In Shakespeare’s rendering of the traditional topos, Joel Fineman points out, the shrew’s linguistic excess becomes a threat not of too many words, but rather of too much meaning. Kate’s speech underscores the way in which language always “carries with it a kind of surplus semiotic baggage, an excess of significance, whose looming, even if unspoken, presence cannot be kept quiet.”27 The semantic superfluity of Kate’s speech, Fineman argues, leads to a series of “fretful verbal confusions” in which the “rhetoricity of language, is made to seem the explanation of [her] ongoing quarrel with the men who are her master.”28 The example he cites is Kate’s unhappy lute lesson, recounted by her hapless music master, Hortensio:
Baptista: Why then, thou canst not break her to the lute?
Hortensio: Why no, for she hath broke the lute to me.
I did but tell her she mistook her frets,…
“Frets, call you these?” quoth she, “I’ll fume with them.”
And with that word she struck me on the head. (2.1.147–53)
Fineman sees Kate’s shrewish “fretting” as a direct result of the rhetorical excess of her speech—in this case, her pun on frets. Karen Newman similarly argues that Kate’s “linguistic protest” is directed against “the role in patriarchal culture to which women are assigned, that of wife and object of exchange in the circulation of male desire.”29 Kate’s excessive, verbal fretting turns her into an unvendible commodity. Yet while Newman emphasizes Kate’s own position as an object of exchange between men, she specifically discounts the importance of material objects elsewhere in the play, subordinating Petruchios manipulation of things to his more “significant” manipulation of words: “Kate is figuratively killed with kindness, by her husband’s rule over her not so much in material terms—the withholding of food, clothing and sleep—but in the withholding of linguistic understanding.”30
In contrast to Newman, Lena Cowen Orlin, in an article on “material culture theatrically represented” in The Shrew, foregrounds the play’s many “references to and displays of objects, and especially household furnishings.” Orlin does not simply invert the terms of Newman’s reading and insist upon the significance of res in the play at the expense of verba. Rather, she maintains that both material and linguistic forms of exchange, far from being opposed within the play, are specifically and repeatedly identified. Drawing on Lévi-Strauss, Orlin argues that the play “synthesizes” the three “forms of exchange that constitute social life,” namely, the exchange of wives, goods, and words.31 While I agree with Orlin’s claim that the play draws very explicit connections between its material and symbolic economies—particularly as these economies converge on what I have called the symbolic order of things—I resist the notion that Kate’s position with respect to this order is simply that of a passive object of exchange. Kate is not figured as one more cate exchanged between men within the play; rather, it is precisely her unvendibility as a commodity on the marriage market that creates the dramatic dilemma to be solved by the taming narrative. The question concerns the relation between Kate’s own position as a cate and her role as a consumer of cates. For Kate’s unvendibility is specifically attributed within the play to her untamed consumption of cates.
III
At the start of the play, Kate’s consumption is represented as a threat that Petruchio, in his novel way, will seek to tame. Both Newman and Fineman take Petruchios first encounter with Kate, perhaps the most “fretful” instance of verbal sparring in the play, to demonstrate that the shrew-tamer chooses to fight his battle with the shrew “in verbal kind.”32 “O, how I long to have some chat with her” (2. 1. 162), he utters, in anticipation of their meeting. The content of Petruchio’s punning “chat” with Kate, however, is principally preoccupied with determining her place within the symbolic order of things. The encounter begins with Petruchio stubbornly insisting upon calling Katherina “Kate”:
Petruchio: Good morrow, Kate, for that’s your name, I hear.
Katherina: Well have you heard, but something hard of hearing;
They call me Katherine that do talk of me.
Petruchio: You lie, in faith, for you are call’d plain Kate,
And bonny Kate, and sometimes Kate the curst;
But Kate, the prettiest Kate in Christendom,
Kate of Kate Hall, my super-dainty Kate,
For dainties are all Kates … (2.1.182–89)
If Petruchio’s punning appellation of Kate as a “super-dainty” cate seems an obvious misnomer in one sense—she could hardly be called “delicate”—in another it is quite apt, as his gloss makes clear. The substantive dainty, deriving from the Latin dignitatem (worthiness, worth, value), designates something that is “estimable, sumptuous, or rare” (OED). In describing Kate as a “dainty,” Petruchio appears to be referring to her value as a commodity, or cate, on the marriage market. (He has just discovered, after all, that her dowry is worth “twenty thousand crowns” [2.1.122].)
Yet Petruchio’s reference to Kate as “dainty” refers not simply to her status as a commodity or object of exchange between men, but to her status as a consumer of commodities as well. For in its adjectival form, the term dainty refers to someone who is “nice, fastidious, particular; sometimes over-nice,” as to “the quality of food, comforts, etc.” In describing Kate as “super-dainty,” Petruchio implies that she belongs to the latter category; she is “over-nice,” not so much discriminating as blindly obedient to the dictates of fashion. Sliding almost imperceptibly from Kate’s status as a consumer of cates to her own status as a cate, Petruchio’s gloss (“For dainties are all Kates”) elides the potential threat posed by the former by subsuming it under the aegis of the latter. His pun on Kates/cates dismisses the significance of Kates role as a consumer by effectively reducing her to an object of exchange between men.
The pun on Kates/cates is repeated at the conclusion of his “chat” with Kate (in the pronouncement quoted at the beginning of this chapter), and effects a similar reduction: “And therefore, setting all this chat aside, / Thus in plain terms,” Petruchio proclaims, “I am he am born to tame you, Kate, / And bring you from a wild Kate to a Kate / Conformable as other household Kates” (2.1. 261–62, 269–71). And yet, in spite of his desire to speak “in plain terms,” Petruchio cannot easily restrict or “tame” the signifying potential of his pun. For once it is articulated, the final pun on Kates/cates refuses to remain tied to its modifier, “household,” and insists instead upon voicing itself, shrewishly, where it shouldn’t (i.e., each and every time Kate is named). In so doing, however, it retrospectively raises the possibility that “cates” may themselves be “wild,” that there is something unruly, something that must be made to conform, in the commodity form itself. This possibility in turn discovers an ambiguity in Petruchio’s “as,” which may mean either “as other household cates are conformable” or “as I have brought other household cates into conformity.” The conformity of household cates cannot be taken for granted within the play because cates, unlike use-values, are not proper to or born of the domestic sphere, but are produced outside the home by the market. They are by definition extra-domestic or to-be-domesticated. Yet insofar as cates obey the logic of exchange and of the market, they may be said to resist such domestication. Petruchio cannot restrict the movement of cates within his utterance, cannot set all “chat” aside and speak in “plain terms,” because words, like commodities, tend to resist all attempts to restrict their circulation and exchange.
The latter assertion finds support—quite literally—in Petruchio’s own “chat.” The term chat, as Brian Morris points out in a note to his Arden edition, was itself a variant spelling of cate in the early modern period (both forms descend from the Old French achat). The term chat thus instantiates, literally performs, the impossibility of restricting the semantic excess proper to language in general and epitomized by the shrew’s