Game, Set, Match

In The Taming of the Shrew, Petruchio tells Katherina, his wife of only four or five days, that the sun is the moon and that an old man is a young maiden. Kate knows that she is looking at the sun and not the moon, at an old man and not a young woman—who would not?—but Petruchio demands that she see things as he does. “It shall be moon, or star, or what I list,” he tells his wife. At this point in the play, poor Kate has been denied food, sleep, and pretty clothes. She has been worn out and worn down by her new husband. “What you have it named,” Kate says of the sun, “even that it is, / And so it shall be so for Katherine.”