In Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew (1590–1592), Katherine is compared, directly and indirectly on many occasions, to a horse to be ridden by her husband, Petruccio. Petruccio refers to Katherine as “my horse”; elsewhere, she is likened to a “Hilding of a diuellish spirit” and a “Iade.”1 All of these terms underline a derogatory association with horses. Nevertheless, readers often miss the equine references in The Shrew and in other texts of the period partly because editors tend to pass over the more veiled allusions to horses. Jean Howard, for example, in her notes to The Shrew in The Norton Shakespeare, explains that a “Hilding” is a “worthless creature.” In fact, a more common Renaissance definition of the term was actually “A worthless or vicious beast, esp. a horse” (OED 1). In the context of the construction of Katherine in the play’s first two acts—where, in Derek Traversi’s words, Kate is marked out by “all the stubbornness she displays”—the OED’s “vicious” seems more persuasive than Howard’s “worthless.”2 Such downplaying of the equine connotations could be seen to characterize the work of critics on the play generally. Linda Woodbridge negates the notion that Katherine is compared to a horse in The Shrew:
Rather than comparing a wife to a recalcitrant horse . . .
Shakespeare . . . softens [the taming metaphor] . . . by
creating the metaphor of a falcon, an animal which
although subhuman is a primate among birds and is
allowed a certain amount of autonomy and aggressiveness.3
The suggestion that the play invests in the implications of bird-management discourse is well taken, but to minimize The Shrew’s equine references is to skid over the play’s insights into the gendered nature of the horse-rider relationship in early modern culture. An engagement with allusions to horse riding is essential for a nuanced study of gender construction in the play. These references are not voluminous in numerical terms—but they always appear at moments when a female figure’s character and relationship to a male figure is being formulated.
Previous critics have realized how seminal is the play’s equine discourse. But there has been a wide disparity in their assessments of the consequences of the gendered registers of horse breaking and riding. This, in itself, indicates the essentially ambiguous nuances of the equine language as used in The Shrew and in some other contemporary dramas. Joan Hartwig argues that the play presents Katherine’s capitulation as a natural, holy wonder, staging the representation through a forceful metaphor of a rider properly handling a horse:
When the rider is able to keep his mount under
his control, both the horse and rider are figures of
nobility . . . [a] complimentary relationship that
accrues honour to both is what Petruccio and
Katherine have achieved.4
Hartwig here offers a positive reading of the discourses of horse domination. It is an optimistic reading in which no participant is denigrated. Hartwig’s is also an assuredly patriarchal interpretation of the work—the use of the gender-specific “his” seems to imply that it is natural for the riding figure in equine rhetoric to be male. But discourse or rhetoric that favors one sex is never natural. It is always to some extent constructed, made. By contrast to Hartwig, Marianne Novy has a totally different reading of the Petruccio/rider and Katherine/horse relationship.5 Petruccio, Novy argues, fails to fuse amorously with Katherine and so has to use a metaphorical bridle to force his wife into a marriage. Broken like a recalcitrant horse, Katherine is savagely bullied into meekly bearing a domesticated but unequal relationship with a character who has failed to woo her without subjugation. For Novy, Katherine is broken and dishonored; Petruccio, meanwhile, breaks and is honored. This reading of Novy’s is far removed from the Hartwig notion that equine discourses convey honor to the married pair. My purpose in this chapter is not to offer a definitive reading of every equine reference in The Shrew but rather to tease out the implications of the gaps and absences in critics’ views by contextualizing the drama’s gendered complexion of horse riding registers and languages. To that end, the following plays—The Taming of a Shrew (circa 1591), Patient Grissill (1600), and Blurt, Master Constable (1601/2)—are read alongside The Shrew as texts with a comparably rich equine semantic investment.6 Viewed together, all four plays betray the shaping influence of the cultural systems in which their equine concerns are communicated. In particular, Renaissance horse riding manuals are enlisted to cast into relief the gendered features of dramatic representation.
To date, no criticism has engaged with the rhetoric of the woman-as-horse trope against the ideal relationship of horse and rider, as depicted in early Elizabethan horse riding manuals by such contemporary commentators as John Astley and Thomas Blundeville.7 This chapter argues that these manuals forge an all-male world, a world created through unwitting echoes of sexuality. Then, I argue that some conduct books of the period borrow language from metaphors of riding: masculine power is constituted through discourses of equine control. I go on to suggest that the chosen plays appropriate such languages and grammars in such a way that they sometimes take on board subversive possibilities—women, for instance, are occasionally seen themselves as holders of the reins (not their male masters, as in the riding manuals and conduct books). The final effect may, then, appear to be ambiguous. The final part of this piece argues that aggressive codes of metaphorical equine domination are sometimes dissonant and powerful—but not always. In fact, with reference to a Brome and Heywood play, The Late Lancashire Witches, the chapter eventually maintains that equine discourse allows scope for female agency and orthodoxy simultaneously. In the conclusion, therefore, I set out the implications that research into the complicated and varying gendering of the horse-rider relationship has for our reading of early modern power relationships between the sexes, as codified in these differing texts.
Dominating the Male Horse; Dominating the Woman
Thomas Blundeville’s 1560 manual on The Arte of Ryding and Breakinge Greate Horses contains many examples of how a recalcitrant horse may have its spirit broken, but a torture involving a cat is among the more elaborate corrective tricks. The horse will be mounted. Behind its rear legs a footman is to stand with a “shrewed catte” tied to a “long pole”—the cat’s legs and mouth will be able to move. When the horse begins to misbehave the footman is to
Thrust the Catte betwixt his [the horse’s] thyes so as she may scratche and bite him, somtime by the thighes, somtime by the rompe, and often times by the stones.8
The text assumes that the tied cat attacking the horse’s testicles will be female, the feline element anticipating the description of Katherine as a “wildcat” in The Shrew (I.ii.191). The femininity of the cat is striking because Blundeville’s book is an otherwise male-orientated work. A greater emphasis falls on the fact that manpower—signified by the evident phallicism of the “long pole”—fights the rebellious surliness of the horse, which is itself defined by masculinist terms. A female animal—the cat—plays a role defined by the most stringent containment, as it is bound and used as a useful object by the men. But the significant equine entity and the people that control its actions are male.
Like its rider, the horse is automatically assigned a masculine gender. As Anthony Dent has noted, “In upper class circles it was unthinkable for a gentleman to ride a mare.”9 There was, no doubt, a practical reason for this—a colt would be naturally faster and stronger than a filly. Nevertheless, there were suggestions, Dent maintains, of an inappropriate sexual symbolism in a male rider riding a female horse. Indeed, the prevalence of Elizabethan bestiality suits against men who had allegedly copulated with mares may hint at why it was considered inappropriate for men to ride female horses.10 It is a bit far-fetched to think that Elizabethan men would not ride mares because of a conscious fear of a vague link to quasi-sodomitical practice; rather, it was simply that the image of a man controlling a colt presented a more powerfully masculine image than a man riding a smaller mare. The horse is always referred to as “he” in Blundeville’s manual. The horse to be tamed is also assumed to be male in John Astley’s 1584 treatise on The Art of Riding. The Astley text is generally less brutal than Blundeville’s but makes clear the domineering intent behind horse breaking and riding:
You must winne him with gentle and curteous dealing, whereby he may hope for rest and quietnesse: for by that meanes he will be more readie and willing to doo whatsoeuer you will haue him.11
It is a clear relationship: the man on top dominates the male horse below. The horse will function only to “doo the will of him that dooth command.”12 The language is grave and formal, underscoring the totality of the imagined horse’s readiness to carry out the instructions conveyed through the reins. There is an emphasis on order and restraint. Astley’s text appeals against “ignorance by violence,” not because of some pioneering interest in animal rights but because (as the very last sentence states) “that Horrseman which neglecteth to vse temperance . . . shall marre more horsses, than he shall make readie or seruiceable.”13 This makes sound economic sense—a marred horse will have little financial or practical value later. The stress on the horse’s sex, however, lends itself to a sort of anthropomorphism that removes Astley’s animal from the flatness of a mere object of property. It is as if the horse makes a mental decision to cooperate with the master. This also, in unwitting linguistic terminology, allows the horse some sexual agency. The horse will be “readie and willing”—not forcibly put upon. The language of sodomy instates the idea that this horse is a servant that will comply with sexual requirements. The animal will be trained to respond to “gentle and curteous dealing”—this is the language of courtship. Astley’s horse is not to be linguistically raped by the rider. Rather, it is to be an almost thinking partner in the dynamics of the horse-rider relationship. The male horse is a nuanced companion to be appropriated and exploited.
