Osburnt: Dispatches From a Life Seared by the Arts

People forget that Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew starts with an induction in which a drunken vagabond is to be regaled with a theatrical performance of what is sometimes mistaken for the whole play. The Kate-Petruchio shenanigans is, in short, a play-within-a-play, an imagined world of sex-play and power relations, perhaps challenging to, but…