Gender and Power in Shrew-Taming Narratives, 1500-1700

This is the first book to address and explore the various dramatic, poetic and narrative versions of the popular `taming of the shrew' story, from the Middle Ages to the Restoration, in the light of new historical work on the place of early modern women in society.

The contributors address the historical interrelationships of key theatrical texts such as the anonymous The Taming of A Shrew, Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, John Fletcher's The Woman's Prize, or The Tamer Tamed and John Lacey's Sauny the Scot. The essays in this volume subsume and extend the historical work, especially on the later seventeenth-century versions, and address the multiple shrew-taming narratives as an extended cultural dialogue debating key issues of gender and sexual politics.

Recent criticism has tended to overplay `power' readings of the shrewplays and to cast especially Shakespeare's play as an irredeemable document of barbarism. This volume reopens some of these critical questions and takes a fresh perspective on the renaissance shrew. The cast of contributors represents a balance between established critics responsible for seminal work in shrew-studies and younger scholars whose research is exploring new directions.

List of Contributors: Anna Bayman, Sandra Clark, Charles Conaway, Holly A. Crocker, Barry Gaines, H.J. Helmers, Richard Madelaine, Leah S. Marcus, Margaret Maurer, Jan Purnis, George Southcombe, and Ann Thompson.

David Wootton is Anniversary Professor of History at the University of York, UK. He was educated at Oxford and Cambridge and has held chairs in history and in politics at the University of Victoria (Canada), Brunel University, Queen Mary (University of London) and the University of York. He has published widely on Renaissance Intellectual History, particularly on atheism and on egalitarianism.
Graham Holderness is Professor of English at the University of Hertfordshire and author or editor of numerous studies in early modern and modern literature and drama. Recent books include Textual Shakespeare: Writing and the Word (2004) and Shakespeare and Venice (2010). He is author of Shakespeare in Performance: The Taming of the Shrew (1989), and editor of The Taming of A Shrew (1992). He is currently working on a biography of Shakespeare.