For Blundeville, this domination has to be maintained by coercive violence—to ensure that the animal is “throughlye broken in all pointes.”14 “By suffering, he [the horse] shall learne to know his faulte.”15 At one stage, this domineering is depicted in language that seems to raise the issue of sexual molestation. A tiring horse can be motivated to continue with you—the rider:
Holdynge a sharpe nayle in your hand, to pricke him continually behinde on the rumpe.16
The crucial sexual terms here are “pricke” (penis) and “rumpe” (backside, or genitals)—it is as if the horse is being subjected to a type of sodomitical practice.17 The implication is affirmatory, implicitly equipping the reader with the sense that horse riding in this textual world is male-only, with no women being allowed to enter. Horses, riders, and readers are all gendered as male. The title page of Astley’s book sells itself by promising to reward the male reader with its helpful contents—the “profit men maie reape thereby.” The frontispiece to Blundeville’s book also presents itself as a seminal text for men: the “newe booke” is “very necessary for all Gentlemen, Souldyours, Seruingmen, and for any man that delighteth in a horse.” It is an appeal for male riders across the social classes to buy and read the octavo. Some of the advice within calls for the rider to be assisted by other men. The manual is implicitly forging homoerotic bonds. Horse-rider bonding is ushered through via sociable man-men bonding. We have already seen that a footman was needed to hold the pole with a captive cat, but more men are needed to budge a horse that refuses to move forward:
Cause certayne men to stand behinde your horse with staues and stones in their hands. And if he wil not go forwarde, then let theym sodenlye strike them with their staues vpon his hams, and legges behinde, and like wise whorle their stones at the same places, also rayting him in that same instant with a terrible voice.18
Clearly, a crowd of men is needed for this aggressive hurling of shouts, staves, and stones. Striking—Elizabethan society’s most basic and apparently widespread form of abuse—of inferiors from behind is called for. When a rod is figured, a sexual, sodomitical undercurrent seems clear in the rhetoric. The instruction to stand behind the horse is practical: it would be unsafe to stand in front of a horse that may call the collective bluff by bolting. But the stipulation for rear positioning affords language that is tainted through the appropriation of similar dialogue when describing women in The Shrew and in other imaginative works. Years later, in a 1667 book, William Cavendish mocks this passage, postulating that Blundeville’s method would need a “whole Town [of men] with Staves to Beat him, with many Curious Inventions . . . Hedg-hoggs, Nailes and I know not what.”19 The proud folio, produced by an equally proud Cavalier, Cavendish, the Earl of Newcastle, does not call for such a rabble. But Blundeville’s text does not invest in such later types of haughtiness. Instead, extra manpower is needed in Blundeville’s text for specific purposes. Either these men will be servants of the rider or, if the rider is one of the lower classes of men alluded to in the frontispiece, companions. Whichever, the text envisions this imaginary male crew as a bonding forged for the purposes of establishing and forcing the proper rider and horse equation.
Despite the myriad occasions when Blundeville’s text calls for considerable violence to be visited on the horse, his book simultaneously calls for considered use of equipment from riders.20 Blundeville’s work expresses disgust at the thoughtless carelessness of riders who do not bother sensitively to choose an appropriate type of bit. The text excoriates “our Englyshe horsemen, that vse to ryde their yonge horses euen at the firste with so roughe a brake or bit as may be gotten, which is one of the chiefest causes why we haue so manye head-strong Jades.”21 A softer “snaffle-bit” should be used on young colts, Blundeville asserts. But, according to the text, ignorant English riders prefer to use harsh iron bits that damage the animal’s mouth and encourage resistance to any cooperation with the human master. (Translations of Xenophon—widely read in Renaissance England—make the same complaint about aggressive riders marring horses by incessantly “pulling at his [the horse’s] mouth with the bit”).22 Blundeville’s book imagines a different England, an England where brutal but learned riders will train obedient horses that will “suffer you to do w[i]t[h] him what you list.”23 This vision of England is like an exclusively male Utopia in which women are surplus to requirements. The bond between males has been forged and upheld through the breaking of the animal. All the horses and all the riders are male; the very idea of women riding is not mentioned once by either Astley or Blundeville. In short, these two early modern horse manuals gender the horse-rider relationship within a purely androcentric and masculine context. The pointed absence of stated gender differences serves actually to highlight the constructing of masculine gender. The forging of gender is still preponderant because masculinity can only be affirmed via negative correlation to its opposite, female gendering. In these texts, gendered identities are underscored through their absence.
The genre of Renaissance prose texts that offer advice on domestic arrangements inevitably discuss women—women cannot be ignored here as they are in the riding manuals. Indeed, in these conduct books, it is striking that the horse-rider relationship is now gendered as heterosexual. In these moralizing texts, the relationship between the heterosexual couple is seen as analogous to the relationship between horse and rider. This equine analogy is an early modern elaboration of the Biblical code for female submissiveness: “Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as is fit in the Lord,” insisted the letters of Paul; Peter’s letters added that “Likewise, ye wives, be in subjection to your own husbands.”24 In equine-enhanced language, some moralizing texts of the period develop this Biblical code, sometimes clouding the uncompromisingly brutal ideologies through a construction of female malleability as a positive phenomenon. Henry Smith, for example, in his Preparatiue to Mariage (1591), constructs wifely obedience as a form of meritorious partnership rather than simple subjugation of the female:
A Wife is called a Yoke-fellowe, to sheue that she should helpe her Husband to beare his yoke . . . she must submit her neck to beare it patiently with him, or els she is not his yoke-fellowe.25
Smith’s text here describes this female bondage as something achieved in tandem with a husband—the married pair is akin to a collaboration of two horses pulling a cart together and dissimilar to a male/rider dominating a female/horse. This language is agricultural. The man and wife are to be a productive union, one that merges in order to make the land more fertile. There is a rhetoric of sexuality here. A heterosexual union of yoke-fellows will be fructifying, providing the basis for stable, controlled growth. Animals other than horses—mules, oxen—may be constrained by yokes. But the concept that the woman must “submit her neck” recalls the horse-dominating language of John Astley: if an animal does not hold its head according to the wishes of its rider, “it is a fowle fault in the horsse to doo it, it is no lesse in the rider to suffer it.”26 This echo of equine domination in Smith’s text makes the “partnership” in the yoke seem a little strained. Smith’s formulation of fellowship is undermined by its linguistic echoes of more overtly patriarchal modes of animal-like submission. Contextualizing Smith’s idyllic, Christian picture of marriage within prevalent modes of horse-dominating language reveals its detachment from the more overtly androcentric rhetoric of the period.
Smith’s notion of the “yoke of love” derives from a medieval commonplace in which both husband and wife were seen as contained animals. As Neil Cartlidge notes, the “description of married people as beasts of burden represents not so much the ‘grind’ of sexual desire as the means of its containment . . . earthly marriage is a shared humiliation and a back breaking trial.”27 But in Smith’s treatise it is manifestly clear that some yoke-fellows are more contained than others. Smith’s figurative, ideal woman is ordered to behave exactly as a well-broken horse—as a willing mount would “submit her neck” and “beare it patiently,” so must the obedient wife. A later sentence offers an indication of the true significance of marriage within the body politic. Smith’s treatise poses the following rhetorical question:
Who shall beare others burden if the Wife doo not beare her Husbands burden?28
This is an ostensibly charitable statement, concerning itself with selfless giving, but it places considerable pressure on the marriage institution. Marriage relations are to be emblematic for society as a whole. If the female yoke-fellow does not carry the husband’s burden, nobody else will; if women shall not obey and submit their necks to their husbands, where else in society will authority be heeded? The analogy of horse control proves to be a powerful trope for writers like Smith. The image of controlling a horse serves as a fanciful parallel for how gender relations should be determined within the domestic arena. These moralizing writers amend the male-only communities imagined by the horse riding manuals to a supposed community in which women were visible but subjected like the horse. Horse riding is seen in the riding manuals as an assertion of male human power over male horse power; the Christian, proscriptive texts change this to a situation whereby the horse is a cultural signifier for a malleable femininity that must be harnessed for Christian service.
