SOURCE: Maurer, Margaret. “Constering Bianca: The Taming of the Shrew and The Woman's Prize, or The Tamer Tamed.” In Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, edited by John Pitcher, pp. 186-206. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001.

[In the following essay, Maurer explores emendations in Shakespeare's play that substantially alter the characterization of Bianca, resulting in a less complex character than the playwright originally intended.]

Ovidius Naso was the man. And why indeed “Naso,” but for smelling out the odoriferous flowers of fancy, the jerks of invention? Imitari is nothing: so doth the hound his master, the ape his keeper, the tired horse his rider.

—Love's Labor's Lost, 4.2.123-27

The early seventeenth-century sequel to Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew is the return, not of the shrew, but of her little sister Bianca. In The Woman's Prize, or The Tamer Tamed, it is Byancha who instigates Petruchio's new wife Maria's defiance; and it is Byancha and Tranio who manage the intrigue, parallel to the one they inhabit in the Shakespearean play, that prevents the marriage of Maria's sister Livia to old man Moroso, her father's choice for her.¹ Yet while Byancha is a principal character in The Woman's Prize, her importance in perceiving the relationship between the two plays is not generally recognized.² A major reason for this is that the text of the Shakespearean Shrew [The Taming of the Shrew] has been substantially emended in the two scenes structured around her, with lines exchanged between her and her suitors redistributed and the business that marries her to one of them simplified.

These changes serve the comprehensive interpretive effect of tidying Bianca's character into a figure simply opposed to that of her sister, the shrew. Now there can be no doubt that Bianca and her wooing action are drawn in contrast to her sister's. Katerina the shrew is loud-mouthed and physically unruly, defies her father and repels suitors, is wooed by being humiliated in front of other people, and wins at last a great deal of money for her husband when, against all expectation, she obeys him and professes the importance of wifely submission. Bianca is low-voiced and properly behaved, respects her father and attracts men with her charms, is married in secret to an ardent suitor, and then, at the moment of the shrew's turnabout, loses a wager for her new husband when she says she is too busy to come at his command. The Bianca intrigue as it unfolds, however, particularly in the First Folio text, suggests that Shakespeare conceived Bianca more intricately than these basic oppositions suggest. In this he takes his cue from Ovid, whose witty invention in Heroides I imagines a rather different character under the few words and ostensibly compliant behavior of Homer's chaste, silent, and obedient Penelope.

Ovid's letter of Penelope to her absent husband Ulysses is an exemplary case of what can be called fanciful imitation: “fanciful,” to distinguish it from the witless kind that Shakespeare has a character in Love's Labor's Lost say (see my epigraph) is “nothing.” The construal or translation of a passage from Ovid's poem enters Shakespeare's Shrew just after the marriages of both the shrew and her sister (tentative in Bianca's case) have been agreed upon; and I take this allusion as Shakespeare's acknowledgment of Ovid's influence on him—on his imagination in general and on his conception of Bianca in particular. Heroides I does not challenge the broad outline of Homer's representation of Penelope's actions, but within the limits set by his predecessor, Ovid rearranges the details of the Odyssey around a decidedly un-Homeric conception of the hero's wife. Ovid's Penelope is still exemplum pudicitiae, but her letter to her husband betrays an unpleasantly reproachful core to her faithful heart.³ The reader enjoys Ovid's witty reconfiguration of details of the Odyssey and winces for Ulysses at the prospect of his homecoming.

F1's text of Shrew is a similarly inventive reworking of the stock features of Italian comic intrigue. In the Bianca business of Shrew, Shakespeare is inspired by George Gascoigne's Supposes, itself a translation of Ludovico Ariosto's I Suppositi. In the source for this part of Shakespeare's play, a young man secures a woman in marriage against her father's wishes by changing identities with his own servant and posing for two years as servant in her house. The lady is responsive to her disguised suitor's attentions (Supposes suggests that it is her being pregnant by her lover that requires the hidden romance to be brought to light), so that her lover's servant's feigned bid for her hand in marriage is a necessary diversion to prevent the marriage her father wants to arrange for her with an old man. In adapting Supposes to the plot of his Shrew, Shakespeare makes its heroine the sister of the shrew and makes her husband-to-be's (Lucentio's) project of winning her a task he must accomplish quickly, there being only a little more than a week between his being introduced to her as her tutor and the wedding date set by her father for her marriage to his false self. Shakespeare also adds to the old-man suitor of Supposes an additional rival in the person of another young man (Hortensio) who, like Lucentio, disguises himself to gain access to the lady.⁴ Thus Shakespeare's Bianca, like Penelope before her, finds herself in the urgent circumstance of having to cope with the attentions of several men whose hopes must be kept alive while she waits on the event.

At crucial points in the development of the business in Shakespeare's play whereby Bianca is attached to the man she ultimately marries, her words and actions as recorded in F1 are almost unintelligibly indirect, and printers and editors have responded to them by gradually revising them into more straightforward configurations. The emendations did not come quickly nor all at once, but they are now an unquestioned part of the standard text. In this essay, I imagine how Bianca might be read within the terms set in F1, and I take The Woman's Prize as evidence that I am not alone in my impulse to do this. The author of The Woman's Prize, who may also, of course, have seen something like the F1 text of Shrew performed, is particularly attentive to the Bianca intrigue. The Woman's Prize gestures toward incidents from Shrew as the F1 text conveys them; further, it constitutes at large a creative imitation of Shakespeare's Bianca, offering in Byancha and Petruchio's new wife Maria two further constructions of the Penelope type.⁵

I

There are two scenes in Shakespeare's Shrew where Bianca is shown in interaction with her suitors, and both have undergone emendation. They are what the modern text calls 3.1, especially TLN 1338-56 (3.1.46-63), and the opening sequence of 4.2, TLN 1846-63 (4.2.1-15). At these two points in the action, what characters say, to whom they say it, and what they might mean to accomplish by the ambiguities of their speeches have been affected by the interventions of editors.

