Adriana, The Comedy of Errors

Katharina, The Taming of the Shrew

    In this paper we will develop three main points: social oppression, in which we will deal with the ideal images of men and women and their social duties; parental oppression, in which we will examine what parents, specially fathers, expected their daughters to act like, and conjugal oppression, where we will examine what the role of women within marriage was.

    Before we begin with the analysis of the characters, it would be of vital importance to depict who they are.

    Adriana is the wife of Antipholus of Ephesus. She seems to be the personification of the ideal image of a wife, according to the thoughts of the Elizabethan society. Her life turns around her husband’s and she does not abandon her home even though she suspects that her husband is being unfaithful to her.

    Katharina is the daughter of one of the wealthiest men in Padua, Baptista. Being so, she would not have to be difficult for her to find a husband. However, Katharina seems to reject all of her suitors. She cannot stand the role that women had to play within the over-prejudiced Elizabethan society. She cannot stand her father telling her what to do, nor any other man doing so. At the end of the play, she will be “tamed” by her husband, Petruchio, and will become the most obedient and docile of all the feminine characters appearing in this comedy.

    Helena is a young girl from Athens. She is crazy in love with Demetrius, who, in its turn, is in love with Hermia. Helena is very unconfident. As Demetrius seems not to be attracted by her, she wonders whether she would be more successful if she were more beautiful, according to the standards of beauty in that time. As we will see, physical appearance was crucial in Elizabethan times.

    Having presented the characters we are going to study, now we will deal with social oppression.

    In Shakespeare’s days, the stereotypical images of both men and women were very marked.

    Women were expected to marry, and once they had done so, they had to become obedient housewives and mothers. In fact, it was thought that the main aim of women was to bear as many children as possible throughout their lifetime (Thomas). We should bear in mind that children were regarded as blessings from God. Besides this, the role of women was very important, as they were expected to bring up the future generations. Taking all this into account, we can conclude that the place where women spent most of their time was the home.

    If we turn our view to the comedies we are interested in in this paper, we will see that there is a common element in all the feminine characters: all of them want to get married. For instance, Adriana is already married and has become a housewife, though not yet a mother. On the other hand, both Katharina and Helena desire to get married. The case of Katharina is less evident, as she seems to be against any suitor. However, once her father has chosen her future husband, Petruchio, the only thing she is sorry for is the fact that she has not been asked for an opinion; she is happy because she is going to marry, although she is sorry for the person she is going to marry with. The fact that Katharina acts violently when she is with her sister may be somehow justified because “Katharina frankly wants a husband, and abuses her father for preferring Bianca” (Bradbrook 105), who is very superficial. So, all of these characters accept the role society imposes on them.

    Whereas women remained at home, men were regarded as the breadwinners, that is to say, through their work they earned money to let their families survive. Being the Elizabethan a patriarchal society, men were thought to be somehow superior to women, who were supposed to need a man by their side in order to protect them both physically and emotionally (women were the “weaker” sex (Thomas)). For this reason, men were always surrounding women, who needed their protection. If women were married, their husbands took care of them. However, if they were single, it was their fathers or their brothers who looked after them.

    Despite this, women had more freedom then than they had had in previous periods. The Renaissance brought to Britain a new ideology which regarded education as something essential for the human being. So, many wealthy and noble women in this period were highly educated (Alchin, “Elizabethan Women”). However, being the home the natural place for women, they were not allowed to attend classes at school or university. Instead, they were taught at home by private tutors. In The Taming of the Shrew, both Katharina and her sister, Bianca, are taught Latin and music at home by two men who pretend to be teachers but who actually desire to obtain Bianca’s favour. During the Renaissance, both classic languages and music were extremely important, as there was a revival of the classic Latin and Greek cultures.

