The Taming of the Shrew
The most enduringly popular of the early comedies, if also the most potentially offensive, The Taming of the Shrew has sometimes been regarded as Shakespeare’s first play—partly on the sentimental grounds that its Induction’s allusions to Warwickshire reflect the homesickness of a Stratford man newly arrived in London. Although the sophistication of its dramatic structure and scenic technique compared to those of The Two Gentlemen of Verona make this placing in the *chronology unlikely, the play does belong to the very first phase of Shakespeare’s writing career: while evidence as to its date is complicated by the existence of a similar play, The *Taming of a Shrew, published anonymously in 1594, it seems certain that The Taming of the Shrew was already extant by 1592, when passages without any equivalent in A Shrew were echoed in another anonymous play, A Knack to Know a Knave. In 1593 Shakespeare’s play was remembered again, this time by the poet Antony Chute, whose poem Beauty Dishonoured includes the line ‘He calls his Kate, and she must come and kiss him.’ The Taming of the Shrew requires a similar size of cast to The First Part of the Contention (2 Henry VI) and Richard Duke of York (3 Henry VI), and shares rare vocabulary with both plays: it is likely that it was composed at around the same time as Shakespeare’s earliest histories, c. 1590–1.
Text: Although The Taming of a Shrew appeared in quarto in 1594, 1596, and 1607, The Taming of the Shrew was not printed until the publication of the Folio in 1623. Its text is among the most puzzling in the canon: for one thing it lacks a completion to the frame-narrative of Christopher Sly, which disappears after 1.1 (though one possible ending is preserved by The Taming of a Shrew, which is probably a garbled plagiarism of Shakespeare’s play). In incidentals the Folio text is a mess, and an inconsistent mess at that: some speech-prefixes preserve the names of actors rather than characters (‘Sinclo’ (see Sincler, John) for one of the players, ‘Nick’ for a messenger in 3.1), consistent with a text derived from *foul papers, while some speech-prefix errors suggest a scribe who has been misled by authorial use of an abbreviated alias to designate a character currently in disguise. Some passages suggest the Folio text derives from foul papers, in which Shakespeare’s process of initial composition is still visible (4.4, for example, suggests indecision as to whether the location is outside Baptista’s house or outside Tranio’s lodging), others—notably ‘Sinclo’s’ reference to ‘Soto’, apparently an interpolated allusion to John *Fletcher’s Women Pleased (c.1620?)—suggest a manuscript which has been altered for a late Jacobean revival, perhaps in conjunction with Fletcher’s sequel The Woman’s Prize; or, The Tamer Tamed. This last hypothesis, however, is itself rendered problematic by the fact that the Folio text has not been expurgated to comply with the *Act to Restrain the Abuses of Players. It seems impossible to decide whether the Folio text derives from foul papers or from a transcript which has undergone some theatrical adaptation: some of its inconsistencies have been explained by the hypothesis that Shakespeare may have been working with a collaborator, but this theory has not been generally accepted.
Sources: The Taming of the Shrew has an impeccably literary sub-plot—the Bianca–Lucentio story is derived from George *Gascoigne’s pioneering prose comedy Supposes (1566), itself a translation of *Ariosto’s I suppositi (1509)—but its main plot belongs more to folklore than to high culture. Although countless *ballads depict a husband disciplining an unruly wife (among them A Merry Jest of a Shrewd and Cursed Wife, 1550), most of these are far more brutal than Shakespeare’s play (in A Merry Jest, for example, the shrew is beaten up and wrapped in the skin of a dead horse), and none is close enough in detail to the Petruccio–Kate story to be cited as a specific source, though the play clearly belongs in the same general tradition. Some commentators, however, have detected the influence of a relatively humane colloquy by the Dutch humanist Erasmus (c. 1466–1536), translated in 1557 as ‘A Merry Dialogue, Declaring the Properties of Shrewd Shrews and Honest Wives’. The Induction, too, detailing the adventure of a peasant duped into believing himself a lord, derives from a story widespread through folklore and told in various earlier ballads, and Shakespeare does not seem to have had any single precedent in mind as he composed his own Warwickshire variant on the theme.
