The frame play, where the action opens (called the "Induction," just prior to Act One), shows a drunk Christopher Sly being ejected from a bar by its hostess.

Another version has a closing segment in which Sly, deposited back outside the tavern in a stupor once more, says he will return home to deal with his own shrewish wife, having had "the best dream that ever I had in my life" in which he learned how to "tame a shrew".

Marian Hacket is said to be the landlady of an ale house, who allows Sly to build up an unpaid tab of 14 pence, but ejects him when he fails to pay up (presumably the same person as the "hostess" who appears at the beginning of the play).

[1] Sly lists his past occupations, insisting that he was born a peddler, trained as a cardmaker, but worked as a "bearherd", (meaning a keeper of bears used in bear-baiting entertainments) before becoming a tinker.

Victor Analogy explains, "Six years ago an uneducated drunk who spoke only Elizabethan English was found wandering in a confused state just outside Warwick.