With this play Shakespeare treats the diachronic problem of the social facing of the woman as a marketable object. Kate is a shrew because she does not accept to be bargained, herself and her sister, for marriage. She is a young, free and unbidden woman, superior in spirit and dynamism from the masters-men who surround her. She finally comes to heel by the most dynamic representative of a new rising class of bourgeois traders who enact financial, social and ethical rules. Thus, the heart-conqueror Petruchio through organized tortures, such as hunger, sleep privation, humiliation and brainwashing, tames Kate and obliges her to express a declaration of repentance.