The Taming of the Shrew and Sex
“in the midst of the street”

[print edition page number: 105]

George Bernard Shaw called Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew disgusting. To be precise, he described Shakespeare’s shrew play as “altogether disgusting to modern sentiments” to the extent that “no man with any decency of feeling can sit it out in the company of a woman without being extremely ashamed of the lord-of-creation moral implied in the wager and the speech put into the woman’s own mouth.”^[1] But the same play that Shaw condemned as “one vile insult to womanhood and manhood from the first word to the last” has been described by others [106] as showcasing a loving partnership and a good marriage.^[2] Declarations that this play is disgusting, misogynistic, or even admirable usually focus on its display of a wife submitting to her husband, and such judgments implicitly evaluate Katherine’s obedience speech (and the “taming” encounters that lead up to it) in relation to the concept of consent. It is possible to judge that Katherine and Petruchio have achieved a felicitous union in which the woman’s yielding to a dominant man is an expression of love so long as we believe that Katherine meaningfully consents to the way she is treated. One can then debate whether female submission of the sort Katherine describes as what wives owe their husbands is particular to this couple or a necessary condition for any successful heterosexual marriage.^[3]

But if we acknowledge that submission and dominance can generate erotic energy, The Taming of the Shrew is a play whose central couple ought to be seen as kinky. Ample evidence exists of a long tradition of individuals finding within Katherine and Petruchio’s courtship and marriage a model — bolstered by the authority of Shakespeare — that helps to make both legible and acceptable what Gayle Rubin would term their benign sexual variation.^[4] In her memoir Sex with Shakespeare, for example, [107] Jillian Keenan turns to The Taming of the Shrew to explain how the spankings she enjoys differ from physical abuse. For Keenan and her readers, an association with Shakespeare’s cultural cache frames kinky desire as not disgusting.^[5] If “kink is useful to think with,” The Taming of the Shrew seems an especially useful play with which to think about kink.^[6]

And there are complex issues about kink we can explore by expanding our focus beyond the erotics of the play’s central couple. Katherine and Petruchio are alone onstage for only one or two scenes, and the opening frame suggests they are always being watched; at times, they make other characters who observe their encounters into participants. As such, The Taming of the Shrew raises questions about the ethics and legality of kink that go beyond a couple’s negotiated agreements to consider what type of consent (if any) should be sought from those who witness or, through their presence, become de facto partakers in a kinky encounter. Consent matters in these situations not only because of ethical concerns but also because legal protections in Western countries for a wide range of sexual practices are often predicated on a presumed right to privacy. Can kink be benign (and not criminalized) only if it is private? Are there limits on the number of people in a sexual encounter and where that activity occurs if it is to be deemed private?^[7] What types of intimacy might be construed as wholly private given that, as Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner have suggested, even what is construed as vanilla, heteronormative sex is “mediated by publics”?^[8] These are the ethical and legal matters [108] we can explore by moving beyond questions of consent within Katherine and Petruchio’s marriage to consider the positionality of the play’s other characters. Paying attention to the individuals in The Taming of the Shrew who start as bystanders and get drawn into erotic play as spectators and sometimes props or accomplices can help us think about the myriad ways that sex can be public.

Marriage Models

Indisputably, Shakespeare’s play features Petruchio taunting Katherine in their first encounter (2.1.180–93) and then humiliating her with his behavior and appearance on their wedding day (3.2.183–240).^[9] He at moments figures Katherine as an animal, most memorably comparing his plan to tame her, by withholding food and preventing sleep, to the way he would treat a hawk (4.1.177–200). He exerts control over her clothing, movement, and speech. And the outcome of Petruchio’s domineering is Katherine’s offer to put her hand under her husband’s foot and her declaration that she is perfectly content to “serve, love, and obey” (5.2.170). Katherine explains that her changed attitude results from the realization that women’s bodies are “soft, weak, and smooth” and that their “lances are but straws” (5.2.171, 179). If we see Petruchio as a stand-in for all husbands and Katherine in her final speech as an exemplar for all wives, then these lines, and the play in which they feature, support patriarchal values.

