Shakespeare’s Shrews Italian Traditions of Paradoxes and the Woman’s Debate

Contents

Foreword by Rocco Coronato

Acknowledgments

Introduction. “There’s a double tongue; there’s two tongues”

Chapter 1 – “A wonderfull thing to hear”: paradoxes and the woman’s question as early modern literary traditions

1.1 – Paradoxical argumentation and its fortune in early modern England and Italy

The classical tradition of paradoxical rhetoric

Universities, Inns of Court, and Italian humanists

The early modern paradox: the mock encomium as an epistemological tool

Between Italy, France and England: the case of Ortensio Lando’s Paradossi

A paradoxical development: the mock encomium and the argumentum contra opinionem omnium

1.2 – The woman’s question and its paradoxical portrayal of the female sex

Literary antecedents and foundational texts of the woman’s question

The woman’s question in early modern Italy: Moderata Fonte and Lucrezia Marinella

The woman’s question in early modern England: the Swetnam controversy

1.3 – The paradox of the talkative woman in early modern Italy and England

Italian talkativeness: from the Roman slave to the masks of the commedia dell’arte

English talkativeness: folktale shrews and Shakespeare’s Kate

The Italian cortigiana and the English shrew: a comparison

Chapter 2 – The role of Italian mediators in the English debate on women and paradoxical literary tradition

2.1 – Of women and agency in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and Harington’s translation

Female infidelity and homosocial relations in Canto IV and Canto XXVIII

Translating misogyny: omissions, additions, and alterations

2.2 – Witty women at the court of Baldassare Castiglione’s Il libro del cortegiano

An Italian turned English: Thomas Hoby’s The Book of the Courtier

A necessary presence: the ordering role of women in Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano and Thomas Hoby’s The Courtier

2.3 – Ercole and Torquato Tasso’s Dell’ammogliarsi, Robert Tofte’s translation, and the “Bishops’ Ban”

“Fained battles, fought in iest”: paradoxical misogyny in Tofte’s translation

Misogynistic anecdotes and the Queen’s praise in Torquato’s defense

Chapter 3 – “So sweet was ne’er so fatal”: the woman’s question and paradoxes in Shakespeare’s shrews

3.1 – The Taming of the Shrew: a shrew-taming narrative in paradoxical terms

The pamphlet literature and the competing representations of the shrew

Petruchio’s pars destruens: coercion and resistance through paradoxes

Petruchio’s pars construens: the case of Kate’s new identity

 “My tongue will tell the anger of my heart”

3.2 – Something new, something old: the use of paradoxes and the woman’s question in Much Ado About Nothing

Idealised partners in Shakespeare’s Messina

“Thou thinkest I am in sport”: love talks and logical paradoxes

The church scene and the shift in the use of paradoxes

“Guarded with fragments”

3.3 – “My lord is not my lord”: paradoxes as figures of the soul in Othello

The stage misogynist and the effects of slander

“It is their husbands’ faults”: Emilia’s defence of women

Iago’s poison: paradoxes as cyphers of tragedy and power imbalances

“A word or two before you go”

Conclusion – Figures of thought and thematical dispersion

Opposite developments: the relationship between the woman’s question and paradoxes

The variable of gender in the form and function of paradoxes

The shrew’s éndoxa, women writers, and the resolution of the paradox

Index

Biography

Beatrice Righetti is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Renaissance English Literature at the University of Verona and member of the “Shakespeare’s Narrative Sources: Italian Novellas and their European Dissemination” and “Classical and Early Modern Paradoxes” projects. She has published on Renaissance women writers and Shakespearean plays, examining the use of paradoxes, gender‑based violence, and Anglo‑Italian relations in Routledge edited volumes, NJES, and Linguae&.