The Taming of the Shrew Induction Analysis

Critics disagree about why Shakespeare begins The Taming of the Shrew with the Induction. The play proper could obviously stand on its own, but the story of the lord’s practical joke on Christopher Sly does reinforce one of the central themes of the main play. Sly’s story dramatizes the idea that a person’s environment and the way he or she is treated by others determines his or her behavior—an idea that Katherine’s story in the main play also illustrates. The lord thrusts Sly into a playacting world and portrays his new role as coming into being through no will of his own. The lord’s huntsman emphasizes this when asked if Sly would fall for the deception and forget himself. “Believe me, lord, I think he cannot choose,” he responds (Induction.I.38). The huntsman’s words could apply equally well to Katherine. Controlled by two wealthy and powerful men—her father, Baptista, and her suitor, Petruchio—Katherine is forced to play the part of a wife, a social role that she initially rejects. The implication that Katherine, like Sly, “cannot choose” suggests that she is as much a plaything of Petruchio as Sly is of the lord.

The Induction also introduces the topic of marriage into the play. Sly resists all the servants’ attempts to convince him that he is a lord until they tell him that he has a wife, at which point he immediately reverses himself: “Am I a lord? And have I such a lady?” (Ind.ii.66). Shakespeare emphasizes Sly’s about-face by switching Sly’s speech pattern to blank verse (unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter, spoken primarily by Shakespeare’s noble characters). Before, Sly had spoken only in prose. The humor of the situation is obvious: though Sly is at first preoccupied with making sense of his outrageous change of circumstances, as soon as he discovers that he might be able to be physically gratified, he immediately stops caring whether his situation is real or fantastical, commanding his wife to “undress you and come now to bed” (Ind.ii.113). Shakespeare here playfully introduces a number of ideas that receive further attention later in the play, such as the idea that marriage is something that people use for their own benefit rather than a reflection of some deeper truth about the married couple. Moreover, the roles of class, gender, and marital status, which in ordinary life seem to be set in stone, here become matters of appearance and perception, subject to manipulation by the characters or the playwright. Indeed, the Induction primes Shakespeare’s audience to think critically about what he will present next.

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