A particularly idealistic example of an exemplary woman willing to be saddled and controlled by a husband is delineated in William Whately’s 1617 Bride-Bush diatribe. As Barry Reay puts it, the “horse riding metaphor was a favourite with Whately,” as an extract from the preacher’s text abundantly illustrates:29
It is laudable, commendable, a note of a vertuous woman, a dutifull wife, when shee submits her-selfe with quietnesse, cheerefully, euen, as a wel-broken horse turnes at the least turning, stands at the least check of the rider’s bridle, readily going and standing as he wishes that sits vpon his backe.30
For the editors of the anthology, Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen, this comment in the Whately text served as an indication that Renaissance misogynists agreed on the existence of a female “baser nature” that “differed little from other members of the animal kingdom.”31 It is easy to dismiss Whately’s analogy between the subjection of horses and women, but it is more fruitful to assess the equine language that is here given a greater sophistication. It was, as we have seen earlier, the true mark of horsemanship for Blundeville that a horse would “do as you list.” But the concept of “turning” was also very important in hippology—a number of chapters in Blundeville’s Arte of Ryding and Breakinge Greate Horses are entirely devoted to help “teache your horse to tourne redely.”32 The ease with which the wife can be turned is also significant—the “least check of the rider’s bridle” will be enough to orient the wife in whichever manner the husband chooses. The husband will “ride” his wife through the bridle—in John Astley’s words, through “the firme and staied direction of the hand.”33 The “horsse with euerie little token by aide of the bridle . . . will vnderstand your meaning” (sig. I1r).34 “Turning” wives should be as easy as “turning” great horses. The immediacy of obedience from Whately’s ideal, imaginary wife also recalls a comment from Astley on how the horse-rider relationship should appear to onlookers. Whately’s husband and wife will disguise the dominance of the stronger partner, since the rapidity of turning will make the married pair seem like one unit; for Astley’s horse and rider, “to the beholders it shall appeare, that he and you be one bodie, of one mind, and of one will.”35 The tightness of the relationships will be almost centaur-like, as both parties fuse into one unit that pulls in one direction. The moralists’ view of the ideal woman as a willing horse is an attempt to contain the horse/woman metaphor within a confined space of constancy and rigidity. By modern standards, these texts legitimize domestic abuse—they advise a fairly tyrannical, masculinist dictatorship within the home. Women, who are implicitly seen as headstrong and untamed, are linguistically bridled by a range of elaborate aesthetics of riding discourse.
In William Whately’s moralizing text, the analogy between horse and woman is stable. I use the term “stable” in a self-conscious equine manner. A “stable” is a covered area of restricted space within which a horse is housed; it is an area that is closed and guarded. The horse is held captive in the “stable.” The groom relies on the “stable” for the horse to be safe and secure—and for the groom to be sure that his management of the horse is safe and secure. In his 1604 ladies’ dictionary, A Table Alphabeticall, Robert Cawdrey defines “stable” as “sure, stedfast.”36 Riders and husbands should have a “sure, stedfast” dominance over their horses and wives—the former with literal bridles, the latter with metaphorical bridles. The moralizing texts appropriate the language of horse riding into a differently gendered system, a system in which the use of the Christian writers’ hands would write and seek to contain the stable image of the woman as a horse trained to be obedient.
Stopped by Measure of His Hand
The eponymous “shrews” of both The Taming of the Shrew and its related play, The Taming of a Shrew, are titularly linked to the horses of Blundeville’s prose through the etymology of the word “shrewd.” In early modern usage, a “shrew” was, of course, a “railing woman,” whereas “shrewd” referred to a “malignant animal” (OED sb2 3a; a 2). Blundeville offers many punishments for a horse that would “do some shrewdnes,” whereas both the shrew-taming plays dramatize an exemplary tale of how a wayward woman should be corrected through the husband’s metaphorical bridle.37 In The Shrew, both Katherine and her younger sister, Bianca, are subject to implicit analogies with horses, as projected onto them by males in the play. Baptista remarks that his supposedly pliant daughter, Bianca, is “apt to learne, and thankful for good turnes”; Petruccio insists that “Kate, I am a husband for your turne.”38 Turning, as we have seen, was an essential component of equine obedience. So, Baptista asserts that his daughter is happy and willing to be turned like a horse, whereas Petruccio, simply tells Katherine that he is the metaphorical rider for her “turns”—the master who will dictate the “turns.” There is also a sexual imperative in the discourse of “turning.” “Turn,” as Gordon Williams points out, was “used allusively for copulation” in bawdry of the period.39 This further ties the rhetoric of equine control to the rhetoric of forceful, sexual jurisdiction. Later in the play, Bianca and the Widow who marries Hortensio are termed “head-strong women”—they have the “vyces” of individualism that a well-trained horse or well-tamed woman should not manifest (V.ii.134).40 They are not the sexually submissive jades that Petruccio constructs Katherine as; these headstrong female figures are not for “turning.”
The taming husbands in A Shrew (Ferando), The Shrew (Petruccio), and Patient Grissill (Marquis Gwalter) all declare themselves to be masters of the reins in the following citations, which are remarkably similar in their appropriations of equitation language:
This humor must I holde me to a while,
To bridle and hold backe my headstrong wife,
With curbes of hunger: ease: and want of sleepe . . .
And make her gentlie come vnto the lure,
Were she as stubborne or as full of strength
As were the Thracian horse Alcides tamde.41
And thus Ile curbe her mad and headstrong humor.42
Married men
That long to tame their wiues must curbe them in
Before they need a bridle.43
Despite the relative brevity of his horse imagery, Petruccio is constructed as a character that uses and appropriates the language of equine domination in the same manner as Ferando and Gwalter. Petruccio will “curb” Katherine’s behavior as Blundeville urges the men of England to curb the recalcitrant “shrewdnes” of their horses.
It is important to explore fully the significance of the word “curb” or “curbe” as used by all three characters. As a noun, a “curbe” is a restraining implement placed under a horse’s jaw, in addition to the standard bridle. There were two major types of bit used in English Renaissance horse riding—the snaffle bit and the iron bit. By referring to the “curbe,” Gwalter and the others are clearly referring to the latter, which was more severe, strong, and effective in managing a mount. (Blundeville’s horse riding manual provides fifty full-page illustrations of iron bits in various designs and stages of repair and disrepair.) The contemporary belief in the material superiority of the iron bit is conveyed in John Derricke’s 1581 verse-statement of English meritoriousness, in which English superiority over Irish “greasye glibbed foes” is argued for. In this work, The Image of Irelande, there are twelve elaborate woodcuts contained among the leaves. In one of these illustrations, the iron-bitted warhorses of Henry Sidney’s English cavalry are seen easily outrunning and outperforming Ireland’s snaffle-bitted resistance.44 As well as military efficiency, there is an obvious undertone of colonial superiority latent in Derricke’s woodcut. Being iron-bitted and more controlled, the Sidney horses represent the mythical Elizabethan English order as opposed to the wild indiscipline of the more loosely reined Irish animals. To “curbe,” then, takes effect as a particularly virulent verb meaning to violently and completely physically dominate and restrain. The word “must,” in Gwalter’s assertion, is an imperative that indicates the necessarily all-encompassing universality of male control—husbands “must” dominate their wives. In such a manifesto, there is no alternative to checking wives with a figurative iron bit. A woman cannot, it is argued in these contemporary discussions, be expected to be deferential and meek if any quarter is given.
