The Tamer Tamed

17th Century London A-Z

To give you the flavor and feel of the time during which Fletcher and his contemporaries wrote, below is list of fun and random, but always enlightening facts regarding Elizabethan and Jacobean England and the people and society of that time.

Alms collectors: Recovered lunatics from Bedlam, equipped with horns to draw attention and badges to establish authority, were sent out in the streets to raise money for the hospital.

Beer: The oldest alcoholic beverage in the world dates back before ancient Greek theatre. In

England

and throughout

Europe

during the Middle Ages, the brewing of beer was considered “women’s work.” This had begun to change throughout

Europe

in the 15^th century or so, but in The Tamer Tamed, the women are still ironically referred to as “brewing knavery.”

Cuckold: In addition to describing a man whose wife has cheated on him, “cuckold” can also be used as a verb (“My wife has cuckolded me”). The word derives from the cuckoo bird: the females habitually lay their eggs in other birds’ nests, which birds are then deceived into raising chicks that are not their own.

Strangely, cuckolded men were always associated with horns, both in literature (see The Merry Wives of Windsor for such a reference) and artwork. Most scholars fail to explain this association, but at least one source conjectures as to why a man grew such pointy appendages due to his wife’s infidelity: the imaginary horns have their origins in the old custom of cutting the spurs off of cockerels when the young roosters are castrated, then planting the growths in the comb (the fleshy outgrowths atop their heads), where they develop into hornlike features that make it easy to distinguish the castrated male chickens (capons) from other fowl. These capons were traditional symbols of cuckoldry. 

Devonshiring: The cutting off and burning of old pasture that would create fertile land was a common occupation in 17^th century

England

. The worker would use a shallow cutting spade that he would push along by a log placed across his thighs. For this grueling work, he would earn a mere £1 per acre. Farming was still the dominant occupation in

England

from 1600 to 1750 despite the onset of urbanization and industrialization at this time. The most widely utilized processes were malting (making grain, usually barley, into malt for alcoholic beverages), oatmeal, and tanning (converting hides or skins into leather), and some corn milling.

Eggs: Elizabethans didn’t know whether the chicken came first or not, but in the English Renaissance, eggs were considered a powerful aphrodisiac, a kind of 17^th century version of Viagra. In The Tamer Tamed, Petruccio also uses muscatel and buttered parsnips as aphrodisiacs. Yum!

Fire: On the night of September 2, 1666, a small fire broke out in a baker's shop in

Pudding Lane

,

London

, possibly due to the carelessness of a maid.

Whatever the cause, the results were disastrous; the fire spread quickly and soon the whole building was aflame. In the tight-packed streets of

London

, where each building competed for space, the blaze soon became an inferno. Fanned by an easterly wind, the fire spread with horrifying speed, feeding on the tar and pitch commonly used to build houses.

The Great Fire of London devastatingly destroyed much of the city’s center, but thankfully it also killed off most of the black rats and fleas that carried the plague bacillus (aka the Bubonic Plague). 

Gewgaws, or trinkets: They weren’t just for Valentine’s Day – lovers like Roland and Livia in The Tamer Tamed would exchange baubles and gifts of all kinds, including bracelets, rings, and locks of hair, all year round.

Hobbies: Sunday afternoons in

England

were active with various sports including wrestling, archery, music, and dancing. Hawking and hunting were the chief amusements of the rich, and while King James publicly condemned football (soccer) and golf, he encouraged the play of bowls, an ancient lawn bowling game whose contemporary cousins include bocce and curling. The English also enjoyed je de paume which is essentially tennis without rackets and still remains popular today.

I’th’cut, or “in the fashion”: Neither formal nor day wear altered considerably for either sex during the 16^th and 17^th centuries. Small changes were made, but all clothing very much represented what we would imagine original Shakespearean costume to look like.

