Shakespeare's "The Taming of Shrew" and Johnson's Epicoene: the women in the stocks

By some kind of devious poetic justice, although males in the Elizabethan-Jacobean period have definitely played the dominant role in every area of public affairs (a female monarch had just been a necessary evil), no matter how hard they tried or how much pain they inflicted, they could never fully control the women in their households, let alone anywhere else. Fathers might impose their will on daughters, restrain their movements, deny them their right to a proper education, arrange their marriages, punish them pitilessly if they refused to obey; husbands could do with their wives as they pleased, curb their spirit by any means at their disposal, forbid their access to any pleasant activity, curtail under false accusations what little freedom was considered their due; sons and brothers could bully their mothers and sisters into anything if that promoted their positions economically and socially. However, in the long run, short of actually murdering the whole female lot around them or having them killed, males would somehow or other ‘pay’ for their misdemeanours, since women whenever the opportunity arose and at their own peril would give as good as they got. In fact, some lenient God or, more probably, the Goddess of their ‘foremothers’ (forefathers would not apply under the circumstances) had given them a powerful weapon always there at their disposal –the clever and liberal use of their voices or rather tongues. And even the most hardened soldier would go to any lengths to avoid such a battle. Actually, the uneasy fear of female verbosity was so ingrained in men that books were written on the subject trying to encourage a more comely behaviour in women. Drama, too, handled the matter frequently with the deliberate aim of amus ing and correcting as The Taming of the Shrew and Epicoene bear witness, since both plays concern themselves with the relative merits and demerits of speech and silence in a woman. 1 All the quotations from Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew and Jonson’s Epicoene are taken from the Craig (1965) and Herford and Simpson (1965) editions respectively.