    By contrast with the wealthy and noble women, the commoners could not have any kind of education. They only learnt how to manage a household and the duties of a housewife. This kind of “domestic education” would let them find a husband, which was of vital importance for most women. In fact, single Elizabethan women were often thought to be strange people by those surrounding them. Being unable to stand the pressure by their neighbours, most single women ended up in convents. (Alchin, “Elizabethan Women”)

    Another point that we should bear in mind is the fact that, in the comedies, the feminine characters are never alone unless they are at home. When they are outside, there is always a masculine figure by their side.

    For instance, in The Comedy of Errors, Adriana sends her husband’s servant in order to inform him that the lunch is ready. Furthermore, the only moment when Adriana abandons her home is at the end of the play, when her husband needs her. The ideal image of the happy marriage oppresses her so much that when she suspects that her marriage might be drowning, she hits her husband’s servant. She cannot stand it and reacts violently. Besides it, there is a moment in which she thinks that her husband has changed so much that he should have gone mad. She cannot stand the fact that he prefers other women and does not care about her any more and she decides to stay with him and help him overcome his “illness”.

    In its turn, neither Katharina, who appears outside only when her father and Petruchio allow her to do so, nor Helena, who follows her lover and goes to the woods, they abandon their homes despite they might want to. Being so uncomformist, it is remarkable that Katharina does not leave her house on her own. This is a clue of what she has inside, that is, something totally opposed to the shrew she seems to be.

    In regard to work, we should say that women were not allowed to enter certain professions. Actually, they could not work as doctors or politicians. In spite of that, they worked as domestic servants (Thomas). However, the vast majority of Elizabethan women were housewives obedient to their husbands. So, women’s dependence on men was not only physical and emotional, but their dependence was also economical.

    Going back to the comedies, we see that Adriana remains at home as a housewife and she is always obedient to her husband. In The Taming of the Shrew, both Katharina and Bianca get married and follow the same steps as Adriana. Finally, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Helena and Hermia are desperately looking for a husband and at the end they succed in their attempt, becoming the same kind of women that both Adriana and Katharina had become.

    Some authors defend the idea that in the comedies Shakespeare is somehow a misogynist, as he is “assigning wives an unambiguously subordinate role and advising them to bite their tongues” (Dolan) in the comedies.

    Things were not easier for women in the field of laws. In fact, they were not allowed to vote nor to inherit their parent’s goods unless they were only children. If they had a brother, all their parents’ richness and titles would be inherited by him, no matter of his age. The only exception to this rule, which most of us would label as unfair currently, was the crown. In fact, it was a woman who was reigning in Shakespeare’s days: Elizabeth I.

    In The Taming of the Shrew, Petruchio is interested in Katharina only because of her richness. Being the daughter of one of the wealthiest men in Padua, Baptista, she would bring an important amount of money to her marriage. Furthermore, once Baptista had passed away, he would inherit (through Katharina) all his wealth, as Katharina had no brothers and was the eldest daughter.

    Even something apparently painless as fashion was also used to control women. The first thing that we should take into consideration is the main aim of fashion at that time, which was to show the woman’s status in society and make her as attractive as possible (Bridges and Granger). This was a way to make the task of finding a husband easier. Besides this, when married women appeared wearing beautiful clothes and make up in public, they were perceived as a success of their husbands. In this sense, they were like trophies.

    As women’s external appearance meant so much for both men and women, we can imagine how Katharina would feel when she is not allowed to dress as she wants. She might feel sorry for having to go to her father’s house dressing in old clothes and not as the daughter of a rich man. Her self-confidence would be quite “damaged”.

    Besides this, Helena thinks she is not able to attract Demetrius because she is not beautiful. She thinks Hermia is more beautiful than her and this is the reason why she will not be able to marry Demetrius. Furthermore, once both Demetrius and Lysander fall in love with her because of Puck’s potion, she thinks they are mocking her. She is so unconfident (and this uncofidence is due to her supposed lack of beauty) that she is unable to come to terms with this new situation.