There is a deeper level to the repression called for by Ferando in A Shrew and fresh dimensions allowed to the equine linguistics of bondage when we understand that “curbe” has another meaning. A “curb” is a wound found on a horse. As the prolific horse expert, Gervase Markham, puts it in a 1597 treatise, “A Curb is a sorance that maketh a horse to halt much, and it appears upon his hinder legs, straight behind upon the canbrel place [hock or joint at the upper part of a horse’s leg], and a little beneath the Spauen [tumour at the bone joints].”45 So, when Ferando speaks of placing “curbes” of punishment on his wife, he is alluding to the possibility of deliberately injuring the woman. Thus, the undertone of physical threat to the weaker vessel is exposed. A “curb,” Markham continues, is full of “brused filthy matter.”46 When such matter is metaphorically positioned by a harsh patriarch, it is impossible to resist the urge to see malign agency in the character’s equine-enhanced discourse and, by implication, a source of venom in the woman herself, a locus of poison that might justify all manner of additionally abusive treatments. Ferando goes on to compare himself to Hercules (Alcides)—the ultimate symbol of masculine strength in the Renaissance.47 Restraining his wife, Ferando says, is equivalent to Hercules’s eighth labor, in which—in Spenser’s words—the rapacious horses of the Thracian leader, Diomedes, were “torne in peeces by Alcides great.”48 The Thracian leader is killed; the horses are then made to eat their master’s carcass. The notion of consumption is stressed, as is the hugely aggressive appropriation/exploitation of the horses. The truly crucial aspect of Hercules’s exploits is that the horses he tamed were mares.49 This classical legend, then, is a useful analogue for the would-be warrior, Ferando. The Hercules myth lies at the background of the whole play, for its inclusion again reminds us of the essentially misogynist violence that haunts every verbal allusion to the woman as horse trope.
In Dekker’s Patient Grissill, Marquis Gwalter’s language is more simplistic. Largely monosyllabic, the perfect iambs reinforce the basic unambiguousness of the character’s misogyny. The repetitive rhythm—augmented by an absence of complicating punctuation—conveys the impression that Gwalter is constructed as a figure who is obliged, at the conclusion of a play that has supposedly demonstrated the superiority of a husband, to chant this lullaby of misogynist cant. The Marquis has plainly spurted out the old woman-as-horse to be broken metaphor. The figure of Ferando also uses the word “curbes,” talking of taming Katherine with “curbes” of “hunger” and “want of sleep”—both tortuous forms of ill-treatment. With both the Gwalter and Ferando characters, then, the “curbing” discourse is one of harsh domination, if not outright violence. Writing about The Shrew, not A Shrew, in her essay, “Household Chastisements: Gender, Authority and ‘Domestic Violence,’” Frances Dolan refers to the “ingenious forms of coercion which can be called ‘policy’ rather than ‘force’” in a definition of nuptial brutality, which also neatly sums up Ferando’s curbing intent.50 The “curbing” discourse is a form of what Dolan sees as coercive “policy.” Dolan’s stress on broader strategies of male violence enables us to see Ferando’s rhetoric as part of a more wide-ranging credo of subjection of the distaff. Ferando’s equine rhetoric takes on a particular stridency precisely because it participates in larger structures of patriarchal aspiration.
The campaign of terror inflicted on Katherine by Ferando in A Shrew is troubling, as is the corresponding treatment by Petruccio of Katherine in The Shrew. But a further look at Marquis Gwalter’s comment proves to be even more alarming. To recap, Gwalter asserts that successfully dominant husbands must rein wives in “Before they need a bridle.” The specter of the “scold’s bridle” or “brank” is raised here—a barbaric contraption actually used in early modern England and well known to audiences of modern popular television through the adaptation of the 1994 Minette Walters novel, The Scold’s Bridle.51 Lynda Boose, David Underdown, and Valerie Wayne have all drawn attention to the significance of this gendered implement of punishment.52 The device was used in what Barry Reay terms “both [the] physical and iconographic containment of female power,” with female victims literally having their tongues constrained and their physical movements and personal autonomy checked.53 Earlier in the Patient Grissill play, Gwalter warns his wife that “this bridle shall pull in thy pride.”54 This does make it appear possible that, in performance, the “Gwalter” actor would carry a replica of the brank—the preposition “this” seems to imply that Gwalter is referring to a real scold’s bridle. (There is no noun in the preceding lines that would serve as an antecedent for “this.”) The stage business certainly does not call for a material brank in the way that, for example, Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great, Part Two (1588) does.55 One of Philip Henslowe’s many property inventories for the Admiral’s Men records a “brydell” for “Tamberlyne”; but the actor playing Grissill would never be physically bridled.56 To imprison Grissill with a brank would probably make less sense dramatically—such a scheme could reduce a tense drama into a mere assertion of male physical force over a defenceless female. However, the very fact that the reader is forced to think about the brank at all shows the potential power of the rhetoric of bridling women as horses.
Physical branking is, then, mostly rejected on the stage, but the bridling of women is given a more literal turn. In the lengthy, anonymous verse-narrative, A Merry Ieste of a Shrewde and Curste Wyfe (1550), the eponymous wife does not subject her neck patiently to her husband’s metaphorical bridle. Riled, the husband savagely beats the wife and eventually ties her bleeding body up inside the salted hide of a horse.57 The “merry ieste” (the humor of which was implicitly rejected by a Victorian editor) is that raw violence has done to the wife what Christian strictures failed to do, literally transmogrifying the wife into a servile equine sot.58 This shrewd woman has been very brutally stopped by the measure of her husband/rider’s hand.
Seizing the Rod
Linda Woodbridge has implored Shakespearean scholars to give more attention to—“if not to admire”—A Merry Ieste of a Shrewde and Curste Wyfe.59 It is little wonder that Woodbridge chooses to lavish such attention on the verse tale. The Merry Ieste may indeed be a source for the Shrew plays, but, for a critic like Woodbridge, it illustrates an early modern tendency to poke mere fun rather than condemnation—even amused approval—at serious domestic violence. However, it is equally important to take account of the fact that, in early modern cultural productions, women, on occasion, hold the reins. In the supposedly nonfictional pamphlet, The Brideling, Sadling and Ryding, of a Rich Churle in Hampshire, by one Judeth Philips (1595), the fool in the title is tricked by Judeth Philips into believing that she can deliver him unlimited wealth. Philips gets the gull to lean over on all fours and be fitted with a saddle:
She sat the saddle on his back, and thereon girteth it fast with two new girths, and also put a bridle upon his head; all which being / done, she gat uppon his backe in the saddle, and so rid him three times betwixt the chamber and the holly tree.60
The totality of Philips’s conquering of the fool is expressed by the fact that she “three times” rode him in a public, exterior display of sexualized (“rid”) domineering. The transgressing female is marking out her territory, like some sort of knight of misrule. She leads the horse-like man on a patrol that covers his traditional places of reign: the bedroom and the garden. The holly tree is of particular significance—it offers a number of nuances for this tale. The reference to the Passion of Christ is comic, if perhaps blasphemous, for it compares the suffering of Philips’s victim with the epic sufferings of Christ at Golgotha. The holly tree has had religious significance in literature, going right back to the Middle Ages. It can symbolize “life and hope.”61 This meaning of the tree can be related to either the protagonist, Philips, or the antagonist, the humiliated man. Thus, the tree may be lauded as a focus of positive joy for the virulent Philips, or it may, conversely, be an ironic sight for the bridled, male victim of this carnival. It can serve both turns. Philips’s Renaissance expansion of the medieval legend of “Phyllis and Aristotle” is carnivalesque because it discovers the female holding the reins and controlling the turns.62 The dramatic potential of the story is exploited in the pamphlet’s crude woodcut: Philips comfortably, effortlessly holds the fool’s reins in her left hand as the bearded, bridled man suffers on all fours.63 The general power of the “Phyllis and Aristotle” conceit is also illustrated by the description of a stereotypical “Scold” as one who “makes an Ass of Aristotle” in an anti-scold production that dates from as late as 1678.64 In the medieval legend, and in the Philips pamphlet, it is through the use of a woman’s hand that the male will be bridled, ridden, and turned. But the generic nature of the Elizabethan sensational narrative means that, inevitably, this topsy-turvy expression of female reign will be soon quashed. Normality is restored when the churl, infuriated by the “base and ridiculous manner of his saddling,” takes horse and rides to Winchester. The fictional man who forces his wife into a horse’s hide is allowed to reign supreme at the end of the Merry Ieste, but the woman who mocks a man, however covetous and gullible, is severely punished in the Judeth Philips pamphlet. At Winchester, a process begins whereby Philips is eventually jailed and brought to account for her destabilizing use of the rich fool. Then, “her iudgement was, to be whipped through the citie”: now censured within social normality, Philips has become horse-like herself, being whipped and ridden all through the city of London.65