            Women’s Fashion

The Elizabeth I (Hardwick House), portrait to the right depicts Queen Elizabeth in 1592.  The style of her dress, while popularized during her reign, remained in fashion during King James’s reign. Such dresses were comprised of a long, pointed, and rigid bodice, and a wide skirt that was supported by hip bolsters in the drum farthingale (the platter-shaped object around the waist that caused the skirt to fall straight down). Wearing wide sleeves, low necklines, and ruffs framing their faces, ladies no longer wore caps, but rather their hair was styled high with decorative ribbons and feathers.

Men’s Fashion

Gentleman wore suits with softer lines than previously. The short-waisted doublet (a close-fitting outer garment) with long skirts boasting slits on the torso and sleeve, allowed for easy movement, and the knee-length breeches were supported by hooks inside the waistline. The ribbon “points” at the waist and knee (shown here) originated in the lacing hose supports of the late medieval period. The lace-trimmed ruff fell to the shoulders and the hair was often long with a lovelock: a lock of hair hanging separately from the rest, usually tied with ribbon and typically worn by courtiers.  The portrait (from the 1560s) is of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester.

For pictures and further descriptions of 17^th century English    

        dress, please visit:  http://www.historic-uk.com

Jonson, Ben (1572-1637): A famous dramatist, poet, and actor, Jonson is still well known today for his satirical plays, the most famous of which are Volpone and The Alchemist. As Master of the Revels for Charles I, Jonson penned court masques that were performed for foreign dignitaries visiting the king and his wife, Queen Anne of Denmark.

King James I inherited the throne from Queen Elizabeth I in 1603. James was the son of Mary, Queen of Scots, whom

Elizabeth

had executed in 1587, and so

Elizabeth

made peace with her rival’s family by recognizing James as her successor. James’s reign is called the Jacobean era (after his Latin name Jacobus), and he commissioned the famous “King James Bible,” which was completed in 1611, the year The Tamer Tamed was first performed. The Tamer Tamed, not surprisingly, has considerably more scatological humor than the Bible.

Liquor: Numerous alcoholic beverages were popular in

London

during the English Renaissance. The potent potables mentioned in The Tamer Tamed include muscatel (a sweet dessert wine), metheglin (a spiced—and sometimes medicated—mead), sack (white wine—not to be confused with Japanese sake), and balderdash (a mixture of liquors: beer and milk, or beer and wine, or some other unsavory combination).

Morris Dance: a British folk dance dating from the late fifteenth century. Often the women who dance wear anklets made of bells. The dance is characterized by groups of dancers who execute rhythmic step maneuvers and sometimes wield sticks or handkerchiefs (see picture to right).

Neats Tongue to Hash, or a dish of cow tongues: To make this common 17^th century meal, simply follow the recipe included in The Whole Duty of a Woman: Or a Guide to the Female Sex (1696):

Boil, blanch, and slice the tongues and put the pieces into a pipkin (small pot) with raisins, mace (a spice similar to nutmeg), three or four blades, blanched almonds, and claret. Boil all together, and add a bit of sweet butter, some verjuice (sour fruit juice), and a little sugar. Strain a ladle or two of the liquor, and beat it up with the yolk of two or three eggs. Place it on a sippet (bread soaked in gravy) and garnish with slices of lemons, parsley, and pickled barberries.

YUMMY!  For more delicious recipes and other information on traditional English dishes, go to:

http://www.godecookery.com/

http://historicfood.com/

Occupational structure of

London

was highly gendered, with women being concentrated in the food, drink, and provisions trades, as well as textile manufacturing.

Plague: Known as the Black Death, the Bubonic Plague was a horrifying disease. The victim's skin turned black in patches, the glands in the groin inflamed, and the victim also experienced compulsive vomiting, swollen tongue, and splitting headaches. It was a truly ghastly way to die.

Incubation took only four to six days, and when the plague appeared in a household, the house was sealed, condemning the whole family to a horrible fate. A painted red cross on the door marked these homes, and at night the corpses were brought out in answer to the cry “Bring out your dead” and put in a cart and taken away to the plague pits.

