Book Report on "the Taming of the Shrew"

The author of The Taming of the Shrew was William Shakespeare. Shakespeare lived from around April 23, 1564 to April 23, 1616. He married Anne Hathaway in 1582 and together they had three children, two girls and a boy (who died at the age of twelve). He wrote thirty-seven plays. His last play, Henry VIII, was written two years before his death.

The Taming of the Shrew begins with the discovery of a drunkard, Christopher Sly. A local lord decides to play a prank on him and dresses him up and puts him in one of his own rooms. When Sly wakes up, the lord and his servants tell him that he has been insane the past few years and is really a lord. He doesn’t believe them until he sees his “wife,” who is really a pageboy dressed as a woman. The rest of the story is a play that the lord’s actors put on for him. In this play, a young man named Lucentio arrives in Padua with his servants Tranio and Biondello. He plans to attend the local university until he meets a woman name Bianca, who he falls in love with. The problem is, there are already two men vying for her father’s approval to marry her. Her father refuses because he says that he must marry his older daughter, Katherine, before allowing the younger to marry. Katherine, the very opposite of Bianca, is very irritable and no one wants to marry her. Lucentio disguises himself as Bianca’s Latin teacher in order to be around her, while his servant Tranio pretends to be Lucentio. During the time that Lucentio is her Latin teacher, he makes her fall in love with him. In the meantime, one of Bianca’s other suitors finds a man willing to marry Katherine. Amazingly, once he marries her, he trains her to be gentle, a perfect lady. While Tranio, disguised as Lucentio, convinces Bianca’s father that he is rich and suitable to marry her, Lucentio and Bianca elope.

This play takes place in Padua, a city-state in Italy. It isn’t very clear exactly when it takes place, but it is thought to probably be during the Italian Renaissance.

The two main characters in the play are Katherine and Petruccio. Katherine is probably meant to be the protagonist, as she is the “shrew” who is tamed. She is very violent and has a bad temper. She speaks against anyone who is willing to marry her and seems very jealous of all the attention her sister gets from men. Eventually, she marries she gives in to her husband, Petruccio. Petruccio, a man from Verona, comes to Padua seeking a woman to marry, particularly, a woman with a rich father. He is frequently drunk and is very loud and energetic. People try to warn him that Katherine is not the kind of woman he would want to marry. He ignores the advice however and immediately goes to her father. He is able to beat Katherine’s temper with his own and trains her to be a gentlewoman.

The major conflict in The Taming of the Shrew is that because of Katherine’s temper, no one is able to marry Bianca. At first, it seems that the problem will never be solved because no one would want to marry someone like Katherine. Petruccio, however, is different than the other men. He is not interested in Bianca, he just wants to find a woman who has a rich father. When he hears of Katherine, he goes to her father and asks for her hand in marriage. He talks to Katherine for a few minutes and they argue