Frances Dolan has analyzed the “[d]ouble standard governing the violence in the shrew-taming tradition.” She argues:
Women’s violence is depicted as disorderly and transgressive; men’s violence is depicted as a legitimate way of restoring the order that women have overturned. Violence thus seems to be a masculine prerogative that shrews usurp; when they insist on wearing the breeches, they also seize the rod.66
Following on from Dolan’s suggestions, one might argue that it is not so much violence that Philips has usurped in the Brideling pamphlet but rather the discourse of domination as expressed in equine terms. (The rod, of course, was an equitation implement used to correct wayward horses.) A similar expression of women riding on top occurs in one of the Iests to Make you Merie (1607) by Thomas Dekker and George Wilkins. In this yarn, a young woman is worried about the sexual fitness of an older man she is bound to marry. An elderly lady tries to reassure the young woman, saying that “an ould horse will houlde out a long / iorney, as well as a nagge of foure yeere ould.”67 Unconvinced, the young woman bawdily states that “as little skill as I haue in riding, I doubt whether he can hould out on some hye wayes that I could name.”68 Here, it is the husband who is expected to bear—it is a reversal of Petruccio’s conventionally sexist remark to Katherine that “Women are made to beare, and so are you.”69 In The Shrew, there is a moment of transgressive female violence when Katherine strikes Petruccio, but generally such overtly carnivalesque moments are rare in Grissill and the Shrew plays.70 Arguably, the scenario described by Grumio at sig. T3r, when the servant tells of Petruccio and Katherine falling from their respective mounts, is a carnivalesque break-down of control over the animals. It can be argued that the failure to ride properly is a scheme contrived by Petruccio to embarrass Katherine, just like the episode described by Biondello, in which he arrives at the wedding on a nag rife with myriad diseases.71
If these episodes stop short of the fully fledged carnivalesque moments characteristic of the satirical Philips pamphlet, they do provide a key to reading the behavior of the female characters of the Shrew plays and Patient Grissill. In short, the incidents suggest that the female characters’ behavioral patterns are never fully determined by the masculine rhetoric of bridling. In A Shrew, there is never any doubt that Katherine is constructed as an entity that is not tamed. This Katherine, rather, fully intends all along to marry Ferando and merely dissembles a shrewish resistance. This is made clear by an aside—“She turnes aside and speakes”—in which Katherine tells us that:
I will consent and marrie him,
For I methinkes haue liude too long a maid,
And match him, or else his manhoods good.72
In other words, the locking of horns between Katherine and Ferando is a sham. Katherine is not broken like an unwilling horse because the text/script make clear that the character will marry Ferando. This Katherine is dissembling a vicious shrewdness toward Ferando. Kate physically “turnes aside” before making these expressly submissive remarks, like the good, willing, and well-schooled horse craved for in John Astley’s training manual. Such female willingness makes Ferando’s rhetoric of bridling and curbing seem a little empty and irrelevant. Katherine is constructed, then, as a character who decides her own destiny—she is not at all controlled through the suitor’s supposed bridling hands. The situation in The Shrew is more ambiguous: there is no explicit remark telling us whether Katherine is genuinely broken and tamed by Petruccio. Debate has raged for decades about the extent of Katherine’s acquiescence in the play’s progress, with recent criticism suggesting that it may be more helpful to consider Katherine as a supposedly shrewish type—one who reputedly operates in contradistinction to the meekness of the Grissill type.73 Whereas Katherine is the proverbial scold, Grissill is the proverbial patient wife—the two women supposedly point up opposite ends of the spectrum of female behavior. Thus, when Petruccio tells a disbelieving Padua that his actions will force Katherine to “proue a second Grissell,” he is, on one hand, drawing attention to the process of transformation that will turn one polar opposite into another.74 Yet, if one foregrounds the knowing and manipulative way in which Grissill acts out her role as a perfect wife, then Petruccio’s words may be read, on the other hand, as a warning to the audience that Katherine, too, may be a character constructed to act from her own volition. A comparison between this version of Katherine and the Dekker, Chettle, and Haughton versions of Grissill may not be so far-fetched: both are, arguably, social climbers. The economic circumstances of both Grissill and Katherine are vastly elevated by their respective marriages. Grissill, in particular, does not appear as an unassuming and innocent figure. There was a pithy Renaissance proverb that seems relevant to the actions of the character: “To know what is what.”75 In other words, knowledge is power. Grissill, the text makes clear, is a character who knows Gwalter is engaging in a patience-testing trick. There is no point rearing up and attacking the Marquis’s dominance because his vulnerability is apparent; the actor playing Grissill has seen how the “deep fetcht sigh from his brest flew” when Grissill and her father, Janicola, were “banisht” from the Salucian court.76 Grissill states convincingly that her children (twins, a boy and a girl) will come to no harm under Gwalter’s confiscation—he will not “rob me, tis to try/ If I loue them.”77 There is a sense in the text that all the characters are playing the Griselda legend out; there never seems to be any doubt that the marriage of Grissill and Gwalter will survive. Gwalter himself “Turnes from her [Grissill]” and states that “She’ll tryumph ouer me doe what I can.”78 There is no need to break the loyal Grissill: the figure is like a willing horse that has no need to be crushed and curbed. Grissill is a character who is not being controlled through Gwalter’s metaphorical bridle. It has been noted that other female characters in the play are also not slavishly dependent on men. Julia Bronfman helpfully points out that Julia absolutely refuses to marry.79 For this character, “a marriage in which one person completely and irrationally masters the other is, [unacceptable] in the Renaissance.”80 The insinuation, then, is that similar conditions of betrothal are available to the Grissill type in the play’s milieu. She, too, could refuse to marry Gwalter if it wasn’t agreeable to her. The typological meekness of the title character is a front: Grissill pursues her own agenda while seeming to be haltered and repressed.
Female hopes are also discovered in the anonymous Blurt, Master Constable. Unlike the leading lady of Grissill, however, the female figures of this play are never bridled and haltered, not even in the rhetoric of exuberant males. In Blurt, Master Constable, the Spaniard, Lazarillo, gives a truly carnivalesque lecture to the residents of a brothel, telling how women should hold the figurative reins in any marriage.81 The lecture appropriates the tendencies of carnival because it constructs the man as the metaphorical horse to be ridden in a marriage, subverting the woman-as-horse trope espoused by Smith, Whately, Ferando, Petruccio, and Gwalter. The Spaniard tells Imperia and her followers that:
Wise is that wife, who (with apt wit) complaines
That shee’s kept vnder, yet rules all the raines.82
Lazarillo’s speech visualizes a wife who professes to be ridden like a horse—“kept vnder”—but actually is in charge of the marriage situation. The alliterative, syllabic, and tonal similarity between “rules” and “reigns” carries across a sense of the smoothness of this female dissembling, as imagined by the Spaniard. The early modern anxiety about the efficient ease with which dominating wives can operate is apparent—an anxiety that occasionally manifested itself in popular activities such as the “Skimmington.”83 Lazarillo says that the man should be the horse that is subjected. In urging the women to denounce their subjugation, even as they hold “all the raines,” the Spaniard is appropriated as a character intent on feeding a perceived female deviousness. It is an opportunistic strategy that would allow the female characters in his audience to appropriate power for themselves. The scheme totally subverts the diatribes of Ferando, Gwalter, and Petruccio on subjecting women, so harshly expressed in their dramatic linguistics of bridling and curbing. Lazarillo goes on to assert that his notion of female rule—matriarchy—is quite natural: he reasons that “a womans onely desire is to haue the raines in her owne white hand.”84 But the females in this stage brothel do not drop fawningly at their unlikely champion’s feet. The Third Lady quite sarcastically enthuses that “wee’ll hencefoorth neuer goe to a cunning woman, since men can teach vs our lerrie [learning].”85 Imperia dismisses Lazarillo as a “broilde red Sprat”—a fish of diminutive proportions.86 The lecture does not meet with the acclaim the obsequious Lazarillo expected. Eventually, Imperia’s follower, Frisco, drops the Spaniard through a trapdoor into a cellar (theatrically, into the Paul’s playhouse “hell”); later, the women soak him with “rammish [sheep’s] vrine.”87 The women of the play treat Lazarillo with the contempt with which Judeth Philips treats the rich fool of Hampshire. The women appear as figures who need to appropriate the power of the horse riding metaphor; Lazarillo’s lecture is an irrelevant distraction for the business of the brothel. Concerned with efficiency and profit, there is no time for semantic debates on horse riding metaphors, however appealingly subversive.
