In this final chapter, I turn to the instrumental role of language itself as a medium of erotic experience. The ‘Desiring is Creating’ metaphor in The Taming of the Shrew depends upon the creative power of words, rather than an artist's pigments or a model's gestures, as erotic instruments. The subject of language is by no means new to this section's analysis of creativity; we already have seen Campaspe's euphuism and polysemy weave the lovers’ artistic and erotic experiences together. But, unlike the instruments of Lyly's lovers, Kate and Petruchio's art is itself an art of language; they creatively recruit words, stories and lies to make a marriage together. Words themselves act in The Taming of the Shrew – for Petruchio and Kate, they create – and this dynamic quality makes their language something more than solely instrumental. As Kenneth Burke explains,

The ‘Desiring is Creating’ metaphor dramatises the dynamic quality of words: erotic language creates and is thus ‘a species of action’. For Kate and Petruchio specifically, their marriage-making project requires them to create a private world through language. Their language becomes as selfconsciously artificial as the synthetic world they build, not only in its often elaborate and even hyperbolic style, but also in its content – Petruchio and Kate's words are artfully styled, but they also are false in their substance, belying the truth of the real world.