Katharina: The Shrew Who Has Reasons

Katharina's bad temper is established before she speaks. Her father cannot marry off the younger daughter Bianca until Katharina finds a husband, and nobody will have Katharina. She is sharp-tongued, physically violent with her sister, and contemptuous of the suitors who come to Padua. Most productions show her as having good reasons for all of this, even if the text makes her spell them out only once.

Petruchio's campaign against her (denying her food, sleep, and new clothes, arguing her into exhaustion over whether the sun is the moon) is called 'taming' and also 'shrewdness' by him. She calls it torment. By Act 4, she starts agreeing with whatever he says. It is not clear whether this is defeat, adaptation, or a private negotiation that the audience is not quite being shown.

Her final speech in Act 5 Scene 2 on a wife's duty to her husband is the most debated passage in the play. She says things that would have been mainstream in 1590s England. She says them at length, with conviction, to women who have refused to come when called. Irony, sincerity, and survival can all fit inside those twenty-two lines, and productions choose between them differently every time.