Critical and theatrical interpretations of The Taming of the Shrew inevitably come into conversation with this moral lesson when determining whether the play’s ending is happy. Shaw’s critique assumes that Katherine’s expression of obedience to Petruchio would be received positively by those who understood women’s submission to men (or at least [109] wives’ submission to their husbands) as natural. Some clearly received such a lesson from this play; a notable example appears in Mary Cowden Clarke’s nineteenth-century prequel in The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines.^[10] For Clarke, Katherine’s shrewishness is a manifestation of high spirits that became unruly because of parental neglect and inadequate education. Katherine has a flash of contentment, though, when a young man named Giulio responds to her acting out at a party by tying her to a tree. The result is that “as her woman’s frame involuntarily yields to his masculine strength … there is an inexplicable acquiescence, an absence of resentment and resistance, altogether unwanted, and surprising to herself.”^[11] Alas, Giulio departs for a naval assignment the next day, and news soon arrives that he has drowned. Within this story for young female readers, Clarke suggests that Katherine has already had an encounter with the pleasurable feeling of “finding herself completely overcome — mastered” that accounts for her final acceptance of Petruchio’s regime.^[12] Long after Clarke’s book was published, even critics and directors who might not describe women as innately dependent on men have posited that Petruchio’s “taming” makes Katherine happy by enabling her to become a functional member of society and a beloved wife.^[13] [110]

Condemnations of the play then need only reject the idea that women are naturally submissive to men to argue that Katherine is a victim and Petruchio is abusive. Charles Marowitz’s 1970s The Shrew seems to literalize Shaw’s characterization of The Taming of the Shrew as disgusting by interspersing contemporary episodes of a heterosexual couple’s dating experiences among renditions of scenes from Shakespeare’s play in which Katherine is tortured and raped; Katherine presents her final “obedience” speech in a monotone, appearing as an abuse victim whose will has been broken.^[14] It seems inevitable that numerous other twentieth-century readings and adaptations of The Taming of the Shrew see the play as problematically misogynistic given that the seventeenth-century sequel suggests that even early modern audiences might have thought Petruchio a bully. John Fletcher’s The Woman’s Prize, or The Tamer Tamed focuses its happy ending on Petruchio’s capitulation to his second wife, Maria, who refuses to tolerate his shrew-taming ways.^[15]

To be clear, tying a woman one has just met to a tree and raping one’s partner are forms of assault. But the play text of The Taming of the Shrew does not demand explicit physical violence against Katherine. While at her most shrewish moments Katherine strikes her sister (2.1.22sd) and Petruchio (2.1.221sd), there is no stage direction in Shakespeare’s play indicating Petruchio hits his wife (although he does beat his servants) — yet physical discipline of Katherine is repeatedly imagined in productions and adaptations. In the late seventeenth-century Sauny the Scot, Petruchio threatens to pull out the teeth of his shrewish wife.^[16] In the [111] eighteenth century, John P. Kemble’s performance in David Garrick’s Catherine and Petruchio, a condensed version of The Taming of the Shrew, popularized the convention of Petruchio carrying a whip.^[17] By the twentieth century, the potential for a husband to physically discipline his wife manifested in productions that featured spanking. Most memorably, carrying on a bit of stage business featured in Lynne Fontanne and Alfred Lunt’s 1930s production of Shakespeare’s play, both the 1949 stage musical Kiss Me, Kate! and its 1953 film version have lead actor Fred Graham (who happens to be playing Petruchio in a musical version of The Taming of the Shrew) put his former wife Lilli Vanessi (in the role of Katherine) over his knee for an extended onstage spanking.^[18] The 1963 western film adaptation McLintock! concludes with John Wayne, in the title role, reconciling with his estranged wife Katherine, played by Maureen O’Hara, after the entire town helps him chase her down and then watches as he beats her bottom with a shovel.^[19]

The popular sense of Katherine and Petruchio’s interactions, especially the cultural memory of whips and spankings, makes the play available to inspire kinky and BDSM fantasies.^[20] The Taming of the Shrew has been referenced in both suggestive and hardcore erotic texts. A Google search of Taming of the Shrew and porn yields 359,000 results, including a video in which a woman recites the obedience speech while masturbating, a short film in which the feuding actors trying to rehearse a production [112] of the play wind up having sex, and a number of spanking scenes.^[21] Whether or not Katherine and Petruchio are a model married couple, for those seeking a script to guide their erotic play — or perhaps just to locate in Shakespeare’s works evidence that their proclivities have a long history — The Taming of the Shrew is a useful resource.

