ABSTRACT
The discourse about the theatre's usefulness as a pedagogical tool continued in two influential plays of the period. William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew and its sequel, John Fletcher's The Tamer Tamed: or, The Woman's Prize, explore theatre's instructive potential by explicitly portraying how gender roles can be learned and taught by each sex. Brooks remains optimistic that the educational revolution of early modern England began to incorporate Montaigne and Vives's view of pleasure accompanying the learning process. Barbara Hodgdon writes that Shrew and its embedded lessons of gender education are a spectacle always endowed with enough accumulated cultural capital to enable women readers or spectators, stranded between incommensurable identities, to buy into its normative gender economy. The masculine dominance model accumulates and gains interest in the normative gender economy of Shrew, Shakespeare gives Petruchio the focus of gender education.
