Modeling Gender Education in The Taming of the Shrew and The Tamer Tamed

The theatre, as opposed to grammar schools and universities, acted as a viable alternative educational space for early modern patrons—both male and female. ¹ Unlike the formal education of grammar schools and universities, limited strictly to men after the age of nine, theatre actively participated in the “social pedagogy” of the larger public, as scholar Darryll Grantley persuasively argues in his book, Wit’s Pilgrimage. ² Grantley posits that this social pedagogy occurs in five intersections between theatre and education: the motif of education in the aristocratic drama of the 16th century; education and theatre as rising institutions; education and the playwrights; education and the audience; and representations of learning on the public stage. ³ The reflexivity between education and theatre occurred in the ways they investigated differing pedagogies of the period, such as corporal punishment and rhetorical debate. Moreover, the very architecture of the Elizabethan playhouse reflected the theatre’s instructive potential, its “eikastic education” as coined by Dennis S. Brooks, by creating a “model classroom” wherein a lecture/play is staged in front of the students/spectators. Additionally, within this eikastic education, Brooks cites that “teachers seek to allure students to virtue through worthy models found in art.” ⁴