The Taming of the Shrew

Written for his daughters as a guide on how to behave appropriately, de la Tour Landry includes "a treatise on the domestic education of women" which features an anecdote in which three merchants make a wager as to which of their wives will prove the most obedient when called upon to jump into a basin of water.

[11] In 1964, Richard Hosley suggested the main source for the play may have been the anonymous ballad "A merry jeste of a shrewde and curst Wyfe, lapped in Morrelles Skin, for her good behauyour".

[34] Keir Elam, however, has argued for a terminus post quem of 1591 for The Shrew, based on Shakespeare's probable use of two sources published that year: Abraham Ortelius' map of Italy in the fourth edition of Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, and John Florio's Second Fruits.

[53] 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).

"[70] 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.

Its language is at first stuffed with difficult Italian quotations, but its dialogue must often sound plain when compared to Marlowe's thunder or Greene's romance, the mouth-filling lines and images that on other afternoons were drawing crowds.

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.

"[94] Philippa Kelly asks: Do we simply add our voices to those of critical disapproval, seeing Shrew as at best an "early Shakespeare", the socially provocative effort of a dramatist who was learning to flex his muscles?

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.

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.

But the fact that they did think like that is absolutely undeniable, so productions which really do try to deny that, and try to hijack the work to make it address current problems about women's place in society, become boring, thin and tractarian.

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.

"[116] 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.

For example, in Act 3, Scene 2, Petruchio explains to all present that Katherina is now literally his property: She is my goods, my chattels, she is my house, My household stuff, my field, my barn, My horse, my ox, my ass, my any thing.

Such duty as the subject owes the prince, Even such a woman oweth to her husband; And when she is froward, peevish, sullen, sour, And not obedient to his honest will, What is she but a foul contending rebel And graceless traitor to her loving lord?

"[145] Detmer argues: the vigor of public discourse on wife-beating exemplifies a culture at work reformulating permissible and impermissible means for husbands to maintain control over the politics of the family, without, however, questioning that goal.

Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew acts as a comedic roadmap for reconfiguring these emergent modes of "skillful" and civilised dominance for gentlemen, that is, for subordinating a wife without resorting to the "common" man's brute strength.

[146]Petruchio's answer is to psychologically tame Katherina, a method not frowned upon by society; "the play signals a shift towards a "modern" way of managing the subordination of wives by legitimatising domination as long as it is not physical.

[155]Ann Thompson argues that "the fact that in the folktale versions the shrew-taming story always comes to its climax when the husbands wager on their wives' obedience must have been partly responsible for the large number of references to sporting, gaming and gambling throughout the play.

Furthermore, Petruchio is encouraged to woo Katherina by Gremio, Tranio (as Lucentio), and Hortensio, who vow to pay him if he wins her, on top of Baptista's dowry ("After my death, the one half of my lands, and in possession, twenty thousand crowns").

[161] Frederic Reynolds' Catherine and Petruchio (1828) is an adaptation of Garrick, with an overture taken from Gioachino Rossini, songs derived from numerous Shakespeare plays and sonnets, and music by John Braham and Thomas Simpson Cooke.

[163] Hermann Goetz' Der Widerspänstigen Zähmung (1874), with libretto by Joseph Viktor Widmann, is a comic opera, which focuses on the Bianca subplot, and cuts back the taming story.

[165] Spyridon Samaras' La furia domata: commedia musicale in tre atti (1895) is a now lost lyric comedy with libretto by Enrico Annibale Butti and Giulio Macchi, which premiered at the Teatro Lirico.

First performed at Drury Lane in 1735, starring Kitty Clive and Charles Macklin, A Cure for a Scold was an adaptation of Lacy's Sauny the Scot rather than Shakespeare's original Taming of the Shrew.

[194] BBC Radio 4 aired another full-length broadcast (without the Induction) in 1973 as part of their Monday Night Theatre series, directed by Ian Cotterell, starring Fenella Fielding and Paul Daneman.

[196] In 2000, BBC Radio 3 aired another full-length production (without the Induction) as part of their Shakespeare for the New Millennium series, directed by Melanie Harris, and starring Ruth Mitchell and Gerard McSorley.

The adaptation was written by Gilbert Seldes, who employed a narrator (Godfrey Tearle) to fill in gaps in the story, tell the audience about the clothes worn by the characters and offer opinions as to the direction of the plot.

"[191] In 1940, a thirty-minute musical version of the play written by Joseph Gottlieb and Irvin Graham aired on CBS as part of their Columbia Workshop series, starring Nan Sunderland and Carleton Young.

[199] In 1941, NBC Blue Network aired a sixty-minute adaptation as part of their Great Plays series, written by Ranald MacDougall, directed by Charles Warburton, and starring Grace Coppin and Herbert Rudley.

[202] In 1960, NBC aired a sixty-minute version adapted by Carl Ritchie from Robert Loper's stage production for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, starring Ann Hackney and Gerard Larson.