In my essay “The Rowe Editions of 1709/1714 and 3.1 of The Taming of the Shrew,” I review the process of the changes to 3.1 up to the decisive “regulation” of it that Lewis Theobald proposed in Shakespeare Restored (1726).⁶ This is the scene in which Bianca, with a disguised Lucentio offering to teach her philosophy and a disguised Hortensio offering to teach her music, manages their competing attentions. In that essay I stop short of saying what I think is true: F1's version of this scene is not only legible; it is more interesting than any subsequent version proposed by editors to resolve its apparent anomalies.⁷

Theobald's disposition of the line assignments through the middle of the scene in which Bianca turns her attention from one suitor to the other (TLN 1338-56) were incorporated first into Pope's edition of 1728. They represent a settlement of a portion of the text that had been rearranged three different ways before Theobald proposed his solution: first, slightly but substantively, in the Second Folio (1632), a version that persists through the third and fourth reprintings of the Folio in 1663/4 and 1685; then in the Rowe edition of 1709; and finally in the 1714 text that also bears Rowe's name. The Rowe changes, I have argued, seem to be related to, and may have been influenced by, the Restoration stage redaction of the play, Sauny the Scot, or The Taming of the Shrew by John Lacy, first performed in 1667 and printed in 1698. Biancha in that play is utterly different from her sister until late in the play when the shrew gives her advice on how to control a husband. As a lead-up to this moment, Lacy has Biancha distinctly prefer Winlove (Lucentio) by the equivalent of 3.1; and it is at the end of that scene, in Lacy's play, that Geraldo (Hortensio) has seen enough to decide that he should resort to his widow.⁸

Changes to Shakespeare's text effected in the 1709 and 1714 editions are consistent with Lacy's strategy of making Bianca's preference for her husband-to-be more explicit than it is in the equivalent of 3.1 in the folios, but it is Theobald's text that removes all doubts. Theobald detaches a line from the three lines that precede it in a four-line speech spoken by one of Bianca's suitors (Lucentio, until the speech is given to Hortensio in 1714):

How fiery and forward our Pedant is,
Now for my life the knave doth court my love,
Pedascule, Ile watch you better yet:
In time I may beleeve, yet I mistrust.

(TLN 1341-44)

Theobald assigns the last line, “In time I may beleeve, yet I mistrust,” to Bianca. Having given Bianca a line that had always before been spoken by one or the other of her suitors, Theobald then assigns the next two lines, which had always been hers before, to Lucentio:

Mistrust it not, for sure Aeacides
Was Ajax cald so from his grandfather.

(TLN 1345-46)

The speaker who says these lines is anticipating the next lines in the text they have taken turns translating. That “philosophy” (TLN 1308; 3.1.13) text is Ovid's Heroides I.

The passage they scrutinize comprises the two elegiac couplets in which Penelope repeats for her husband the account of the war that she has heard. It is a passage that would be a model for an imitative school exercise, summarizing the Iliad and conveniently (for pedagogical purposes at various levels) repeating forms of demonstrative adverbs:

‘hac ibat Simois; haec est Sigeia tellus,
          hic steterat Priami regia celsa senis.
illic Aeacides, illic tendebat Vlixes;
          hic lacer admissos terruit Hector equos’.(9)

Lucentio and Bianca have taken turns translating or construing (the word they use is conster¹⁰) the first couplet, he using it as a pretext to repeat that he is the disguised son of Vincentio:

Hic Ibat, as I told you before, Simois, I am Lucentio, hic est, sonne unto Vincentio of Pisa, Sigeria tellus, disguised thus to get your love, hic steterat, and that Lucentio that comes a wooing, priami, is my man Tranio, regia, bearing my port, celsa senis that we might beguile the old Pantalowne.

(TLN 1325-30)

and she using it to reply. Bianca's construction of the same couplet—

Hic ibat simois, I know you not, hic est sigeria tellus, I trust you not, hic staterat priami, take heede he heare us not, regia presume not, Celsa senis, despaire not.

(TLN 1334-37)

—responds to Lucentio's lovemaking in something like the way Penelope would have had to do to Eurymachos over the head of Antinoos, keeping hope alive without committing herself.

When Hortensio presses for his share of the lesson time, Bianca's words to Lucentio must be even more intricate, expressing regard for him in terms that allow his rival to think she might mean no such thing. At TLN 1345-46, in response to Lucentio's “In time I may beleeve, yet I mistrust,” she replies, “Mistrust it not, for sure Aeacides / Was Ajax, cald so from his grandfather.” This allusion to “illic Aeacides,” the next half-line in the passage, can pass simply as a mistake, but it proves, in effect, a pointed misconstruction. In Heroides I, Aeacides refers, not to Ajax, but to Achilles, the other of the two Achaian heroes for whom Aeacides is a patronymic. In Anglicized pronunciation the names ay-ass-i-des and a-jakes convey a coarse put-down of Lucentio, mocking his description of himself as the son of his father in terms that recall Ulysses dismissing Ajax's claim to the armor of Achilles based on their common lineage in Ovid's Metamorphoses XIII.¹¹ Bianca in Shakespeare's play at this point, negotiating with two suitors neither of whom she expressly prefers (“Vlixes” is only a few meters away in Ovid's poem, but she shows no sign of thinking his name is relevant to the situation), is drawn after the type of woman Penelope exemplifies; Shakespeare's imitation also gives her an original character. Her wit is more than a match for the men's, and its exhibition in language nice girls do not use suggests that the chastity so celebrated in Penelope might also be playfully reconstructed.¹²

Reading the modern text with its adjustments that diminish Bianca's sauciness, it is easy to forget that Bianca in 3.1 has been provisionally given by her father to the Lucentio who is Tranio, subject to his offer being ratified by his father, and will, in the next scene, when Petruchio takes his new bride away before her banquet, be enjoined by Baptista to “take her sisters roome,” a suggestion that Tranio, as Lucentio, construes as permission for her to “practise how to bride it” (TLN 1636-37; 3.2.250-51) with him. The modern text likewise does little to encourage imagining what Bianca might make of a situation that would have married her secretly to one man and publicly to another under the same name. Characteristically, of course, Bianca says little, so much depends on the nuances of what she says and to whom. In the other scene predominantly concerned with the disposition of her affection, the equivalent of the modern 4.2, it is again the case that precisely what she says and to whom have been affected by emendations.