Lazarillo gets a poor reception from the play’s whorish types not because his topsy-turvy views on marital relations are odious, but because they are irrelevant—the women of this brothel already ride on top. The only man resident in the brothel is the lowly attendant, Frisco. Frisco and the other male figures in the play are very much dictated to by the women; the whores are constructed as figures who decide which men come into the building. They are “women on top,” as defined by Nathalie Zemon Davis. For this historian, true inversion has a “connection with everyday circumstances outside the privileged time of carnival.”88 The characters in the brothel are not just “on top” at a carnivalesque moment—they are always in charge, proactively central to the dramatic narrative’s progression. They already “hold the raines” in this play. The point I am making is not that the reining metaphor is always irrelevant to dramatic action but that it can be ignored when the character who uses the rhetoric is easily dismissed. The characters of the other plays may not subjugate their wives totally, but the husbands of Patient Grissill and the Shrew dramas are not discredited like Lazarillo. Coming from them, the discourses of bridling and reining are forceful and formidable. The dramatic situation of Lazarillo is described here to show that the language of curbing is not always important to the drama—but the fact that it can be incidental in one text underlines the potential power of the horse/woman trope when it is important, as in the Shrew plays or in the poem about the wife tied up in the salted horse’s hide.
Conclusion
Lazarillo’s appeal for a subversive gender code whereby women metaphorically bridle men is, then, irrelevant in the context of the play’s unfurling of events. The inconsequential nature of his ramblings derives from the basic, harmless ineffectiveness of the Spanish would-be rogue that is so easily broken in the play’s action. Marriage, in the brothel in Blurt, Master Constable, is not an issue for the female characters, so the rhetoric of horse domination poses little threat. On the other hand, it is clear that the language of the horse contributes to a discussion of hostility and suppression of women in many other texts of the period, most obviously violently in the Merry Ieste of a Shrewde and Curste Wyfe. There is, I have argued, grave doubt as to whether the Katherines from the Shrew plays or Gwalter’s wife, Grissill, really are constructed as broken and tamed by their husbands. Nevertheless, equine imagery at least raises the possibility of hostile subjection by husbands: Katherine’s fall from the unreliable horse Petruccio forces her to ride is a form of orchestrated aggression; Gwalter’s language of curbing reminds us that metaphorical and material (branking) bridling discourses of oppression did exist in the early modern period.
The Shrew plays and Patient Grissill discuss and interrogate these violent tropes with considerable complexity of tone and nuance, but the conduct books of the period are less ambivalent. Using imagery of horse domination to accentuate their message about the necessity of tight, male control, these moralizing works set an objective theoretical basis for the saddling of women that is demanded by the plays’ masculine characters. The horse language, in the conduct books, is used to cement gender. That is, the biological differences between the sexes require them, according to these religiously and socially constructed texts, to behave in different ways. One sex will be gendered as the sex that holds the reins; the other sex will be directed by the arms controlling the theoretical reins. The lack of mares in the horse riding manuals is reflected by the lack of female participants. At the very least, the implication is that efficient horse management will occur without female interference, that a gendered division of labor is required. Women are not to strike great horses between the ears with rods, nor are they to punish equine servants by provoking terrified cats to scratch hapless colts’ testicles—that is work for the communities of cooperative men imagined in Astley and Blundeville’s texts. So, even though women are not even mentioned in these manuals, there is a gendering separatism discovered and upheld. As in all these texts, the horse is a material and metaphorical means of underlining and/or challenging these discourses of gender difference.
However, a pattern of female, equine-enhanced agency that is ultimately conquered by male reaction is evident throughout, before and after our period. A collection of conventional wisdoms assembled together in a 1550 collection tells us that an exemplary horse should have a number of “propertyes & condicions.” Three of these attributes should find a match in a useful woman: both the animal and the woman should be “fayre brested, fayre of heer [hair], and easy to lepe vpo[n].”89 Many of the female types that have been encountered in this chapter are not so easy to leap upon, but the survival of the ideal woman as horse trope is detectable—with the same crude sexual insinuations—in proverbial collections right up until the Interregnum and after. A 1659 collection asserts that “A grunting Horse, and a groaning Wife, never fail their Masters.”90 The wife is, still, seen as little more than a sexualized beast of burden—at best, there is a hint of cooperation in the possibility of female agency in the wife’s “grunting.” Fundamentally, however, it is the wife’s business to please the man. Sometimes, in early modern drama, women take the reins themselves, getting on top for a while. In Richard Brome and Thomas Heywood’s 1634 play, The Late Lancashire Witches, one of the supernaturally charged female characters, Mrs. Generous, turns a servant, Robin, into a gelding because he has refused to ready her husband’s horse for her to ride. Following the usual pattern in the period’s culture, this audacious act of agency crumbles as Mrs. Generous and her colleagues are eventually apprehended. It becomes apparent that this transgressor has lost a hand during the play’s subsequent action: a stage direction tells that the actor “Lookes about and findes the hand.”91 Clearly, the moment of material horse riding has passed for Mrs. Generous. So enraged is Master Generous at his wife’s equine disobedience that he ensures she is physically incapable of ever riding again. The metaphorical prevention of the woman’s riding must have lasting consequences for our reading of the play. It is hard to accept, then, the great twentieth-century Shakespearean, Frederick Boas’s strange assertion that the women of the play are allowed forgiveness and repentance—something “symptomatic of a change in attitude towards his [Heywood’s] contemporary world in the last years of his life.”92 The indulgent overoptimism of such assertions is exposed by engaging closely with the oppressive equine discourses apparent in Heywood’s work and in many other artistic depictions, events, cultural productions, and literary and unliterary works of the Renaissance.
Notes
1. The Taming of the Shrew, in William Shakespeare, Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (London, 1623; STC 22273), T2v, S6r, S6v. All quotations from Shakespeare’s Shrew are taken from the 1623 Folio.
2. Derek Traversi, Shakespeare: The Early Comedies (London: Longmans, 1960), 17.
3. Linda Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540–1620 (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1984), 206. Jeanne Addison Roberts also downplays the centrality of equine imagery in The Shrew, saying that the play’s horse allusions are insubstantial and “fleeting”: “the play does not accept the emblem of horse and rider as a proper model for marriage.” See her article, “Horses and Hermaphrodites: Metamorphoses in The Taming of the Shrew,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 45 (1983), 164. Roberts goes on to argue that a harmonic fusion of Katherine and Petruccio is achieved not through horse-riding terminology, but by a veiled allusion in the play to the Hermaphroditus and Salamachis legend:
The substitution of the hermaphrodite with its two human components for the earlier images of horse and rider, of falcon and falconer is progress. (170)
In this formulation, the play’s action outgrows the equine metaphor, eventually denigrating any notion of inequality between the married pair.
