Your interpretation of the play-within-play device in Shakespeare’s comedy The Taming of the Shrew

The Taming of the Shrew opens with a framing story, labeled the Induction in the text. This sort of device was quite common during the Elizabethan era. Nonetheless, it is worth noting the connotations of the word "induction" - as if we the audience were being inducted into a ceremony or institution in our honor. Sly is led to believe as much, falsely "inducted" as he is into the nobility. The entire play thus emerges as a device to fool the drunkard - and, by extension, us. The Lord is thus a representation of Shakespeare himself, staging a set of carefully controlled and convincing illusions. However, whereas the typical theater audience succumbs merely to the illusion of the stage, Sly succumbs to illusions about his own self. He must submit to the new identity the Lord has fashioned for him. In other words, he must become not merely spectator but an actor and character. As the play unfolds, the specter of the observing fool, i.e. Sly, permeates the fabric of the Players' "illusion." Indeed, the play as a whole layers its theater to a dizzying degree, as the player's within Shrew also play-act and put on disguises. May thus be interpreted as a play about playing, theater about theater, in which the central concern is not love but illusion. Given that Petruchio and Katharina certainly assume roles themselves, though without wearing costumes or changing their names, one is tempted to wonder what "truth" - if any - may inform performance. Theater, in Shakespeare's play, is posited as a means to dissolve class barriers. Through the art of acting, the servant Tranio becomes his master, the wealthy Lucentio becomes the "meaner" Cambio, the Pedant becomes Vincentio, "a merchant of incomparable wealth" - and the drunken tinker Christopher Sly becomes a lord.Through these depictions of class as mere performance, Shakespeare suggests that the only traits separating the lower from the upper classes are largely superficial. Class barriers in The Taming of the Shrew are not a matter of innate endowment or superior virtue; they simply follow from a style of speech and dress. Class status, in other words, can be attained by a costume and a pretty speech. The play-within-a-play, for instance, is the culmination of the theme of theatricality.The induction serves to introduce the plot of the play and to set some of the attending characters as an audience watching the rest of the story unfold.