Language and Desire in The Taming of the Shrew

When Petruchio first courts Kate, he does not woo her with flattery or sentiment. Instead, he contradicts her. She insults him; he praises her fury as sweetness. “Say that she rail,” he explains to Hortensio, “why then I’ll tell her plain / She sings as sweetly as a nightingale.” The strategy is linguistic judo: he meets her words with an inversion so complete that she cannot engage him on her own terms. Language becomes a weapon and a tool of seduction all at once. To desire someone in this play often means to understand their language so thoroughly that you can use it against them, or with them, or to transform it entirely.

Lucentio’s courtship of Bianca operates through similar linguistic games. He woos her by teaching her a Latin lesson that is secretly a love declaration. The words “Hic ibat Simois” are supposed to mean one thing on the page, but Lucentio uses them to confess his true identity and his love. Language operates on multiple levels—surface meaning and hidden meaning at once. Bianca responds to this in kind, translating his Latin love poem into her own terms, telling him not to trust her, to be careful. Even in the lesson, they are having a conversation about love while pretending to have a conversation about grammar. The desire flows through the language itself.

By the middle of the play, language becomes the primary currency of desire. When Petruchio and Kate arrive at his house, he starves her while praising the burnt meat as perfect, the cold room as warm, the night as day. He is writing reality through language, and she is forced to choose between her own perception and his words. When she finally agrees that the sun is the moon, she is not merely submitting to his authority. She is entering into his linguistic world, accepting his version of reality as valid. This is both a defeat and an intimacy—they have achieved a kind of linguistic harmony, a shared language that excludes everyone else.

The play’s final scene confirms that language and desire are inseparable. Kate’s speech on wifely obedience is delivered in language so powerful that it convinces the audience even as it confuses them about what she means. Does she believe what she is saying? It does not matter. The language itself is the point. She has mastered Petruchio’s art—the art of using words to shape reality, to persuade, to transform. Lucentio and Bianca are married through language and legal documents. Hortensio marries a Widow he barely knows. In each case, language precedes commitment. The play suggests that in a world where words can rewrite what we see and feel, desire itself is linguistic—not a feeling that finds expression in words, but a feeling created by words, shaped by them, made real through them.