Joan Overfield's A Proper Taming

In Joan Overfield's A Proper Taming, despite the apparent allusion to The Taming of the Shrew and the markedly hoydenish character of the heroine, the central Shakespearean allusion to Julius Caesar and appears when the heroine explains her name:

"My father named me for Brutus's longsuffering wife," she said . . . "He was a literature don at Cambridge, and he was teaching Julius Caesar to his students when my mother gave birth to me," Portia explained, her eyes twinkled as she remembered the many times she had heard her father tell the story. "I have often given thanks that he was not teaching the comedies or else I might have been saddled with Titania or Thisbee [sic] for a name." (190)

Though she spends a good portion of the book taming the oafish Connor who ultimately bellows his intention to marry her during a luncheon and drags her off to make wedding plans as peremptorily as Petruchio, she is trying to live up to her father's remembered goal for her to be a lady; she tries to be the longsuffering Portia of tragedy rather than the clever and aggressive manipulator of comedy but does not quite succeed. As the final line of the novel puts it, "he Beast and the hoyden, it would be whispered for several generations to come, had tamed each other" (217). Incidental Shakespeare / Reference List by Play / Return to: Shakespeare Quoters