Abstract
The Taming of the Shrew opens with an altercation between a man and a woman in which each threatens violence, and the woman clearly has the upper hand. The hostess, probably owner as well as manager of the alehouse in which Christopher Sly has evidently been drunk and disorderly, forcibly ejects him from it. He responds with a threat of physical battery, “I’ll feeze you, in faith,” meaning he’ll beat or flog her, and she retorts with a similar threat: “A pair of stocks, you rogue” (Ind. 1–2).1 She calls on what Alexandra Shepard calls “disciplinary violence,” the state’s legal instrument designed to enforce, often through public humiliation and shaming rituals, social hierarchy and political order. The hostess invokes the law, but in early modern England, neither she nor any other woman except the queen had the power to execute it, for disciplinary violence was “almost entirely carried out by men.”2 Sly, however, has only verbal weapons to command: he calls the hostess a “baggage,” laughably claims descent from “Richard Conqueror” in an attempt to pull rank on her, and mocks her for lacking the status of a married woman (“Go to thy cold bed and warm thee”) (Ind. 3–8). She confidently declares, “I know my remedy, I must go fetch the thirdborough,” for in addition to his unruly behavior, the tinker now refuses to pay for the glasses he has broken.
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Notes
William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, ed. Brian Morris (London and New York: Methuen, 1981).
Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 131–2.
Coppélia Kahn, Man’s Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981), 12. See also the Introduction, 1–20.
See Coppélia Kahn, Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds, and Women (London: Routledge, 1997). Here I argue that “Shakespeare’s Roman heroes strive to prove themselves men not in relation to women, but a against a rival whom they emulate in two senses— by imitating as the mirror-image of an ideal self, and by competing against with the aim of excelling and dominating” (15).
Bruce R. Smith, Shakespeare and Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 44.
Among the most influential works that interpret early modern homosocial relations are: Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London: Gay Men’s Press, 1982);
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985);
Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992);
and Jonathan Goldberg, ed., Queering the Renaissance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994);
Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration in Authorship and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997);
Laurie Shannon, Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002);
Madhavi Menon, ed., Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins (London and New York: Methuen, 1982).
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© 2013 Jennifer Feather and Catherine E. Thomas
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Kahn, C. (2013). Afterword. In: Feather, J., Thomas, C.E. (eds) Violent Masculinities. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137344755_12
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