The Woman's Prize
The Woman's Prize, or the Tamer Tamed is a
The play is a counterpart to Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, in which (as the subtitle indicates) the gender tables are turned and Petruchio the "tamer" is "tamed" by his second wife Maria, whom he marries after the death of Katherine, the "shrew" in Shakespeare's text. As a "reply" to Shakespeare's play, The Woman's Prize attracted critical attention in later generations and centuries. Maria's principal weapon, a refusal to consummate her marriage, shows the influence of Aristophanes' play Lysistrata.
Synopsis
Petruchio's stormy marriage to Katherine ended with her death. Petruchio is now married to Maria, who is even more resistant to domination than Katherine initially had been. Petruchio's tactics and manipulations are no longer effective, and Maria has some resourceful tricks of her own. Maria refuses to consummate their marriage till Petruchio changes his ways; she bands together with other women in abstention from sex with their husbands. The women barricade themselves with provisions in the upper floor of Maria's house, to the displeased surprise of their husbands below.
In Act Three, Maria settles in to pursue a career of scholarship and horsemanship at Petruchio's country estate, but the peace is again broken when Maria once more refuses to perform her conjugal duties and imposes further demands on her husband. Petruchio resolves to play ill in an attempt to awaken his wife's pity. His ruse fails totally when Maria catches on; with the pretext that he has caught the plague, Petruchio is walled up in his house.
Petruchio finally fights his way out, but in Act Four he discovers that his wife has "gone mad"—she has begun to dress like a common whore and is busy flirting with his friends. When Petruchio announces that he has had enough of marriage and is abandoning Maria for foreign travel, she encourages him to depart on the pretext that his journeys may broaden his vision and turn him into a better human being.
Almost totally defeated as Act Five opens, Petruchio tries one final stratagem in an attempt to awaken some spark of compassion in Maria. He decides to play dead, and is borne onstage in a coffin before his wife and friends. Maria is indeed moved to tears, but they are inspired, not by his person, but by his "unmanly, wretched, foolish life... how far below a man, how far from reason" Petruchio has remained.
This last salvo of abuse causes Petruchio to rise from his coffin in bewailment, prompting in Maria to state that she has finally "tamed" Petruchio. The two then pledge that they will start life anew together.
In the play's subplot, Livia joins in the protest of the married women, though her primary motive is to avoid an arranged marriage with the old and unpleasant Moroso and marry her own choice of husband, Roland. Both Maria and Livia succeed in attaining their wishes by the play's end.
Date
The date of the play is very uncertain and has attracted a large body of dispute and opinion. A reference to the
The question of date is complicated by the matter of revision. The characters all have Italian names, and the original was likely set in Italy – but the existing version is set in London instead.[5] The date of revision and the identity of the reviser are equally unknown, though a reasonable conjecture holds that the revision was likely done just before the 1633 revival of the play by the King's Men, when the play was acted in conjunction with Shakespeare's.
Sources
Fletcher borrowed[
Fletcher's classical source for his play was Lysistrata. The Tamer Tamed was one of the first English plays based on Aristophanes, and Fletcher one of the first European critics to pay special attention to Lysistrata.
The 1633 revival
The 1633 revival provoked the wrath of Sir
In order to de-politicise the play, a new prologue was introduced for the 1633 revival. Fletcher's play was cleaned up in time for a Court performance the next month: The Taming of the Shrew and The Woman's Prize were acted before
The manuscript
A manuscript of The Woman's Prize also survives, dating from this era. Appearing under the title of The Woman’s Prize: or, The Tamer Tamed the play was contained in the 1647 folio edition of thirty-four Comedies and Tragedies attributed to Beaumont and Fletcher.
The text of this manuscript comes from Herbert's licensed playbook. The editing of the manuscript has been interpreted by some scholars as showing that Herbert had other goals besides suppressing "public ribaldry." Some elements of vulgarity still appear in the manuscript despite Herbert's intervention. The original text of the play had some blatant anti-Catholic elements, which, according to this view, Herbert wanted to suppress out of deference to the Queen, Henrietta Maria.[8]
Now residing in the Folger Library, another undated and untitled seventeenth-century manuscript survives. It appears to have been copied from the original source text, before Herbet's revision of the text in 1633. This, in turn, means that much of the content that was deemed by Herbert to be "offensive" is contained in this manuscript and the original text can be restored somewhat.