George Cruikshank’s concluding image of Kate, from an 1838 illustrated edition of Garrick’s adaptation Katharine and Petruchio at once celebrates her taming and acknowledges the violence by which it is accomplished.
Synopsis: Induction 1 Christopher Sly, a beggarly tinker, falls asleep after being ejected from a tavern for breaking glasses, and is found by a lord out hunting, who instructs his men to take Sly to his house, put him to bed, and persuade him when he wakes that he is its lord, who has been suffering from delusions. The Lord welcomes a troupe of players, and gives order that his page Bartholomew shall be dressed for the role of Sly’s lady.
Induction 2 As instructed, the servingmen tell Sly he is a lord who has been mentally ill for fifteen years, to the grief of his lady: accepting the story, Sly is eager to resume conjugal relations with the cross-dressed Bartholomew, but is put off, and instead agrees to watch the players perform a comedy.
1.1 Lucentio, arriving in Padua to study, falls in love with Bianca when he sees her with her father Baptista, her elder sister Katherine, and two rivals for her love, Gremio and Hortensio. Baptista declares that Bianca may be courted only after the angry and disdainful Katherine is married, and that meanwhile Bianca will be tutored at home. Hortensio and Gremio agree that they must find some man willing to marry Katherine. Lucentio, overhearing all this, hits upon a strategy with his servant Tranio: he will gain access to Bianca by disguising himself as a schoolmaster while Tranio, seconded by his other servant Biondello, fills the role of Lucentio. They exchange clothes. (Above, Sly is apparently bored by the play.)
1.2 Petruccio, arriving from Verona with his servant Grumio, calls on his friend Hortensio, and, learning of Katherine’s dowry, agrees to woo her despite her reported shrewishness: he also agrees to recommend a disguised Hortensio to Baptista as Bianca’s music teacher. Gremio arrives with the disguised Lucentio, whom he will present to Baptista as a tutor for Bianca: he agrees with Hortensio to co-sponsor Petruccio’s wooing of Katherine. Tranio arrives, disguised as Lucentio, and announces his own intention of courting Bianca: he too agrees to fund Petruccio’s suit, and Petruccio and the rivals repair to a tavern.
2.1 Katherine has tied Bianca’s hands, and is interrogating her about her suitors when Baptista arrives, separates them, and sends them indoors. The company arrive from the tavern: Petruccio offers himself as a suitor for Katherine (confirming that her dowry is 20,000 crowns and half of Baptista’s land in reversion) and presents Hortensio, disguised as Licio, as a music master. Gremio offers Lucentio, disguised as Cambio, as a tutor: both supposed teachers are accepted and sent to the two women, though Hortensio soon returns, after Katherine has broken his head with a lute, and is sent to Bianca instead. At Petruccio’s insistence he is left alone and Katherine sent to him: in the wrangling conversation which follows Petruccio affects to disregard the contempt she displays, declares that he was born to tame her, and tells the returning Baptista that she has agreed to marry him the following Sunday. Despite Katherine’s protests Baptista agrees, and Petruccio leaves to prepare for the wedding. Gremio and the disguised Tranio now attempt to outbid one another for Bianca’s hand, Tranio promising all Lucentio’s father Vincentio’s wealth, an offer Baptista accepts on condition that Vincentio confirms it. Tranio realizes he will need to produce a surrogate Vincentio.
3.1 Hortensio and Lucentio, furious rivals, each declare their identities and purposes to Bianca under cover of teaching her: she seems to favour Lucentio, and Hortensio is disgusted at the idea that she might welcome the courtship of a mere tutor.
3.2 After keeping his bride and the company waiting, Petruccio arrives for his wedding in grossly tattered and absurd clothes.
3.3 Gremio tells Lucentio and Tranio of Petruccio’s rough and swaggering behaviour during the marriage service: when the company arrive from the church, Petruccio refuses even to stay for the wedding breakfast, despite Katherine’s protests, and takes her away immediately.
4.1 Grumio, arriving at Petruccio’s country house to prepare his master’s welcome, tells the servant Curtis of the foul and uncomfortable journey Katherine has suffered. When Petruccio and Katherine arrive, Petruccio abuses the servants, rejects the food they bring, and insists that Katherine goes to bed hungry: alone, he explains that his strategy is to break her spirit by depriving her of food and sleep, always pretending that he is doing so for her own good, and he asks whether anyone in the audience knows of a better way of taming a shrew.
