Romeo and Petruchio, two young gentlemen of Verona, one the hero of a romantic tragedy, the other the hero of a marriage farce, live, and move, and have their being in a similar social and historical setting, so it would not unreasonable to suppose that their paths might have crossed. When Tybalt enters with his party in Act Three, Scene One of Romeo and Juliet the stage direction reads:
Enter TYBALT, PETRUCHIO, and others.
The “Petruchio” who enters with Tybalt says nothing, passes unacknowledged and is neither seen nor heard of again. There is no reason for anybody in the audience to be aware of his identity unless they remember him from Act One, Scene Five, when he was tentatively identified by the Nurse:
JULIET: What’s he that now is going out of door?
NURSE: Marry, that I think be young Petruchio.
(I. 5. 131-132)
He is just a body filling a space on stage and his departure is as silent as the disappearance of Sly in The Taming of the Shrew. Whether the ghostly Petruchio of Romeo and Juliet and the boisterous hero of The Taming of the Shrew were intended by Shakespeare to be the same character is a moot point.
Whoever he is, however, it can be inferred that he is younger and less mature than the Petruchio who arrives in Padua to seek his fortune. If the two Petruchios were intended to represent the same character, therefore, the action of Romeo and Juliet would precede that of The Taming of the Shrew, for in Romeo and Juliet the young bachelors are relatively inexperienced in the ways of the world whereas the Petruchio of The Taming of the Shrew speaks and moves as a “manly man” grown confident through experience of the world:
Have I not in my time heard lions roar?
Have I not heard the sea, puffed up with winds,Rage like an angry boar chafed with sweat?
Have I not heard great ordinance in the field,
And heaven’s artillery thunder in the skies?
Have I not in a pitched battle heard
Loud ‘larums, neighing steeds, and trumpets’ clang?
(I. 2. 196-202)
The Petruchio who pursues Kate is a more mature, purposeful and wiser character than his Veronese compatriot, Romeo, although they do resemble each other to some degree in their wit and impetuosity. In Petruchio, however, those qualities have been honed and refined into useful resources that can be drawn upon to work towards ends that he keeps constantly in view.
Both Petruchio and Romeo exhibit a fiery quality, and indeed Shakespeare uses the metaphor of fire to delineate aspects of both characters in relation to their response to the settings he places them in. Thus, when Petruchio declares that he is as “peremptory” as Kate is “proud minded”, he likens those qualities to “two raging fires”, (II. 1. 132); and when Friar Lawrence rebukes Romeo for the violence of his conflicting passions he compares to “fire and powder”, (II. 6. 10).
I shall return to the way in which the metaphor of fire is variously handled in the characterization of Romeo and Petruchio in the context of their tragic and comic settings later in this paper.
Analysis of characterization in a comic or tragic setting, which is to say, analysis of the relations and reactions of a character to his circumstances, or, in short, to his “fortune”, is something of a Machiavellian preoccupation, by which I mean, of course, something that preoccupied Machiavelli in his studies of political history rather than something that is in itself sinister and suspect. The application of the Machiavellian preoccupation with fortune to literary exegesis has also become…
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Precipitous Romeo & Peremptory Petruchio
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