It's an unlikely pairing -- what possible connection could there be between Petruchio, a creature of farce, and Othello, distinguished general and tragic victim of the green monster. Yet there is a surprising point of contact -- two similar (but very different) reminiscences. It's not usual for Shakespeare's characters to have a "backstory," but both P and O attempt one.
Petruchio brags that a shrew can't scare him, because he's been there before. "Think you a little din can daunt mine ears?"
He riffs on the word "din." He's inured to noise, he claims -- and how he came to be so adds a new and improbable dimension to his character.
Have I not in my time heard lions roar?
Have I not heard the sea puff'd up with winds
Rage like an angry boar chafed with sweat?
Have I not heard great ordnance in the field,
And heaven's artillery thunder in the skies?
Have I not in a pitched battle heard
Loud 'larums, neighing steeds, and trumpets' clang?
I, for one, don't believe a word that Petruchio utters and I doubt whether Shakespeare expects us to do so. It's all bluster, the words of an accomplished bullshitter. Petruchio is a youthful fortune-hunter, full of bravado and effrontery to be sure, but except in this passage, he lacks an adventurous past or a military history. When did he hear lions roar? While on a guided tour of Scythia or central Africa? And where was the sea like an "angry boar?" Where was the "great ordnance" and "loud alarum?" More likely at Saturday afternoon serials than in the tented field.
Othello's story, on the other hand, though more extravagant and fantastic, is grandly persuasive. Here's a piece of it:
I spake of most disastrous chances,
Of moving accidents by flood and field
Of hair-breadth scapes i' the imminent deadly breach,
Of being taken by the insolent foe
And sold to slavery, of my redemption thence
And portance in my travels' history:
Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle,
Rough quarries, rocks and hills whose heads touch heaven
It was my hint to speak,—such was the process;
And of the Cannibals that each other eat,
The Anthropophagi and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders.
Othello veers into the mythological yet his story comports with what we otherwise know of him.
Petruchio's tale is an instance of "just-in-time" characterization. Shakespeare needs to display Petruchio's bravery in the face of a scolding woman -- so he produces a soldiership story. It doesn't accord with Petruchio's history, but it doesn't need to, because it serves an immediate necessary dramatic function. Othello's speech is part and parcel; Petruchio's is a loose end.
And the language! The first passage, in early The Taming of the Shrew, is perfunctory; the second, in the mature tragedy, is simply magnificent. Anyone looking for evidence of Shakespeare's progress of a poet could do worse than compare these two passages.
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