"To show scorn her own image": The Varieties of Education in The Taming of the Shrew

"To show scorn her own image": The Varieties of Education in The Taming ofthe Shrew Dennis S. Brooks University ofNebraska-Lincoln Recent work on The Taming ofthe Shrew has contended that such problematic features of the play as the open-ended Sly framework, the interrelationships among the various subplots, Petruchio's treatment of Kate, and Kate's notorious final speech are illuminated by such themes as patriarchy, game-playing, and the Ovidian transformations that Shakespeare uses throughout this phase of his career.1 However valid these approaches may be, the disparate themes, anomalies, and subplots of The Taming of the Shrew coalesce into a dramatic unity when framed by the broader Renaissance debate over education. To be sure, The Shrew is a romantic farce; it would be a mistake to reduce the play to a simple examination of the timeworn nature vs. nurture debate. But to approach The Shrew without considering Renaissance theories of education is analogous to approaching The Tempest without taking into account Renaissance beliefs concerning magic.2 1 shall argue below that, while Renaissance education theorists vigorously debated the most efficient and effective means to impart literacy and numeracy, all sides agreed that education was a complex process of socialization. Through it, the student learns to acquiesce to the prevailing social hierarchies by internalizing the dominant value system and tempering those passions that threaten social order: namely, irascibility and concupiscence. Such self-mastery enables the student to accept his or her designated role in society.3 This theory of education undergirds The Shrew's Induction and the play-within-the-play. In the context of this theory, both the on-stage lord and his courtiers and Shakespeare's audience, ranging from groundlings to court wits, might have viewed Petruchio and Kate not only as a swaggering, patriarchal boor and an Amazonian icon, but also as exempla of the educative function of mimetic art. Groundlings and wits alike in the on- and off-stage audiences would have seen Kate's tantrums as a mirror of their own lack of self-control, her transformation into a submissive wife as a reflection of their potential for Renaissance versions of educated civility, and Petruchio's roughand -tumble approach to courtship and marriage as exemplary of a pedagogy that might move them from incorrigibility to civility.4 Lucentio's and Hortensio's love-in-idleness and their wooing of 8 Rocky Mountain Review Bianca, in which they appropriate conventional tutorials not to educate but to seduce, illustrate a miseducation that fails to socialize and results in misfits like Sly who press what knowledge they possess into the service of their asocial appetites. The Shrew does not reflect a consensus in Renaissance pedagogy, for there was none. The play does, however, depict with broad brush-strokes two dominant continental pedagogies: the regimented rote learning advocated by reformation and Jesuit theorists, and the private tutorials championed by some of the more innovative humanists . These two approaches vied for the attention of English intellectuals disenchanted with the English grammar school tradition. In The Shrew, Shakespeare weighs both and, finding them wanting, proposes as an alternative what I call, following Sidney, an eikastic education.5 In an eikastic education, the theatre is the model classroom : students and teachers together act out lessons, and teachers seek to allure students to virtue through worthy models found in art, just as "great poets . . . allure the credulous to their improvement ," and poetry "lurefs] away nobler souls from those foundering under moral disease" (Boccaccio 78). It is in this spirit that the lord produces for Sly a play-within-the-play in which Petruchio's courtship of Kate and their subsequent marriage constitute her education in self-mastery. First in the Induction, then in the playwithin -the-play, Shakespeare explores the use of arts to tame humanity's asocial passions in the interests of civility. Shakespeare's belief in the ability of the arts to temper anti-social impulses and attitudes echoes the belief, widely held among Renaissance education theorists, that moral education is a fundamental means of socialization. Reformers and Jesuits alike viewed the academy as a place in which the human personality could be refashioned in conformity to their...