The plague started in the East and quickly spread throughout

Europe

. It began slowly, first overtaking

London

’s poor, but at its peak, over 30,000 people died in one terrible summer.

Quack doctors were popular throughout the 14^th – 18^th centuries. Also called mountebanks, quacks listened to people’s ailments, pretended to know exactly what their symptoms implied, and then offered completely ludicrous medical advice. For example, did you know that to remove freckles all a girl has to do is wash her face with elderflower water in the wane of the moon?  Who knew cosmetic surgery could be so simple!

Ring a Ring O' Roses: The nursery rhyme is said to be a macabre parody on the horrors of the Bubonic Plague. One of the first signs of the plague was a ring of rose-colored spots, and many believed that the protection against this horrific disease was a posy of herbs. Sneezing was taken as a sure sign that you were about to die, and the last line of the poem ("We all fall down") omits the word, "dead!”  Creepy.

Shrew or Scold: The historic definition of the shrew (as in Taming of the) is a poor woman who is a social outcast and likely to vent her frustrations to the nearest authority figure. Essentially, shrews and scolds (basically equivalent terms) were outspoken, strong women who had the guts to speak out against the patriarchal powers of their time. Because of their nerve, they were oftentimes punished in the same manner as “witches”: strapped to a chair (a “cucking stool” – remember the discussion of the cuckold?) on a cart and paraded through town to ensure humiliation, they were then dunked into a river numerous times. Another popular torture was the use of the “scold’s bridle,” a metal device secured to the head that painfully bound down the tongue so that the woman could not speak (her mind). Doesn’t exactly make you want to travel back in time to Shakespeare’s day, now does it?

Tea: What would the English be without their tea? Incredibly, this quintessential British drink was not introduced to Europe and the UK until the early 1600s, though legend has it that the Chinese invented it as early as 2737 B.C.E. Coffee and chocolate also came into European fashion around the same time in the late 16^th and early 17^th centuries. To make chocolate, cocoa beans were lightly crushed, boiled for hours with white sugar, cinnamon, Mexican pepper, cloves, aniseed, almonds, orange-flower water, and vanilla straws. It was then enriched with milk and beaten eggs. Such fine ingredients and intricate processing clearly made chocolate a luxury that only the gentry could afford: in fact, it was so extraordinarily popular with the wealthy that a lady would often have a dish of chocolate with her morning cup of tea.

Usher & 17^th century servants: The usher brought the dishes up from the kitchen, directed the garnishing from the sideboard, and if bread or beer was desired on the table, he would call for it. For unexpected surprises, he always had a boy posted at the chamber door, ready to run errands, and he saw to it that the best dressed servants attended the lords and ladies of the house, while the other servants remained below and out of sight.

Virgin Queen: Elizabeth I (reigned 1558-1603): Daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn,

Elizabeth

was on the throne during a golden age when both Shakespeare and Fletcher were penning their plays. Extremely popular, it is said that her union with the people substituted for the marriage she never had. Both greatly respected and feared, she famously stated, “I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a King.”

Films about the Virgin Queen and the time of her reign: Elizabeth (1998), Elizabeth: the Golden Age (2007), Shakespeare in Love (1998).

Women were both better and worse off during the reigns of Queen Elizabeth and King James. With the rise of the Church of England, the convents in

Great Britain

were dismantled and with them, many opportunities for the education of women. However, the roles of women and men in society, as evidenced by The Tamer Tamed, were the subject of much public debate.

X-rated: Puritans and other moralists wrote treatises and preached loudly against the theatres, both in the 17^th century and later. Some of the reasons given for their anti-theatrical prejudices were that the theatres often served as brothels. Such things really did go on at the theatres, as members of the oldest profession would meet their clients during the show and then serve as intermission entertainment.

Yeoman: In

England

, he was a farmer who cultivates his own land.

