 He believes cruelty permeates the entire play, including the Induction, arguing the Sly frame, with the Lord's spiteful practical joke, prepares the audience for a play willing to treat cruelty as a comedic matter.He suggests that cruelty is a more important theme than gender, arguing that "the aggression represented in "Taming" can be read as having less to do with gender and more to do with hate, with the text thereby becoming a comic representation of the general problem of human cruelty and victimisation.