The Tamer Tamed

by John Fletcher

An irreverent sequel to Taming of the Shrew, written in 1611.

Genres: Plays, Classics, Drama, Shakespeare, Theatre, Fiction, 17th Century

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1647

About the author

John Fletcher (1579-1625) was an English playwright and one of the most prolific and influential dramatists of the early seventeenth century, whose career bridged the Elizabethan theatrical tradition and the drama of the Stuart Restoration. He emerged as a major figure in London theatre in the first decade of the 1600s, initially writing for the Children of the Queen’s Revels and soon becoming closely associated with the King’s Men. Fletcher’s early education at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, appears to have prepared him for a clerical career, but like many of the university-trained writers of his generation he gravitated instead toward the commercial stage. His rise was closely tied to his celebrated partnership with Francis Beaumont, with whom he developed a distinctive form of tragicomedy that proved enormously popular. Their collaboration produced several of the period’s most successful plays, including Philaster, The Maid’s Tragedy, and A King and No King, works that helped define Jacobean taste through their blend of romance, political tension, and emotional intensity. Following Beaumont’s withdrawal from writing, Fletcher became increasingly central to the King’s Men and, after the death of William Shakespeare, effectively succeeded him as the company’s principal playwright. During this period he collaborated with Shakespeare on plays such as Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen, while also producing a large body of work either alone or with other dramatists, most notably Philip Massinger. Fletcher’s drama is marked by technical fluency, flexible verse, and a keen sense of theatrical pacing, and he showed particular mastery in tragicomedy and comedy of manners, genres that would dominate the Restoration stage. Although some of his early experiments, such as The Faithful Shepherdess, initially failed to find an audience, he quickly adapted his style and achieved sustained popularity, with multiple plays performed at court and revived frequently after his death. During the Commonwealth, scenes from his works circulated widely as short theatrical drolls, and following the reopening of the theatres in 1660, Fletcher’s plays were staged more often than those of any other playwright. Over time, however, his reputation declined as Shakespeare’s stature grew, and by the eighteenth century only a handful of his comedies remained in regular performance. Modern scholarship has emphasized both the scale of Fletcher’s output and the complexity of authorship within his canon, which reflects extensive collaboration and has prompted detailed stylistic analysis. Despite fluctuations in critical standing, Fletcher remains a key transitional figure in English drama, whose influence shaped both his contemporaries and the theatrical traditions that followed.

Reviews

[jules · Rating 3 out of 5]

it's a very low bar to be better than the taming of the shrew, and fletcher solidly clears it in terms of gender politics, but we're still in middling-comedy-with-a-very-questionable-ending territory. his portrayal of petruchio is VERY disturbing in a way that i think works quite well but then it doesn't pay off very well. maria i'm glad you got the win but this guy is a violent domestic abuser, maybe just run. also, why are we in england now?

[Veru · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some very questionable parts aside, I have to say that I actually quite enjoyed this play. I am still appalled at some of the things being proposed/said by the men of the play, especially in regards to violence and, on multiple occasions, also rape. The scenes in which the women revolt against their husbands, however, were absolutely brilliant. When they talk about how one day women will wear breeches, I could not help but feel like they play was written by someone from our time who simply decided to locate it in early modern England, as it seemed like such a reference to our modern times.

I have to admit that the end irritated me a little bit, seeing that I could not understand why Maria and Petruchio decided to cast their differences aside and what had triggered it and I was disappointed by Maria saying that she will be his “servant”. I would have loved to see an ending in which the woman does not submit to this role, but in which both partners are truly equal, but I think that would simply have been too progressive and more or less never happened apart from some exceptions (Benedick and Beatrice, I am looking at you guys).

Scratch that. The perfect ending would have been Petruchio truly being dead. Anyone agrees? I hate him from the very bottom of my heart with all I have.

