William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew vs. John Fletcher’s The Woman’s Prize

            These two books are plays written early in the seventeenth century, William Shakespeare’s The Taming of The Shrew and John Fletcher’s The Woman’s Prize. Each depicts female characters, one of whom supports the masculine paradigm, while the other undermines it.  The plays also tell about the relationship between a husband and a wife in a family.  In The Taming of the Shrew, the wife, Katherine, is dominated by the husband, Petruchio, while, on the other hand in The Woman’s Prize, the husband, Petruchio (the same character), is dominated by the wife, Maria.  The difference between the two plays is that Shakespeare’s The Shrew has a pro patriarchal theme, whereas Fletcher’s The Prize has an anti-patriarchal theme. 

William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew is the story about how to tame a shrewish woman, Katherine, who is an elder daughter of Baptista, a gentleman of Padua.  Katherine is depicted as a wild and sarcastic woman who needs to be taught to be a gorgeous woman as society demanded at the time.  Petruchio is depicted as a macho man, and he comes to Padua both to propose to Kate and to tame her.  

John Fletcher’s The Woman’s Prize is an inverted story from Shakespeare’s The Taming of The Shrew in which the tamer is tamed.  After Kate died because of her submissive marriage, Petruchio married again to his second wife, Maria, who is teaching Petruchio to be a tamed husband, just like Petruchio did to Kate before.  Maria withholds sex from Petruchio on her wedding night in order to conquer him.  There are some tricks Maria uses to defeat Petruchio, such as demanding Petruchio sign a marital contract and she pretends to cheat on Petruchio.  Eventually, Maria wins the game so that Petruchio is willing to sign the marriage contract, and to treat his wife better.  At the same time Maria promises Petruchio to be his perfect wife.

These two books are interesting because they provide an editor’s introduction, Sympa Callaghan in The Shrew, and Celsea R. Daileader in The Prize.  Both of them explain more about these plays, especially for today’s students who have difficulties in reading old English from sixteenth century.  Callaghan and Daileader write a brief history of the plays in their introductions.  They mention some scholar’s opinions about the plays. For example Daileader states that The Prize is “the misogynist rhetoric that likens women to animals, particularly horses, to be tamed and ridden by men” (16).    

The difference between the two plays is Fletcher’s play demonstrates an anti-patriarchal theme, where his heroine, Maria, is depicted as a vocal woman who can gather a troupe of other women who lock themselves in a chamber upstairs with food and wine.  In protesting against a patriarchal system,  Daileader explains how Maria succeeded in leading a rebellion against her tyrannous husband, Petruchio  (10).  Fletcher is showing his character having a more extensive and aware identity than the Shakespeare’s character, Kate in The Taming of the Shrew.

These plays also show unrecognized insights into the complex gender and marital relationships of the plays.  The Taming of The Shrew makes Kate unpleasant, which allows her husband, Petruchio, to punish her, so the audience can feel that she deserves to be treated improperly, which is against the feminist paradigm.  According to Dolan, marriage was represented in the early modern period as a struggle for dominance in which violence was the fundamental arbiter (165).  Especially in Shrew, one is dominated and one dominates.  Petruchio controls everything about Kate’s life, and Kate has no rights to decide. The marriage here, is described as a violent relationship between a wife and husband. Kate and Petruchio are depicted as combating sexes where there is almost no more proper communication except violence and physical domination of a husband who controls everything about his wife, including food, clothes, and money.

Fletcher’s play attempts to subvert Shakespeare’s depiction of marriage by criticizing the masculine paradigm which creates domestic rules for women. Fletcher describes a wife who controls the husband and behaves counter to the masculine tyranny that other woman of her era experience.  In The Woman’s Prize, the marital relationship is egalitarian, which allows Maria as a wife to make her own decisions. In The Taming of the Shrew, Kate is under her husband’s control.  Fletcher’s  Petruchio is in contrast to the Petruchio of The Taming of The Shrew wherein he controls everything.  But the Petruchio of The Woman’s Prize does not have the power he had in his first marriage since his second wife, Maria, made a bargain with him to provide her the power and authority to have the same rights as his to control the family.

Fletcher was willing to assert an anti-patriarchal theme because he did not like how English men from higher society treated women at the time.  For example, there were some girls who were not virgins anymore on their first wedding night because wealthy men had taken their virginity first.  Fletcher wanted to criticize his society.  He wrote The Prize, depicting the setting in London, whereas Shakespeare chose Padua as setting in the Shrew.  The reason Fletcher moved the setting is because he wanted to move from the village, which was a traditional view, to the city of London, which was a modern view.  He tried to make an elites realize that the old view of treating women improperly was not effective anymore.  Women have rights to be treated well.  Thus, he created his heroine, Maria, as a leader to conduct a revolt against a patriarchal system that was very powerful at the time.  

Another reason Fletcher supports an anti-patriarchal system is his protest against the misogynistic elements in the society and in the play at the time.  Modern audience and readers had debated, and controversy was developed as to misogyny in early modern English literature.  Especially in the Shrew, we can see some misogyny examples that depict Kate as a shrewish woman whom no men are willing to marry because of her wild and sarcastic verbosity.  In spite of this, Petruchio succeeded in taming her.  The act of taming can be linked to the taming of an animal. According to Daileder, “the misogynist rhetoric … likens women to animals, particularly horses, to be tamed and (sexually) ‘ridden’ by men” (16).  Therefore, women are associated with animals that can be fed and clothed at men’s discretion.  

By contrasting the two plays, the Shrew and the Prize, we can understand that in the Shrew,  misogyny is a central theme of the play, but in the Prize, the theme is anti-patriarchal . Even though they have similar themes,  the battle of the sexes between a wife and husband, the plot is described in different ways and purposes.  In the Shrew, the woman, Kate is passive and is silent and hidden to protest the male supremacy in marriage.  But in the Prize, the woman, Maria is active and gathers other women in rebellion to protest  male supremacy in marriage.  Therefore, The Shrew is rich with traditional perspective, which is  pro patriarchal , whereas The Prize is rich with more modern perspective, which is an anti-patriarchal.

I strongly recommend these books with their excellent introductions, especially for literature students, to get insight into Shakespeare’s and Fletcher’s works, which are not only romances but also in the social comedy genre. This book is published by Manchester University Press in 2006 with the price $12.00, and ISBN: 719053676 paperback.