An apparently defective stage direction at the point at which the modern 4.2 begins, “Enter Tranio and Hortensio” (TLN 1846), puts those two characters on stage without any notice of when Lucentio enters. Yet the dialogue that ensues in F1 involves him:

                                        Enter Tranio and Hortensio:
TRA.
Is't possible friend Lisio, that mistris Bianca
Doth fancie any other but Lucentio,
I tel you sir, she beares me faire in hand.
LUC.
Sir, to satisfie you in what I have said,
Stand by, and marke the manner of his teaching.
                                                            Enter Bianca.

Bianca, on her entrance, is addressed by Hortensio:

HOR.
Now Mistris, profit you in what you reade?
BIAN.
What Master reade you first, resolve me that?
HOR.
I reade, that I professe the Art to love.
BIAN.
And may you prove sir Master of your Art.
LUC.
While you sweet deere p[r]ove Mistresse of my heart.

(TLN 1846-58)

The Second Folio reconciles the opening direction with the subsequent dialogue by giving Lucentio's first speech to Hortensio and the first two of Hortensio's to Lucentio.

Thus the speech assignments in the current form of the scene have been essentially set since 1632. Several smaller changes, however, have been longer in coming; and it is only with these changes that the speech assignments in F2 are rationalized. Bianca's entrance alone, for example, remains through all four folios, with Lucentio's entrance not marked at all in the text until the 1709 Rowe edition made his entrance accompany Bianca's. Of course, by 1709 Sauny the Scot had been played on the stage for two generations and had been in print for over a decade, and, as I have noted already, at this point in Lacy's play, Biancha is plainly devoted to her language teacher.¹³

In F1, the equivalent of 4.2 in the modern text is not the manifestation of Lucentio's success with Bianca, as the modern text reads, but rather the ingenious maneuver to dismiss Hortensio projected by Tranio at TLN 1530 (3.2.147). Since an entrance for Lucentio has to be supplied to F1's text, it is reasonable to assume it occurs at the opening of the scene when Lucentio disguised as Cambio enters attending Tranio disguised as Lucentio to whom Cambio has just spoken. Hortensio enters separately from them. Indeed, the first two speeches as assigned in F1 suggest that the device Tranio and Lucentio have arranged is to act as if Cambio has been telling Bianca's betrothed that she seems to be encouraging Litio (Hortensio), a reflection on Bianca's conduct that, if not true, is nonetheless credible. As a result of what he has just heard from Cambio, the false Lucentio challenges Litio:

Enter Tranio [with Lucentio] and Hortensio:
TRA.
Is't possible friend Lisio, that mistris Bianca
Doth fancie any other but Lucentio [that is, me],
I tel you sir, she beares me faire in hand.

Cambio speaks next, referring to what he has just said outside Litio's and the audience's hearing:

LUC.
Sir, to satisfie you in what I have said,
Stand by, and marke the manner of his teaching.
                                                            Enter Bianca.

Litio is prevented by Bianca's entrance from answering this challenge. Indeed, her entrance plays so beautifully into the device that it is tempting to think she is playing a deliberate part in it, though there is no indication of that or of the contrary.

Bianca's response to Litio, whatever it is, renders him vulnerable. If her behavior toward him is accepting, Lucentio (that is, Tranio), engaged to Bianca, will challenge him. If Bianca puts Litio off, the desired end comes even more quickly. The device works the second way. Hortensio addresses her tentatively, prompted perhaps by a book she carries, since, as she tells her father and sister earlier, she has no particular interest in any of her suitors (“My bookes and instruments” are company enough, “On them to looke, and practise by my selfe,” TLN 385-86; 1.1.82-83):

HOR.
Now Mistris, profit you in what you reade?

Bianca's reply in the modern text, spoken to Lucentio with whom she has entered—“What, master, read you? First resolve me that”—differs only in its punctuation from the line in F1; but the difference in what it conveys as a response to Hortensio's address is considerable:

BIAN.
What Master reade you first, resolve me that?

In making master the object of the verb read, not a noun of address (its enclosure in commas was Theobald's addition, though by 1733 it is likely that he was only making explicit in print what had been an element of the scene's construction for some time), F1 allows Bianca to maintain her characteristically noncommittal strategy, leaving Litio no choice but to declare himself:

HOR.
I reade, that I professe the Art to love.

Bianca's ambiguous reply,

BIAN.
And may you prove sir Master of your Art.

is enough of a dismissal of him to encourage the real Lucentio, who now speaks, as F1 has it, for the second time in the scene:

LUC.
While you sweet deere p[r]ove Mistresse of my heart.

Some action ensues, wordless of course, that draws Hortensio's comment to Tranio-Lucentio:

HOR.
Quicke proceeders marry, now tel me I pray,
you that durst sweare that your mistris Bianca
Lov'd me in the World so wel as Lucentio.

(TLN 1859-61)

This speech in F1 refers to the one that opens the scene in which Lucentio (Tranio) accosts Litio (Hortensio) about Bianca's attentions to him. It is only since the 1709 Rowe edition that “Lov'd me” has been emended to “Loved none,” the modern reading, that reconciles the line with the speeches as distributed since F2.

In what is now his feigned outrage at Bianca, Tranio-Lucentio, who sees his betrothed kissing and courting Lucentio-Cambio, professes to be doubly surprised:

TRA.
Oh despightful Love, unconstant womankind,

As Lucentio, he thought she had betrayed him with Litio, but he sees now that she has turned from both of them to Cambio:

I tel thee Lisio this is wonderfull.

(TLN 1862-63)

As Tranio, of course, he is exulting in the ingenuity of the intrigue. It is a good trick, much better than what transpires in the modern version of the scene. A question lingers: to what degree was Bianca in on it and with whom?

