Matrimonial Relations in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew: The Machiavellian Husband/Ruler
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper argues with the feminist scholars that Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew is essentially a romanticized version of male's dominance over woman, which reveals a historical context where gender crisis was salient. However, it proposes that the play presents the idea of marriage in such a way that the relation of the wife--the potentially disorderly woman--to her husband becomes an epitome for the relation of subordinates to their ruler. In the little world of the family, with its conspicuous tension between love and power, the larger matters of political and social order could find ready symbolization. In this world, the powerful Pertruchio acts in a Machiavellian manner to subjugate the powerless Katherine. His brutality is justified as a necessary evil in order to achieve social order as a higher moral goal. Love is contingent on the establishment of male's power in such a matrimonial relation; the husband is feared first, and then loved. Similarly, according to Machiavellian standards a successful ruler should build his state on fear rather than love for, while love is precarious, fear is held by a dread of punishment. Thus the marriage of Petruchio and Katherine is praised and rewarded at the end, because such a matrimonial relationship exorcised the fear of disorder that dominated early modern England.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".