Critical history The relationship with A Shrew One of the most fundamental critical debates surrounding
The Shrew is its relationship with a separate play,
A Shrew. There are five main theories as to the nature of this relationship: • The two plays are unrelated other than the fact that they are both based on another play which is now lost. This is the
Ur-Shrew theory (in reference to
Ur-Hamlet). •
A Shrew is a reconstructed version of
The Shrew; i.e. a
bad quarto, an attempt by actors to reconstruct the original play from memory. • Shakespeare used the previously existing
A Shrew, which he did not write, as a source for
The Shrew. • Both versions were legitimately written by Shakespeare himself; i.e.
A Shrew is an early draft of
The Shrew. •
A Shrew is an adaptation of
The Shrew by someone other than Shakespeare. The exact relationship between
The Shrew and
A Shrew is uncertain, but many scholars consider
The Shrew the original, with
A Shrew derived from it; as H.J. Oliver suggests, there are "passages in [
A Shrew] [...] that make sense only if one knows the [
First Folio] version from which they must have been derived." The debate regarding the relationship between the two plays began in 1725, when
Alexander Pope incorporated extracts from
A Shrew into
The Shrew in his edition of Shakespeare's works. In
The Shrew, the Christopher Sly framework is only featured twice; at the opening of the play, and at the end of Act 1, Scene 1. However, in
A Shrew, the Sly framework reappears a further five times, including a scene which comes after the final scene of the Petruchio/Katherina story. Pope added most of the Sly framework to
The Shrew, even though he acknowledged in his preface that he did not believe Shakespeare had written
A Shrew. Subsequent editors followed suit, adding some or all of the Sly framework to their versions of
The Shrew;
Lewis Theobald (1733),
Thomas Hanmer (1744),
William Warburton (1747),
Samuel Johnson and
George Steevens (
1765) and
Edward Capell (1768). In his 1790 edition of
The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare, however,
Edmond Malone removed all
A Shrew extracts and returned the text to the 1623
First Folio version. By the end of the eighteenth century, the predominant theory had come to be that
A Shrew was a non-Shakespearean source for
The Shrew, and hence to include extracts from it was to graft non-authorial material onto the play. This theory prevailed until 1850 when Samuel Hickson compared the texts of
The Shrew and
A Shrew, concluding
The Shrew was the original, and
A Shrew was derived from it. By comparing seven passages which are similar in both plays, he concluded "the original conception is invariably to be found" in
The Shrew. His explanation was that
A Shrew was written by
Christopher Marlowe, with
The Shrew as his template. He reached this conclusion primarily because
A Shrew features numerous lines almost identical to lines in Marlowe's
Tamburlaine and
Dr. Faustus. In 1926, building on Hickson's research,
Peter Alexander first suggested the
bad quarto theory. Alexander agreed with Hickson that
A Shrew was derived from
The Shrew, but he did not agree that Marlowe wrote
A Shrew. Instead, he labelled
A Shrew a bad quarto. His main argument was that, primarily in the subplot of
A Shrew, characters act without motivation, whereas such motivation is present in
The Shrew. Alexander believed this represents an example of a "reporter" forgetting details and becoming confused, which also explains why lines from other plays are used from time to time; to cover gaps which the reporter knows have been left. He also argued the subplot in
The Shrew was closer to the plot of
I Suppositi/
Supposes than the subplot in
A Shrew, which he felt indicated the subplot in
The Shrew must have been based directly on the source, whereas the subplot in
A Shrew was a step removed. In their 1928 edition of the play for the New Shakespeare,
Arthur Quiller-Couch and
John Dover Wilson supported Alexander's argument. However, there has always been critical resistance to the theory. An early scholar to find fault with Alexander's reasoning was
E.K. Chambers, who reasserted the source theory. Chambers, who supported Alexander's bad quarto theory regarding
The First part of the Contention betwixt the two famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster and
The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of Yorke, argued
A Shrew did not fit the pattern of a bad quarto; "I am quite unable to believe that
A Shrew had any such origin. Its textual relation to
The Shrew does not bear any analogy to that of other 'bad Quartos' to the legitimate texts from which they were memorised. The
nomenclature, which at least a memoriser can recall, is entirely different. The verbal parallels are limited to stray phrases, most frequent in the main plot, for which I believe Shakespeare picked them up from