I see no reason to expect a play to prescribe a definite answer to that question, especially not a play that features this kind of woman. On all the crucial details of her disposition in marriage, silence and ambiguity attend Bianca. In this scene, after her dallying with Lucentio precipitates the exit of Hortensio, Tranio says,

Mistris Bianca, blesse you with such grace,
As longeth to a Lovers blessed case:
Nay, I have tane you napping gentle Love,
And have forsworne you with Hortensio

Bianca replies, “Tranio you jest, but have you both forsworne mee?” (TLN 1892-97; 4.2.44-48) Her tone with him is familiar; and she does not speak directly to the genuine Lucentio in this scene. Indeed, in all of the F1 Shrew, she never speaks directly to him in his own person until she calls him a fool for “laying on [her] dutie” (TLN 2685; 5.2.129) at the play's end.

The text leaves it up to the players to make what they will of what Bianca is doing at this point in 4.2 or, for that matter, what Cambio (Lucentio) is doing with Gremio that puts Bianca's old man suitor at Lucentio's (Tranio's) house when Baptista meets the false father of the false Lucentio to sign agreement for the “dower” (TLN 2227; 4.4.45), or how Tranio is dressed in the last scene.¹⁴ At TLN 2493 (5.1.113), as she asks her father's pardon for doing what, on one level at least, was his will—marrying Lucentio—she makes room for her own will, with either or both men: “Cambio is chang'd into Lucentio” (TLN 2503; 5.1.123). In the last scene, her silence is marked for readers of the play by her new father-in-law Vincentio registering his surprise when she improves on Gremio's coarse jest: “I Mistris Bride, hath that awakened you?” Bianca reverts to her habitual condition, “I, but not frighted me, therefore Ile sleepe againe.” But Petruchio is now interested: “Nay that you shall not since you have begun: / Have at you for a better jest or too.”¹⁵ That Bianca is neither a shrew nor the simply compliant opposite of one is never more obvious than this moment. She declines to trade in coarse talk, but she takes her leave with a provocative remark: “Am I your Bird, I meane to shift my bush, / And then pursue me as you draw your Bow. / You are welcome all” (TLN 2584-91; 5.2.42-48). Ulysses's great weapon will be useless against such a quick little thing.

The First Folio says, “Exit Bianca” (TLN 2591), but it is reasonable to assume, as most editors do, that Katherine and the widow follow her off stage, making this moment look like an early manifestation of the leadership she will exhibit in The Woman's Prize. Petruchio aptly describes her use of the silence her departure creates, “She hath prevented me” (TLN 2592; 5.2.49). For Lucentio's part, his loss of the wager when she sends word that “she is busie, and she cannot come” (TLN 2630; 5.2.81) in answer to his bidding is the least of his worries. A double cross from Tranio has always been a possibility, and it would hardly be dispelled when Tranio resumes his role as servant in Lucentio's house.¹⁶

II

The Woman's Prize continues the adventures of three of Shrew's characters—Petruchio, Tranio, and Bianca—making the description of it as a sequel to Shakespeare's play accurate enough as far as it goes. Attention to the way Bianca is configured in the F1 text of Shrew, however, allows us to perceive how the sequel is conceived as an imitation of the earlier play. The Woman's Prize has, like Shrew, a double action combining a taming (of Petruchio by his new bride Maria) with a betrothal intrigue (devised around Maria's sister Livia to prevent her marriage to her father's choice, old man Moroso, and link her to Rowland, her heart's desire).¹⁷ Byancha is a critical element in both of these actions. She is “Colonell Byancha, [who] commands the workes” (1.3.65) of the resistance action that sets in motion Maria's taming of Petruchio, and she is called, even when her role in the subsequent elements of this action is no longer obvious, “the spirit, that inspires 'em all” (4.1.72). She is also the mastermind of the Livia action, inventing and successfully accomplishing the device that outwits the old men on the young lovers' behalf.

This Byancha is a projection of the Bianca of Shakespeare's Shrew. It is, to some extent, a matter of details, how her actions recall her analogue in the earlier play, but it is also, more generally, an incidence of invention: Byancha is a translation of Bianca as Bianca herself, in Shakespeare's play, is a translation of Ovid's Penelope, translated in turn from Homer. Byancha in The Woman's Prize is, after Penelope, married but without a husband. In this condition, she is no man's instrument but her own agent, though the circumstances of her agency are, like Bianca's in Shrew, curiously represented and consequently, on reflection, open to construction.

The Woman's Prize establishes its relationship to Shakespeare's Shrew at the start by recalling Kate's submission to Petruchio in the earlier play and taking a simple line on it. It was an assumed aspect that she abandoned at once. Characters returning from the ceremony of Petruchio's second wedding discuss how Kate and Petruchio lived out a stormy marriage until her early death freed him to marry again. This time he has chosen the docile Maria for respite from the “long since buried Tempest” (1.1.21) of Kate. Petruchio's friends pity the new bride, and Tranio suggests that Maria take refuge in shrewishness:

… if God had made me woman,
And his wife that must be—…
I would learn to eate Coales with an angry Cat,
And spit fire at him: I would (to prevent him)
Do all the ramping, roaring tricks, a whore
Being drunke, and tumbling ripe, would tremble at.

(1.1.23-28)

Byancha makes her first appearance in the next scene, and she also counsels resistance. She tells Maria to abandon “your blushes, / Your modesty, and tendernesse of spirit. … Twill shew the rarer, and the stranger in you. / But do not say I urg'd you” (1.2.56-65).

Postnuptial taming of the tamer will constitute one of the play's major actions and, as in the Shakespearean Shrew, it is the part of the play Petruchio inhabits, but as the counter-taming is worked out, it proves to be more than a simple replay of Kate's angry resistance. Maria tells Livia that Petruchio's first wife “was a foole, / And took a scurvy course; … I have a new daunce for him, and a mad one” (1.2.140-43). Early scenes in The Woman's Prize show Byancha involved with setting this course and taking a leading role in it. It begins with Maria's defending her maidenhood—she barricades herself from Petruchio on her wedding night—and evolves into a kind of rebellion, with other women joining Maria and Byancha in defiance of their husbands. Looking at “Maria and Byanca above,” Sophocles, a friend of Petruchio, says,

from this present houre, I never will believe a silent woman. When they break out, they are bonfires.

