Society is very influential in the character of Bianca. She is a young girl and her father decides that she will not marry until her sister finds someone to marry too. Bianca must be obedient to her father, because not doing so would be considered socially unacceptable. We can see this in the reaction of most part of the characters when they see and listen to Katharine, who is considered a shrew because she does not follow the conventions established for women at that time.
But at the same time, we observe that Bianca has her own strategies to escape from this society structure. She can show her real face when she plays with her wooers Hortensio and Lucentio. He flirts with both of them, in order to maintain their attention on her. As G. R. Hibbard says we can see that Bianca controls the situation when, being with Hortensio and Lucentio acting as tutors, she says: “I am no breeching scholar in the schools, / I’ll not be tied to hours nor ‘pointed times, / But learn my lessons as I please myself”. She has realized that in her society deception and cheating is a good weapon for women to use.
Bianca’s personal gain is to get what she really wants. She knows that acting as the perfect, sweet woman will make her achieve what she desires. She has more wooers than her sisters because of her personality. She acts as a gentile girl that obeys her father, so the men that try to gain her heart and marry her consider Bianca a submissive woman, the way a woman has to be, a tamed one. She plays this role because she sees that on the contrary she wouldn’t be able to achieve her wishes.
We know that she’s acting, that what she shows in front of her father and the other men is a mere performance because at the end of the play, when she has married Lucentio, she disobeys him. She shows her real face, her real character.
The new order that is established at the end of the play is not the typical happy ending. The plot of Bianca, which is the subplot of the play, is a story that contrasts with the main plot. Bianca is happy at this point of the story, she has got what she wanted, she has married Lucentio and now she acts the way she wants to act, but Lucentio is discovering a new woman in Bianca, a woman that is not the sweet, gentle and modest young girl he though she was.
As a conclusion I see that first impressions are not what they seem, and that one has to look deeper and not simply see what’s on the surface.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
- Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1996.
- Shakespeare, William. The Taming of the Shrew. Great Britain: Richard Clay (New Penguin Shakespeare), 1968
Academic Year 2006/2007
© a.r.e.a. / Dr. Vicente Forés López
© Laura Rumí Pérez
Universidad de Valencia Press
