Woman's Prize, or the Tamer Tamed

John Fletcher's audacious comedy takes Shakespeare's shrew-tamer and turns him into the punchline. Petruchio, the man who famously tamed Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew, has remarried and brought home a wife named Maria. But this wife is no passive maiden. She is clever, witty, and utterly unwilling to bow. When her cousin Bianca and sister Livia encourage her to resist the expected roles of wifehood, Maria declares war: she will not cook, clean, or submit. She'll stay in bed until Petruchio learns to treat her as an equal. The results are wildly, gleefully comic. Fletcher flips Shakespeare's original premise on its head, asking what happens when the tamer gets tamed. The play remains a startlingly modern-feeling satire of marriage and gender roles, proving that even in 1611, someone was asking whether the whole system was absurd. For readers who wish Katherina had fought back, or who love seeing powerful men brought low by their own hubris, this is the sequel you've been waiting for.