ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to demonstrate the play's value not only for its delightful theatricality and more empowered female characters, but also for its refreshing contrast with Shakespearean approaches to foreign cultures. Even if one accepts the suggestion that Shakespeare somehow improved upon Aretino's view of women, the fact that Jonson left in place—even, arguably, enhanced—the misogyny of Il Marescalco, while also uncritically expanding upon antifeminist "taming" rhetoric saturating Shrew, creates guilt-by-association argument that tempers feminist enthusiasm for the latter. The chapter also aims to reframe ideological contrast between Shakespeare's Shrew and Fletcher's Tamer Tamedby elucidating a kind of proto-transnationalism or cosmopolitanism in Fletcher's play that reinforces its more progressive message about female mobility, speech, and learning. It describes a pair of recent readings of Shrew in relation to Italian sources, the goal being to underscore subtle reinforcement of Shakespeare's misogyny and xenophobia that can arise from Shrew-centric approach to early modern Anglo-Italian debates on gender and power.
