The Tamer Tamed

Synopsis

In John Fletcher's hilarious sequel to The Taming of the Shrew, Petruchio gets married for a second time, and is tamed by his second wife, Maria. Written twenty years after Shakespeare's original, but within his lifetime, The Tamer Tamed, clearly demonstrates how attitudes to women were changing.

Our Review:

21 January 2004

This companion piece to The Taming of the Shrew is a bit of an oddity. It's a sequel that's not been written by the author of the original, although it seems to have been written with Shakespeare's blessing. And it is certainly disarmingly modern with its strong emphasis on female solidarity culminating with Maria's plea for equality within marriage - a sentiment far removed from the ones expressed in Shrew.

This story of Petruchio's second marriage to the independently-minded Maria and her attempts to 'tame' him to her way of thinking could be seen as the flipside of Shrew, although the emphasis is much more on comedy.

The plot has some of its roots in Aristophanes' Lysistrata, there is much that sounds remarkably contemporary; for example, the women's demands for 'clothes and liberty' sounds as if it has come straight from Sex in the City. Although the scheming Maria could be seen as harbinger of the duplicitous women of Restoration...

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Latest User Review

USER: Whatsonstage.com (129.227.139.96) - 4 March 2004:

I haven’t read the other reviews yet, shall do after I have sent mine. I thought the acting was great, Jasper Britton’s comedy bits, especially with the cough were great. I wondered if the front seats got insulted every time. I haven’t seen any of Fletcher’s plays before and he seemed very down to earth, there were also lots of references to places in London that the original audience would have known. However the second half seemed very disjointed. I got the impression he’d got so far and wasn’t sure how to end it. Petruchio goes off to sea and next thing he’s in a coffin. Why? Did the people really think he was dead or was it a ploy? As for Maria, she started off very assertive in the first half and turned into jelly in the second? I saw the Shrew last week and this was no contest, no reflection on the company, they were great. ...

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