The Taming of the Queen: Foxe’s Katherine and Shakespeare’s Kate

Abstract

In considering the transmission of religious and gender ideologies in sixteenth-century England, we must consider John Foxes Acts and Monuments, one of the most influential and widely read books of the English Renaissance, and a source for much Renaissance drama. Many early modern plays depict queens in perilous situations and some of these works drew on Foxe as a source. Henry VIII’s sixth and last wife Katherine Parr is one such queen in peril whose story is chronicled in Foxe and then retold in part in Samuel Rowley’s When You See Me, You Know Me (1605). While Rowley’s version holds some interest historically, I would suggest the most intriguing parallel between Foxe’s narrative and an early modern play is with Katherine Parr’s namesake in one of Shakespeare’s comedies, the one where Kate is known as a “curst shrew.” I would argue that in The Taming of the Shrew we can see some deliberate echoes of the confrontation between Katherine and Henry, the threats to Katherine, and the cultural anxieties about an educated or strong-willed wife. Though Rowley’s play follows Foxe more closely, it is The Taming of the Shrew that deals more thoroughly with the issue raised by Foxe. Furthermore, these concerns are found not only in the representation of Kate, but even, ironically, in Bianca as well. Though the traditional view of Bianca is that she is a brainless beauty who fools her father by her quiet and ladylike demeanor and then turns out to be actually spoiled and disobedient once married, I would argue that Bianca is really a model of an unruly woman who disrupts societal norms—but unlike both Katherine Parr and Kate—does not revert to the role of the pliant woman at the end of the play.