4.2 Hortensio leads Tranio where he may see the mutual courting of Bianca and Lucentio: Tranio feigns shock and abandons his pretended suit, while Hortensio, forswearing Bianca, leaves to court a wealthy widow he means to marry instead, intending to call on Petruccio on the way. Lucentio, Bianca, and Tranio agree on their strategy for obtaining Baptista’s consent by producing a false Vincentio to assure a marriage portion. Tranio persuades a passing Mantuan pedant that he is in mortal danger in Padua because of fictitious hostilities between the two city-states, and must disguise himself for safety: he explains that the Pedant can easily pass for Vincentio if he only goes through some formalities about a marriage settlement, in which Tranio will brief him.
4.3 At Petruccio’s house Grumio loyally refuses to let Katherine have any food, and assists Petruccio, watched by Hortensio, in rejecting the new cap and gown ordered from a haberdasher and a tailor for Katherine to wear on her bridal visit to her father. Petruccio insists the clothes are not good enough, abuses the tradesmen, and tells Katherine they will go only when she shows complete obedience.
4.4 Tranio presents the Pedant, dressed as Vincentio, to Baptista, and they agree to sign the marriage settlement between Lucentio and Bianca at Tranio’s lodgings over supper.
4.5 Biondello, on Tranio’s instructions, advises Lucentio to marry Bianca privately while her father is busy over the pretended marriage settlements.
4.6 On their way to Baptista’s house, Petruccio makes Katherine humour him by calling the sun the moon, and when they meet the real Vincentio he at first makes her greet him as if he were a young girl. Learning Vincentio’s identity, Petruccio congratulates him on his son’s marriage to Bianca, news which is confirmed by Hortensio before he leaves to woo the Widow.
5.1 Lucentio and Bianca hasten from his lodging towards their surreptitious wedding. Petruccio and Katherine arrive, bringing Vincentio, who knocks and is answered by the Pedant. The Pedant insists that he is Vincentio, supported by Biondello, who denies having ever seen the real Vincentio before (and is beaten by him), and when Tranio arrives in Lucentio’s clothes, Vincentio becomes convinced that his son has been murdered by his servants. Baptista is trying to have Vincentio taken to prison as an impostor when the newly-wed Lucentio and Bianca arrive (at which Tranio, Biondello, and the Pedant flee), and Lucentio confesses all. Petruccio agrees to follow them all and see how the affair turns out on condition that Katherine kisses him in the street: she does so.
5.2 The entire reconciled cast are assembled at Lucentio’s banquet, celebrating his wedding to Bianca and Hortensio’s to the Widow; after the three brides leave the chamber, each husband bets 20 crowns that his wife will return most obediently when summoned. Bianca and the Widow refuse to come, but Katherine comes immediately, and at Petruccio’s bidding fetches the other two wives, throws off her hat, and preaches a long homily on wifely obedience, thereby winning him the wager. A delighted Baptista adds another 20,000 crowns to Petruccio’s winnings. (In The Taming of a Shrew, Sly, now asleep, is put back into his own clothes and returned to where the Lord found him: awakened at dawn by a tapster, he says he has had a wonderful dream, and since he now knows how to tame a shrew has no fear of returning home to his wife.)
Artistic features: The Taming of the Shrew is the first of Shakespeare’s comedies to hint at his power to pursue a serious idea across a whole range of comic plots and situations, taking up the notions of identity and persuasion initiated by the Induction (which has already modelled the production of an ‘ideal’ wife through the transformation of Bartholomew), and developing them through each of the intrigues of the play proper.