    It is also worth commenting that fashion was controlled by men. So, the fact that tight corsets surrounded a woman’s body, making it more difficult to move, as they were extremely uncomfortable, was not casual. They wore this corsets because the standards of that time established that they had to. But men were the ones who created the standards and took profit of corsets to control women, who, feeling so uncomfortable, could not fight against the physical and moral oppression they were suffering.

    Even though marriage at this age seems so terrible to us, it was the best thing that could happen to a woman at that time. Single women (or spinsters, a despective term used to label them at that time) might spend their life in a convent or in a nunnery but, after the dissolution of monasteries, this was no longer an option. So, their only alternative was to work as domestic servants. (Alchin, “Elizabethan Women”)

    Being so, all those unmarried women in Shakespeare’s comedies are desperately looking for somebody to save them from spinsterhood, which was regarded as a tragedy. Bianca has many suitors and knows she will have no problem to find a husband. However, her sister’s character prevents her from getting what she wants. So, she decides to do anything to fulfill her wishes, even if it means that she has to lie to her own sister, as she does in the beginning of the play. As Katharina cannot stand this lies, this double morality, she hits her. Through this beating, she wants Bianca to forget about the prejudices society is imposing on her.

    In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it is Hermia who would do anything to marry the person she selects. So, she escapes from the rules of a patriarchal society and decides to make her dreams come true in the forest, a place where there is no religion, where there is no law and where there is no civilization. Helena follows Hermia’s steps and both of them get what they want with the “help” of the forest, a magical place that does not exist in reality.

    Once we know who the charaters are and what social oppression meant for Elizabethan women, we can lead our attention to parental oppression.

    We will carry out the study of this interesting topic through the comparison of the two relationships father-daughter that we find in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Egeus-Hermia) and in The Taming of the Shrew (Baptista-Katharina).

    The first thing we should bear in mind, as we have already seen, is that at the time the plays we are analysing were written (The Taming of the Shrew was written between 1593 and 1954, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream between 1595 and 1596 (“Shakespeare, William”), England was a protestant country where women were expected to become housewives obedient to their husbands and to educate the children who would become the future citrizens of the nation.

    Going back to the education women received, we should comment that, from a very early age, girls were taught to obey their fathers. Masculine figures always prevailed over feminine ones. For instance, when a mother ordered something to her daughter and her man ordered something different, the daughter was expected to obey her father.

    Taking all this into account, we can conclude that even something as crucial as the person women were going to spend their lives wih was decided by their fathers.

    In The Taming of the Shrew, Petruchio is obsessed with Katharina, as she is said to have a lot of money. He thinks that if he marries her, he will get a very interesting dowry. Furthermore, in the future he might inhereit Baptista’s economic wealth. Once Baptista has found out that Petruchio might guarantee an economic stability for Katharina, he gives Petruchio Katharina’s hand in marriage, no matter of her opinion. As we have seen, Katharina will be sorry for the person she is going to marry with, but, at the end of the play, her relationship with Petruchio will turn dramatically and she will fall in love with him. In fact, in Act IV, scene 2, she kisses her husband.

    Something similar happens with Katharina’s sister, Bianca. By contrast with Katharina, Bianca has many suitors, as she is believed to have a “mild behaviour and sobriety” (Act I, scene I). Besides this, she is obedient. When Baptista orders her something, “to his pleasure humbly she subscribes” (Act I, scene I). However, this is only Bianca’s external appearance; her interior is very different. As Baptista cannot see through Bianca, he thinks she is the perfect daughter, and this is one of the issues that make Katharina act violently and reject the patriarchal values surrounding her.

    Baptista is who decides who his daughters are going to marry with. In Act I scene I, he says: “not bestow my youngest daughter before I have a husband for the elder”. Being a nonconformist girl, Katharina rejects her father’s words, creating herself a very bad reputation. For this reason, she is thought to be a kind of devil, as she does not fit into the natural rules of God, that is to say, she does not agree with the Puritan doctrine which claims that women are inferior to men and that they have to obey men.

