The relationship between Katherine and Bianca in the Taming of the Shrew is often framed as a ritualised rivalry forcing the audience to pick a side. Just as you can’t support both Liverpool and Everton, so you can’t back both Minola sisters. The cat-fight trope dies hard. Katherine is loud, violent and aggressive in public, but Bianca’s inner diva emerges in private. Katherine binds and whips Bianca in order to find out which lover she favours, while Bianca throws shade at her sister by offering to put in a good word (‘I’ll plead for you myself’) with one of the rejects. Modern audiences tend to appreciate Katherine’s feisty rebellion more than Bianca’s tactical compliance.
While Baptista warns Petruchio that there will be no marriage with Katherine until ‘the special thing is well obtained / That is, her love, for that is all in all’, when interviewing Tranio and Gremio he never mentions needing Bianca’s consent for a marriage to take place — let alone her love. Auctioned to the highest bidder by her loving father, Bianca deftly manipulates the men who seek to control her. ‘Sir, to your pleasure humbly I subscribe,’ she assures Baptista in public: ‘My books and instruments shall be my company / On them to look and practise by myself.’ In private, however, she pits her hapless suitor/tutors against each other — ‘I’ll learn my lessons as I please myself.’ Lucentio, who once read Bianca’s silence as ‘Maid’s mild behaviour and sobriety’, is horrified when his new wife’s disobedience loses him a lucrative bet: ‘the more fool you for laying on my duty’ is her mic-drop reply. Apparently content to respect established gender boundaries, Bianca proves to be a fifth-columnist undermining the system from within.
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