Performance history
The play was probably first performed between December 1609 and April 1610 in the Whitefriars Theatre by the Children of the Queen's Revels, and would have been performed by a troupe of boys. It was revived in 1633, to the objection of the Master of Revels, who viewed it as vulgar. After the return of Charles II, it was one of the first plays performed after the official re-opening of the theatres.
The play was popular and was revived early and often in the
David Garrick adapted the play, but removed the subplot; it was performed at least three times, twice in 1757 and once in 1760, with Hannah Pritchard playing Maria.
In 1979, the full play was seen for the first time in over four hundred years when it was presented in Baltimore, Maryland's Harbor Shakespeare Festival, produced by Jeff Cohen, directed by John Beary and performed in repertory with "As You Like It" on an outdoor stage overlooking Baltimore's Inner Harbor. That production also marked the play's North American premiere. Cohen presented the play again in 1987 at the RAPP Arts Center in New York where it was filmed and archived at Lincoln Center's Theater On Film and Tape (TOFT) program and the Billy Rose Theater Collection.http://www.nypl.org/locations/lpa/theatre-film-and-tape-archive. Another adaption was performed at the Arcola Theatre in London in 2001 and featured a combination of Fletcher's play and Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew. In 2003 The Woman's Prize; or, The Tamer Tamed was revived by the Royal Shakespeare Company, opening on 6 March[10] and subsequently moving to the Kennedy Center.[11]
See also
References
Citations
- ^ Hoy/Erdman, pp. 204-23.
- ^ Chambers, Vol. 3, p. 222.
- ^ Q3, printed by Valentine Simmes for the bookseller Nicholas Ling.
- ^ Logan and Smith, p. 61.
- ^ Oliphant, pp. 155-6.
- ^ Halliday, p. 268.
- ^ "EMLoT: db/browse/?page=24&resulttype=event&ordering=default". emlot.kcl.ac.uk. Retrieved 6 June 2015.
- ^ Dutton, pp. 13, 42, 56-60.
- ^ Dobson, p. 23.
- ISBN 9781903436936.
- ^ Tarloff, Erik (14 December 2003). "Theatre: The Play That Tamed Taming of the Shrew". The New York Times. Retrieved 9 January 2015.
Bibliography
- Chambers, E. K.The Elizabethan Stage. 4 Volumes, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1923.
- Daileader, Celia R. Eroticism on the Renaissance Stage: Transcendence, Desire, and the Limits of the Visible. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998.
- Dobson, Michael S. The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660-1769. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995.
- Dutton, Richard. Licensing, Censorship, and Authorship in Early Modern England. London, Palgrave, 2001.
- Downes, John. Roscius Anglicanus. original edition, London, H. Playford, 1708. Montague Summers, ed., New York, Benjamin Blom, 1929; reprinted Ayers Publishing, 1968.
- Fischlin, Daniel, and Mark Fortier. Adaptations of Shakespeare: A Critical Anthology of Plays From the Seventeenth Century to the Present. London, Routledge, 2000.
- Halliday, F. E. A Shakespeare Companion 1564–1964. Baltimore, Penguin, 1964.
- Hoy, Cyrus. "The Shares of Fletcher and His Collaborators in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon." Studies in Bibliography VIII (1956), pp. 129–46. Reprinted in: Evidence for Authorship: Essays on Problems of Attribution, edited by David V. Erdman and Ephim G. Fogel. Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1996.
- Logan, Terence P., and Denzell S. Smith, eds. The Later Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists: A Survey and Bibliography of Recent Studies in English Renaissance Drama. Lincoln, NE, University of Nebraska Press, 1978.
- Oliphant, E. H. C. The Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher: An Attempt to Determine Their Respective Shares and the Shares of Others. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1927.