The Taming of the Shrew (Vol. 31) | Joan Hartwig (essay date 1982)
Joan Hartwig (essay date 1982)
SOURCE: "Horses and Women in The Taming of the Shrew" in The Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 45, No. 4, Autumn, 1982, pp. 285-94.
[In the following essay, Hartwig traces analogies between horses and women in The Taming of the Shrew and relates them to similar analogies in other Renaissance texts.]
An Elizabethan gentleman was acutely aware of the quality of his servants, his horses, and his wife, as Falstaff's response to his page's news that Bardolph has gone into Smithfield to buy him a horse parodies:
I bought him [Bardolph] in Paul's and he'll buy me a horse in Smithfield. An I could get me but a wife in the stews, I were manned, horsed, and wived.
(2 Hen IV: I.ii.49-51)
Smithfield, the site of Bartholomew Fair, had been a mart for horse trading as long as memory holds, and the horse coursers there were...
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