Questions of Consent

We can believe that Katherine finds her marriage to Petruchio satisfying because it relies upon dominant/submissive power plays and that the so-called taming process involves two people happily discovering their kinks are compatible. But even for those who find this dynamic worth imitating, if only in the context of fantasy, it is worth reflecting on how it gets established. Within the context of contemporary discussions of BDSM, the ethics of an action hinge on consent, and The Taming of the Shrew includes no clear statement from Katherine consenting to marriage,^[22] much less to domination. Early modern wives were arguably so legally disempowered as to preclude meaningful consent; some theorists [113] have questioned whether women’s consent to be submissive to men is possible within the context of societies that have not achieved gender equality.^[23] Even now, eliding the language of love and mutuality with consent is problematic. Recognizing that power imbalances might exist within what appears to be an encounter between two mutually attracted people, current standards for ethical kink assume that all parties involved must explicitly consent to participate.

Adding to the possibility of understanding Katherine as coerced, Petruchio’s plan relies on what we would now describe as gaslighting. In a soliloquy he promises,

If she deny to wed, I’ll crave the day
When I shall ask the banns, and when be married.
(2.1.178–79)

He then tells Katherine, “[W]ill you, nill you, I will marry you” (2.1.273); and he declares to the men who have just witnessed Katherine saying to him she would rather see him hanged than marry him (2.1.302),

Tis bargained ’twixt us twain, being alone,
That she shall still be curst in company.
(2.1.308–9)

Petruchio denies Katherine’s reality, making it impossible for her to say no. The closest the play comes to allowing her agency is Katherine’s outburst when Petruchio is late for the scheduled wedding as she describes herself as being in an impossible position: [114]

I must forsooth be forced
To give my hand opposed against my heart
Unto a mad-brain rudesby.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Now must the world point at poor Katherine
And say, “Lo, there is mad Petruchio’s wife,
If it would please him come and marry her.”
(3.2.8–10, 18–20)

At best, we can say that Katherine makes a choice in not actively refusing to marry Petruchio.

If there is a moment of positive consent in The Taming of the Shrew, it comes in Katherine’s final speech, especially if we perceive her as crafting a performance that puts obedience in quotation marks.^[24] Katherine justifies female submission on the grounds that a husband is

one that cares for thee
And for thy maintenance; commits his body
To painful labour both by sea and land,
To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,
Whilst thou liest warm at home secure and safe.
(5.2.153–57)

Her vision does not fit with what the play shows us of her own marriage; that is, Petruchio’s only labor takes the form of seeking a wife and bossing servants, and her experience consists of not being secure and safe while trying to sleep in his house. But the speech proposes a contract: if the husband will “[commit] his body / To painful labour,” the wife will return “love, fair looks, and true obedience” (5.2.154–55, 159). Some [115] rules around power dynamics are negotiated here through self-consciously counterfactual language that resembles Petruchio’s when he calls the sun the moon before insisting that Katherine do the same.^[25]

Particularly if one sees Petruchio as accepting that Katherine is role-playing at servility — and that is a plausible interpretation of his verbal response to her speech: “Why, there’s a wench” (5.2.186) — this wife and husband might be understood to have collaboratively created a script for consensual dominant/submissive encounters. People who now look to The Taming of the Shrew for erotic inspiration ought to negotiate their own boundaries more explicitly before breaking out a riding crop. But if they assume the play’s central relationship is consensual, then they can find in it a model of how a couple might develop something mutually satisfying; this ideal is beautifully captured in Gillian Knoll’s analysis: “Love and marriage are creative acts for Petruchio and Kate — they make marriage just as we make love. Their lies are inseminating; from them germinates an intimate, erotic, shared and ever so private imaginary in which ‘men and women are alone.’”^[26]

In Company

Yet Katherine and Petruchio are almost never alone. Key moments, like the final obedience speech, when they could be seen to create a shared and ever so private imaginary, mostly take place in a range of public settings — and this raises even more complex questions about consent. Except for a hundred lines of dialogue when they first meet (2.1.180–276), Katherine and Petruchio have no sustained private moments onstage — and even that encounter is bookended by Baptista leaving to send Katherine [116] in and then returning to see how the wooing progresses. Considering how much time Katherine and Petruchio spend in the presence of family members, friends, neighbors, and servants, it’s fair to say their erotic encounters are always on public display. Relatedly, I believe, we can understand a key element of their erotic play lies in the experience of performing dominance and submission in the company of other people.

