Illustration by @DoodleMicheal13

warnings: domestic abuse, bdsm, violence, misogyny, brainrot

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I grew up watching Shakespeare plays. For whatever reason I happened to see very many productions of The Taming of the Shrew, which is one of Shakespeare's most bleak, cruel, misogynistic plays, as a child. To be honest...I didn't see how brutal it was; I just...thought it was hilarious, because it is. As a teenager, when I saw it again, I listened more to the actors and directors, who all like to justify the play: something about how Kate and Petruchio were really in love, how the violence and gaslighting were okay because it was ironic.

I had to reevaluate it when I was an adult, and these reassurances stopped really hitting the same way. "Irony" started to feel more like a cope that allowed us to enjoy it. I reevaluated it again when I came to terms with being a woman. I still think it's an immensely valuable play, and I absolutely adore the production with Meryl Streep and Raul Julia. (Hnnnghhh Raul Julia is husband material...) But it makes me uncomfortable.

Recently it occurred to me that the text supports another interpretation. If we just make this an st4t (straight t4t) relationship, and transpose the unrestrained violence of abuse to the controlled violence of bdsm, everything falls into place. I beg a moment of your attention.

What happens, again?

This is the main arc of the story, as I remember it.

The lovely Bianca can’t get married until her older sister Kate gets married—but Kate is abrasive, bitter, sarcastic, strong-willed, and she intimidates all the men around her. Everybody wants Bianca, nobody will go near Kate.

Enter Petruchio, who is willing to “tame” her for the sake of the dowry (and I guess for his own amusement). Petruchio and Kate exchange some delightfully smart, vicious banter. The father marries them off. Petruchio embarrasses everybody at the wedding by showing up late wearing ridiculous clothes, and he takes her off to his household before they can have the wedding feast.

At his house, Petruchio is brutally controlling towards Kate. He starves her, he toys with her, he offers her beautiful things only to take them away. Eventually he gaslights her into acting like a submissive tradwife, and she’s willing to call the sun the moon if it pleases him.

Finally he returns with her, and he makes a bet with the normies who made fun of him and Kate before, as to whose wife is the most obedient. She wins by acting like a cartoon character of a housewife; and she delivers a speech to the ungrateful other brides about how women are physically made to serve. Haw haw!

Okay what the fuck

I don’t want to pretend that Shakespeare wasn’t being a monster when he wrote this. I don’t think it will do to look for signs that, secretly, Shakespeare intended Kate to be Petruchio’s equal, that he wasn’t just accepting and reinforcing the popular beliefs about the subordination of women. Shakespeare was not our guy here.

Which sucks because his writing is so good! I mean, just, still, despite how horrible it is, it’s so damn beautiful and funny.

So here’s my position. Rather than hunting for clues that Shakespeare’s version is woke actually, I would like instead to point to a few opportunities: things we can bring out in the source material.

1. Kate and Petruchio make off with twenty thousand crowns of her father’s money. (Based)
2. There’s a weird feeling through the whole play that both Kate and Petruchio are performing.
3. They seem to have some genuine chemistry when they first meet. Kate is the only one whose wit can keep up with Petruchio’s, and vice versa.
4. The beginning of the play—which is usually cut—frames the entire play as…basically a drag show. Long story involving a lord, a drunk, more gaslighting, and a number of femboys with little bowls of rosewater. But there’s something thematically rich here about performativity, the comedy of being placed on a throne you don’t deserve…
5. At the end of the play, Kate is repeating everything she has been told her whole life to the people who bullied her for not being womanly enough. Now she is turning their words on them.

Some productions take the irony in Kate’s speech as if it made everything okay. But…in my opinion it doesn’t totally work, not just yet. Let me quote J. Mitchell Morse on this (emphasis mine):

At the end of the play [Kate] has armed herself with the useless weapon of the unarmed, irony: her excessive obedience is a mockery of her husband’s values and his world, but it has no effect, because—well, there are two possibilities. Either he is unaware of being mocked, or he is aware and amused. [...] Katherine is as abnormal at the end of the play as at the beginning—just as much an object of wonder to all who see her. She has, to be sure, gained the amusement of being a spectator of the farce in which she is a victim; to this extent she escapes into a world of her own—but, like all private worlds, it is a delusion.

I agree with this, mostly. Professor Morse says there are two options: (1) Petruchio is unaware of being mocked, or (2) he is aware and amused. I say there is a third way.

My version (why we need to make it a st4t bdsm relationship)

Kate is trans. Petruchio is trans.

Kate is an intimidating, acerbic young woman, mocked and treated as a spectacle by her father and her cis little sister and all her suitors and a whole town of bullies.

Petruchio had been married in a former life. After the bastard—ahem—disappeared somewhere, Petruchio got all his property, took on manly raiment, and chose a name that literally sounds like “patriarch.”

This is the third way: Petruchio and Kate are doing this together.

Petruchio is not instructing the other men in the art of taming a shrew, though he lets them think that. Petruchio and Kate are rehearsing. I want to see a couple extra moments of explicit consent to contextualize the horrors they are acting out. I want to see caretaking afterward (We get a little when Kate thanks and comforts Petruchio, and finally eats.)

Kate and Petruchio bond over participating in a marriage dynamic that goes “too far.” Their performance lays bare the grotesque violence of a supposedly “normal” (patriarchal, abusive) marriage, in a way that (1) makes the other straight couples squirm, and (2) makes them say out loud the unspoken rules of gendered behavior.

Not only do they check all the boxes of a marriage—they make a “better” husband and wife, a better man and woman, than any of the cis people who only showed up to ridicule them. Then they leave with all their money. Absolutely based.