Sometimes we assume that what seem to us ambiguities in Shakespeare’s plays – whether Henry V is a good king, or Othello a racist play, for example – are the result of different ethical frameworks then and now. So, this argument goes, scenarios which were quite unproblematic to early modern audiences have gained moral complexity because our attitudes to race, or military expediency, or, in the case of The Taming of the Shrew, the relationship between the sexes, have changed since Shakespeare’s time. But actually it seems that The Taming of the Shrew was always ambiguous, right from the
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