The Taming of the Shrew was first published in the 1623 Folio, but a related play, shorter and simpler, with the title The Taming of a Shrew, had appeared in print in 1594. The exact relationship of these plays is disputed. A Shrew has sometimes been regarded as the source for The Shrew; some scholars have believed that both plays derive independently from an earlier play, now lost; it has even been suggested that Shakespeare wrote both plays. In our view Shakespeare’s play was written first, not necessarily on the foundation of an earlier play, and A Shrew is an anonymous imitation, written in the hope of capitalizing on the success of Shakespeare’s play. The difference between the titles is probably no more significant than the fact that The Winter’s Tale is even now often loosely referred to as A Winter’s Tale, or The Comedy of Errors as A Comedy of Errors.

The plot of The Taming of the Shrew has three main strands. First comes the Induction showing how a drunken tinker, Christopher Sly, is made to believe himself a lord for whose entertainment a play is to be presented. This resembles an episode in The Arabian Nights, in which Caliph Haroun al Raschid plays a similar trick on Abu Hassan. A Latin version of this story was known in Shakespeare’s England; it may also have circulated by word of mouth. Second comes the principal plot of the play performed for Sly, in which the shrewish Katherine is wooed, won, and tamed by the fortune-hunting Petruccio. This is a popular narrative theme; Shakespeare may have known a ballad called ‘A merry jest of a shrewd and curst wife lapped in morel’s skin for her good behaviour’, printed around 1550. The third strand of the play involves Lucentio, Gremio, and Hortensio, all of them suitors for the hand of Katherine’s sister, Bianca. This is based on the first English prose comedy, George Gascoigne’s Supposes, translated from Ludovico Ariosto’s I Suppositi (1509), acted in 1566, and published in 1573. In The Taming of the Shrew as printed in the 1623 Folio Christopher Sly fades out after Act 1, Scene 1, in A Shrew he makes other appearances, and rounds off the play. These episodes may derive from a version of Shakespeare’s play different from that preserved in the Folio; we print them as Additional Passages.

The adapting of Shakespeare’s play that seems to have occurred early in its career foreshadows its later history on the stage. Seven versions appeared during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, culminating in David Garrick’s Catharine and Petruchio, first performed in 1754. This version, omitting Christopher Sly and concentrating on the taming story, held the stage almost unchallenged until late in the nineteenth century. In various incarnations The Taming of the Shrew has always been popular on the stage, but its reputation as a robust comedy verging on farce has often obscured its more subtle and imaginative aspects, brutalizing Petruccio and trivializing Kate. The Induction, finely written, establishes a fundamentally serious concern with the powers of persuasion to change not merely appearance but reality, and this theme is acted out at different levels in both strands of the subsequent action.

THE PERSONS OF THE PLAY

In the Induction

CHRISTOPHER SLY, beggar and tinker

A HOSTESS

A LORD

BARTHOLOMEW, his page

HUNTSMEN

SERVANTS

PLAYERS

In the play-within-the-play

BAPTISTA Minola, a gentleman of Padua

KATHERINE, his elder daughter

BIANCA, his younger daughter

PETRUCCIO, a gentleman of Verona, suitor of Katherine

GREMIO, a rich old man of Padua, suitor of Bianca

HORTENSIO, another suitor, who disguises himself as Licio, a

teacher

LUCENTIO, from Pisa, who disguises himself as Cambio, a teacher

VINCENTIO, Lucentio’s father

A PEDANT (schoolmaster), from Mantua

A WIDOW

A TAILOR

A HABERDASHER

An OFFICER

SERVINGMEN, including NATHANIEL, PHILIP, JOSEPH, and PETER

Other servants of Baptista and Petruccio

The Taming of the Shrew

Induction 1 Enter Christopher Sly the beggar, and the Hostess

SLY I’ll feeze you, in faith.

HOSTESS A pair of stocks, you rogue.

SLY You’re a baggage. The Slys are no rogues. Look in the Chronicles—we came in with Richard Conqueror, therefore paucas palabras, let the world slide. Sessa!

HOSTESS You will not pay for the glasses you have burst?

SLY No, not a denier. Go by, Saint Jeronimy! Go to thy cold bed and warm thee.

HOSTESS I know my remedy, I must go fetch the headborough. Exit

SLY Third or fourth or fifth borough, I’ll answer him by law. I’ll not budge an inch, boy. Let him come, and kindly.

He falls asleep.

Horns sound. Enter a Lord from hunting, with his train

LORD

Huntsman, I charge thee, tender well my hounds.

Breathe Merriman—the poor cur is embossed—

And couple Clowder with the deep-mouthed brach.

Saw’st thou not, boy, how Silver made it good

At the hedge corner, in the coldest fault?

I would not lose the dog for twenty pound.

FIRST HUNTSMAN

Why, Belman is as good as he, my lord.

He cried upon it at the merest loss,

And twice today picked out the dullest scent.

Trust me, I take him for the better dog.

LORD

Thou art a fool. If Echo were as fleet

I would esteem him worth a dozen such.

But sup them well, and look unto them all.

Tomorrow I intend to hunt again.

FIRST HUNTSMAN I will, my lord.

LORD (seeing Sly)

What’s here? One dead, or drunk? See, doth he breathe?

SECOND HUNTSMAN

He breathes, my lord. Were he not warmed with ale

This were a bed but cold to sleep so soundly.

LORD

O monstrous beast! How like a swine he lies.

Grim death, how foul and loathsome is thine image.

Sirs, I will practise on this drunken man.

What think you: if he were conveyed to bed,

Wrapped in sweet clothes, rings put upon his fingers,

A most delicious banquet by his bed,

And brave attendants near him when he wakes—

Would not the beggar then forget himself?