A Shrew." He explained the relationship between
I Suppositi/
Supposes and the subplots by arguing the subplot in
The Shrew was based upon both the subplot in
A Shrew and the original version of the story in Ariosto/Gascoigne. (1885) In 1938, Leo Kirschbaum made a similar argument. In an article listing over twenty examples of bad quartos, Kirschbaum did not include
A Shrew, which he felt was too different from
The Shrew to come under the bad quarto banner; "despite protestations to the contrary,
The Taming of a Shrew does not stand in relation to
The Shrew as
The True Tragedie, for example, stands in relation to
3 Henry VI." Writing in 1998, Stephen Roy Miller offers much the same opinion; "the relation of the early quarto to the
Folio text is unlike other early quartos because the texts vary much more in plotting and dialogue [...] the differences between the texts are substantial and coherent enough to establish that there was deliberate revision in producing one text out of the other; hence
A Shrew is not merely a poor report (or 'bad quarto') of
The Shrew." Character names are changed, basic plot points are altered (Kate has two sisters for example, not one), the play is set in
Athens instead of Padua, the Sly framework forms a complete narrative, and entire speeches are completely different, all of which suggests to Miller that the author of
A Shrew thought they were working on something different from Shakespeare's play, not attempting to transcribe it for resale; "underpinning the notion of a 'Shakespearean bad quarto' is the assumption that the motive of whoever compiled that text was to produce, differentially, a verbal replica of what appeared on stage." Miller believes that Chambers and Kirschbaum successfully illustrate
A Shrew does not fulfil this rubric. Alexander's theory continued to be challenged as the years went on. In 1942, R.A. Houk developed what came to be dubbed the
Ur-Shrew theory; both
A Shrew and
The Shrew were based upon a third play, now lost. In 1943, G.I. Duthie refined Houk's suggestion by arguing
A Shrew was a memorial reconstruction of
Ur-Shrew, a now lost early draft of
The Shrew; "
A Shrew is substantially a memorially constructed text and is dependent upon an early
Shrew play, now lost.
The Shrew is a reworking of this lost play." Hickson, who believed Marlowe to have written
A Shrew, had hinted at this theory in 1850; "though I do not believe Shakspeare's play to contain a line of any other writer, I think it extremely probable that we have it only in a revised form, and that, consequently, the play which Marlowe imitated might not necessarily have been that fund of life and humour that we find it now." Hickson is here arguing that Marlowe's
A Shrew is not based upon the version of
The Shrew found in the
First Folio, but on another version of the play. Duthie argues this other version was a Shakespearean early draft of
The Shrew;
A Shrew constitutes a reported text of a now lost early draft. Alexander returned to the debate in 1969, re-presenting his bad quarto theory. In particular, he concentrated on the various complications and inconsistencies in the subplot of
A Shrew, which had been used by Houk and Duthie as evidence for an
Ur-Shrew, to argue that the reporter of
A Shrew attempted to recreate the complex subplot from
The Shrew but got confused; "the compiler of
A Shrew while trying to follow the subplot of
The Shrew gave it up as too complicated to reproduce, and fell back on love scenes in which he substituted for the maneuvers of the disguised Lucentio and Hortensio extracts from
Tamburlaine and
Faustus, with which the lovers woo their ladies." After little further discussion of the issue in the 1970s, the 1980s saw the publication of three scholarly editions of
The Shrew, all of which re-addressed the question of the relationship between the two plays;
Brian Morris' 1981 edition for the second series of the
Arden Shakespeare, H.J. Oliver's 1982 edition for the Oxford Shakespeare and Ann Thompson's 1984 edition for the New Cambridge Shakespeare. Morris summarised the scholarly position in 1981 as one in which no clear-cut answers could be found; "unless new, external evidence comes to light, the relationship between
The Shrew and
A Shrew can never be decided beyond a peradventure. It will always be a balance of probabilities, shifting as new arguments and opinions are added to the scales. Nevertheless, in the present century, the movement has unquestionably been towards an acceptance of the Bad Quarto theory, and this can now be accepted as at least the current orthodoxy." Morris himself, and Thompson, supported the bad quarto theory, with Oliver tentatively arguing for Duthie's bad quarto/early draft/
Ur-Shrew theory. (1809) Perhaps the most extensive examination of the question came in 1998 in Stephen Roy Miller's edition of
