Kate’s speech in The Taming of the Shrew in V.ii is a complicated joke, like her speech in IV.v. It represents the culmination of the lessons she learned from the games Petruchio played with her throughout Act IV. Some of those lessons were intended to train her to direct her wit at others upon cue from him. This goal he accomplished. He intended to teach her the lesson that she would be rewarded for obedience and punished for disobedience, which he also accomplished. Kate also learned, however, the paradoxical art of being submissive and subversive at the same time, which was a lesson Petruchio certainly did not intend to teach her. She achieved a subtle, subversive mocking effect by carrying a given premise of Petruchio’s to its extreme logical conclusion, thereby exposing it as ridiculous and ironically implying just the opposite.

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