Critical history: Long dismissed as a simple-minded, robust farce (*Johnson’s verdict, though he was impressed by Shakespeare’s interlinking of the two main plots, was merely that the play was ‘very popular and diverting’), The Taming of the Shrew has been taken ever more seriously since the early 20th century, and not only because that period has seen the emergence of modern *feminism. As with its stage history, the play has divided interpreters between those who wish to excuse or celebrate Petruccio’s behaviour towards Kate and those who wish to condemn it—essentially, between those who regard the ‘taming’ as a benign piece of psychic or social therapy inflicted in the cause of mutual love, and those who see it as simply an expression of the naked power of Elizabethan men over Elizabethan women. Many commentators have related Katherine’s speech on *marriage to wider Elizabethan doctrines of authority and social subordination (notably E. M. W. *Tillyard in The Elizabethan World Picture, 1943), but opinion on the play remains profoundly divided as to whether her submission is to be accepted and welcomed at face value or whether the play suggests it is to be viewed with scepticism, irony, or even revulsion.
Stage history: Partly because of this very controversy over how we are to take Petruccio’s triumph, the play has been inspiring adaptations and spin-offs ever since The Taming of a Shrew: around 1611, for example, *Fletcher produced a sequel (in which the characters have all miraculously become English), The Woman’s Prize; or, The Tamer Tamed, in which Petruccio’s second wife Maria proves much less tractable than the now-dead Kate. Although Shakespeare’s original was performed at court in the 1630s and in the early 1660s, The Taming of the Shrew was rewritten by John *Lacy in 1667 as Sauny the Scot, a largely prose version of the play, anglicized to match The Woman’s Prize, and dominated by Lacy’s performance as the caricatured Scottish servant Sauny (Grumio, ‘Sander’ in A Shrew). Despite two topical rewritings of the Induction (both as *The Cobbler of Preston, 1716) and a 1735 ballad opera (*A Cure for a Scold), this was the version that held the stage until the mid-18th century, when it was supplanted by David *Garrick’s three-act afterpiece *Catharine and Petruchio (1754). Garrick’s version, eliminating the Bianca plot and insisting that Petruchio loves Catharine all along and only feigns his various tactical brutalities, was not finally replaced until after Augustin *Daly’s production of the original in 1887–8, with Ada *Rehan as Kate, though the original had been revived twice in the 1840s, by Benjamin Webster in 1844 (in a precociously quasi-Elizabethan staging by J. R. *Planché) and by Samuel *Phelps in 1856. The play has enjoyed frequent revivals ever since, with great Kates including Violet *Vanbrugh, Laurence *Olivier (his debut, in a school production, 1922), Edith *Evans, Barbara *Jefford, and Vanessa *Redgrave (at Stratford in 1961, and in London 25 years later). Since feminism’s second wave in the 1970s, the tradition of playing Petruccio and Kate as a couple who fall happily in love in between their less happy lines has often given place to more critical productions, which have sometimes overcompensated by rendering Petruccio more brutal: Charles *Marowitz’s 1973 adaptation The Shrew has Petruchio (as the role was then known) sodomizing Kate onstage, and in Michael *Bogdanov’s 1978 RSC production Jonathan Pryce, a loutish, set-demolishing Sly, burst into the play-within-the-play as Petruchio on a phallic motorbike. He was finally slightly abashed, however, by Paola Dionisotti’s submission speech, which many successive actresses have sought to reclaim as an act of perverse defiance.
Michael Dobson
On the screen: The earliest film (1908) is of historical interest in being the work of D. W. Griffith. Five silent versions followed before Sam Taylor’s adaptation (1929), the first Shakespeare film to have a soundtrack with English dialogue. Two television productions followed, one for BBC TV (1939) by Dallas Bower and George Schaefer’s American production (1956) with Maurice Evans as Petruchio. *Zeffirelli’s film (1966) filled the screen with colour and captivatingly robust action, with Elizabeth Taylor as Kate and Richard *Burton as a powerful, swaggering, though unsubtle Petruchio. Jonathan *Miller’s production for BBC TV (1980), criticized for failing to give Kate sufficient dramatic weight in her own right, tackled the play along surprisingly unorthodox lines, casting John Cleese as a Puritan Petruchio. Shirley Henderson played Katherine Minola as an abrasive politician advised to marry in order to soften her public image in Sally Wainwright’s adaptation for the Shakespeare Retold series (BBC, 2005), with Rufus Sewell the rhinoceros-skinned, penniless nobleman happy to oblige.
Anthony Davies, rev. Will Sharpe