The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare
Published 1594 · 62,954 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Drama, Comedy
How hard is The Taming of the Shrew to read?
The Taming of the Shrew scores 49 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 72 out of 100
- Shakespeare's Early Modern English demands constant navigation of archaic and obsolete words: 'paucas pallabris,' 'thirdborough,' 'brach,' 'embossed,' 'farthingales,' 'custard-coffin,' 'cony-catched,' 'mete-yard.' The text is annotated with hundreds of numbered glosses, indicating how frequently readers need translation. Latin phrases surface in legal and comic contexts, and period-specific idioms ('a God's name,' 'sessa,' 'go to') lack obvious modern equivalents.
- Sentence structure: 62 out of 100
- The play alternates between blank verse (iambic pentameter) and prose, both shaped by Elizabethan rhetorical convention. Inversions, elisions, and contracted forms ('tis, 'twere, 'twas) require active parsing, and the meter enforces a different reading rhythm than modern prose. Still, the theatrical imperative for stage clarity keeps sentences more navigable than the hypotaxis of James or Faulkner — dialogue moves fast, and long speeches have clear rhetorical structure.
- Abstraction: 40 out of 100
- The play is almost entirely action and dialogue — courtship schemes, disguises, the taming campaign, and the wager. Katherine's final submission speech gestures toward political philosophy ('Such duty as the subject owes the prince'), and Petruchio's 'the mind makes the body rich' frames clothing symbolically, but these are brief. The dominant mode is comic incident: mustard without beef, a gown condemned as 'demi-cannon,' a sun declared to be the moon.
- Information density: 52 out of 100
- Two simultaneous plots — Petruchio's taming of Katherine and Lucentio's courtship of Bianca — unfold in parallel with four characters operating under assumed identities (Lucentio as Cambio, Tranio as Lucentio, Hortensio as Litio, the Pedant as Vincentio). The Induction adds a third narrative layer via the Christopher Sly frame. Tracking who is pretending to be whom requires attention, though the play's stagecraft makes the scheme visible in ways prose disguise does not.
- Narrative indirection: 35 out of 100
- The play is transparent about its mechanisms: Petruchio announces his taming strategy directly, disguises are explained to the audience, and Katherine's capitulation is dramatized on stage. What remains genuinely unstated is whether Katherine's obedience in Act 5 is sincere transformation or tactical accommodation — the text shows the behavior without access to her inner state. The Induction's metatheatrical frame (a beggar tricked into watching a play) adds a layer of irony about the reliability of performed submission.
- Symbolic density: 45 out of 100
- The sun/moon argument in Act 4 functions as an explicit emblem of the power struggle: whoever names reality wins. Clothing — the cap, the gown, the 'honest mean habiliments' Petruchio insists on — operates as a running index of identity and control. Katherine's final image of women's bodies as 'soft and weak and smooth' carries ideological freight. But the play is primarily comic plot rather than symbolic architecture — the disguises are practical devices, not metaphysical ones.
- Ironic distance: 60 out of 100
- The play's ironic gap is most acute in Katherine's final speech: delivered as sincere submission by the 'tamed' shrew, it reads to modern audiences as either a calculated performance of compliance or a disturbing earnest endorsement of patriarchal hierarchy. Neither reading can be closed off from the text. The Induction adds further ironic distance — the entire play is performed for Christopher Sly, a dupe who is himself being deceived, framing all of 'taming' as theater staged for an audience that cannot distinguish performance from reality.
- Resolution withholding: 38 out of 100
- The comic plot resolves completely: Lucentio marries Bianca, Hortensio weds his widow, Petruchio wins his wager, and all disguises are stripped. The Induction, however, is never closed — Christopher Sly vanishes after Act 1 and the play-within-a-play frame is simply abandoned, a structural loose end that scholars have debated for centuries. The deepest ambiguity is whether Katherine is genuinely changed or performing change, a question the play's ending stages visually (she throws her cap down) but refuses to answer internally.
- Structural complexity: 52 out of 100
- The Induction opens a play-within-a-play frame that is deliberately never closed — Sly disappears, leaving the audience inside a performance whose outer frame has been dropped. The main plot runs two parallel courtship narratives with four simultaneous disguises, requiring continuous tracking of who is impersonating whom for which purpose. The plotting is more intricate than The Great Gatsby's retrospective narration, closer to the layered schemes of Midnight's Children without that novel's chronological disruption.
How The Taming of the Shrew is regarded
The Taming of the Shrew holds a literary regard score of 88 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.