4. Joan Hartwig, “Horses and Women in The Taming of the Shrew,” Huntington Library Quarterly, 45 (1982), 292.
5. Marianne Novy, “Patriarchy and Play in The Taming of the Shrew,” English Literary Renaissance, 9 (1979), 264–80.
6. Citations from A Shrew are taken from the first quarto, A Pleasant Conceited Historie, Called The Taming of a Shrew (London, 1594; STC 23367); quotations from Patient Grissill, by Thomas Dekker, Henry Chettle and William Haughton, are taken from The Pleasant Comodie of Patient Grissill (London, 1603; STC 6518); citations from Blurt, Master Constable are taken from the play’s first quarto, Blvrt Master Constable, or The Spaniards Night-walke (London, 1602; STC 17876).
7. Astley and Blundeville have been chosen partly because they date from before the conduct books and plays discussed in this chapter, but also because they convey the language of domination in a more direct and simplistic way than later English riding experts such as Markham and Cavendish. For an article that discusses the more elaborate complications of Cavendish’s dressage manuals, see Karen L. Raber, “‘Reasonable Creatures’: William Cavendish and the Art of Dressage,” in Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt, eds, Renaissance Culture and the Everyday (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 42–66.
8. Thomas Blundeville, The Arte of Ryding and Breakinge Greate Horses (London, 1560; STC 3158), 2C1v.
9. Anthony Dent, Horses in Shakespeare’s England (London: J. A. Allen, 1987), 23.
10. According to Bruce Thomas Boehrer, fifty percent of bestiality indictments against men involved mares. See his “Bestial Buggery in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” in David Lee Miller, Sharon O’Dair and Harold Weber, eds., The Production of English Renaissance Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 150. Agreement with Boehrer’s figures can be found in Erica Fudge, “Monstrous Acts,” in Daniel Snowman, ed., The Best of History Today (London: Sutton, 2001), 473–81.
11. John Astley, The Art of Riding (London, 1584; STC 884), F1r. At the time of writing, June 2013, the National Portrait Gallery, in London, 1550s painting of Astley is on display in the “Elizabethan” room: Astley is represented as being lithe of limb and erect of posture—a fit rider indeed, Astley went on to live until he was nearly ninety (ODNB). On a more quirky note, I was surprised during a 2012 holiday in Maidstone, Kent, to “meet” a life-sized mannequin of Astley at the town’s Museum—Astley owned a major property in the town.
12. Ibid., B2r.
13. Ibid., B4r, L4r.
14. Blundeville, 1A4v
15. Ibid., 2B1r.
16. Ibid., 2C1r.
17. For “prick,” see Gordon Williams, A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature, 3 vols. (London: Athlone Press, 1994), III, 1094–5; for “rump” see ibid., III, 1180.
18. Blundeville, 2B6r.
19. William Cavendish, A New Method, and Extraordinary Invention to Dress Horses (London, 1667; Wing N887), F1v.
20. The following instances are only some of the many examples of Blundeville calling for horses to be struck: “Beate him with a terrible voyce, and beate him your selfe with a good sticke vpon the heade betwixt the eares” (1A8v); “Beatinge him behinde, sometime with the one hande, and sometime wyth the other ... will make him so gentle as a lambe” (B1v); “Rate him vpon the heade betwixt the eares, and vppon the forelegges” (2B8r).
21. Ibid, 2Cr-v.
22. On the importance of Xenophon’s writings in early modern England, with regard to, for example, the analogue of Adonis’s ideal horse in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis to the Xenophon ideal, see J. K. Anderson, Xenophon (London: Duckworth, 1974), 185; the Xenophon quotation is taken from Xenophon, On Equitation, in J. K. Anderson, Ancient Greek Horsemanship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961), 174.
23. Blundeville, B1v.
24. The Bible: Authorized King James Version, with Apocrypha, ed. Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), Colossians III.18; 1 Peter III.1.
25. Henry Smith, A Preparatiue to Mariage (London, 1591; STC 22685), F3v-4r.
26. Blundeville, K3r. Blundeville devotes several chapters to correcting “vyces of the heade and necke,” 2A1v-B2r.
27. Neil Cartlidge, Medieval Marriage: Literary Approaches, 1100–1300 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997), 151.
28. Smith, F4v.
29. Barry Reay, Popular Cultures in England, 1550–1750 (London: Longman, 1998), 20.
30. William Whately, A Bride-Bush (London, 1617; STC 25296), F4v.
31. Elspeth Graham, Hilary Hinds, Elaine Hobby, and Helen Wilcox, eds., Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen (London: Routledge, 1989), 8.
32. Blundeville, 1F6r-I6v and K5v-6r.
33. Astley, D2r.
34. Ibid., I1r.
35. Ibid., I1v.
36. Robert Cawdrey, A Table Alphabeticall (London, 1604; STC 4884), H7r. I call Cawdrey’s octavo a “ladies’ dictionary” rather sardonically, as the frontispiece patronizes the female sex by presenting “the interpretation thereof by plaine English words, gathered for the benefit & helpe of Ladies, Gentlewomen, or any other vnskilfull persons.”
37. Blundeville, 2B4v.
38. The Shrew, S6v, T1r.
39. Williams, III, 1440. See also Eric Partridge, Shakespeare’s Bawdy: A Literary and Psychological Essay and a Comprehensive Glossary (London: Routledge, 1956), 211.
40. The Shrew, T6v.
41. A Shrew, D3r-v
42. The Shrew, T3v.
43. Dekker, Chettle, and Haughton, L1v.
44. John Derricke, The Image of Irelande, with a Discoverie of Woodkarne, ed. David B. Quinn (Belfast: Blackstaff, 1985), plate IX. The snaffle bit could also be termed “sliding reins.” In the cited woodcut, the Irish riders also lack stirrups.
45. Gervase Markham, How to Chuse, Ride, Traine, and Diet, both Hunting-Horses and Running Horses (London, 1597; STC 17348), O3r. See also, Thomas De Grey, The Compleat Horseman and Expert Ferrier (London, 1639; STC 12206), T3r; Gervase Markham, The English Farrier, or, Countrey-mans Treasure, Showing Approved Remedies to Cure all Diseases (London, 1639; STC 10410), Cc2v; Nicholas Morgan, The Perfection of Horsemanship (London, 1609; STC 18105), X3v; and Thomas Purfoote, Remedies for Diseases in Horses (London, 1586; STC 20872), B2r.
46. How to Chuse, O3r.
47. On Tudor and Stuart admiration for Hercules, see Eugene M. Waith, The Herculean Hero in Marlowe, Chapman, Shakespeare and Dryden (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), 49–59.
48. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Book 5, Canto 8, Verse xxxi, in E. Greenlaw, C. G. Osgood and F. M. Padelford, eds., The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, 9 vols (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1932–57), V.
49. Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth, eds., The Oxford Classical Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 199; and Jenny March, Cassell Dictionary of Classical Mythology (London: Cassell, 1998), 194.
50. Frances E. Dolan, “Household Chastisements: Gender, Authority and ‘Domestic Violence,’” in Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt, eds., Renaissance Culture and the Everyday (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 208.
51. Minette Walters, The Scold’s Bridle (London: Macmillan, 1994). The novel, incidentally, features many other Shakespearean allusions and refractions. The murdered female character’s diary is discovered to reflect its author’s obsession with discourses of cruelty in King Lear.
52. Lynda Boose, “Scolding Brides and Bridling Scolds: Taming the Woman’s Unruly Member,” in Ivo Kamps, ed., Materialist Shakespeare: A History (London: Verso, 1995), 179–213; David Underdown, “The Taming of the Scold: The Enforcement of Patriarchal Authority in Early Modern England,” in Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson, eds., Order and Disorder in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 116–36; Valerie Wayne, “Refashioning the Shrew,” Shakespeare Studies, 17 (1985), 159–87. Wayne’s article includes a photograph of a scold’s bridle preserved in Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire, 160.
53. Reay, 35. There is a small picture of a brank, which is briefly discussed, in Suzanne W. Hull, Women According to Men: The World of Tudor and Stuart Women (Walnut Creek: Altamira Press, 1996), 42.
