The city, which enjoyed the protection of Venice, was considerably freer than other parts of Italy. Padua is considered the oldest city in northern Italy and among the most beautiful. It has many ancient, covered streets that open into large public squares, or piazzas. The nearby city of Venice, whose rulers protected Padua, built new walls for the city between and and several enormous gates. Shakespeare would have heard of these great structures from stories of travelers and students.
Padua was also known for its successful industries. Shakespeare got inspiration from many folktales and ballads popular in England about shrewish wives being tamed by their aggressive husbands. In his false status, he is entertained with a play by a group of travelling actors. Act 1 Lucentio arrives in Padua as a student. He sees the merchant Baptista and his two daughters, and immediately falls in love with the younger, Bianca.
Baptista declares that her elder sister Katherina, a shrew, must be married before Bianca. Lucentio decides to pose as a schoolmaster to woo Bianca. Petruchio arrives in Padua, looking for a rich wife. Hortensio, a would-be suitor to Bianca, tells Petruchio of Katherina. Petruchio decides to court her. When they meet, Petruchio and Katherina quarrel, but their marriage is agreed and the day fixed.
Act 3 Lucentio, diguised as a Latin master, and Hortensio, disguised as a music master, court Bianca. Petruchio arrives for his wedding with Katherina dressed in old and fantastic clothes. If it were possible to assign a single place the honour of having been the home of the scientific revolution — this honour should go to Padova. What Paris had been in the thirteenth century, and what Oxford and Paris together had been in the fourteenth, Padua became in the fifteenth : the center in which ideas from all Europe were combined into an organized and cumulative body of knowledge.
I guess everyone knows the plot of The Taming of the Shrew around , La bisbetica domata in Italian. A gentleman of Padua has two daughters: one, Bianca , is sweet and gentle, the other one, Katherina , is… well, a shrew. The father does not want Bianca to get married before Katherina, but it seems an impossible task, given the bad character of the girl. Another version, famous in Italy, is the one in which the beautiful Ornella Muti tames the shrew Adriano Celentano.
After this treatment she, unsurprisingly, meekly serves her husband's guests at his feast. The resourceful ingenuity shown by Petruchio in his 'teaching' of his new wife is a long way from this cruelty.
His hawking metaphor and his strategy of 'killing her in her own humour' are Shakespeare's own addition to the taming tradition. Shakespeare's original audience would have been familiar with sermons and pamphlets on the subject of decorous marital behaviour.
Katherina's long speech on the relationship between a husband and wife echoes one of the Colloquies of the sixteenth-century humanist scholar, Erasmus. Juan Vives's The Office of and Duetie of an Husband translated by Thomas Paynell in is another example of an intellectual Christian perspective on the subject.
The subjection of the wife to the authority of the husband is very clearly set out in the Anglican Homily on Marriage, which was one of the many sermons read in church from onwards by order of the Crown. The story of the beggar man waking up to find himself a king is an age-old folk tale: one of the earliest written versions is that in the Arabian Nights.
It was the subject of many ballads and jigs current in Shakespeare's time.
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