Why is the play set in the Renaissance period?
‘The Taming of the Shrew is truly a play that belongs to a different age. The reason the values of the characters in the play strike us is because they are irremediably at conflict with our own values and with what we perceive to be right. The way Petruchio behaves with Katherine is typically Renaissance: she does not conform with the rules of society as he knows it and he sees her almost as not human, so he tries to make her conform and ‘humanise’ her. There is never any question as to whether such rules are right or wrong, and the process of ‘humanisation’ is a violent, ruthless one; the object (Katherine) is forced to lose everything in order to gain a new identity. This is exactly how Europeans were behaving towards native people in America at the time. To make sense of the story I feel it is necessary to put some distance between the Renaissance characters and ourselves, a modern audience. Usually the first thing a director uses to indicate when a play is set is costume, but in ad