As he undertakes the project of taming his wife, Petruchio engages his servants as both audience for and participants in his acts of domination. They at times apparently revel in the chance to demonstrate their submission to the head of household by functioning as instruments that extend their master’s power over others. Even though he has chastised them (as “you rogue” [4.1.133] and “whoreson villain” [4.1.141]), Petruchio’s men are not just aware of but actively support his plan for managing Katherine, with one accurately noting, “He kills her in her own humour” (4.1.169). Even though Petruchio’s only marital and primary romantic relationship is with Katherine, he acts out his dominance over her with the help of a number of willing submissives; his servants function as members of a leather household.

Individuals in this household seem to learn from their master and from one another the range of experiences and actions available to submissives. Grumio gets his opportunity to dominate by following Petruchio’s orders. This servant keeps food from Katherine and teases her while imitating his master by insisting he is only concerned with her health — fretting that “too choleric a meat” (4.3.19) will make her ill when he denies her a variety of dishes before finally offering, as though being generous, “mustard without the beef” (4.3.30). Grumio is the servant sent to Katherine with Petruchio’s order “I command her come to me” (5.2.100).^[27] Katherine’s obedience speech then parallels, with its [117] hyperbolic expression of submission, Grumio’s earlier insistence that he will not follow Petruchio’s request to “knock me here soundly” (1.2.8) because, as he queries while being beaten for his refusal to knock on Hortensio’s door, “was it fit for a servant to use a master so?” (1.2.31–32). Both Grumio, by embracing the role of protective servant, and Katherine, by over-identifying as a perfect wife, justify what amounts to disobedience, topping from the bottom.

Petruchio brings Hortensio into his household, making him a party to the taming campaign. While visiting the newly married couple, this friend withholds food from Katherine by following Petruchio’s instruction “Eat it all up, Hortensio, if thou lovest me” (4.3.52). As Petruchio dismisses the tailor’s man and denies his wife clothing, Hortensio aids in the smooth expression of the husband’s dominance by acceding to the command “Hortensio, say thou wilt see the tailor paid” (4.3.163). Not only Petruchio declaring, “It shall be the moon or star or what I list / Or e’er I journey to your father’s house” (4.5.7–8), but also Hortensio advising, “Say as he says, or we shall never go” (4.5.11) motivates Katherine to yield. Her proclamation offers obedience while acknowledging a set of rules:

[S]un it is not, when you say it is not,
And the moon changes even as your mind,
What you will have it named, even that it is
And so it shall be for Katherine.
(4.5.20–23)

Hortensio here becomes both participant in and witness to the couple’s play of dominance and submission. Although he does not seem aroused by following Petruchio’s orders, he gets what he wants by helping Katherine understand the rewards of acquiescence — they are all able to [118] travel to her sister’s wedding only if Katherine gives in. Hortensio clearly sees his male friend as a model to emulate, declaring,

Well Petruchio, this has put me in heart.
Have to my widow, and if she be forward,
Then hast thou taught Hortensio to be untoward.
(4.5.78–80)

The play’s final scene shows Hortensio to be less successful as a wife-tamer, but Petruchio’s public domination of Katherine presents a script for what Hortensio desires, and he consistently seems a willing participant in the couple’s scenes.

But it is more difficult to describe Katherine and Petruchio’s engagement with others as equally consensual. Vincentio, who enters immediately after Katherine calls the sun the moon, gets treated as an occasion for play, even as a prop. After Lucentio’s father Vincentio comes upon them on the road, Petruchio describes the older man as a “Fair lovely maid” (4.5.35), thus motivating Katherine to greet him as “Young budding virgin, fair, and fresh, and sweet” (4.5.38). While amusing for knowing spectators, the person being misidentified might reasonably be upset; Hortensio seems correct to surmise “A will make the man mad, to make a woman of him” (4.5.36-37) since Vincentio reveals he has experienced discomfort (at least from confusion and possibly from fear of insanity) by admitting “your strange encounter much amazed me” (4.5.55). Albeit fleeting, this moment of dragging into their role-playing scene a stranger who happens to occupy the same public space is arguably the first instance in which Katherine and Petruchio mutually negotiate their engagement with one another — and it notably deviates from what many would see as basic ethical standards for kink by failing to obtain consent from all participants. [126]

