ABSTRACT
When Kate delineates a wife's duties to “her loving lord” within a hierarchical configuration of marriage, The Taming of the Shrew closes on an image of “woman” that the play's male characters use as a means of speaking to each other about themselves. Her speech, which so radically positions subjection as the determining condition for women's subjectivity and teaches how distinctions between male and female bodies are produced, understood, and maintained within the institution of heterosexual marriage, not only has become a site for examining the abrasive relations among feminisms, post-feminisms, and early modern texts but has turned Shrew into highly overin-vested real estate, a property without boundary markers that attracts discussions about material histories, material texts, and theatrical as well as cinematic reproductions, where the play, re-textualized and re-textured by actors' bodies and voices, appears in its most material form.