(1.3.106-8)

Yet Maria's own description of her action—“a little guarded for my safety sir” (1.3.98)—makes clear that intellect, not temperament, is setting the course of her resistance, and as it unfolds through the rest of the play, that resistance takes more subtle and ingenious forms.

The way the early scenes of The Woman's Prize depict women defying men has impressed some commentators as taking a bold, even a radical stand on the question of the relationship between men and women; and they see in this a significant contrast to the Shakespearean play that it so pointedly succeeds.¹⁸ This is to miss, I think, the deeply conceited connection between the two plays. In The Woman's Prize, the scenes showing women temporarily overturning the conventions of wifely conduct and decorum are projected by Byancha before they are realized in the women's actions; and Byancha, after Shakespeare's bookish Bianca, is inspired by epic tradition.

The rebellion begins with Byancha projecting a feminist Aeneid. Maria's sister Livia sues to join Maria and Byancha to escape her father's insistence that she marry old Moroso, and, in the one speech of any length she makes in either play, Byancha suspects a trick:

                    did their wisdomes thinke
That sent you hither, we would be so foolish,
To entertaine our gentle Sister Sinon,
And give her credit, while the woodden Jade
Petruchio stole upon us: no good Sister,
Goe home, and tell the merry Greekes that sent you,
Ilium shall burn, and I, as did Aeneas,
Will on my back, spite of the Myrmidons,
Carry this warlike Lady, and through Seas
Unknown, and unbeleev'd, seek out a Land,
Where like a race of noble Amazons,
We'le root our selves, and to our endlesse glory
Live, and despise base men.

(2.2.27-39)

The land across the water where women can enjoy such independence is England, or perhaps more precisely, an English playhouse. The allusion to Vergil suggests not only that Byancha's so-to-speak feminist imagination has been stimulated by her reading of classical texts but also that The Woman's Prize is constructed in the same imitative spirit that Shakespeare acknowledges in his allusion to Heroides in Shrew.

Byancha is less visibly involved in the subsequent stages of the Maria-Petruchio action: Maria's continuing to withhold herself from her husband, her negotiation of a contract that affords her extravagant privileges as a wife, her insinuation that she is considering taking other lovers, her response to Petruchio's device of feigning illness by giving out that he has the plague, her ready acquiescence to his announcement that he is leaving her to voyage abroad, and her sanguine acceptance of his (pretended) death. Yet even as the action of the play suggests that, once set in motion by Byancha, Maria carries through on her own, an encounter between Maria's father Petronius and Byancha late in the play represents other characters suspecting Byancha's pervasive influence in the action:

PETRONIUS.
                    A word with you Sweet Lady.
BYANCHA.
I am very hasty sir.
PETRONIUS.
                    So you were ever.
BYANCHA.
Well what's your will?
PETRONIUS.
                    Was not your skilfull hand
In this last stratagem? were not your mischiefes
Eeking the matter on?
BYANCHA.
                    In's shutting up? …
PETRONIUS.
Yes.
BYANCHA.
                    Ile tell you.
PETRONIUS.
                                        Doe.
BYANCHA.
                                                            And truly …
I would it had [been my invention], on that condition
I had but one halfe smock, I like it so well.

(4.1.73-94)

Byancha's quality is conveyed in the form as well as the substance of this dialogue. Dodging the interrogation in the same way that she quits the scene when Petruchio wishes to engage her in the last scene of Shrew, she replies in monosyllables and questions until at last she denies that she has hatched the scheme but says she delights in it nonetheless.

While Byancha's few words and predilection for indirection surrender center stage, particularly for readers of the play, to Maria, the similar configuration of these two women is established by the terms of Maria's reaction to Petruchio's threat to leave her. Maria says that there is a classical heroine on whom she is modeling herself and writing anew an old tale:

MARIA.
                              Then when time,
And fulnesse of occasion have new made you,
And squard you from a sot into a Signior,
Or neerer from a Jade into a courser;
Come home an aged man, as did Ulysses,
And I your glad Penelope.
PETRUCHIO.
                                                            That must have
As many lovers as I languages,
And what she do's with one i'th day, i'th night
Undoe it with an other.
MARIA.
                                                            Much that way sir;
For in your absence, it must be my honour,
That, that must make me spoken of hereafter,
To have temptations, and not little ones
Daily and hourely offer'd me, and strongly,
Almost believed against me, to set off
The faith, and loyalty of her that loves ye.

Petruchio's harassed response to this—“What should I do?” (4.5.168-83)—spells his defeat. The Woman's Prize conceives the tamer's taming as essentially a Penelope action, a game of wits.

Meanwhile, Byancha's business in The Woman's Prize is focused after act 2 not on Maria's but on her sister's plight. She arranges an elaborate intrigue to effect the love match of Livia with Rowland. The actual workings of this plan are kept hidden, to some extent even from the audience, until the device is successful: Livia seems to submit to her father's wish to marry Moroso; she feigns desperate illness, and Rowland is summoned to her bedside to cancel their vows with her father and Moroso as witnesses. This forswearing involves signing papers that prove, however, to be very different from what the signers understand them to be: Rowland, Livia's father, and Moroso unwittingly sign the young lovers' betrothal contract. “Yes sir, we trickt ye” (5.4.71) are Byancha's last words in The Woman's Prize.

