Afterword

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.