Some Rhetorical elements in Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew

What are the rhetorical underpinnings of Kate’s speech? Who is Kate’s audience? She repeatedly looks at Petruchio, implying that indeed it is him she is addressing, but implied by him are the other male audience in the banquet. Thus, we can say her audience is a patriarchic society which for her in this particular occasion is represented by Petruchio.Her speech is long and consists of many rhetorical elements. As an example, we can point to her appeal to ethos, i.e., the authority of the established norms of the society. Her appeal in fact takes the form of an implicit enthymeme as such:(A) Your husbands provide for you (B) In this, the husband is like a sovereign. (C) You should respect your sovereign; therefore, (D) You should respect your husbands. Not all the premises in this syllogism are explicitly stated, but overall, she is placing her argument within the context of not only a patriarchal society, but one in which relationships are well defined vertically, a hierarchy that ascends all the way up to the “sovereign.” The relationship of a wife to her husband is therefore likened to the relationship of a subject to a sovereign, and based on this analogy, the conclusion, i.e., that a wife should submit to the authority of her husband, is argued for.