This project, Byancha's signature scheme, is a critical element of The Woman's Prize for appreciating its relationship to Shrew, since it is a variation on the action of getting Bianca herself married in the earlier play. A passing remark of Petronius—“Hang ye, / For surely, if your husband looke not to ye, / I know what will” (4.1.97-99)—alludes to that husband and suggests that in the world of The Woman's Prize he is still alive; but Lucentio never appears in the play and is never mentioned by name. Instead, as we have seen, Byancha urges wives to resist their husbands. She also sings of cuckoldry and even has a flirtatious encounter herself with Rowland when, believing that Livia has given him over for Moroso, the young man professes his determination to forswear women altogether:

BYANCHA.
                                                                      Are ye honest?
I see you are young, and hansome. …
Had ye lov'd me—
ROWLAND.
                                                            I would I had. …
                                                                                                              This woman
Either abuses me, or loves me dearely.
BYANCHA.
Ile tell you one thing, if I were to choose
A husband to mine own mind, I should think
One of your mothers making would content me,
For o'my conscience she makes good ones.(19)
ROWLAND.
                                                                                                                        Lady,
Ile leave you to your commendations:—
I am in again, The divel take their tongues.

(3.4.15-38)

It is fitting that Byancha be a marriage broker in The Woman's Prize because everything she says and does in this play implies that women, even married women, are impossible to tame. In fact, it is in marriage, Byancha seems to suggest, that a clever woman can enjoy her greatest liberty.

In Shrew, the scheme of Tranio masquerading as a stand-in for the man who ultimately becomes Bianca's husband invites reflections on the conduct of a married Bianca. In the last scene of Shrew, Petruchio's jesting with Tranio brings this issue to the surface of the earlier play. Prevented by Bianca's departure from making the obviously coarse reply to her image of herself as a bird shifting her bush, Petruchio turns to Tranio:

PETR.
                                                            here signior Tranio,
This bird you aim'd at, though you hit her not,
Therefore a health to all that shot and mist.
TR[A].
Oh sir, Lucentio slipt me like his Gray-hound,
Which runs himselfe, and catches for his Master.
PETR.
A good swift simile, but something currish.

(TLN 2592-97; 5.2.49-54)

Both Tranio's response to Petruchio and Petruchio's return comment will sustain insinuations to the contrary of what they appear at first to be professing.

The Woman's Prize takes for granted the camaraderie between Tranio and Petruchio implied in this exchange. Entering the later play as a gentleman friend of Petruchio, Tranio seems to have achieved a status to which he only pretended in Shrew. At the same time, he functions as if Byancha is his mistress in some sense or other. In a collaboration that the play never fully rationalizes, he takes instructions from her as he would if he were still her husband's servant, seeming to know more than other characters about her plans for Livia and even anticipating the outcome well enough to wager with Rowland that the young man will not be able to keep a vow to forswear Livia. There is also, however, a signal moment of her treating him the way she treated her lovers in Shrew.

At the critical point of the Livia/Rowland intrigue, Tranio is engaged by Byancha to arrange the scene of the forswearing:

                    Enter Byancha, and Tranio.
TRANIO.
Faith Mistresse, you must doe it.
BYANCHA.
                                                                      Are the writings
Ready I told ye of?
TRANIO.
                                                                                          Yes they are ready,
But to what use I know not.
BYANCHA.
                                                                                          Y'are an Asse,
You must have all things constru'd.

(4.3.1-4)

“Constru'd” recalls the constering exercise of Shrew's 3.1, and the coarse word “Asse” repeats the insulting syllable of Aeacides that is Bianca's put-down of Lucentio until editors, and Theobald decisively, reconfigured the speeches of the scene.

To readers of the earlier texts of Shakespeare's play, this moment in The Woman's Prize acknowledges its author's appreciation not just of Bianca herself but of the intricately conceited intelligence that could fashion a play like Shrew, an intelligence that the author of The Woman's Prize aspires to match. As it happens, it is hard not to see in this moment as well something more immediate to our experience of Shrew's text: a rebuke to readers who expect a play's language to represent its action simply and straightforwardly. Unedited, Bianca in Shrew is no mere opposite to her shrewish sister. She is a figure drawn after Penelope, constered, as Shakespeare learned after Ovid to do, in a way that seems to have suited the habit of his player's heart.

Notes

1. The Woman's Prize is in volume 4 of The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, gen. ed. Fredson Bowers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), the edition from which I quote the play when I discuss it. It is generally attributed to John Fletcher. My epigraph from Love's Labor's Lost is quoted from The Riverside Shakespeare, 2^nd ed., gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), the edition of Shakespeare I use when I quote from or refer to the modern text. Except when I am citing the modern text of Shrew for comparison, I quote that play from the version printed in the Norton facsimile of The First Folio of Shakespeare, prepared by Charlton Hinman (New York: Norton, 1968). I do not reproduce ligatures nor the long s, and I follow modern conventions for i-j and u-v.

2. An exception is Daniel Morley McKeithan, The Debt to Shakespeare in the Beaumont-and-Fletcher Plays (New York: AMS Press, 1970), 58-82. A dissertation, printed first in 1938 by the University of Texas Press, its appreciative discussion of the close relationship between the two plays, including some good insights into Bianca and Tranio, has been generally ignored. In his critical edition of The Woman's Prize, or the Tamer Tamed, George B. Ferguson (The Hague: Mouton and Co., 1966) stresses that beyond some “rather general hints” and the names of Petruchio, Tranio, and Byancha, of whom “only Petruchio bears any resemblance to the characters of Shakespeare's play,” there is “little else to remind the reader of the Shakespeare play” (12). Comparisons disadvantageous to The Woman's Prize or the assertions that the two are not really comparable have been the dominant notes in discussions of the two plays until recently, when the later play has begun to be praised for its boldness in reconsidering the issues raised about the relationship between men and women in Shrew. Molly Easo Smith, in “John Fletcher's Response to the Gender Debate: The Woman's Prize and The Taming of the Shrew,” Papers on Language and Literature 31 (1995): 38-60, sees The Woman's Prize as going beyond Shakespeare's play, “tak[ing] Shakespeare to task for his inadequate representation of gender conflicts” (45). Smith's attention is primarily on Maria, though she acknowledges Byancha's role in Maria's resistance. David M. Bergeron, in “Fletcher's The Woman's Prize, Transgression, and Querelle des Femmes,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 8 (1996): 146-64, says that The Woman's Prize, as an adaptation of Shrew, represents “imitation plus innovation” (147): “late Elizabethan romantic comedy has yielded ground to a harsher, more satiric Jacobean comedy” (148). Bergeron also acknowledges Byancha's role in the subversion of Shrew, but he, too, is generally more attentive to the elements of the play that are dealing directly with Petruchio. The Bianca intrigue of Shrew, if not Bianca herself, has had its admirers. See Cecil C. Seronsy, “‘Supposes’ as the Unifying Theme in The Taming of the Shrew,” Shakespeare Quarterly 14 (1963): 15-30. A relatively recent exception to the general habit of discussing Bianca only in passing is Thomas Moisan, “Interlinear Trysting and ‘household stuff’: The Latin Lesson and the Domestication of Learning in The Taming of the Shrew,” Shakespeare Studies 23 (1995): 100-119.

