Trickery and Deceit in Shakespeare's Works

Trickery and Deceit in Shakespeare's Works

William Shakespeare had a way of creating intelligent characters who made use of the art of deception for their own personal gains. Characters such as Lucentio and Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew; Oberon and Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream; Portia in The Merchant of Venice; and Richard in Richard III, all wanted to further their own agenda and did so in very sneaky and deceitful ways. These characters smartly used trickery and deceit to achieve their goals, and succeeded.

"And let me be a slave, t' achieve that maid whose sudden sight hath thrall'd my wounded eye, " (I.i.219-220) In The Taming of the Shrew, Lucentio has come up with a plan to woo his love Bianca. It involves his servant Tranio pretending to be him so that he can pretend to be a schoolmaster. Bianca's father, Baptista, has decreed that she stay locked up in the house until her sister, Kate, is married. The only people allowed in to see her are her tutors, one of which is Lucentio in disguise. Ironically, Lucentio came to Padua to study Philosophy and virtue. While disguised as Bianca's tutor, he woo's her and in the end he wins her heart and her hand in marriage.

Petruchio, who's one driving need is to marry a rich woman, uses trickery once he has wed Kate to change her from a shrew to a loving wife. He acts foul and ill-tempered

toward all of his servants, more ill-tempered than Kate ever had, and at the same time he keeps reassuring her of her own good qualities, such as sweetness and kindness. She immediately sees from Petruchio's actions that her own shrewish ways were wrong and impossible for others to tolerate. At the same time, she realizes what kind of a person she is inside, the same kind of person that Petruchio has been insisting she is. Petruchio effectively tricks Kate into stopping the shrewish behavior so that she can be that kind of person. In the end, Kate is a more loving and attentive wife than her own sister.

In A Midsummer Night's Dream, the fairy king Oberon wants an Indian boy to be his henchman, but the fairy queen Titania will not give him the boy. They argue about it and Titania simply leaves. "Well; go thy way. Thou shalt not from this grove till I torment thee for this injury," (II.