ENGL 215 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Petruchio, Main Plot, Irony
Document Summary
Disguise figures prominently in the taming of the shrew: sly dresses as a lord, lucentio dresses as a latin tutor, tranio dresses as lucentio, hortensio dresses as a music tutor, and the pedant dresses as vincentio. These disguises enable the characters to transgress barriers in social position and class, and, for a time, each of them is successful. The play thus poses the question of whether clothes make the man that is, whether a person can change his or her role by putting on new clothes. In the taming of the shrew, society involves a web of antecedents that are always able to uncover one"s true nature, no matter how differently one wishes to portray oneself. Tranio, disguised as lucentio, needs only to bump into. As petruchio implies on his wedding day, a garment is simply a garment, and the person beneath remains the same no matter what disguise is worn.
