Good Grammar, Possessive Pronouns, and Preposterous Possessions in The Taming of the Shrew

With their focus on Bianca's Latinate lessons in act 3 of The Taming of the Shrew, scholars have long overlooked the play's indebtedness to a vernacular English grammar. Drawing attention to such vernacular "characters" as possessive pronouns, shrews, hysteron proteron, and other preposterous rhetorical figures, this essay considers new possibilities for reading The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare's representations of this vernacular grammar, and the purpose and message of Katherine's final speech. The essay considers what it means that, in both early modern England and in The Taming of the Shrew, English takes precedence over Latin; that possessive pronouns become keys to interpreting lessons in an English grammar; and that pronouns, even in their proper places, become sites of "preposterous possession." Strategically employing possessive pronouns in her final speech, Katherine, the shrew of this play who is (supposedly) tamed, enacts some preposterous possessions of her own. Through a close reading of a wide range of early modern texts alongside The Taming of the Shrew, the essay navigates a variety of contexts in order to reveal their continuities, rather than thinking about them as mutually exclusive. Such contextualizations illuminate and culminate in a reading of Katherine's final speech, which demonstrates how her grammar disrupts and overturns grammatical and gendered orders and allows her (and Shakespeare, too) to shape and imagine a new order of things. Indeed, Katherine embodies a burgeoning English vernacular, and as such, she is a figure through which Shakespeare explores that vernacular's critical moment, thereby reflecting Shakespeare's understanding of and participation in a changing educational landscape of early modern England.