54. Dekker, Chettle, and Haughton, D2v.
55. In Tamburlaine the Great, Part Two, a stage direction demands that the Scythian warrior is “drawn in his chariot by [the KINGS of] TREBIZOND and SORIA with bits in their mouths, reins in his left hand.” See Christopher Marlowe, The Complete Plays, ed. Mark Thornton Burnett (London: Everyman, 1999), IV.iii.0.1–3.
56. Carol C. Rutter, ed., Documents of the Rose Playhouse (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 136.
57. Here Begynneth a Merry Ieste of a Shrewde and Curste Wyfe (London, [1550?]; STC 14521).
58. It is noticeable that J. P. Collier drops the clause “Merry Jest” from the tale’s title in the contents pages at the front of his large collection of Shakespearean sources—it is as if already in 1875 it is inappropriate to think of the savage tale as being amusing, J. P. Collier, ed., Shakespeare’s Library: A Collection of the Plays, Romances, Novels, Poems and Histories Employed by Shakespeare, 6 vols. (London: Reeves and Turner, 1875), I, xx.
59. Linda Woodbridge, “New Light on The Wife Lapped in Morel’s Skin and The Proud Wife’s Paternoster,” English Literary Renaissance, 13 (1983), 35.
60. The Brideling, Sadling and Ryding, of a Rich Churle in Hampshire, by one Judeth Philips (London, 1595; STC 19855), A4r-v. See also Barbara Rosen, ed., Witchcraft in England: 1558–1618 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991), 217–8.
61. “Several species of tree possess special symbolic import . . . the holly tree life and hope, as well as the Passion,” David Lyle Jeffrey, ed., A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1992), 780.
62. The Medieval legend of “Phyllis and Aristotle,” in which the lust-driven philosopher is ridden like a horse by the young Phyllis, is described by Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), 135–6. Davis’s book also reproduces a 1513 visual rendering of the legend by Hans Baldung (188–9).
63. The power of the image has been exploited by feminist scholars. Although the body of her text makes no reference to the Phillips tale, Suzanne Hull illustrates her Women According to Men monograph’s cover with the pamphlet’s woodcut. Elizabeth Niemyer has also noted the longevity and fascination of the type. This critic notes that an illustration of a “shrew” riding a husband from a 1528 Vegetius work “has not gone unnoted by modern feminists,” Elizabeth Niemyer, ed., The Reign of the Horse in Print, 1500–1715 (Washington: Folger, 1991), 10.
64. William Winstanley, Poor Robin’s True Character of a Scold, or, the Shrew’s Looking-glass (London, 1678; Wing W3077), A2v. This late pamphlet also—helpfully for this chapter’s themes—compares the worrying, perceived expansion of the race of shrews to the fecundity of “noxious Animals,” A4v.
65. The Brideling, B4r.
66. Dolan, 207.
67. Thomas Dekker and George Wilkins, Iests to Make You Merie London, 1607; STC 6541), D1r-v.
68. See the entry on “riding” in Williams, III, 1154–5.
69. The Shrew, S6v.
70. “She strikes him,” Ibid.
71. Ibid., B3r.
72. A Shrew, B3r.
73. Ann Thompson helpfully accounts for much of this criticism in the “Introduction” to her edition of the play, William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, ed. Ann Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 25–41. Penny Gay, in a chapter devoted to twentieth-century stagings of The Shrew, points out that Kate is a contested figure, whose capacity for cooperation and/or shrewishness depends greatly on the motivations or prejudices of the director. Gay is greatly angered by what she sees as blatant, theatrical efforts to diffuse the play’s inherent misogyny; Penny Gay, As She Likes It: Shakespeare’s Unruly Women (London: Routledge, 1996), 86–119.
74. The Shrew, T1r.
75. Morris Palmer Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966), 363.
76. Dekker, Chettle, and Haughton, G4v.
77. Ibid., H2r.
78. Ibid., G3r. Earlier, Gwalter has mused that “Spite of my soule sheele triumph ouer me,” D2v.
79. Julia Bronfman, “Griselda, Renaissance Woman,” in Anne Haselkhorn and Betty Travitsky, eds., The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print: Counter-Balancing the Canon (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), 219.
80. Ibid.
81. Lazarillo’s name may be allusive of the Spanish picaresque anti-hero, Lazarillo de Tormes. English translations of that figure’s life of crime were available to Elizabethan readers. See The Pleasaunt Historie of Lazarillo de Tormes (London, 1586; STC 15336); The Most Pleasaunt Historie of Lazarillo de Tormes, the second part (London, 1596; STC 15340). A useful, succinct description of the Lazarillo type and its place in rogue literature is supplied by James Roult, Crowell’s Handbook of Elizabethan and Stuart Literature (New York: Crowell, 1975), 361; another brief guide to the literary career of the Spanish rogue is supplied in Ulrich Wicks, Picaresque Narrative, Picaresque Fictions: A Theory and Research Guide (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), 230–41.
82. Dekker, Chettle, and Haughton, E3r.
83. See Martin Ingram, “Ridings, Rough Music and Mocking Rhymes in Early Modern England,” in Barry Reay, ed., Popular Culture in Seventeenth Century England (London: Croom Helm, 1985), 166–97. For a contemporary visual representation of a Skimmington event, see the frontispiece of John Taylor, Divers Crabtree Lectures (London, 1639; STC 23743).
84. Dekker, Chettle, and Haughton, E4r.
85. Ibid., F1r.
86. Ibid., F1v.
87. Ibid., G1r. Lazarillo’s trapdoor fate is similar to the humiliation shared by Malvolio in the Middle Temple play, Twelfth Night (1600–1601). Blurt’s hell incident neatly illustrates a point made in an essay by Andrew Murphy, in which the critic makes the fairly obvious but useful point that “authors” are not solely in charge of dramatic texts, but work in collaboration with other factors, including the drama company and their playing premises:
Playtexts (at least of the late sixteenth century) tend not to function within an economy of unique, original solo authorship. Such works tend to be permeable to, and reliant upon, a broader cultural context; they are often collaboratively written; they do not participate in a régime of authorial proprietorship; and they are addressed to and dependent on an institutional source (the theatre) for their production, a structure . . . [of] broadly social and collaborative nature.
See Andrew Murphy, “‘Came Errour Here by Mysse of Man’: Editing and the Metaphysics of Presence,” The Yearbook of English Studies, 29 (1999), 128–9. Charles Cathcart’s essay, “Plural Authorship, Attribution, and the Children of the King’s Revels,” develops and insists upon Murphy’s stress on dramatic collaboration between numerous agencies, Renaissance Forum, 4.2 (2000), www.hull.ac.uk/renforum/v4no2/cathcart.htm. The “hell” facility at the Paul’s playhouse was a collaborative factor—without it, the boys who were playing the whores could not have sent Lazarillo down into the cellar live on stage. The trapdoor had just been built into the Paul’s playhouse stage when Blurt was written and performed. See Reavely Gair, The Children of Paul’s: The Story of a Theatre Company, 1553–1608 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 60. Gair also provides a diagram showing exactly where the new trapdoor was situated on the renovated stage, 59. Andrew Gurr specifically discusses Blurt, Master Constable in relation to the Paul’s Boys’ theatrical conditions in The Shakespearian Playing Companies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 338, 343.
88. Davis, 31.
89. Here be Certayne Questyons of Kynge Bocthus of the Manners, Tokyns and Condycions of Man (London, c. 1550; STC 3188), B3r. See also John Heywood, A Dialogue Conteinyng the Nomber in Effect of all the Prouerbes in the Englishe Tongue (London, 1549; STC 13292), which imagines a nonideal woman serving a poorish man as a “scald hors is good inough for a scabde squyer,” C2r (incorrectly marked as B3r in the original edition).
90. N. R., Proverbs English, French, Dutch, Italian and Spanish, All Englished and Alphabetically Digested (London, 1659; Wing R56), A7r.
91. Richard Brome and Thomas Heywood, The Late Lancashire Witches (London, 1634; STC 13373), K3r.
92. Frederick Boas, Thomas Heywood (London: Williams and Norgate, 1950), 157.