To let my inner literature student come out: I found the theme of warfare quite interesting and loved the fact that the women were often stylised as warriors and particularly likened to the Trojans (though they, of course, lost the battle). The play also pointed out the double standards, with Maria being harshly criticised and threatened with death for merely having refused to have sex with her husband, whereas Petruchio abused Kate and threatens to abuse Maria and is somehow still not treated as badly, but, in fact, lauded by most. The topic of female agency was also quite strong in this play with both Maria and her sister Livia using tricks to reach their goals, which I quite loved, though I do feel like the goal being (a peaceful) marriage did take away from that a little.

Either way, I can recommend to read this book and it was definitely a more satisfying and less frustrating read than Taming of the Shrew.

[Geertje · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a bawdy play! I thought it was funny and clever, and definitely a good response to The Taming of the Shrew.

[Kobe · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5⭐️

[bri]

I can’t believe Fletcher A Doll’s House Part 2’d The Taming of the Shrew

[Eliza · Rating 5 out of 5]

I LOVED THIS! 'how got she tongue?'
amazing, will endeavour to read more fletcher now

[Matthew · Rating 3 out of 5]

The sequel and antithesis to "The Taming of the Shrew," written in 1611 by John Fletcher, who would go on to collaborate with Shakespeare on three plays. What could be better than a contemporaneous play that rights the wrongs of "Shrew," to me Shakespeare's most distasteful work (and, yes, I know the savage "Titus Andronicus," the miserific "Timon of Athens," and the problem plays with their bed-tricks), one which I've read and seen as many times as any other piece of theatre, trying with all my might to like it, but always walking away with my stomach churning. I'm only a couple scenes in, so I can't be sure about this play yet, but here's an encouraging early line from Petruchio's second wife, Maria:

By the faith I have
In mine own noble will, that childish woman
That lives a prisoner to her husband's pleasure
Has lost her making, and becomes a beast,
Created for his use, not fellowship.

[Rae Thompson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reread for my term paper. I love the women in this play, it’s just constant fuck yous to the patriarchy <3

[Cat · Rating 3 out of 5]

wow il est vraiment tamed maintenant

[Rainbow · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good stuff

[Tom Gray · Rating 3 out of 5]

This play can be seen as a response to Shakespeare's 'The Taming of the Shrew.' It is not a direct sequel but some of the character names are the same and it can be seen to address some of the consequences of what occurred in Shakespeare's play. As in the Shrew, Petruchio is a man who had married and tamed a shrew. That shrew is not named but can be regarded as equivalent toe Shakespeare’s Katharine. Petruchio is a widower with her death. At the play’s beginning he has just married Maria, the daughter of Petronius, and has yet to consummate the marriage. Maria, knowing Petruchio’s reputation as a shrew tamer, has refused to let him consummate the marriage unless he agrees to desist from that and to treat her differently. She sees marriage as a union of two people and as such she sees herself as equal to her husband and taming or deprecating her would be equivalent to taming himself. She locks herself up with some friends in this house and refuses to come out until he agrees. This leads to a widespread rebellion of the women of the town who join her in the house for a wild party that surprises the men of the town with its immodesty contrary to their perception of placid obedient women.

I found it difficult to read this play in contrast to that of Shakespeare. The language and the cultural references of the early 17th century play were very obscure to me. This may be the result of the effect that Shakespeare’s play ahs had on our culture. His language and his imagery have been passed down the generations and are not an intrinsic part of our culture while Fletcher has been forgotten outside of academic discourse. However, beneath the obscurity of the text, lies a very funny and very perceptive play. The play casts women not as entirely submissive beings with no minds of their own but to serve the needs of their fathers and their husbands as Katherine’s last speech in the Shrew indicated. It can be remembered that even in that play, a bet was made on the ability of a husband to order his wife to come into his presence. Only Petruchio won that bet with Katharine’s compliance. Both Bianca and the widow refused their husband’s order. Katharine’s speech was a remonstrance to those two women to give up their shrewish ways. They were still shrews at the end.

