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Taming of the Shrew research paper Pg.1

At the beginning of the play Kate and Pertruchio seem like opposites psychologically, but by the end they’re similar.

At the beginning of the play Kate and Pertruchio seem as if they are two completely different characters. Towards the beginning of the play in the mirror scene you can see dramatic differences between the two characters. For example, when Petruchio meets Kate for the first time you can see right away that the attitudes of the characters are completely different. I say this because Petruchio at this time in the play is a very relaxed, well mannered and is in a totally different mind state than Kate. He is also standing whereas Kate is sitting or vise versa; they are never doing the same thing. Kate in this scene feels to an audience that she is a person that no one should come in contact with.
Also in this scene there is a time when both of the characters are seen in the mirror. This can mean many things; I interpret this as a foreshadowing of things to come and that both of them in the mirror means that they reflect each other.







Kate is coarse and rough around the edges at the start of the play. She constantly insults and degrades the men around her, and she is prone to showing wild displays of anger, during which she may physically and verbally attack whomever gets her mad enough. Though most of the play’s characters simply believe Kate to be inherently “hot headed”. It is definitely possible to think that her unsettling behavior comes from unhappiness. She may act like a shrew because she is miserable and desperate. There are many possible sources of Katherine’s unhappiness: she shows jealousy about her father’s treatment of her sister, but her anxiety may also come from feelings about her own undesirability, the fear that she may never have a husband, hating the way men treat her, and so on....