3. See the commentary on Heroides I in Ovid, Heroides: Select Epistles, ed. Peter E. Knox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 86-87.

4. A text of Gascoigne's Supposes is in Geoffrey Bullough's Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, I (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957), 111-58. With Seronsy, I think the importance of Gascoigne's play to Shakespeare's Shrew goes beyond its relationship to the Bianca intrigue. A Petruchio and a Litio are characters in Supposes. Petruchio, who never speaks, attends the man who will counterfeit the disguised servant's father; Litio is the servant of the disguised gentleman suitor's actual father. In Shrew, Petruchio is friends with Hortensio, the extra suitor to Bianca, who in disguise takes the name Litio.

5. If, as I take it to be, the anonymous quarto play A Pleasant Conceited Historie, called The taming of a Shrew is an adaptation of Shakespeare's Shrew, its response to the Bianca business is to change it entirely to an intrigue involving the wooing of two sisters, one mild and the other shrewish, thereby setting off the shrew-taming business more emphatically and arranging from the start the set of three women needed for the last act's final test. The text of this play has been recently reprinted in facsimile by the Malone Society (1998), edited by Stephen Roy Miller. See Miller's fine essay, “The Taming of a Shrew and the Theories; or, ‘Though this be badness, yet there is method in't,’” in Textual Formations and Reformations, eds. Laurie E. Maguire and Thomas L. Berger (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998), 251-63. Adaptations of the Shakespearean Shrew are generally inclined to reduce the Bianca intrigue to make more time for the taming. John Lacy's Sauny the Scot, or the Taming of the Shrew (1667), revises the F1 version of Shrew by streamlining the Bianca business in ways I will describe, to some extent, below and using Petruchio's servant Sauny (Lacy's role) in a considerably more elaborate taming business. Subsequent Shrew adaptations through the eighteenth century (James Worsdale's A Cure for a Scold, 1735, and David Garrick's Catharine and Petruchio, 1756) shorten the play, with the Bianca intrigue minimized. The Woman's Prize is remarkable, then, for its attention to Bianca. Equally responsive to the complex double intrigue of Shakespeare's Shrew, though imitative of it to very different effect, is Ben Jonson's Epicoene, or The Silent Woman, the subtitle of which suggests that Jonson, too, had his eye on what Shakespeare was doing with Bianca. A number of features, most obviously the name of the character Moroso, suggests that Epicoene also influenced The Woman's Prize.

6. “Regulation” is Theobald's word in his 1733 edition to describe his disposition of the speech headings in 3.1. See my essay “The Rowe Editions of 1709/1714 and 3.1 of The Taming of the Shrew,” in Reading Readings: Essays on Shakespeare Editing in the Eighteenth Century,” ed. Joanna Gondris (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998), 244-67.

7. I confess to an interest, as well, in F2's 3.1. The change introduced there is remarkable for two reasons. In F1, two successive speeches (TLN 1347-51 and 1352-53; 3.1.54-58 and 59-60) are assigned to Hortensio. F2 effects, probably mechanically, a correction of this anomaly by giving the second of these speeches to Bianca. This means that it is Bianca, not Hortensio, who tells Lucentio to withdraw: “You may go walk, and give me leave a while, / My Lessons make no musicke in three parts.” It is interesting to imagine Bianca saying this speech; and it interesting to realize that the passage, as printed in F2, was reprinted in F3 and F4, so readers of the play in folio for over fifty years saw Bianca in this light. See my essay, “The Rowe Editions of 1709/1714,” 250-52. In working out the interpretations that all of the versions in which these two scenes have appeared in print can sustain, I am indebted to two of my undergraduate students, now alumni, of Colgate University, Jeffrey Kaczorowski and Sebastian Trainor. My comments on Shrew 4.2 below are indebted in particular to the latter's direction of a little production that brought that scene in its earliest form to life for me.

8. A facsimile of the 1698 printing of Sauny the Scot was printed by Cornmarket Press, 1969. A modern text of the play is available in the Everyman anthology Shakespeare Made Fit: Restoration Adaptations of Shakespeare, ed. Sandra Clark (London: J. M. Dent, 1997), 3-78.

9. The modern text of Heroides, I.33-36 (I am quoting it from Knox's Cambridge edition), differs from the Latin of F1. H. J. Oliver makes helpful comments about the variations in his notes to his new Oxford edition (1984) of The Taming of the Shrew: “Shakespeare may have intended Lucentio's Latin to be bad; or perhaps Shakespeare was quoting from a different text of Ovid … or from memory” (158). The slight difference between what Lucentio first quotes in the Latin and what Bianca quotes back (she changes steterat to staterat) is probably not significant; but the superior way she breaks the Latin periods to insert the English words suggests that she repeats the exercise in a tone of correction.

10. “Conster” appears seven times in the canon of Shakespeare's works, and the synonym of “construe,” meaning “interpret,” sometimes in the sense of “translate,” ordinarily fits each context. There is no reason to assume, as the Oxford English Dictionary does, that in this passage in Shrew it is used in a more limited sense of “construe”: “3[a]. Gram., To analyse or trace the grammatical construction of a sentence; to take its words in such an order as to show the meaning of the sentence; spec., to do this in the study of a foreign and especially a classical language, adding a word for word translation; hence, loosely, to translate orally a passage in an ancient or foreign author.” To take the word in this sense is to assume that Lucentio and Bianca are pretending to do one thing—that is, parsing the passage—and actually doing something quite different—conveying their own messages that have nothing to do with the Latin words. To anyone who would recognize the quoted lines, what is going on is interpretation, that is, translation, in a wittier sense. The passage is being moved from one rhetorical place to another; that is, it is being played upon or used as a pretext for invention. Lucentio uses Ovid's Penelope's description of a report of the Trojan War to assert that he is nobler than he appears to be, as was Ulysses at his homecoming. Bianca's reply enacts Penelope's notorious wariness of strangers and their claims. See Oliver's notes to this passage and Moisan's analysis of it for readings of its implications based on the line assignments in the modern text.

