THERE ARE three theories about the relationship of Shakespeare’s play to The Taming of a Shrew: (I) that A Shrew was the main source of Shakespeare’s play; (2) that it was piratically derived from it; (3) that both A Shrew and The Shrew were derived from a lost play, the Ur-Shrew. Not many critics cling to the first of these views. The third view, of the lost play, has the advantage of evading the awkward differences between most bad quartos and A Shrew. There are hardly any verbal echoes of Shakespeare’s play in A Shrew; and although there is some plagiarism from Marlowe, most of the verse is at least respectable, beyond the scope of the normal pirate. Richard Hosley, in what is the most convincing contribution to a continuing debate,1 has argued that A Shrew postdates The Shrew, that it is a piratical version of it, and that the author responsible deliberately deviated from Shakespeare’s play, altering the names of most of the characters, giving the Shrew a third sister, and adding an epilogue to round off the Sly story.
If we accept Hosley’s arguments, as I have gradually come to do, Shakespeare must have based his play on a number of different sources. The Sly Induction is derived ultimately from a story in The Arabian Nights, a variant of which Shakespeare could have read in De rebus burgundicis of Heuterus (1584), or in a lost collection of stories by Richard Edwardes (1570). (Translations of Heuterus by Goulart into French (1600) and English (1607) were, of course, too late for Shakespeare to have used them.) The drunk artisan tricked by the Duke of Burgundy in Goulart’s version is entertained with a pleasant comedy.2 Shakespeare, unless an epilogue dropped out during the thirty years that elapsed before his play appeared in print, avoided a scene in which the tricked drunkard awakens to his normal existence.
The second strand in the play was provided by Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), a lively version of Ariosto’s I Suppositi. As the prologue explains, the word ‘Suppose’, as used in the play, ‘is nothing else but a mystaking or imagination of one thing for an other’. Gascoigne calls attention to twenty-five supposes in marginal notes. Most of these are caused by the numerous disguises, master as servant, servant as master, stranger for friend, and friend for stranger. Polynesta, the heroine, is pregnant by Erostrato, but Shakespeare’s Bianca is a virgin. Erostrato’s servant, posing as his master, persuades a Siennese merchant to pretend to be his rich father whose coming with a dowry he had promised, by warning him that Ferrara was dangerous to people from Sienna. (From this incident Shakespeare derived Ægeon’s plight in The Comedy of Errors.) When Erostrato’s father arrives there follow complications similar to those in Shakespeare’s play. Cleander, the aged suitor corresponding to Gremio, turns out to be the father of Dulipo, the bogus Erostrato. Shakespeare does not make use of this twist in the plot. He gives Bianca three suitors and adds the business of the Latin and music teachers. It has been suggested3 that the Latin lesson is based on a scene in The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London (1590), but the debt may be the other way round. Hortensio’s marriage to a widow and Lucentio’s to Bianca provide two apparently docile wives to contrast with the genuinely obedient Katherine.
The main plot, of the taming, seems to have no identifiable source. The taming of a shrew is a popular theme and there may well have been something closer to Shakespeare’s plot than A Shrewde and Curste Wyfe, a ballad in which the shrew is chastened with birch rods. Hosley points out a number of parallels4 – the contrast of the shrew with her sister, the description of the shrew as mad, a fiend, as angry as a wasp, and the mention of the rout at the wedding – but the only one that makes it fairly certain that Shakespeare did know the ballad is ‘He that can charme a shrewde wyfe,/ Better then thus’, which is close to Shakespeare’s ‘He that knows better how to tame a shrew’; but Menaechmus, in W.W.’s translation, exclaims similarly: ‘Would euery man could tame his shrewe as well as I doo mine’ (I. iii).
Details of the taming plot may be derived from various sources. The scolding of the tailor is similar to an anecdote about Sir Philip Caulthrop in Legh’s Accedens of Armoury (1562).5 The scene of the wager is reminiscent of The Book of the Knight of La Tour-Landry, which Caxton translated in 1484.6 Three merchants wager on their wives’ obedience. There is an analogue of the scene in which Katherine agrees with statements she knows are absurd in El Conde Lucanor but Shakespeare is unlikely to have known this.
There are some curious parallels7 with one of Erasmus’ Colloquies, translated as A Mery Dialogue, Declaringe the Propertyes of Shrowde Shrewes and Honest Wyves (1557), in which a young wife, who has become shrewish through her husband’s misbehaviour, like Adriana in The Comedy of Errors, is advised to be patient so that she may gradually reform her husband. Two passages in the first scene of the play seem to echo passages in the colloquy:
But if it were, doubt not her care should be
To comb your noddle with a three-legg’d stool…
A pretty peat! it is best
Put finger in the eye, an she knew why.
(I. i. 63–4, 78–9)
Compare the following:
I gat me a thre foted stole in hand, and he had but ones layd his littell finger on me, he shulde not haue founde me lame… (Sig. A3v)
She withdrew her good mynde and dylygence and when her husband called vpon her, she put the finger in the eye, and wepte. (Sig. A9)
Shakespeare seems to have echoed another of the Colloquies – one that had not been translated – in Katherine’s sermon to the disobedient wives:8
our Condition is much preferable to theirs: For they, endeavouring to get a Maintenance for their Families, scamper thro all the Parts of the Earth by Land and Sea. In Times of War they are call’d up by the Sound of the Trumpet, stand in Armour in the Front of the Battle; while we sit at home in Safety.
So Katherine tells the other wives that the husband is
one that cares for thee,
And for thy maintenance commits his body
To painful labour both by sea and land,
To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,
Whilst thou liest warm at home, secure and safe.
(V. ii. 147–51)
There were, of course, countless sermons on the subordination of women to their husbands. The same doctrine had been preached by Luciana in The Comedy of Errors. Hosley quotes an interesting passage from A Very Frutefull and Pleasant Boke Called the Instruction of a Christen Woman by Juan Vives, translated by Richard Hyrde (c. 1529). Although there is no reason to believe that Shakespeare had read this book, one sentence suggests that Katherine’s tactical submission may be interpreted as a strategic victory: ‘A good woman by lowely obeysaunce ruleth hir husbande’.9
The names of Tranio and Grumio, but nothing else, were taken from the Mostellaria of Plautus.
The three plots are brilliantly linked structurally (as the attempts by Garrick and others to play the Taming on its own inadvertently proved) but they are also linked thematically.10 In all three plots there are characters who are rôle-playing. Sly, for a few hours, is made to play the part of a lord; characters in the Bianca plot pretend to be servant or master, music tutor or Latin tutor, father or son; Petruchio pretends to be a male shrew in order to cure Katherine; and she enters into the game of pretending. The play is not, therefore, the crude and degrading farce it has been thought to be by some critics; but, it must be confessed, some of the verse, particularly in the first scene, is flat and feeble. This is not merely a device, as used later in Much Ado about Nothing, to throw into relief the more vital pair of lovers, but a positive lack of poetry; it compares unfavourably in this respect with all the other early plays.