Kate as Griselda

After his verbal tussle with Kate in 2.1., Petruchio remakes her with words, claiming the "she's not froward, but modest as the dove" etc. He also makes some ominous predictions about her, including the prediction that she will prove a "second Grissel" (l. 292).

The story of patient Grissel or Griselda was well-known in the early modern period --retold by Chaucer as well as glanced at by Shakespeare (not only in this play but also in The Winter's Tale ... so keep an eye open for it). It's not a pretty story. It goes something like this:

A nobleman named Walter chooses to marry a peasant girl called Griselda, effecting her change in social status by stripping her naked and reclothing her in fine robes. Griselda bears two children, a boy and a girl, and Walter 'tests' her by taking both away, pretending to kill them, giving her low origins and unfitness to be a mother as reason. He further 'tests' by sending her back to her father, stripped to her 'smock' (i.e. her underwear). As a final humiliation, years later, Walter announces he is marrying a younger, aristocratic woman. Griselda bears all of this with super-human obedience and patience! For this, she is finally 'rewarded': the new young wife turns out to be her daughter, and Griselda is reinstated as Walter's proper wife by being re-clothed in fine clothes.

In her essay "Controlling Clothes, Manipulating Mates: Petruchio’s Griselda" Margaret Rose Jaster argues that the old tale of Griselda underlies the play, Petruchio's taming of Kate in particular. On this reading, the stripping of Kate in the "tailor scene" (4.3) is not innocuous fun, but rather a brutal deconstruction of Kate designed to elicit total Grissel-like obedience.

The question for us to consider now is whether this deconstruction is successful.

Full reference for the link:
Margaret Rose Jaster, “Controlling Clothes, Manipulating Mates: Petruchio’s Griselda,” 29 Shakespeare Studies (2001): 93-108.