with her earlier resistance and the play’s stage directions.
- Consider how the Sly frame affects the audience’s judgment of the main plot.
Version note
Text source: the Standard Ebooks EPUB edition identified on this page. This site extracted the English text and retained the source edition’s chapter order. Public-domain status must be checked for the territory where the text will be distributed.