    In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the only father-daughter relation we have is that of Egeus and Hermia. Egeus wants her daughter to marry Demetrius, but actually she is in love with Lysander, who is “as worthy as Lysander” (Act I, scene I), according to her. Despite the fact that this play takes place in Athens, it reflects the English sociocultural backgroud. So, the patriarchal values, personified by Egeus, become the authority and Hermia has to accept what this authority asks her to do. However, similarly to Katharina, she rejects it and leaves the city where she lives in order to go to the forest, a fairy world where anything can happen.

    In Act I, scene I, Hermia says to her father: “Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind”. As well as Katharina, she thinks she has a right to love the person she is going to spend the rest of her life with. She does not want anybody to take her decissions. Her only way out of that situation is leaving society and going to a place where a new society is possible and where the only rules are those of love and magic instead of those of religion.

    For Puritans, forests were seen as places where evil lived. Any uncivilized place was seen as an evil place. In fact, when they arrived in America, they built fences and they extermined all the Indians  using the pretext that they were ocuppying their promised land and they were human incarnations of the devil (Manuel).

    As we have seen, almost all the weddings taking place in Elizabethan times were arranged for economic or prestige reasons. Many couples saw each other for the first time in their wedding.

    Another thing that is worth commenting in this paper is the fact that, by contrast with the tragedies, in the comedies the daughter’s voice is often ignored by the father (Pérez). For instance, in King Lear, Cordelia says something that disturbs her father and, in the end, Lear realizes that, despite what he thought, her words were correct. However, in The Taming of the Shrew, Katharina ends up being married with Petruchio, despite the fact that she had said that she did not want to marry him. In Act I, scene I, Katharina says: “is it your will to make a stale of me amongst these mates?” However, she will end up being married to a person she did not want to marry with and suffering the pains of the society she lived in.

    Now we are going to focus on conjugal opression.

    As we know, women had to submit to their fathers’ and husbands’ orders. For instance, in The Taming of the Shrew, Katharina fights against this, though finally she has to accept both his father’s and her husband’s orders, as if she does not do so, she is unable to get anything she wants. According to the religion professed by the Puritans, women were thought to be inferior to men, so that any attempt to change the roles established by God was morally legitimized to be punished.

    As for marriage, most women could not choose their husbands, but it was their fathers’ will. In The Taming of the Shrew, Baptista chooses both Bianca and Katharina’s husbands, and in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it is Egeus who chooses Demetrius as Hermia’s husband. Differently from them, Helena decides to marry Demetrius and succeds in her attempt. So, we can conclude that there has been some kind of evolution from The Taming of the Shrew to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Shakespeare’s mind might have changed and in A Midsummer Night’s Dream a women can get what she wants despite of society.

    Besides this, another important aspect of marriage was the dowry that women had to provide, that is, “the money, goods, or estate that a woman brings to her husband in marriage” (Alchin, “Elizabethan marriages and Weddings”).

    One of the basic functions of a dowry has been to serve as a form of protection for the wife against ill treatment by her husband. A dowry used in this way was actually a conditional gift to the husband that would be restored to the wife or her family if the husband divorced his wife or committed some grave offense against her. Such dowries were frequently land or some other form of real property and were made inalienable by the husband, though he might otherwise use and profit from them during marriage (“Dowry”).

    A dowry sometimes served to help a new husband discharge the responsibilities that go with marriage. This function assumed special importance in societies where marriages were regularly made between very young people; the dowry made it possible for the new husband to establish a household, which he otherwise would not have been able to do. In some societies a dowry provided the wife with a means of support in case of her husband's death. (“Dowry”).

    Katharina’s dowry is of vital importance for Petruchio, who would do anything in order to get it. In fact, he “tames” the horrible “shrew” that Katharina is said to be. He takes control over the food Katharina eats, over the amount of hours she sleeps, over sex, over external appearance (which was very important at that time), and even over the time she spends with her family. He even obliges her to recognize that the sun is the moon if he says so.

