The play was then presented as a " Big Brother type social experiment ", in which the Lady plays Katherina and allows Sly ( as Petruchio ) to dominate where the action goes, all the while attempting to gauge how the male mind works under a given set of circumstances.

For example, speaking of herself in the third person, Katherina tells Hortensio and Gremio,

Katherina, however, appropriates this method herself, leading to a trading of insults rife with animal imagery, such as in Act 2, Scene 1 ( l. 194ff.

The main plot depicts the courtship of Petruchio, a gentleman of Verona, and Katherina, the headstrong, obdurate shrew.

Initially, Katherina is an unwilling participant in the relationship, but Petruchio tempers her with various psychological torments — the " taming "— until she becomes a compliant and obedient bride.

* Petruchio – suitor of Katherina

Hearing this, Hortensio seizes the opportunity to recruit Petruchio as a suitor for Katherina.

Along the way, they meet Vincentio who is also on his way to Padua, and Katherina agrees with Petruchio when he declares that Vincentio is a woman and then apologises to Vincentio when Petruchio tells her he is a man.

Meanwhile, Hortensio has married a rich widow, and so in the final scene of the play there are three newly married couples at Baptista's banquet ; Bianca and Lucentio, the widow and Hortensio, and Katherina and Petruchio.

Katherina is the only one of the three who comes, winning the wager for Petruchio.

At the end of the play, after the other two wives have been hauled into the room by Katherina, she gives a speech on the subject of why wives should always obey their husbands and the play ends with Baptista, Hortensio and Lucentio marvelling at how successfully Petruchio has tamed the shrew.

Something similar is the case with regard to the Petruchio / Katherina story.

Shroeder conjectured that the literary source for the Petruchio / Katherina story could have been William Caxton's translation of the Queen Vastis story from Livre pour l ' enseignement de ses filles du Chevalier de La Tour Landry.

Specifically, Brunvand argued that the Petruchio / Katherina story represents a subtype of Type 901 (' Shrew-taming Complex ') in the Aarne – Thompson classification system.

In The Shrew, after the wedding, Gremio expresses doubts as to whether or not Petruchio will be able to tame Katherina.

Oliver, for example, believes that Shakespeare created the Induction so that the audience wouldn't react badly to the inherent misogyny in the Petruchio / Katherina story, in effect defending himself against charges of sexism.

Oliver argues that the Induction is used to remove the audience from the world of the enclosed plot – to place the ontological sphere of the Sly story on the same level of reality as the audience, and to place the ontological sphere of the Katherina / Petruchio story on a different level of reality, where it will seem less real, more distant from the reality of the viewing public.

This is perhaps seen most clearly in Act 3, Scene 2, where Petruchio explains to all present that Katherina is now literally his property:

The final blow is dealt towards the end of the play, in Act 4, Scene 5, when Katherina is made to switch the words moon and sun, and she acknowledges that she will agree with whatever Petruchio says no matter how absurd:

From this point, Katherina's language drastically changes from her earlier vernacular ; instead of defying Petruchio and his words, she has apparently succumbed to his rhetoric and accepted that she will use his language instead of her own – both Katherina and her language have, seemingly, been tamed.

The important role of language however, is not confined to Petruchio and Katherina.

The first is to emphasise the play's farcical elements, such as Sly and the metatheatrical nature of the Katherina / Petruchio play, thus suggesting that what happens is not to be taken in any way seriously.

" However, although Petruchio never strikes Katherina, he does threaten to and he also uses other tactics to physically tame her and thus exert his superiority.

" Other critics, such as Natasha Korda, believe that even though Petruchio does not use force to tame Katherina, his actions are still an endorsement of patriarchy ; Petruchio makes Katherina his property.

However, Baptista has sworn not to allow his younger daughter to marry before Katherina is wed, much to the despair of her suitors, who agree that they will work together to marry off Katherina so that they will be free to compete for Bianca.

Second, Katherina is objectified when they are first introduced ; Petruchio wishes to physically judge Katherina and asks her to walk for his observation.

Two examples present themselves while Katherina and Petruchio are courting.

