ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Shakespeare's play through versions of playing the pedagogue that connect different modes of patriarchal authority with fundamental principles and practices of humanist educational culture, particularly those concerning literary and imitative practice and the interface between theatrical art and learning. All these versions play on the fluidity of counterfeiting and the performative dimensions of learning and can be considered to some extent as disguises and as demonstrating the intersection of the multiple statuses of schoolmasters. Most prominent are impersonations illustrating the familiar trope of suppose, a figure common in the Italianate romance of the lover who counterfeits a tutor to a young gentlewoman to gain non-chaperoned access to the object of love. As in Gascoigne's Glasse, education carries and transfers material value. In the Shrew, the teacher resembles a hawker of covetable fashionable accoutrements for equipping the gentlewoman as desirable commodity, specifically, a product fitted for a competitive marriage market. Here, too, the device of inverting status relationships – master–servant, master–scholar – includes female characters posing threats to male hegemony, transgressing normal cultural practice through bodily and verbal resistance or offering an alternative ideology through forms of material conformity. Given the multiplicity of deceits and impersonations, they leave the audience pondering the distinction between shrewd shrews and honest wives.