A Shrew for the New Cambridge Shakespeare: The Early Quartos series. Miller agrees with most modern scholars that
A Shrew is derived from
The Shrew, but he does not believe it to be a bad quarto. Instead, he argues it is an adaptation by someone other than Shakespeare. Miller believes Alexander's suggestion in 1969 that the reporter became confused is unlikely, and instead suggests an adapter at work; "the most economic explanation of indebtedness is that whoever compiled
A Shrew borrowed the lines from Shakespeare's
The Shrew, or a version of it, and adapted them." Part of Miller's evidence relates to Gremio, who has no counterpart in
A Shrew. In
The Shrew, after the wedding, Gremio expresses doubts as to whether or not Petruchio will be able to tame Katherina. In
A Shrew, these lines are extended and split between Polidor (the equivalent of Hortensio) and Phylema (Bianca). As Gremio
does have a counterpart in
I Suppositi, Miller concludes that "to argue the priority of
A Shrew in this case would mean arguing that Shakespeare took the negative hints from the speeches of Polidor and Phylema and gave them to a character he resurrected from
Supposes. This is a less economical argument than to suggest that the compiler of
A Shrew, dismissing Gremio, simply shared his doubts among the characters available." He argues there is even evidence in the play that the compiler knew he was working within a specific literary tradition; "as with his partial change of character names, the compiler seems to wish to produce dialogue much like his models, but not the same. For him, adaptation includes exact quotation, imitation and incorporation of his own additions. This seems to define his personal style, and his aim seems to be to produce his own version, presumably intended that it should be tuned more towards the popular era than
The Shrew." As had Alexander, Houk and Duthie, Miller believes the key to the debate is to be found in the subplot, as it is here where the two plays differ most. He points out that the subplot in
The Shrew is based on "the classical style of
Latin comedy with an intricate plot involving deception, often kept in motion by a comic servant." The subplot in
A Shrew, however, which features an extra sister and addresses the issue of marrying above and below one's class, "has many elements more associated with the romantic style of comedy popular in London in the 1590s." Miller cites plays such as
Robert Greene's
Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and
Fair Em as evidence of the popularity of such plays. He points to the fact that in
The Shrew, there are only eleven lines of romance between Lucentio and Bianca, but in
A Shrew, there is an entire scene between Kate's two sisters and their lovers. This, he argues, is evidence of an adaptation rather than a faulty report; Miller believes the compiler "appears to have wished to make the play shorter, more of a romantic comedy full of wooing and glamorous
rhetoric, and to add more obvious, broad comedy."
Hortensio problem ' illustration of Sly and the Hostess; from
The Plays of William Shakespeare: The Comedies, edited by
Charles Cowden Clarke and
Mary Cowden Clarke (1830) H.J. Oliver argues the version of the play in the 1623
First Folio was likely copied not from a
prompt book or transcript, but from the author's own
foul papers, which he believes showed signs of revision by Shakespeare. Randall Martin reaches the same conclusion regarding
The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of Yorke in his 2001 Oxford Shakespeare edition of
3 Henry VI. This lends support to the theory that
A Shrew could be both a reported text and an early draft.
Sexism controversy The Taming of the Shrew has been the subject of critical controversy. Dana Aspinall writes "Since its first appearance, some time between 1588 and 1594,
Shrew has elicited a panoply of heartily supportive, ethically uneasy, or altogether disgusted responses to its rough-and-tumble treatment of the 'taming' of the 'curst shrew' Katherina, and obviously, of all potentially unruly wives." Phyllis Rackin argues that "seen in the context of current anxieties, desires and beliefs, Shakespeare's play seems to prefigure the most oppressive modern assumptions about women and to validate those assumptions as timeless truths."
Stevie Davies says that responses to
Shrew have been "dominated by feelings of unease and embarrassment, accompanied by the desire to prove that Shakespeare cannot have meant what he seems to be saying; and that therefore he cannot really be saying it." Philippa Kelly asks: Some scholars argue that even in Shakespeare's day the play must have been controversial, due to the changing nature of gender politics.
Marjorie Garber, for example, suggests Shakespeare created the Induction so the audience would not react badly to the misogyny in the Petruchio/Katherina story; he was, in effect, defending himself against charges of
sexism.