Other film versions ( which are loose adaptations as opposed to straight translations from stage to screen ) include: the 1929 The Framing of the Shrew, directed by Arvid E. Gillstrom, and starring Edward Thompson and Evelyn Preer ; the 1933 You Made Me Love You, directed by Monty Banks, and starring Stanley Lupino and Thelma Todd ; the 1938 Second Best Bed, directed by Tom Walls, and starring Jane Baxter and Walls himself ; the 1942 Italian adaptation La bisbetica domata, directed by Ferdinando Maria Poggioli, and starring Amedeo Nazzari and Lilia Silvi ; the 1943 Hungarian adaptation Makacs Kata ( Stubborn Kate ) directed by Emil Martonffy, and starring Katalin Karády and Pál Jávor ; another 1943 Hungarian adaptation, Makrancos hölgy ( Unruly Lady ), directed by Viktor Bánky, and starring Emmi Buttykay and Miklós Hajmássy ; the 1948 Mexican adaptation Cartas marcadas, directed by René Cardona, and starring Marga López and Pedro Infante ; the 1956 Spanish adaptation La fierecilla domada, directed by Antonio Román, and starring Carmen Sevilla and Alberto Closas ; the 1962 Egyptian adaptation Ah min hawaa, directed by Fatin Abdel Wahab, and starring Lobna Abdel Aziz and Rushdy Abaza ; the 1963 western McLintock !, directed by Andrew McLaglen, and starring John Wayne and Maureen O ' Hara ; the 1999 teen film 10 Things I Hate About You, directed by Gil Junger, and starring Julia Stiles as Kat Stratford ( Katherina ) and Heath Ledger as Patrick Verona ( Petruchio ); the 2003 comedy Deliver Us from Eva, directed by Gary Hardwick, and starring Gabrielle Union and LL Cool J ; and the 2010 Bollywood film Isi Life Mein, directed by Vidhi Kasliwal, and starring Akshay Oberoi and Sandeepa Dhar.

Oldenburg married as his second wife, Dora Katherina Dury ( 1654 – 77 ), the daughter of John Dury.

Anton Dreher ( the younger ) married Katherina, daughter of the master brewer Meichl of Simmering, to whom he had been apprenticed.

After arriving in Virginia, Henry had married in 1659, a wealthy widow, Katherina Banks Royall ( c. 1630 Canterbury, Kent – aft.

The scene where Petruchio and Katherina first meet was shot using a primitive sound process known as Voxograph, where the actors spoke the complete text during filming.

In 1931, Harcourt Williams used the conclusion of A Shrew ( in which, after the Petruchio / Katherina story is finished, the Lord returns the now sleeping Sly to the inn where he was found, and who, upon waking up, announces he has had a dream in which he has learned how to tame his own wife ).

Antoon's 1990 production at the New York Shakespeare Festival, starring Morgan Freeman and Tracey Ullman, which was set in the old west ; Bill Alexander's 1992 RSC production at the Barbican, starring Anton Lesser and Amanda Harris, in which the Induction was rewritten in modern language, and the play-within-the-play featured actors carrying scripts and continually forgetting lines ; Delia Taylor's 1999 production at the Clark Street Playhouse, which featured an all female cast, with Diane Manning as Petruchio and Elizabeth Perotti as Katherina ; Phyllida Lloyd's 2003 production at the Globe, again with an all female cast, starring Janet McTeer as Petruchio and Kathryn Hunter as Katherina ; Gregory Doran's 2003 RSC production at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, where the play was presented with Fletcher's The Tamer Tamed as a two-part piece, with Jasper Britton and Alexandra Gilbreath ( playing both Katherina in The Shrew and Maria ( Petruchio's second wife ) in The Tamer Tamed ); Edward Hall's 2006 Propeller Company production at the Courtyard Theatre as part of the RSC's presentation of the Complete Works, featuring an all-male cast, with Dugald Bruce Lockhart as Petruchio and Simon Scardifield as Katherina ; and Conall Morrison's 2008 RSC production at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, starring Stephen Boxer and Michelle Gomez.

In fact, Meyer changed Jenatsch's birthdate in the novel to make such a relationship possible ; earlier authors had already renamed the real Katherina von Planta as ' Lucrecia ', a name for which there is no historical foundation.

Petruchio's decision to marry is based almost wholly on his desire to accrue money ; he vows to marry Katherina knowing next to nothing about her, other than the fact that she is a shrew and comes with a sizeable dowry.

The final speech then appears to indicate that Katherina willingly accepts her newly submissive role, agreeing with the social and physical differences between a husband and wife and emphasising that the role of a wife is to support and obey a husband in all things.

The ' play within the play ' is then presented as Sly's dream, and as such, the main plot is set in a surreal landscape, with Siberry and Lawrence doubling as Petruchio and Katherina.

Petruchio is much more vicious in this version, threatening to whip Katherina if she doesn't marry him, then telling everyone she is dead, and tying her to a bier.

He goes to his room and begins reading, and the episode then takes place in his mind as he imagines the members of the cast of Moonlighting in an adaptation of the play itself ( Bruce Willis plays Petruchio, Cybill Shepherd plays Katherina ).

This particular adaptation was heavily influenced by the commedia dell ' arte tradition, with a bare stage featuring clowns carrying props as required, whilst the first meeting of Katherina and Petruchio takes plays in a boxing ring.