"As I please myself". Recollections and reconfigurations of female agency in Ariosto's Suppositi, Gascoigne's Supposes and Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew

This chapter cross-examines meaningful passages in Ariosto and Gascoigne (Acts 1.1; 1.3/4; 3.4), bringing them into dialogue with Italian and English cultural “resources” (Drakakis 2021) to shed light on the transformations of the main female character, Polynesta, before reaching Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. Slightly better rounded than her Latin models but still confined in a protactic role in Ariosto, Polynesta comes across as more resourceful and forward in Gascoigne’s translation: close readings into the translator’s additions, recombinations, and variations of the Ariostan hypotexts evidence how Supposes’s Polynesta eschews Elizabethan mores, exercising agency over her father’s patriarchal authority through her body and sexuality – a form of action that compromises Damon’s bargaining power on the marriage market where he tries to sell her virginity to the highest bidding suitor. This ‘agency in body’, already present in Ariosto and interestingly accentuated in Gascoigne, marks a point of divergence from Shakespeare’s later treatment of the character: as is well known, Bianca is onomastically and metaphorically ‘white’, given that premarital sex is expurgated from Shrew. This does not mean, however, that she is as passive, innocent, and silent as criticism has traditionally construed her to be. To quote Lorna Hutson, Shrew “works to create uncertainty around Bianca’s speech and action”, inviting “readers, actors, and audience to interpret her in retrospect” (1994: 215). This ‘hindsight hermeneutics’ should stretch, I contend, further back to include Bianca’s Anglo-Italian genealogy, as well. The second section of the chapter will thus explore Shakespeare’s creative engagement with Bianca’s antecedents, arguing for the playwright’s reconfiguration of female agency in the subplot through the re-articulation of the theme of ‘supposes’. While acting within a system of paternal control comparable to the one dramatized in Ariosto and Gascoigne, Bianca reclaims power by exercising ‘agency in mind’ instead of body, mastering the ‘supposes’ – the trickery, deceptions, and broader system of make-believe – that, to expand on a seminal study by Cecil Seronsy (1963), serve as a unifying theme in Shrew. As the analyses in this chapter ultimately suggest, in stirring Anglo-Italian social costumes of marriage-making with Ariosto’s idea of ‘supposes’ as reinterpreted by Gascoigne, Shakespeare memorializes Shrew’s origin in Suppositi and Supposes, innovating the hypotexts’ gender dynamics by reusing their ‘supposes’ to redirect Bianca’s agency from body to mind.