Having his wife perform obedience in front

of others seems to excite Petruchio given his repetition and heightening of orders to perform such [119] actions. He wins the wager not just because Katherine comes at his command, throws down her hat, and publicly declares her submission but as a result of this behavior taking place in front of a house full of wedding guests. And even if Katherine and Petruchio both fully consent to playing out this Dom/sub encounter, they make at least some of their witnesses function as less than willing participants. After Petruchio tells her to “fetch” (5.2.109) Bianca and the Widow to their husbands, Katherine chooses to obey, but the other women are forced, having previously refused to come and then being led onstage in a manner that causes Petruchio to describe them “as prisoners” (5.2.126). Katherine follows Petruchio’s command when she launches into her speech, but both members of the couple ignore the Widow’s clear refusal to participate as she states, “[W]e will have no telling” (5.2.138) and “She shall not” (5.2.140). Petruchio seems to enjoy Katherine’s public declaration of the duty that wives owe to husbands, and other men present laud her as “a wonder” (5.2.195). But the women who are demeaned by being compared to “a fountain troubled, / Muddy, ill-seeming, thick, bereft of beauty” (5.2.147-49) are coerced, if only momentarily, into unwanted submissive roles.^[28] If Katherine and Petruchio were alone, their mutual consent would be sufficient — by making their erotic play public, however, they engage in actions that touch upon complex issues of both ethics and law. [120]

Doing It in Public

While all agree that consent remains central to questions about when any erotic act becomes ethically problematic (or even amounts to criminal assault), what is recognized as legal in terms of kinky sex has often been determined to rely not just on consent but also privacy. When behaviors take place in public — spaces where others might witness them — legal discussions normally assume that the rights of those who would find an act disgusting, distasteful, upsetting, or unwanted must be protected. Stuart P. Green’s work on legal aspects of sex describes public acts as potentially problematic because of what he identifies as negative sexual autonomy, “the right not to engage in, or be subject to, one or another form of sexual conduct.”^[29]

Exhibitionism, which Green discusses under the more general heading indecent exposure, can be ethically and legally tricky because there are situations in which public nudity or even public sexual behavior might inadvertently subject others to something they don’t want to see — for example, a couple having sex in a park because they have no other place in which to be intimate would not intentionally be exhibitionistic. Intent matters when it comes to determining whether nudity is indecent or even criminal, and deliberate sexual exhibitionism is even more fraught.^[30]

The ethics of exhibitionism raise particularly complicated questions within communities that identify as kinky. For instance, in the Reddit forum r/BDSMAdvice a person wrote,

My bf [boyfriend] is really into exhibitionism but I’m not. I won’t do anything too public bc [because] of the consent issue (bystanders). I tried suggesting bdsm clubs (or zoom calls lol) but he wasn’t interested. [122] He says the risk of getting caught is what does it for him, not the flashing(?). Do [sic] anyone have any ideas?^[31]

All sixteen replies to this posting argue that it is unethical (as well as legally risky) to have sex where just anyone could stumble on their encounter. Making a similar point, sexuality educator Charlie Glickman has criticized the Kink.com site Public Disgrace because “the [ video ] shoots [of sexual activity] that take place in public settings are forcing observers to participate in the experience.”^[32] It is in part for this reason that Greta Christina at the end of a blog post pondering “The Ethics of Public Sex” writes, “I’m coming up blank on this one.”^[33]

While those who enjoy exhibitionism discuss how best to practice this kink ethically, legal rulings have made the situation more complex by broadly construing what counts as public sex. The 2003 US Supreme Court case Lawrence v. Texas ruled unconstitutional laws that prohibit sexual acts — including sodomy and oral sex — between any consenting adults regardless of their gender. That ruling relied on precedents positing a constitutional right to privacy to insist a couple’s behavior within their own home would normally be protected. But what conditions make a space public rather than private? A dissenting justice in the Lawrence v. Texas case went so far as to query whether situations involving more than two people merit protection; legal scholar Lior Jacob Strahilevitz records that “[Antonin] Scalia wondered aloud how ‘privacy’ could possibly [120] cover five people, let alone some larger number, such as ‘the number of people required to fill the Coliseum.’”^[34]

In raising this objection, Scalia echoes past instances when people’s actions were determined not to merit the protections afforded to private behavior. For example, in 1976 the United States Fourth Circuit Court ruled that a married heterosexual couple was not allowed to claim that their sexual acts were private because they had invited another man to join them for a threesome. The case came about after one of their children brought to school polaroid photos these adults had taken of their consensual encounters; the couple was then charged with sodomy. The court specifically ruled that “once a married couple admits strangers as onlookers, federal protection of privacy dissolves.”^[35] Both the British and European legal systems invoked similar reasoning in the so-called Spanner case, a 1993 legal judgment in England against a group of men who engaged in sadomasochistic acts as members of a private sex club. Although consensual homosexual activity was legal in England at the time, the charge brought under the Offenses Against Persons Act classified the behaviors in the club as assault. The European Court of Human Rights then upheld the men’s conviction in part on the grounds that their encounters were not private. While Article 8 of the European Convention for Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms declares, “Everyone shall have the right to respect for his private and family life,” because what took place in the club was videotaped, the court determined the sexual encounters could not be considered private and therefore were not legally protected.^[36] [123]

