her, but at the last minute, her mother, Gaea (the earth goddess), turned her into a laurel tree.
Little by little, then, Sly is convinced that after all he is a lord. He even begins to speak in blank verse instead of the usual prose. And to cap the climax, a play is presented for his edification, and it is this play which is what we usually think of as The Taming of the Shrew.
... fair Padua...
The play within a play opens with two young men, Lucentio and his servant Tranio, entering. Lucentio summarizes the situation:
Tranio, since for the great desire 1 had
To see fair Padua, nursery of arts,
I am arrived for fruitful Lombardy,
- Act I, scene i, lines 1-3
Padua is a city in northeastern Italy a little over twenty miles west of Venice and noted for its university.
Medieval Italy was, in fact, famous for its universities, for learning had taken new root there while it was still all but dead in the countries beyond the Alps. The first medieval university was established in Bologna, eighty miles southwest of Venice, in 1088. It specialized in the study of Roman law and remained the great center of legal studies for centuries afterward.
Bologna had its quarrels and problems and, on occasion, its schisms. In 1222 a group of its professors and students broke away and established a competing university at Padua, and it was this which made that city the "nursery of arts." It, as well as Bologna, supported a great law school and the two were great rivals.
Padua was an independent city-state through the Middle Ages but in 1405 it was absorbed into the territory of the Venetian republic and was still part of it in Shakespeare's time (and remained so till 1797). Padua was not actually part of Lombardy in the medieval or modern sense. Lombardy is located in northwestern Italy with Milan as its chief city, and even at its closest approach, Lombardy is fifty miles west of Padua.
This, however, is not as bad as it sounds. In the eighth century all of northern Italy was under the control of the Lombards and the term might therefore be used in a poetic sense for northern Italy generally. (Nevertheless, Shakespeare may well have been a little hazy on the fine points of Italian geography. This shows up more clearly elsewhere.)
Pisa...
Lucentio has come to Padua for an education, but he pauses also to announce his birthplace:
Pisa, renowned for grave citizens,
Gave me my being...
- Act I, scene i, lines 10-11
Pisa is located on the western coast of Italy, about 140 miles southwest of Padua. During the Middle Ages it was for a time a great commercial city, the rival of Genoa and Venice. It was at its height between 1050 and 1250, and in 1173 it built what is now its leading feature, a bell tower that, through some flaw in its foundation, settled out of the vertical. It is the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
Toward the end of the thirteenth century Pisa was defeated in a long war with Genoa and began a steady decline. In 1406 it was captured by the forces of the city of Florence, forty-five miles to its east, and remained under Florentine domination through Shakespeare's time (and, indeed, until 1860). In fact, Lucentio describes himself as:
Vincentio's son, brought up in Florence,
- Act I, scene i, line 14
Florence, the home city of Dante, was the very epitome of Renaissance culture. It was the Athens of Italy, and one would boast of being brought up there as one might boast of having been brought up in Athens in ancient times or in Paris in modern times.
As Ovid ...
Tranio is a little nervous at Lucentio's grandiloquent speech, for he views with some concern the prospect of a close course of study. He says:
Let's be no stoics nor no stocks, I pray,
Or so devote to Aristotle's checks
As [to make] Ovid be an outcast quite abjured.
- Act I, scene i, lines 31-33
Tranio's distaste for Stoics (see page I-305) or for Aristotle (see page I-104) is not so puzzling in a merry young man.
As for Ovid, whom he prefers, his best-known work is his Metamorphoses (see page I-8). However, a more notorious piece of work was his Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love), which gave, in witty and amusing style, a course in seduction for young men.
Ovid insisted it was intended to deal only with the relations of young men and women of easy virtue, but it could easily be applied to anyone, of