The Taming of the Shrew Tranio Quotes

There's that word "pastime" again. Here, Kate is causing quite a "scene" and Tranio and Lucentio watch and comment on the spectacle of Kate arguing with her father and Bianca's suitors in public. The point? We are all spectators and spectacles at one point or another. Kate is literally causing a "scene" but later she and Petruchio will watch others misbehave in public. Everyday life has become a kind of theater.

Tranio's role as advisor and mentor is unusual because elsewhere in the play, servants don't subvert the typical dynamic of power between master and servant. Tranio is helpful when it comes to Lucentio getting his way, but it's doubtful that Lucentio's father would see the servant as a good "teacher" for his son.

Tranio's insistence that Lucentio study "Ovid" is actually a clever way of promoting the relevance of real–life experience – falling in love. Critics point out that Shrew tends to agree with Tranio's point of view. Formal education is often usurped by worldly learning.

This dialogue sets up the idea that Petruchio is some kind of master teacher. He will teach Hortensio how to control the Widow while he teaches Kate to control her "tongue." The words "tricks" and "charm" are interesting as they make Petruchio sound like a magician. We're not sure if this implies a kind of supernatural ability on Petruchio's part because the terms can also suggest that Petruchio's tactics are not real – rather, they're like the slight of hand tricks magicians use to fool audiences. This makes sense, especially given that Hortensio doesn't really learn anything thing at the so-called "taming school." The whole concept, it seems, is mere fantasy.

Here, Tranio muses about finding someone to pretend to be Lucentio's father, Vincentio, in order to finalize Lucentio's wedding contracts. Tranio cleverly puns on "get" (to find a fake father) and to "beget" (to sire, or to father). This is significant because it points to the way typical parent/child roles are reversed. (Parents are supposed to be in charge but the actions of rebellious and deceitful children throw such relationships into chaos.) In this case, a child is going to beget (invent) a fake father figure, the Pedant, behind his real father's back. In the last line, Tranio also suggests that a child (Lucentio) is going to "get" Bianca's father. That is, he's going to gain a father-in-law and he's going to get the better of his new father-in-law by eloping with Bianca and fooling Baptista. All of which helps him get rich (a common 16th-century definition for "get") in the process. That's a lot of work for one little word.