Seeing blatant anti-women sentiments in the final speech of A Shrew helps us to look again at the particular arguments Shakespeare gives his Katherine. She argues that men have particular obligations to women, and so women have reciprocal responsibilities in turn. This is the rhetoric of mutual obligation, something that has a distinct role in sixteenth-century debates about Protestant ‘companionate marriage’. Marriage, while not a union of equals, nevertheless carried mutual responsibilities, in which each partner endured limits on their individual freedom within a bond of reciprocity. As the
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