The Taming of the Shrew in performance

Popular in Shakespeare's day, the play fell out of favour during the seventeenth century, when it was replaced on the stage by John Lacy's Sauny the Scott.

The original Shakespearean text was not performed at all during the eighteenth century, with David Garrick's adaptation Catharine and Petruchio dominating the stage.

[4] Apart from a possible production at Drury Lane in 1663 or 1664,[5] the play's place on the stage was taken by John Lacy's adaptation, Sauny the Scot at some point during the seventeenth century.

The Induction was included in full, with Sly remaining at the front of the stage after Act 1, Scene 1, and slowly falling asleep over the course of the play.

Planché referred to his role in returning the play to the stage as "one of the events in my theatrical career on which I look back with greatest pride and gratification.

"[9] The play received mixed reviews, with many criticising Webster's performance, and accusing the production of being overly bawdy, but it was a box office success and was revived in 1847.

In this production, Sly was carried off-stage at the end of Act 1, and although Phelps stuck to the First Folio text throughout the play, he "much abbreviated" Katherina's final speech.

[15] Elizabeth Schafer writes "Ada Rehan's Katherina was to haunt her successors, who were always found wanting alongside the fiery, imperious character she created.

The production was very much a farce, with the emphasis on broad physical comedy in which Petruchio athletically leaps about the stage terrorizing a relatively passive Katherina.

[24] In its early days, it received generally strong reviews, but by 1910, the political climate had changed somewhat; the 1909 Stratford by-election had seen suffragette protests, and henceforth some critics expressed discomfort with Benson's use of farce to depict what had now become a socially relevant situation.

[25] Indeed, in the 1912 season, suffragette activist Violet Vanbrugh replaced Constance Benson in the role of Katherina, although her performance was roundly criticised for failing to bring the anticipated political edge to the character.

[26] In the wake of the success of the Daly, Benson and Asche productions, the play began to be performed with much more frequency all over the world.

Acting opposite Henry Kolker in a production she herself directed, Anglin is generally regarded as the first actress to have performed Katherina's final speech in an ironic manner.

"[28] In a 1909 Max Reinhardt directed production at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, starring Lucie Höflich and Albert Bassermann,[12] the Induction was emphasised and the play was presented as a commedia dell'arte style farce, to the point of the male leads literally wearing clown costumes.

[30][31] In an "extremely conventional production" at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in 1919, starring Ethel Warwick and Edmund Willard,[32] William Bridges-Adams stuck rigidly to the First Folio text, but completely removed the Induction and all references to Sly.

Ayliff directed a modern dress production at the Garrick Theatre in New York, with Mary Ellis and Basil Sydney.

Barry Jackson, who co-directed the Birmingham performances, was initially keen to use the epilogue from A Shrew, but he ultimately decided against it "because the actual words in the old edition are so corrupt as to be illiterate.

[38] The most successful early-twentieth-century staging was the 1935/1936 Theatre Guild production, which began on Broadway and subsequently toured all over North America.

Starring husband and wife Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, the show ran for a record 129 performances, and was remounted in 1940 as a fundraiser for the Finnish Relief Fund.

[41] Lunt and Fontanne were the most famous celebrity couple of the time, and their backstage fights were rumoured to be just as ferocious as their on-stage performances.

In an effort to elicit her sympathy, Petruchio pretends to be sick, but his plan backfires when Maria has him walled up in his own bedroom, telling everyone he has the plague.

Maria begins to cry but reveals she is doing so not because she is sad at her loss, but because it upsets her that Petruchio was such a pathetic person who wasted his life.

Lacy also expanded the part of Grumio into the title role Sauny (who speaks in a heavy Scottish brogue), which he played himself.

In Sauny, Petruchio is much more vicious, threatening to whip Meg if she doesn't marry him, then telling everyone she is dead, and tying her to a bier.

[102] Prior to that, however, it was a huge success on both sides of the Atlantic; it was first staged in North America in 1768 at the John Street Theatre, starring Margaret Cheer and Lewis Hallam.

[105] Michael Dobson argues that Garrick's changes to Shrew in writing Catharine and Petruchio "mute the outright feudal masculinism in favour of guardedly egalitarian, and specifically private, contemporary versions of sympathy and domestic virtue.

One example of this rearrangement was Marowitz's use of Bartholomew's lines in the Induction when he is trying to shun Sly's amorous advances; Thrice noble lord, let me entreat of you To pardon me yet for a night or two, Or, if not so, until the sun be set, For your physicians have expressly charged, In peril to incur your former malady, That I should yet absent me from your bed.

[112] As she finishes, she is flanked by the modern-day couple, one on each side of her, both in wedding attire, posing for imaginary photographers, "a juxtaposition suggesting that marriage legitimates psycho-social and psycho-sexual abuse.

[108] Foregrounding the themes of sadism and brainwashing, in this version, the happy ending of Shakespeare's play thus takes on a disturbing irony.

[113] Marowitz described his intention in The Shrew as "a head-on confrontation with the intellectual substructure of the play, an attempt to test or challenge, revoke or destroy the intellectual foundation which makes a classic the formidable thing it has become [and to] combat the assumptions of a classic with a series of new assumptions, and force it to bend under the power of a new polemic.