In addition, Yeoman Warders, now commonly referred to as Beefeaters (see picture to right), have guarded the

Tower

of

London

since its construction in the 11^th century. In early times, they were charged with guarding the Tower’s prominent prisoners and assisting in their punishment, which often involved torture. Today, they act primarily as historians and guides, and live with their families in the Tower so that they may attend to duties at any time of the day or night. Amazingly, it was not until 2007 that the first female warder was installed.

For a musical twist on the Yeoman Warder, see Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Yeomen of the Guard, or The Merryman and His Maid.  One of the darkest of the famous duo’s works, this operetta tells the story of a colonel who is sentenced to be beheaded in the Tower and his bride-to-be who only wants to marry him so that she can inherit his fortunes once he’s dead.

Zennor and other Parishes: A Parish is the smallest unit of the Church organization and can refer to a township or a cluster of townships that maintain their own church (the parish church). A parish has its own priest, vicar, or clergyman to whom the tithes and ecclesiastical dues are paid.

To learn more about Zennor in particular, and to view the beautiful land that inspired the artwork of Terry Frost and Patrick Heron, and the literary masterpieces of D.H. Lawrence, visit that Parish’s official website: http://www.zennor.org/.

Notes from the Dramaturg

More Than Shakespeare

A Note from the Dramaturg of The Tamer Tamed

Dramaturg Aaron C. Thomas argues on behalf of the wild and bawdy John Fletcher: While Uncle Willy is the most prolific and beloved of the Renaissance playwrights, he certainly isn’t the only one – and he might not be the most fun either.

Interest in the writings of William Shakespeare has grown exponentially over the last four hundred years. His plays are done all over the world and in every conceivable language. Productions range from modern re-imaginings to classical adaptations. In the midst of all of this excitement about the Bard, however, the work of many of Shakespeare’s contemporaries has faded into the background. One such writer is the man who took over Shakespeare’s job as chief playwright for the King’s Men when the Bard retired: John Fletcher.

For the first hundred and fifty or so years after his death, John Fletcher was immensely popular, but the reputations of Fletcher and his partner Francis Beaumont began to wane in the 19th century, when British society under Queen Victoria saw Fletcher’s work as altogether too irreverent, too morally lax, and too sexy for stiff-upper-lip theatre patrons.

All that changed in 2002 when the Royal Shakespeare Company in London began to mount Fletcher’s plays, beginning with The Island Princess and following it up with The Tamer Tamed. Their 2003 production was the RSC’s first staging of the play in its history. In the United States, productions of The Tamer Tamed have been equally rare. Florida State is only the second American university ever to stage the play.

The truth is we’ve all been missing out! Partially based on Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, an ancient Greek comedy where the women of Athens refuse to satisfy their husbands’ sexual desires until they stop the Peloponnesian War, The Tamer Tamed is a triumph.  Fletcher’s play, it turns out, is a clever, endlessly funny turning of the tables on Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. For in Fletcher’s play, instead of taming his scolding bride, Petruccio is himself tamed.

But is The Tamer Tamed a feminist play, or is Fletcher making as much fun of the women as he is of the men? Scholars divide on the issue. Certainly a lot of the laughs in the play are at the women’s expense, but (without giving away the ending) perhaps audience members can judge for themselves how much of a feminist John Fletcher is. The questions I’ll pose are these: Which of the sexes is cleverest in the play? Which of the sexes gets more of what they want?

Whichever you decide is the answer, it’s hard to deny that the play is hilarious, raunchy, and smart. As our love for William Shakespeare continues, we can perhaps find room for a few more plays by Mr. Shakespeare’s contemporaries. They’re certainly out there. The Tamer Tamed is just one such gem in a treasure-trove of Renaissance riches.

So what’s The Tamer Tamed all about?