11. See Ovid, Metamorphoses, XIII.1-399, especially ll. 21-33 and 140-61.

12. The coarseness of some of the dialogue of The Woman's Prize is one of its most conspicuous features. I do not agree with those commentators who think that The Woman's Prize is bawdier than the Shrew; but I agree that the bawdiness of the later play appears more insistent and obvious to modern eyes.

13. Lacy changes the Latin lesson to one involving a French text, “de ver fine Story in de Varle of Mounsieur Appollo, And Madomoselle Daphne” (p. 14 in the Cornmarket facsimile). The change may have been a concession to an audience he could not expect to appreciate the references to Ovid, but it is also true that it accords with a Bianca modeled on a very different mythological figure. The reference to Daphne emphasizes Winlove's pursuit and sets up the sudden transformation of Bianca at the end into something other than what inspired his passion.

14. There is no dialogue to explain the direction that opens the modern 5.1 (TLN 2379-80), which begins with Lucentio and Bianca meeting Biondello, who tells them that the priest is ready: “Enter Biondello, Lucentio and Bianca, Gremio is out before.” At TLN 2245-49 (4.4.62-66), Baptista sends Cambio to his house to bid Bianca make herself ready for a wedding, while he signs papers at Tranio/Lucentio's house. He fears that conducting the business in his own house will be interrupted by Gremio (TLN 2233-36; 4.4.51-54). Lucentio (Cambio) apparently does something to make the interruption likely by arranging to meet Gremio where the agreement is being drawn (Gremio says, “I marvaile Cambio comes not all this while,” TLN 2386; 5.1.7); but the old man either does not see him enter or does not recognize him because he is in different (Lucentio) clothes. The interruption occurs nonetheless, however, caused not by Gremio but by the unanticipated arrival of Vincentio, Lucentio's actual father. Compare Ralph Alan Cohen's discussion of this stage direction in “Looking for Cousin Ferdinand: The Value of F1 Stage Directions for a Production of The Taming of the Shrew,” Textual Formations and Reformations, 268. The curious wording of an F1 stage direction at the opening of the final scene also seems to have made Tranio's status at the end of Shrew not altogether clear to some editors. The direction reads, “Enter Baptista, Vincentio, Gremio, the Pedant, Lucentio, and Bianca. Tranio, Biondello Grumio, and Widdow: The Servingmen with Tranio bringing in a Banquet.” The 1709 Rowe edition, notoriously careful about stage directions, prints, “Enter Baptista, Vincentio, Gremio, Pedant, Lucentio. Bianca, Tranio, Biondello, Petruchio, Katharina, Grumio, Hortensio and Widow. Tranio's Servants bringing in a Banquet.” The full stop between Lucentio and Bianca is interesting. Theobald prints, “Enter Baptista, Vincentio, Gremio, Pedant, Lucentio, Bianca, Tranio, Biondello, Petruchio, Catharina, Grumio, Hortensio, and Widow. Tranio's servants bringing in a banquet.” Tranio's status in The Woman's Prize is, as we shall see, more gentlemanly; and it may have made his promotion more likely to Rowe and Theobald.

15. Edward Capell first printed bitter for better; and the change is accepted by most modern editors. The new Oxford text is an exception.

16. See the comments on “Gremio is out before” in note 14 above. Tranio's assumed character as Lucentio has, from the start, made his protestations of dutiful loyalty to his master liable to be construed as expressions of self-interest. In the first scene, for example, Biondello is instructed that he must, in front of others, call Tranio and Lucentio by each other's names:

    LUC.

    And not a jot of Tranio in your mouth,

    Tranio is chang'd into Lucentio.

    BION.

    The better for him, would I were so too.

    TRA.

    So could I 'faith boy, to have the next wish after, that Lucentio indeede had Baptistas yongest daughter.

    (TLN 544-49; 1.1.236-40)

    When the change-of-identity plan is first formulated, the text of Shrew is playfully ambiguous about whose idea it is (see TLN 488-515; 1.1.185-209); but by the time Bianca's wedding date to Lucentio (Tranio) is set by Baptista on the successful disposal of her sister, Tranio is clearly in charge of moving the plan forward (TLN 1511-31; 3.2.128-48).

17. In The Woman's Prize, the old-man suitor is the threatening one, as he is in Supposes, because the woman's father prefers him. Shrew's plot, in having both a young man (Hortensio) and an old man (Gremio) be rivals for the younger sister in addition to the lover-servant combination that will eventually win her, is unusually complex, and most adaptations simplify it. Lacy's Sauny the Scot has both Woodall (Gremio) and Geraldo counted well out by the middle of the play. There is only one rival suitor for the younger sister in both Worsdale's A Cure for a Scold and Garrick's Catharine and Petruchio, and neither of these adaptations has the successful suitor employ a servant who woos in his stead.

18. See essays by Smith and Bergeron cited in note 2 above.

19. These last two and a half lines are a variation on Beatrice's reply to Don Pedro at Much Ado, 2.1.323-25: “Hath your Grace ne'er a brother like you? Your father got excellent husbands, if a maid could come by them.” The trick of Byancha's troping of the line comes from this same scene in Much Ado. When Don Pedro subsequently tells Beatrice he thinks she was “out a' question … born in a merry hour,” she reminds him that no man was there to know that, the man's part of the business being over for some time: “No, sure, my lord, my mother cried” (2.1.332-34). Byancha likewise changes the emphasis from a father's getting to a mother's making.