These and other cases that have come to the attention of law enforcement suggest how shaky it is to build legal protections on the foundation of privacy. The 2022 United States Supreme Court case overturning Roe v. Wade further calls into question whether Americans have a constitutional right to privacy. And making sexual content visible to an observer — whether as a participant in a threesome or as part of an audience as large as the one Scalia imagined would fill the Coliseum — complicates the ethics of consent beyond what those following Safe, Sane, and Consensual practices might be able to negotiate in advance of any encounter.^[37] But just as The Taming of the Shrew offers test cases for the ethics of doing it in public in scenes that feature Katherine and Petruchio’s exhibitionistic Dom/sub play, it also hints at some different ways of negotiating consent in the context of public erotic behavior.

Playgoing with Christopher Sly

Shakespeare arguably smooths over what would be a tangle of ethical and legal questions by signaling that Katherine and Petruchio exist in the context of a play — specifically the “kind of history” being staged by a group of traveling players for Christopher Sly.^[38] Indeed, it is because of the opening frame that Jillian Keenan asserts — even after she describes Petruchio’s process for taming Katherine as “uncomfortable and alarming” — that “their relationship is a literal fantasy. It’s play.” She then [124] queries, “Should we hold play to the same standards as reality?”^[39] We could find pornography that skips discussions of safewords and limits acceptable because we understand the video we are watching to be a staged fantasy rather than a document of a spontaneous reality.^[40] Katherine and Petruchio’s interactions might seem similarly unproblematic as long as they are situated within a theatrical entertainment “[w]hich bars a thousand harms and lengthens life” (Ind.2.132). More interesting, I believe, is how the opening frame of The Taming of the Shrew explores the complex pleasures that are made possible when an audience member consents to allow a particular amount of risk.

The varying levels of consent the opening frame of The Taming of the Shrew sets up are readily apparent when one compares it to the roughly contemporary, anonymous Taming of a Shrew. In neither play does the Lord seek or obtain consent from the inebriated, unconscious tinker who awakes to find himself dressed as a nobleman and surrounded by people telling him that he has a fine house, servants, and a wife. The Taming of the Shrew highlights the power dynamics of the deception when one of the Lord’s huntsmen comments on the Lord’s scheme: “Believe me, lord, I think he cannot choose” (Ind.1.41). But others are given more or less mediated access to plans regarding the scenarios in which they will perform. In A Shrew, the boy ordered to play the role of the tinker’s wife receives both explicit instructions about what to do as well as an opportunity to offer enthusiastic consent — he declares, [125]

Fear not, my lord, I’ll dandle him well enough,
And make him think I love him mightily.
(1.77–78)

In The Taming of the Shrew, the parallel boy character only receives indirect orders to dress and behave as a lady would (Ind.1.104–34). The boy in A Shrew is a member of the Lord’s playing company, whereas in The Taming of the Shrew the page Bartholomew is a member of the Lord’s household; based on their official positions, only one of these individuals has agreed that his work includes playacting. And the players receive different briefings about the Lord’s intentions; those in A Shrew get told that the Lord will pretend to be a servant as part of a prank (1.64–68) while those in The Taming of the Shrew are informed only that they will be performing for a nobleman who “never heard a play” and thus might behave strangely (Ind.90–98, 95).^[41]

The fact that the Lord in Shakespeare’s play does not offer everyone complete information about his plans is notable given that he clearly intends the scene featuring Sly-as-lord will be erotically charged. The Lord anticipates the pleasure he will take from watching the tinker and his page interact: “I long to hear him call the drunkard ‘husband’” (Ind.1.123). He orders servants to carry Sly into “my fairest chamber,” which they should “hang … round with all my wanton pictures” (Ind.1.45–46). It is later revealed that the images in these wanton pictures link sex to power imbalance (in the case of Venus and Adonis), deception (Jove and Io), and force (Apollo and Daphne). The Lord’s encounter with Sly extends these mythological coercive encounters into the present and clarifies why the duping of Sly is so exciting for him. The Lord, in sum, offers a problematic case study of an individual’s “fantasy” authorizing a lack of consent from all participants.

