Kate's closing speech about wifely duty is the single most debated passage in The Taming of the Shrew, and it makes for an unusually productive essay prompt because reasonable readers genuinely land on different sides. Some scholars and students read it as sincere capitulation, others as ironic performance, and others as a strategic choice that benefits Kate within the constraints of her world.

Because the question has no consensus answer, it is one of the best possible prompts for teaching students how to build and defend a genuine argument rather than reporting a settled interpretation. Grading here should focus almost entirely on the quality of the reasoning and evidence rather than which side a student takes.

Framing the assignment as a formal debate topic before students write, even with a short in-class discussion where students argue both sides regardless of their real opinion, tends to produce stronger essays than simply assigning the question cold.

This kind of structured disagreement also helps students see that a good essay does not need to resolve every ambiguity, it just needs to make the strongest possible case for one reading while acknowledging what the other side gets right.

Structuring the Prompt for Strong Arguments

The prompt works best when it requires students to address the strongest counterargument directly, rather than simply picking a side and ignoring the alternative. This can be built into the prompt itself, for example by requiring one full paragraph dedicated to the opposing reading before the student returns to their own position.

• Require students to state the strongest version of the opposing interpretation
• Ask students to cite specific staging or performance choices that would support their reading
• Push students to address the speech's language, not just its overall message
• Require at least one piece of evidence from earlier in the play, not just the final scene
• Ask students to explain what is at stake in choosing one interpretation over another

Using Performance Choices as Evidence

Because this is a play meant for performance, students can strengthen their essays by citing how different productions have staged the final speech, from sincere delivery to visibly ironic delivery to physically uncomfortable delivery that signals ambivalence. Watching two contrasting film or stage clips before writing gives students concrete performance evidence to cite alongside the text itself.

This also reinforces an important lesson about drama as a genre: the words on the page are only part of the meaning, and staging choices actively shape how an audience receives a scene.

Grading Essays on a Genuinely Open Question

Because there is no single correct answer, rubrics for this prompt should be built entirely around argument quality: clarity of thesis, strength of evidence, handling of counterargument, and coherence of reasoning. Teachers should resist the temptation to grade based on personal agreement with the student's conclusion.

It can help to grade a batch of essays on this topic without looking at names or which side a student argued first, focusing purely on the rubric categories, before going back to add more personalized feedback in a second pass.

Extending the Debate Beyond the Essay

This prompt works well as the anchor for a larger unit assessment, including a formal in-class debate or a Socratic seminar that happens before the essay is due. Students who have already had to defend their position out loud tend to write more confident, better organized essays than students writing cold.

Recording brief peer feedback from the discussion, even informally, gives students another data point to draw on as they revise their written argument, which often improves the final draft considerably.