    In marriage, as we have already seen, “masculine” was a synonym of superiority, whereas “feminine” meant submission.

    In The Comedy of Errors, we can see that Adriana’s life is totally marked by the fact that she is married. Her life turns around her husband’s. For instance, she prepares lunch when he gets back from work, not when she wants to, and she would not abandon her house, should it not have been for the fact that he needs her help, which was a situation of extreme danger for the family. Besides this, the ideal image of what a woman has to be when she is married oppresses her so much that she is unable to abandon her husband even when she suspects him of being unfaithful to her and when he has gone mad she says: “I will attend my husband, be his nurse, diet his sickness, for it is my office, and will have no attorney but myself; and therefore let me have him home with me” (Act V, scene I). This sentence sums up the ideas imposed on women by the Elizabethan society and by its official religion. In fact, if she disobeyed her husband, she would be committing sin and she would not be one of the elected.

    By contrast with Adriana, Hermia and Helena follow their lovers to the woods, even though this is a place of magic, unknown to them. They fight against social prejudices despite it might mean that they are being sinful.

    In Act II, scene I of The Comedy of Errors, Adriana and Luciana are waiting for Antipholus at lunch time: Adriana says: “Why should their liberty than ours be more?”. Her sister replies: “Because their business still lies out o’door”. Luciana’s sentence also reflects the oppression exercised on women. She thinks that men should have more freedom than women. Men were supposed to have different necessities and they had to fulfill their wishes. Being inferior, women were thought to have less necessities, so that they needed less freedom and they could remain at home. Nowadays, for most of us it is difficult to imagine a society like the Elizabethan, in which women were kind of slaves. However, the lifestyle is still surrounding us, in many cities, in many countries, in many communities.  

    To finish with, we can conclude that the three kinds of oppression we have mentioned in the beginning of the paper are present in the three comedies we are analyzing. However, there is an enormous difference in the ways the characters we are interested in face this oppression. There are two kinds of behaviours. The first is that of Adriana and the “tamed” Katharina, of which Katharina’s last speech would be representative (“Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper, thy head, thy sovereign . . . Such duty as the subject owes the prince, even such a woman oweth to her husband, and when she is forward, peevish, sullen, sour, and not obedient to his honest will, what is she but a foul contending rebel and graceless traitor to her loving lord? I am ashamed that women are so simple [foolish] to offer war where they should kneel for peace, or seek for rule, supremacy, and sway, when they are bound to serve, love, and obey” (Act V, scene II)). The other kind of attitude is that of Helena and the “shrewish” Katharina, who claims: “Why, sir, I trust I may have leave to speak; and speak I will; I am no child, no babe: your betters have endured me say my mind, and if you cannot, best you stop your ears. My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, or else my heart concealing it will break, and rather than it shall, I will be free even to the uttermost, as I please, in words” (Act IV, scene III). There has been an evolution in Shakespeare’s idea of women. From being the perfect housewife who cannot do anything but obeying men women become more independent people who can take their decisions and get what they want, even though marriage continues to be their main aim.

Consulted Sources:

-Bradbrook, Muriel C. "Dramatic Role as Social Image: A Study of The Taming of the Shrew." Shakespeare early comedies. Ed. E.M.W. Tillyard. London: Athlone Press; New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1983. 97 - 110

-Shakespeare, William. The Comedy of Errors. Ed. Dolan, Frances E. New York: Penguin Books, 1999

-Manuel Cuenca, Carme. “John Smith: from The General History of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles”. Facultat de Filologia (Universitat de València), Valencia. 3rd October 2005

-Pérez Gallego, Cándido. "La relación padre-hija en Shakespeare." En torno a Shakespeare, vol. II. Fundación Instituto Shakespeare, Valencia, 1992.

-"Dowry." Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica 2007 Ultimate Reference Suite. Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 2007.