A synopsis of Fletcher’s play

By Aaron C. Thomas

In the early 1600s, about twenty years after William Shakespeare penned The Taming of the Shrew, John Fletcher wrote a sequel to that woman-taming play and turned the tables on Shakespeare’s main character. In Fletcher’s The Tamer Tamed, Petruccio’s shrewish wife Katharine has died and Petruccio has decided to marry Maria, a young, quiet woman who loves him very much. But Maria has other plans for Petruccio. Aided by Katharine’s sister Bianca and the other townswomen, Maria sets out to tame her husband and to fight for equality between the sexes. The women fortify the house and keep Petruccio and his friends out, refusing to make love to the men unless they agree to their terms.

Of course, it couldn’t be that simple – nor would it be a Renaissance comedy – without more romantic complications. Maria’s sister Livia and her young lover Roland want to marry, but Livia’s father wishes her to wed Gremio, the rich old man from The Taming of the Shrew. However, the clever and industrious women always triumph in The Tamer Tamed; Bianca and Livia cunningly trick the older men and true love conquers all.

Since Shakespeare was still writing his own plays when Fletcher penned The Tamer Tamed, it is more than likely that the Bard himself saw the play. Shakespeare and Fletcher, in fact, wrote three plays together after The Tamer Tamed premiered in London. And though Shakespeare’s original, The Taming of the Shrew, was popular in its day, London theatregoers enjoyed Fletcher’s The Tamer Tamed even more, and it’s easy to see why: The Tamer Tamed is bawdy, witty, and fun, and the comic battle of the sexes is as timeless as Shakespeare himself.

Think The Tamer Tamed sounds like fun?  Here are a few other works you may enjoy:

Lysistrata by Aristophanes: Resourceful women cunningly withhold sex from their warring men, who foolishly refuse to succumb without a fight.  The result is an uproarious battle of the sexes in this classical Greek comedy.

The Two Noble Kinsmen by William Shakespeare & John Fletcher: Their first collaboration is a play about two friends named Arcite and Palamon, who fall in love with Emilia, the sister of Hippolya, queen of the Amazons. The two friends then fight to the death in this late romance.

Adam’s Rib: This 1949 film starring Hollywood’s royal couple, Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, is a classic battle of the sexes from director George Cukor.

The Witches of Eastwick: John Updike’s classic novel, the 1987 film with Jack Nicholson, Cher, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Susan Sarandon, as well as the 2000 West End musical starring Ian McShane, all paint a picture of women who find inner strength by battling a he-devil.

The First Wives Club: Starring Diane Keaton, Bette Midler, and Goldie Hawn, this movie is the story of three women who enthusiastically take revenge on their ex-husbands and their new trophy wives.

10 Things I Hate about You: Director Gil Junger’s modern film adaptation of Taming of the Shrew starring Heath Ledger and Julia Stiles (as Patrick Verona and Kat Stratford) takes place at Padua High and is chock-full of witty banter.

A Word from the Director

The Tamer Tamed’s director, William Martin, tells us what drew him to the project.

The play was Cameron Jackson's idea. It is he who first suggested the play to me. I had never read it, although I, of course, knew of John Fletcher. It was a perfect fit for me, because of my experience with directing Shakespeare and my interest in his work. I think I was particularly drawn to the show because of my love for Taming of the Shrew and its characters, which make their reappearance in Fletcher's The Tamer Tamed.

Coming Attractions on the SOT Blog....

Each Monday a new entry will be added, so be sure to bookmark this blog and check back frequently for more fun and informative postings about what’s new at FSU!  Future entries will further illuminate the SOT’s continuing work on The Tamer Tamed and may include:

•  Fun facts about Shakespeare and Fletcher’s London

•  A “What’s On” of the 17^th century London theatre scene:  what people were seeing and

   where they were seeing it

•  Gender relations and the role of the “shrew” in early modern England 

Mark your calendars!

•  February 22 – March 2, 2008: FSU’s production of The Tamer Tamed

•  February 23, 2008, 1-4 p.m.:  Symposium for The Tamer Tamed at FSU

•  February 25 & 26, 2008:  Actors from the London Stage present William Shakespeare's

   Taming of the Shrew at Turner Auditorium at Tallahassee Community College