ABSTRACT
From the opening complaint of the Hostess that Sly has “burst” glasses for which he refuses to pay, The Taming of the Shrew is cluttered with references to and displays of objects, and especially household furnishings. 1 Add to these the text's preoccupations with apparel, with food, and with material wealth, again both described and exhibited, and we are confronted with a play unusually rich in “things.” 2 Such things, especially those sufficiently common and flexible to be required with any confidence by an Elizabethan theatrical performance, would seem to have little mystery for us. According to Pierre Bourdieu, however, “cultural consecration” confers not only upon the persons and situations it touches but also upon objects “a sort of ontological promotion akin to a transubstantiation.” 3 For the sake of the argument of this essay, I intend to begin by treating the Elizabethan theatre as a discrete culture susceptible of ethnohistorical investigation; to take as a case study in that theatrical culture The Taming of the Shrew; to investigate some ways in which The Shrew consecrates its objects; to proceed as if their “transubstantiation” entails a form of personalization, an intuition of their motivation and agency; and to look then at the reflexive ontology that objectifies The Shrew's persons.