The power of this paly appears to me to be in the acceptance of what must have been the reality in Shakespeare’s day as it in in ours. The women of that day had minds of their own and refused any cultural imperative to marital submission. It is this knowing wink at the reality that is the humour of this play. Satire is funny when people see something deeply real about themselves. This play’s humor is a knowing wink at “The Taming of the Shrew’ and the cultural stereotypes contained within it. Shakespeare’s ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’ contains women who ae independent enough too easily detect and deal with Falstaff’s attempted seductions. Falstaff asserted the ability to easily manipulate women, but they proved more than his equal in manipulation. The Tamer presents its women in the same light and as such its humour lies in its collaboration with the audience in seeing the falsity of the cultural belief otherwise.

This all being said; the obscurity of the language and the refences made this a very difficult pay for me to read. For Someone of this era, this is not a play that one would find entertaining on the stage. Its language is just too obscure. If someone carefully studies the text and considers the notes supplied, one can see that that this is an hilarious insightful play. However, it is just that. This is a text that has to be studied an historical artifact. It is not an entertainment.

[Eleanor · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Mistake me not, I have a new soul in me
Made of a north wind, nothing but tempest,
And like a tempest shall it make all ruins
Till I have run my will out."

4.5/5 stars.

WHY DID NO ONE TELL ME THIS PROTO-FEMINIST REVISION OF THE TAMING OF THE SHREW EXISTED UNTIL NOW?

Picture the following: After a contentious marriage to Petruchio in which she was actually never tamed, Katherine dies. Petruchio remarries a woman named Maria, determined to succeed this time in forging an obedient wife for himself. Maria, however, has other ideas, deciding to give Petruchio a taste of his own medicine. And at the end, it is not Maria, but Petruchio, who is tamed.

Twenty years after Shakespeare wrote The Taming of the Shrew, Fletcher penned this response, in which the tables are turned and the focus of the narrative is gender inequality, gender roles, and structural violence against women (in particular regarding the institution of marriage), all from what most scholars consider to be a proto-feminist perspective (and I would agree).

I loved so many things about this story. I loved the nonjudgmental, immediate solidarity between women of different classes all banding together to assert their rights. I loved the realistic portrayal of varying degrees of misogyny--it doesn't all look the same, but it's all harmful. I loved the brilliant, unrelenting Bianca, who I would come the closest to comparing to a modern feminist out of all the characters. And I underlined and tabbed so many passages, like the following:

"All the several wrongs
Done by imperious husbands to their wives
These thousand years and upward strengthen thee!"
- Bianca, I.ii.122-124

"And we appear like her that sent us hither,
That only excellent and beauteous Nature,
Truly ourselves, for men to wonder at,
But too divine to handle."
- Maria, I.iii.251-254

"Tell me of due obedience. What's a husband?
What are we married for? To carry sumpters?
Are we not one piece of you, and as worthy
Our own intentions as you yours?"
- Maria, III.ii.146-149

YOU KNOW WHAT, I ORIGINALLY GAVE THIS BOOK 4 STARS, BUT MY HEART IS TELLING ME TO ROUND UP TO FIVE AND I WILL BECAUSE I DO WHAT I WANT. But I'll still talk about the ending. After Petruchio is "tamed" and submits to Maria's authority, she hands it back to him, her reasoning essentially being that he's now "earned" the ability to take on the role of her husband in a traditional way. There's a passage in the introduction to this edition in which the editor, Dr. Lucy Munro, summarizes my feelings on this quite well:

"Fletcher is sympathetic to the plight of women caught within patriarchal structures, but he is not a twenty-first century feminist, and it is unrealistic to expect him to be able to imagine an alternative to these structures [. . .] A temporary inversion of gender roles is possible, and may have beneficial long-term results, but it can only be temporary, and while marriage may have been a problematic institution, it was the only one available."

To me, this doesn't diminish the value of The Tamer Tamed as a powerful proto-feminist narrative. I don't think it undermines Fletcher's points about gender-based inequality and structural violence, and I would still highly, highly recommend this play.

Recommended to: Fans of classics; people interested in feminist theory; anyone who's ever liked Shakespeare, even once.

