Household Kates

Commentary on Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew has frequently noted that the play's novel taming strategy marks a departure from traditional shrew taming tales. Unlike his predecessors, Petruchio does not use force to tame Kate; he does not simply beat his wife into submission. ¹ Little attention has been paid, however, to the historical implications of the play's unorthodox methodology, which is conceived in specifically economic terms: “I am he am born to tame you, Kate,” Petruchio summarily declares, “And bring you from a wild Kate to a Kate / Conformable as other household Kates” (2.1.269–71). ² Petruchio likens Kate's planned domestication to a domestication of the emergent commodity form itself, whose name parallels the naming of the shrew. The Oxford English Dictionary defines cates as “provisions or victuals bought (as distinguished from, and usually more delicate or dainty than, those of home production).” The term is an aphetic form of acate, which derives from the Old French achat, meaning “purchase.” ³ Cates are thus by definition exchange-values—commodities, properly speaking—as opposed to use-values, or objects of home production. ⁴ In order to grasp the historical implications of Shrew's unorthodox methodology and of the economic terms Shakespeare employs to shape its taming strategy, I would like first to situate precisely the form of its departure from previous shrew-taming tales. What differentiates The Taming of the Shrew from its precursors is not so much a concern with domestic economy—which has always been a central preoccupation of shrew-taming literature—but rather a shift in modes of production and thus in the very terms through which domestic economy is conceived. The coordinates of this shift are contained within the term cates itself, which, in distinguishing goods that are purchased from those that are produced within and for the home, may be said to map the historical shift from domestic use value production to production for the market.