In the controversial final scene, the "tamed" Katherine lectures other wives on wifely obedience. Whether this speech is sincere submission, ironic performance, or playful game between equals remains hotly debated.
The speech closes the play. Petruchio, Lucentio and Hortensio have wagered on whose wife is most obedient; Bianca and the Widow refuse to come when summoned, but Katherine appears immediately. Petruchio then sends her to fetch the other wives and, when they arrive, instructs her to "tell these headstrong women / What duty they do owe their lords and husbands." She delivers forty-four lines to a stage full of fathers, husbands, servants, and two sisters-in-law who have just publicly humiliated their men. Baptista, astonished, gives Petruchio another twenty thousand crowns on the spot. The play ends moments later. Whether Katherine is broken, performing, in on a joke with Petruchio, or has genuinely arrived at a worldview is the central interpretive question of the production and has been argued since at least the 1611 sequel The Tamer Tamed.
What Katherine wants from Bianca and the Widow depends entirely on the production's reading, and the actor must commit to one. Sincere reading: she has discovered partnership through Petruchio's brutal pedagogy and is genuinely trying to spare these women a worse fight than the one she lost. Ironic reading: she is performing the speech as theatre, scoring points off the room, splitting the prize money with her husband, and the two of them are now a comic double-act against a stupid world. Survival reading: she is doing what she must to eat and sleep warm, and the speech is a hostage video. All three are textually defensible. What is not defensible is playing it half-heartedly. Whatever she wants, she wants it with the whole apparatus of her formidable intelligence.
Pick your reading before you open your mouth and let it organise every choice. The biggest pitfall is hedging — actors who try to play "ambiguity" produce mush. Make a strong choice and let the audience do the interpreting. If sincere: the speech needs warmth toward Bianca specifically, who has been Kate's tormentor for years. Find the moment she breaks her own bitterness. If ironic: locate the eye contact with Petruchio — probably around "place your hands below your husband's foot" — and play the private joke. Mark the structural movement: it begins by scolding ("Fie, fie, unknit that threatening unkind brow"), expands into political analogy (subject/prince), then physiological argument (women's soft bodies), and ends with the extraordinary offer to place her hand beneath his foot. Don't rush the analogies — they are her argument, not throat-clearing. Watch for over-cried versions; tears can let you off the hook of meaning the words. The verse is unusually fluent for late Shakespeare-adjacent writing; trust the line endings.
A serious piece that announces you take the classical canon and its problems seriously. Strong for MFA programs, classical companies, and any room interested in actors who can hold a long argument. It will show your intelligence, your relationship to language, your stamina, and whether you can sustain a forty-line thought. It also shows you have a point of view about gender and performance, which matters in contemporary classical casting. Cut it carefully — the full speech is too long for most audition slots; the section from "Thy husband is thy lord" through "to obey" is a strong twenty-line excerpt. Not over-used in auditions precisely because so many actors are nervous of it. That nervousness is your opportunity if you have done the thinking.
Fie, fie! unknit that threatening unkind brow,
And dart not scornful glances from those eyes,
To wound thy lord, thy king, thy governor:
It blots thy beauty as frosts do bite the meads,
Confounds thy fame as whirlwinds shake fair buds,
And in no sense is meet or amiable.
A woman moved is like a fountain troubled,
Muddy, ill-seeming, thick, bereft of beauty;
And while it is so, none so dry or thirsty
Will deign to sip or touch one drop of it.
Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,
Thy head, thy sovereign; 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;
And craves no other tribute at thy hands
But love, fair looks and true obedience;
Too little payment for so great a debt.
Such duty as the subject owes the prince
Even such a woman oweth to her husband;
And when she is froward, peevish, sullen, sour,
And not obedient to his honest will,
What is she but a foul contending rebel
And graceless traitor to her loving lord?
I am ashamed that women are so simple
To offer war where they should kneel for peace;
Or seek for rule, supremacy and sway,
When they are bound to serve, love and obey.