[Yorgos · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not sure it works, on the page, and the subplot is rather better than the main. Still, consistently humorous melodrama, even if only rarely funny (case in point: the literal siege of women that takes place). The imagery is just as spare: two poetic image are goodish (the rainbow IV.v and Neptune V.ii) -- it is possible these are the only two (images, not good ones). The meter is so flexible you can't really call this poetry, but Fletcher is easy even to the point of affectation. And people ask me why I don't read Restoration drama! Pshaw. I read this in Darlet's Works, a folio-based edition: thus, I have been made to understand, what I've read is significantly less bawdy than the MS. Oh well. Anyway, 3*. Random Play June #1.

---

Misc comments and Excerpts:

Elizabethan women call each other "wench" in exact analogue to how modern women call each other "bitch;" unreal.

I [have] seen her within these three days kiss him / with such an appetite as though she would eat him.

When they [lovers] cant [speak] (for 'tis a kind of canting) / you shall hear, if you reach to understand 'em [...] / such gibb'rish, such "believe me!", "I protest, sweet!" / And, "oh, dear Heavens, in which such constellations / reign at the birth of lovers!" This is too well! / And, "deign me, lady, deign me, I beseech you, / your poor unworthy lump" -- and then... she licks him!

In IV.iii Livia is really horny, and her cousin Bianca comforts her:

Be quiet, wench! Thou shalt be done, and done, / And done, and double done, or all shall split for't!

The only emotion Fletcher really sells me on is the jubilant joy of V.iii; not exactly delicate work but good clay for the stage.

The wily servants are consistently unfunny (while generally humorous), except V.ii, where they are funny, enumerating all the qualities of their (despised) mistress's tongue: [multiple], strange, lying, lisping, long, lawless, loud, liquorish, and "many other tongues, and many stranger tongues / than ever Babel had to tell his ruins!" (noting that the next line runs: "Were woman raised withal; but never a true one!"). I am a sucker for enumeration.

V.iv dad asks her boyfriend's daughter: "And hast thou done the deed, boy?" Reply: "I have done, sir, / that that will serve the turn, I think."

[Mac · Rating 4 out of 5]

John Fletcher's "The Woman's Prize; or, The Tamer Tam'd" is a sequel to Shakespeare's "The Taming of the Shrew." It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out that it not only reversed the scenario of the original play, but actually used some of the same characters! Fletcher's plot has Petruchio, who tamed the "shrew" Katherine in Shakespeare, remarry a younger woman, Maria. But when he tries to consummate the marriage, Maria turns the tables on him, barricading herself in her room until he himself is tamed!

This was the twelfth and final play covered in the lecture series I have been following on Elizabethan and Jacobean theater beyond Shakespeare. In the accompanying lecture I learned that Fletcher was a younger playwright in the same theater company as Shakespeare. They actually collaborated on a few plays at the end of Shakespeare's career, including Henry VIII, which may explain why that play seemed so atypical to me. Shockingly to our modern sensibilities, Fletcher's work stayed in the theater company's repertoire long after Shakespeare's!

"The Woman's Prize/Tamer Tam'd" is an enjoyable read. It has some hilarious scenes, including ones where the women join forces in military style to fend off the men. For other readers, I recommend that you read it directly in conjunction with Shakespeare's play. In many ways it can serve as a corrective to the misogyny inherent in the original. Plus you will enjoy the overlap of the characters in the two plays from the outset, rather than midway through as I did.

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Taming of the Shrew is unusual among Shakespeare's comedies both in having marriage at its centre rather than its end, and in having inspired a direct sequel by another Jacobean dramatist. It is also one of Shakespeare's most controversial plays, and it is hard not to believe that this must have had some bearing on its "sequelability". If audiences wanted to see the tables turned on Petruchio, The Woman's Prize, or the Tamer Tamed delivers no holds barred, with Maria (not poor Kate, unfortunately) going full Lysistrata on her husband for virtually the whole play. It's very rough, bawdy, and energetic, with bold plot strokes and a lot (even an excess) of language instead of finesse: I imagine that many of the speeches would need some trimming, but could be pretty entertaining in performance. The Livia/Roland subplot (which most reviewers pretty much ignore) starts promisingly but doesn't amount to much, concluding with an uninspired bet/trick combination, and Fletcher also turns to a "coffin trick" (which James Shirley will use much more effectively a couple of decades later in The Witty Fair One) to bring Petruchio and Maria together in a ending that's more resigned shrug than triumphant high five. It's a four-star play, except when it's a two-star one.

