Shakespeare's Presentation of the Sisters in The Taming of the Shrew

Shakespeare's Presentation of the Sisters in The Taming of the Shrew

This essay is on the playwright called The Taming of the shrew, and is

written by William Shakespeare. The book or play was written in 1594

and was very successful.

This play is about a group of villagers in everyday life but there are

particular characters that stand out. The title of the play is, the

taming of the shrew, and is based on trying to tame a particular

person, in this case the person they are trying to tame is Katherina.

Katherina is Baptista's eldest daughter and is very ill tempered and

does not seem to have any respect for anybody. Baptista also has a

younger daughter, Bianca, who comes across as quite quiet and cannot

come out with a bad word. A man comes into the play, his name

Petruchio. He comes from a place called Verona and seeks a wealthy

wife and thus finds Katherina.

In this essay I am going to show you how they are presented to the

reader by William Shakespeare's way of writing.

We see Katherina, the elder daughter enter firstly out of the two

sisters and this is near the beginning of Act 1 scene 1. She enters

with the line,

"I pray you, sir, is it your will to make a stale of me amongst these

mates?"

This line does not give us any indication of what she is about or what

her intension is. As we read on we see that she uses insults pretty

much straight away we see this in lines 64-65 on page 16 of act 1. She

says,

"To comb your noodle with a three legged stool and paint your face and

use you like a fool".

This comment is aimed at Hortensio, one of the many characters in the

play. Already Shakespeare has presented Katherina as a sort of rude

and unruly character. As we read on through this passage we see that

Bianca, the younger of the sisters comes into the play. Her first line