G.R. Hibbard argues that during the period in which the play was written,
arranged marriages were beginning to give way to newer, more romantically informed unions, and thus people's views on women's position in society, and their relationships with men, were in a state of flux. As such, audiences may not have been as predisposed to tolerate the harsh treatment of Katherina as is often thought. Evidence of at least some initial societal discomfort with
The Shrew is, perhaps, to be found in the fact that
John Fletcher, Shakespeare's successor as house playwright for the
King's Men, wrote ''
The Woman's Prize, or The Tamer Tamed'' as a sequel to Shakespeare's play. Written
c.1611, the play tells the story of Petruchio's remarriage after Katherina's death. In a mirror of the original, his new wife attempts (successfully) to tame him – thus the tamer becomes the tamed. Although Fletcher's sequel is often downplayed as merely a farce, some critics acknowledge the more serious implications of such a reaction. Lynda Boose, for example, writes, "Fletcher's response may in itself reflect the kind of discomfort that
Shrew has characteristically provoked in men and why its many revisions since 1594 have repeatedly contrived ways of softening the edges." With the rise of the
feminist movement in the twentieth century, reactions to the play have tended to become more divergent. For some critics, "Kate's taming was no longer as funny as it had been [...] her domination became, in
George Bernard Shaw's words 'altogether disgusting to modern sensibility'." Addressing the relationship between
A Shrew and
The Shrew from a political perspective, for example, Leah S. Marcus very much believes the play to be what it seems. She argues
A Shrew is an earlier version of
The Shrew, but acknowledges that most scholars reject the idea that
A Shrew was written by Shakespeare. She believes one of the reasons for this is because
A Shrew "hedges the play's
patriarchal message with numerous qualifiers that do not exist in"
The Shrew. She calls
A Shrew a more "progressive" text than
The Shrew, and argues that scholars tend to dismiss the idea that
A Shrew is Shakespearean because "the women are not as satisfactorily tamed as they are in
The Shrew." She also points out that if
A Shrew is an early draft, it suggests Shakespeare "may have increased rather than decreased the patriarchal violence of his materials", something which, she believes, scholars find difficult to accept. However, others see the play as preceding
20th century feminist condemnation of patriarchal domination, and as an argument for the liberation of women. For example,
Conall Morrison, director of the
RSC 2008 production, wrote: Philippa Kelly makes this point:
Jonathan Miller, director of the 1980
BBC Television Shakespeare adaptation, and several theatrical productions, argues that although the play is not misogynistic, neither is it a feminist treatise:
Induction An element in the debate regarding the play's misogyny, or lack thereof, is the Induction, and how it relates to the Katherina/Petruchio story. According to H.J. Oliver, "it has become orthodoxy to claim to find in the Induction the same 'theme' as is to be found in both the Bianca and the Katherine-Petruchio plots of the main play, and to take it for granted that identity of theme is a merit and 'justifies' the introduction of Sly." For example, Geoffrey Bullough argues the three plots "are all linked in idea because all contain discussion of the relations of the sexes in marriage." Richard Hosley suggests the three plots form a unified whole insofar as they all deal with "assumptions about identity and assumptions about personality." Oliver, however, argues that "the Sly Induction does not so much announce the theme of the enclosed stories as establish their
tone." 's illustration of Sly and the Lord, engraved by Charles William Sharpe; from the
Imperial Edition of The Works of Shakespere, edited by
Charles Knight (1876) This is important in terms of determining the seriousness of Katherina's final speech. Marjorie Garber writes of the Induction, "the frame performs the important task of distancing the later action, and of insuring a lightness of tone – significant in light of the real abuse to which Kate is subjected by Petruchio." Oliver argues that Induction is used to remove the audience from the world of the enclosed plot – to place the Sly story on the same level of reality as the audience, and the Katherina/Petruchio story on a different level of reality. This, he argues, is done to ensure the audience does not take the play literally, that it sees the Katherina/Petruchio story as a farce: Oliver argues that "the main purpose of the Induction was to set the tone for the play within the play – in particular, to present the story of Kate and her sister as none-too-serious comedy put on to divert a drunken tinker". He suggests that if the Induction is removed from a production of the play (as it very often is), a fundamental part of the structure has been lost. Speaking of Jonathan Miller's
BBC Television Shakespeare adaptation of 1980, which omitted the Induction,
Stanley Wells wrote "to omit the Christopher Sly episodes is to suppress one of Shakespeare's most volatile lesser characters, to jettison most of the play's best poetry, and to strip it of an entire dramatic dimension." Regarding the importance of the Induction,
Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen argue that "the Sly framework establishes a
self-referential theatricality in which the status of the shrew-play
as a play is enforced."
Graham Holderness argues "the play in its received entirety does not propose any simple or unitary view of sexual politics: it contains a crudely reactionary
dogma of masculine supremacy, but it also works on that ideology to force its expression into self-contradiction. The means by which this self-interrogation is accomplished is that complex theatrical device of the Sly-framework [...] without the
metadramatic potentialities of the Sly-framework, any production of
Shrew is thrown much more passively at the mercy of the director's artistic and political ideology."