[Ilia · Rating 4 out of 5]

A rare case where the sequel improves on the original, showing that The Taming of the Shrew’s dodgy sexual politics were questioned even in Shakespeare’s day. Fletcher turns the tables on the flamboyant “wife-breaker” by having the women in the play group together to go on strike and demand conditions for better treatment. There’s a bit of balancing there, as some of the demands seem then as now quite frivolous – Maria making free with her husband’s wealth in a way that doesn’t quite square with the responsible management of the household. But arguably this is just another ploy to “break” Petruchio’s will. Once achieved, Maria promises mutuality and obedience, although as the play’s beginning suggests, these promises at a play’s end don’t always last a marriage.

[Katsuro · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was better than Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, to which it is a sequel, in some ways and inferior in other ways.
The characters are more cartoonish, in a good way, which is good comedy. On the other hand, the lines aren't as good as Shakespeare's, and the characterization is a bit weaker, too. So all in all, I'd say this play is pretty decent, but no more than that, despite its feminist bent.

Or to put it in verse:
It's always gonna be quite hard
to try to outperform the Bard.

[Nut Meg · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fun play, full of innuendo and the same kind of tricks and twists that might be expected in a Shakespeare work, which is more than fitting given it's a sequel and proto-feminist commentary on The Taming of the Shrew. The language isn't as beautiful as the Bard's but it has a similar sense of humor. Revels Student Edition is particularly good, including a lengthy introduction with valuable historical context. While not essential reading, this is an excellent addition to any Shakespeare fans library.

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

Why this play isn't performed more often is the only surprise here: it's filthy, funny, farcical and feminist (the four Fs).

Now, if you want a fascinating response to this AND Shakespeare's much older The Taming of the Shrew, read the chapter in Emma Smith's This Is Shakespeare, but really: read this play, and (if you're a theatre company) put it on: I'll come.

[Serafina Pevensie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Where was this play when 12 year old feminist me was disappointed by the bards wifetaming story? I liked how the uncompromising female voice was vindicative but not odious and that it wasn't so much manshaming as reaching equality. Pleasure wasn't sacrificed and neither was amusement. Shakespeare could never.

🥇📖

[Russio · Rating 5 out of 5]

Flip of the Taming of the Shrew - very funny and a strong feminist tract. The first three acts go by in a whirl while the last two bring home the message, although lack the verve of what has come before to some extent.

[Georgia · Rating 5 out of 5]

An unauthorised sequel that surpasses the original, though the bar was not very high. I really enjoyed this play, but it is a bit shit and I am self aware enough to recognise that. Do I think Pertrucio is a great guy? No. Do I love to hate him? Absolutely.

[a.]

I'm so tired of this plot I'm SO TIRED

[Kelly &#x1f33b;&#x1f31e;&#x1f331; · Rating 5 out of 5]

V good v good, much to think about! Loved

[Marissa]

Required reading

[G · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not exactly Shakespeare, but a contemporary-John Fletcher. A sequel, supposedly, to The Taming of the Shrew. Entertaining if nothing more.

[tessa · Rating 3 out of 5]

i was not expecting so many sexual innuendos. it peaked in the first act though

[Taylor Manookian · Rating 2 out of 5]

it was alright but it was too long
everyone is sus and i dont like her dad

[Mora]

i would actually love to see this performed i think it would be really funny

[Tate Fonda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Perhaps a more comfortable story than the original (The Taming of the Shrew), but not as structurally refined as Shakespeare. Longer than necessary.