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Hi Friends,
It is time! It is the best time of the year! I don’t mean back-to-school, for those of you who are parents…I mean the pub date of By Any Other Name! My new novel arrives 8/20 and I will be all over the US to talk about it. In honor of Emilia Bassano, whose story I’m telling, here is one last sneak peek of my research, again dissecting a Shakespearean play to give you proof that perhaps Willie S didn’t write all his own stuff.
Today’s example comes from The Taming of the Shrew — a play that has been resurrected in shows like Kiss Me Kate and movies like Ten Things I Hate About You. The original play, a comedy, is simple: when a suitor is attracted to sweet, compliant Bianca, her father insists that Bianca’s elder sister – the brash, outspoken Kate – has to be married first. Enter Petruchio, the man who decides to take on that challenge by spending the entirety of the play breaking the will of his wild fiancée. For years, scholars have questioned whether the play is meant to be taken at face value – if the Elizabethan audience would have clapped heartily at the thought of a woman broken into submission by a man – or if the message was tongue-in-cheek, and meant to call out the idiocy of a patriarchal society that demanded women be subservient. At the very end of the play, Kate counsels other women to “lower your pride – there’s nothing you can do. Place your hands below your husband’s foot. This duty my hand is ready to do, if he wants me to.”
So which is it? A reminder that women should submit? Or a giant eye-roll at that premise? Well, part of that probably depends on whether you think Shakespeare wrote it – or someone else. Shakespeare, as you might recall me saying, had two daughters he never taught to read or write. They signed with a mark. Emilia Bassano, on the other hand, was better educated than most men in society – with no socially acceptable outlet for her intelligence or her creativity.
Most people do not know that The Taming of the Shrew was a revision of an earlier version of the play called Taming of A Shrew. In this initial ur-draft, there were three sisters, not two – named Kate, Phylema, and Emilia. Their father is named Alphonso. The setting is Greece.
In the revised version, the father, Alphonso, is renamed Baptista – which happens to be the name of Emilia Bassano’s father. The setting is changed to Italy, where Emilia’s family was from. One sister is cut from the story, leaving the troublesome Kate, and the sweet, biddable Bianca – who, in the first draft, was named Emilia (It is worth pointing out that neither Emilia nor Baptista were common names of the time). Finally, the new version of the play was peppered with a hundred allusions to music and a plot featuring false identities.
At the end of the revised Taming of the Shrew, Petruchio has worn down his shrew of a wife to a point where she displays utter obedience, coming when she is called. It is this that has enabled Kate’s sister Bianca – the rule follower – to be married to her suitor. But when Bianca’s husband calls her – she doesn’t budge. Kate’s obeisance has awakened Bianca’s resistance.
Bianca, who in the previous draft, was named...Emilia.
Years after The Taming of the Shrew was first performed, Emilia was the first woman in England to publish a book of poetry. One poem – “A Defense of Eve” – questioned man’s dominion over women. After all, if men were by nature so much stronger and wiser than women, when Eve offered that apple couldn’t Adam have said, “Nah, I’m not hungry”? For the time, this was radical, proto-feminist thought. But if Emilia was the one who penned Taming of The Shrew, then it wasn’t the first time she used the patriarchy’s own BS to point out how ridiculous men’s expectations of women are.
I do think there is enough evidence to suggest that Emilia wrote Shrew – not Shakespeare. And I believe that it’s not a play about how women should be biddable, but rather a comment on how fragile men are – because they can’t accept the thought of women being intellectually equal.
As I prepare for this tour, I keep thinking about what it means to be a woman in America these days. On one hand, we are watching our rights be stripped away. On the other, we have our second female presidential candidate. We are literally at a crossroads. Although this book reaches back further in time than any of my other novels...it is probably the most CURRENT and TIMELY thing I’ve ever written. I can’t wait to share it with you — the countdown starts NOW.
XO,
Jodi
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