There is no doubt that the play is the work of Fletcher alone; his highly distinctive and characteristic pattern of linguistic preferences is continuous through the text.
Petruchio finally fights his way out, but in Act Four he discovers that his wife has "gone mad"—she has begun to dress like a common whore and is busy flirting with his friends.
When Petruchio announces that he has had enough of marriage and is abandoning Maria for foreign travel, she encourages him to depart on the pretext that his journeys may broaden his vision and turn him into a better human being.
Maria is indeed moved to tears, but they are inspired, not by his person, but by his "unmanly, wretched, foolish life... how far below a man, how far from reason" Petruchio has remained.
Others have favored a date as late as 1618-22 for the original version of the play, based on internal characteristics of Fletcher's evolving style.
However, the first surviving reference to the play is contained in a government document dating on the morning of 18 October 1633 when Sir Henry Herbert, the Master of the Revels, 'sent a warrant by messenger of the chamber to suppress The Tamer Tamed, to the King's players for the afternoon'.
Fletcher borrowed[citation needed] the name, age, and nuptial desire of Moroso from the character Morose in Ben Jonson's comedy The Silent Woman (1609).
The Tamer Tamed was one of the first English plays based on Aristophanes, and Fletcher one of the first European critics to pay special attention to Lysistrata.
The 1633 revival provoked the wrath of Sir Henry Herbert, the Master of the Revels and the overseer of London theatre in the Caroline era.
On 19 October 1633, Herbert ordered the King's Men not to perform The Woman's Prize that day, because of complaints of the "foul and offensive matters" it contained; the company acted the Beaumont/Fletcher play The Scornful Lady instead.
In regard to the same matter, Herbert addressed a 21 October letter to Edward Knight, the "book-keeper" or prompter of the King's Men, on the subject of "oaths, profaneness, and public ribaldry" in the company's plays.
Fletcher's play was cleaned up in time for a Court performance the next month: The Taming of the Shrew and The Woman's Prize were acted before Charles I of England and Henrietta Maria at St. James's Palace on 26 and 28 November respectively.
Appearing under the title of The Woman’s Prize: or, The Tamer Tamed the play was contained in the 1647 folio edition of thirty-four Comedies and Tragedies attributed to Beaumont and Fletcher.
The original text of the play had some blatant anti-Catholic elements, which, according to this view, Herbert wanted to suppress out of deference to the Queen, Henrietta Maria.
In 2003 The Woman's Prize; or, The Tamer Tamed was revived by the Royal Shakespeare Company, opening on 6 March[10] and subsequently moving to the Kennedy Center.