Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Shortly into the opening scene of one of Shakespeare's earliest comedies, an inebriated tinker is made to believe that he is the master of a noble household. The duping of the disorderly Christopher Sly has long been recognized as an apt beginning to a play devoted to the taming of an “uncivil” wife. Yet in its representation of the operations of desire and discipline within and across the boundaries of the domestic, the Induction to The Taming of the Shrew also offers a useful point of departure for an analysis of the Shakespearean comic household. From the start, the Induction associates Sly's disorderliness with his absence from, and perhaps complete lack of, a proper home. Ejected from the tavern (itself probably contiguous with the Hostess's home), Sly makes a “bed” of the ground (Induction, 1.29). Consequently, he falls under the harsh gaze of his social opposite: an aristocratic householder who competently manages his servants and possessions – the hounds that he “esteem[s]” and charges his huntsmen to “tender well,” “sup … well,” and “look unto” (23, 12, 24). In a stark emblem of social hierarchy, the commanding Lord stands above the prostrate beggar, moralizing about his inferior's beastly loss of self-mastery: “O monstrous beast! How like a swine he lies” (30). By “practis[ing]” on Sly, thereby amusing himself and punishing an idle drunk, the Lord actively expresses ... log in or subscribe to read full text