But even in the absence of explicit agreements spelled out before the start of their erotically charged performances, the characters in the opening frame of The Taming of the Shrew offer numerous examples of on-the-fly negotiations of consent. After being introduced to his “wife,” Sly wants to address this person respectfully, possibly as an equal, and asks,

Are you my wife and will not call me “husband”?
My men should call me “lord”;
I am your goodman.
(Ind.2.101–02)

Despite getting a response to his request for her given name — “‘Al’ce madam’? or ‘Joan madam’” (Ind.2.107) — that directs him to use a generic form of address — “‘Madam’, and nothing else. So lords call ladies” (Ind.2.108) — Sly attempts something more personal, addressing the person before him as “Madam wife” (Ind.2.109). This attempt to connect with the wife as an individual with some agency explains his reaction to her lament that she has been “all this time abandoned from your bed” (Ind.2.112). His response, “Madam, undress you and come now to bed” (Ind.2.114), inevitably gets a laugh from audiences who know he is speaking to a boy dressed as a woman, but, fundamentally, this is an attempt to meet his wife’s needs. And it is easy to overlook how quickly Sly backs off when she refuses his advances. The page improvises a boundary by saying,

[L]et me entreat of you
To pardon me yet for a night or two …
For your physicians have expressly charged …
That I should yet absent me from your bed.
(Ind. 2.115–20) [127]

Sly then respects this limit. Their exchange amounts to a couple cooperatively establishing the parameters of how they will engage with one another. In this moment, Sly and his “wife” present the clearest example of openly negotiated power dynamics within a marital relationship we find in The Taming of the Shrew.

Because the entire opening frame relies on levels of coercion and deception, it cannot be said to offer a straightforward model for ethical kink — but it does invite us to consider the complexity of shifting but sometimes acceptable levels of risk and consent. Who in this scene is consenting and when? Who has not explicitly consented but seems to be willingly participating and deriving pleasure from ongoing play? Most importantly, who is harmed? What goes right in the scenario the Lord has created for his own enjoyment, and what could go wrong? Such questions not only allow for nuanced discussions of ethical kink but also point to a different legal foundation for protecting sexual expression, including acts that are not entirely private: a reasonable expectation of a right to bodily autonomy.

This principle underpins a Canadian ruling that extended legal protections to those who engage in group sex. In 2005, the Supreme Court of Canada overturned laws that had criminalized bawdy houses as a threat to public morality and thus made people who engaged in consensual sexual activity in group settings (such as a club or dungeon) subject to prosecution. The cases that led to this decision had been brought against a man named Labaye for running a members-only sex club and another named Kouri for encouraging indecency by managing a sex club that allowed entry to couples who paid an admission fee. The Supreme Court determined that sex need not be completely private — or approved of by the majority of the population — to be legal. Rather, as long as such activity took place in what could be defined as a semi-public space, it was protected by an individual’s right to autonomy rather than their right to privacy. Both consent and morality could be delimited by an individual’s [128] decision to enter a group sex club or other semi-public space and their autonomous understanding of themselves as deriving benefit from their participation.^[42] In such a situation, meaningful consent resides in the individual’s choice to avoid a space, to enter and remain in it, or to enter and then leave.

This concept of bodily autonomy makes possible individual determination of what is and is not more pleasurable than it is harmful within a negotiated set of limits. It therefore suggests a legal parallel to the ethical principles laid out by those who advocate for Risk-Aware Consensual Kink. And it offers possible guidelines for those inclined to exhibitionism. We see a version of this idea in the responses to the Reddit post requesting advice about how the writer and their boyfriend might ethically have sex in public that suggest creating a scene in which potential witnesses consent to being surprised — for instance, in a recommendation that they arrange for willing friends to “catch” them in the act.^[43] This scenario doesn’t necessarily rely on explicitly negotiated consent for all that might happen; the exhibitionistic couple and their potential witnesses need not discuss in advance every act that someone might witness in what they establish to be a semi-public erotic space. But advanced planning takes seriously the bodily autonomy of the people who will walk in on the couple and see them having sex; potential observers offer consent regarding whether or not to enter a room in which they know a sexual scenario might take place but then can negotiate on the fly how they wish to watch, participate, or depart.