Coppélia Kahn suggests "the transformation of Christopher Sly from drunken lout to noble lord, a transformation only temporary and skin-deep, suggests that Kate's switch from independence may also be deceptive and prepares us for the irony of the
dénouement." The Induction serves to undercut charges of misogyny – the play within the play is a farce, it is not supposed to be taken seriously by the audience, as it is not taken seriously by Sly. As such, questions of the seriousness of what happens within it are rendered irrelevant.
Language Language itself is a major theme in the play, especially in the taming process, where mastery of language becomes paramount. Katherina is initially described as a shrew because of her harsh language to those around her. Karen Newman points out, "from the outset of the play, Katherine's threat to male authority is posed through language: it is perceived by others as such and is linked to a claim larger than shrewishness–
witchcraft–through the constant allusions to Katherine's kinship with the
devil." For example, after Katherina rebukes Hortensio and Gremio in Act 1, Scene 1, Hortensio replies with "From all such devils, good Lord deliver us!" (l.66). Even Katherina's own father refers to her as "thou hilding of a devilish spirit" (2.1.26). Petruchio, however, attempts to tame her – and thus her language – with rhetoric that specifically undermines her tempestuous nature; Here Petruchio is specifically attacking the very function of Katherina's language, vowing that no matter what she says, he will purposely misinterpret it, thus undermining the basis of the
linguistic sign, and disrupting the relationship between signifier and signified. In this sense, Margaret Jane Kidnie argues this scene demonstrates the "slipperiness of language." Apart from undermining her language, Petruchio also uses language to
objectify her. For example, in Act 3, Scene 2, Petruchio explains to all present that Katherina is now literally his property: In discussing Petruchio's objectification of Katherina, Tita French Baumlin focuses on his puns on her name. By referring to her as a "cake" and a "cat" (2.1.185–195), he objectifies her in a more subtle manner than saying she belongs to him. A further aspect of Petruchio's taming rhetoric is the repeated comparison of Katherina to animals. In particular, he is prone to comparing her to a
hawk (2.1.8 and 4.1.177–183), often employing an overarching hunting metaphor; "My falcon now is sharp and passing empty,/And till she stoop she must not be full-gorged" (4.1.177–178). Katherina, however, appropriates this method herself, leading to a trading of insults rife with animal imagery in Act 2, Scene 1 (ll.207–232), where she compares Petruchio to a turtle and a crab. Language itself has thus become a battleground. However, it is Petruchio who seemingly emerges as the victor. In his house, after Petruchio has dismissed the haberdasher, Katherina exclaims Katherina is here declaring her independence of language; no matter what Petruchio may do, she will always be free to speak her mind. However, only one hundred lines later, the following exchange occurs; Kidnie says of this scene, "the language game has suddenly changed and the stakes have been raised. Whereas before he seemed to mishear or misunderstand her words, Petruchio now overtly tests his wife's subjection by demanding that she concede to his views even when they are demonstrably unreasonable. The lesson is that Petruchio has the absolute authority to rename their world." Katherina is free to say whatever she wishes, as long she agrees with Petruchio. His apparent victory in the 'language game' is seen in Act 4, Scene 5, when Katherina is made to switch the words "moon" and "sun", and she concedes that she will agree with whatever Petruchio says, no matter how absurd: illustration of Act 4, Scene 5 (the "sun and moon" conversation) from
The Boydell Shakespeare Prints; engraved by
Isaac Taylor (1803) Of this scene, Kidnie argues "what he 'says' must take priority over what Katherina 'knows'." From this point, Katherina's language changes from her earlier
vernacular; instead of defying Petruchio and his words, she has apparently succumbed to his rhetoric and accepted that she will use
his language instead of her own – both Katherina and her language have, seemingly, been tamed. The important role of language, however, is not confined to the taming plot. For example, in a
psychoanalytic reading of the play, Joel Fineman suggests there is a distinction made between male and female language, further subcategorising the latter into good and bad, epitomised by Bianca and Katherina respectively. Language is also important in relation to the Induction. Here, Sly speaks in
prose until he begins to accept his new role as lord, at which point he switches to
blank verse and adopts the
royal we. Language is also important in relation to Tranio and Lucentio, who appear on stage speaking a highly artificial style of blank verse full of
classical and
mythological allusions and elaborate
metaphors and
similes, thus immediately setting them aside from the more straightforward language of the Induction, and alerting the audience to the fact that they are now in an entirely different
milieu. == Themes ==