In other words, exhibitionists and others who enjoy sex in public can ethically create scenes that work like improvisational rather than scripted and meticulously rehearsed theatre. For those planning such [129] improvisations, The Taming of the Shrew provides both scripts for Dom-sub encounters and a case study for working through questions about consent, harm, and pleasure. And, as a play, it offers fodder for the thoughtful exploration of how we might reasonably seek and obtain consent from those who are potential witnesses to erotic acts. Anyone participating in semi-public or public sex can draw from the model of how theatres — for instance by providing a content warning about nudity and adult content on the ticket sale website — presume consent to watch without seeking approval from each audience member for exactly what will be presented onstage. Perhaps live theatre, and especially The Taming of the Shrew, can help mediate heated debates about sexual ethics, including recent disputes about whether sex scenes on television are problematic because not all viewers consent to see such material and annual arguments about whether to allow kink at Pride given that not all people want to see fetish gear, nudity, or suggestive behavior.

Taking Kink to the Street

Most importantly, The Taming of the Shrew suggests why those who do not think of themselves as kinky — even those who consider kink at Pride inappropriate or disgusting — would benefit from some reflection on the ethical and legal complexities of public eroticism. The title of this essay quotes the one moment in The Taming of the Shrew that speaks directly to such an action. Katherine’s response to Petruchio’s order “kiss me, Kate” (5.1.134) is “What, in the midst of the street?” (5.1.135). She clarifies that she is not shy about kissing her husband but “ashamed to kiss” (5.1.137) where almost anyone could see them. Ultimately, she yields to her husband’s request and thus meets the condition Petruchio has set to join her sister’s wedding party rather than to return to his house. While some might perceive Katherine and Petruchio, the only two characters onstage at this moment, to be in private, Katherine’s line suggests the street is a public space where different rules for behavior operate. [130] Her objection further reminds us that the standards of what is public or private, as well as what is disgusting or acceptable (what counts as benign or upsetting, kinky or vanilla), change over time.

A kiss between spouses, even in a public setting, seems innocuous to modern audiences but might have been understood among early modern people as improper outside the context of a wedding or a greeting. Understandings of privacy in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England differed from our own. In households comprised of multi-generational family members and servants, sex would necessarily occur not only in places where someone might come upon a couple but also in shared rooms and even beds. Both in the street and in what we would consider public indoor spaces, some actions we typically characterize as private might be acceptable since, as Laura Gowing puts it, “the distinction between public and private was still … in the making; the private family was hard to conceptualise when so much of domestic life had a public context.”^[44]

Community standards as well as definitions of community change, and debates about what is and is not ethical (or legal) need to take seriously that privacy is a shaky foundation on which to build a case for the right to consensual sexual expression. Berlant and Warner note that heterosexual relationships benefit from a notion of privacy that is not extended to queer encounters while also showing through vivid examples that a particular act between consenting heterosexual partners might be denigrated as problematic, kinky, or disgusting as soon as it is made public.^[45] Even George Bernard Shaw’s evaluation of The Taming of the Shrew as disgusting calls attention to the complexities of social contexts; Shaw objects not just to the lord-of-creation moral but to the experience [131] of being a man in a theatre seated next to a woman and therefore possibly perceived by his companion and others present as approving of patriarchal principles.

But both The Taming of the Shrew and a contemporary of George Bernard Shaw’s with whom he might have seen a production of this play point to other ways of delimiting individual rights and public morality, private consent and semi-public bodily autonomy. Actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell, who originated the role of Eliza in Shaw’s Pygmalion, when asked for her opinion of two men’s intimate relationship reportedly replied, “Does it matter what these affectionate people do — so long as they don’t do it in the streets and frighten the horses!”^[46] This quotation invites us to reflect on whether public sex (and the display of behavior related to sex, such as kink at Pride) is problematic because it takes place in a space where others who have not explicitly consented might witness it — that is, because someone is doing it in the street — or only if it causes distress or harm — that is, if it frightens the horses. Even if the latter, how might those assumed to have a right to bodily autonomy be reasonably expected to encounter and manage risk? (Is the problem that the horses are frightened? Or might anyone on a crowded Edwardian street need to keep in mind that a frightened horse might trample a person?) For exhibitionists as well as others whose proclivities might require or attract spectators, whether they pursue their pleasures in public or semi-public spaces, legal and ethical debates are not yet fully settled. Rather than continuing to focus on the lessons it offers about the presumed insularity of heteronormative married relations, The Taming of the Shrew seems more useful as a play through which we can safely explore kink, even the ethics of public sex in the midst of the street.