Not the sexist disappointment so many people think it is. Less about behaving than learning how to “act” maybe?
Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew can be considered the original rom-com, but one that has dismayed a majority of audience members and readers who bring along their own ill-considered assumptions and fail to look beneath stereotypes, like so many characters in the play itself. In the set-up, a drunkard is tricked into thinking he’s a lord about to watch a play. The show features the power couple — Petruchio and Katherina, or Kate — who overshadow the other characters, several of them trying to woo Kate’s supposedly sweet, mild sister Bianca: daddy Baptista’s “treasure.” Disguises lead to chaos, but Petruchio and Kate again steal the show with their own outrageous behavior, until Kate seems to undergo a surprising change in attitude. Is it abject subjugation? Or have we all been played?
One oblique source for this play, George Gascoigne’s play Supposes, was performed at Gray’s Inn on December 26, 1566 (Farina 73). Gascoigne had translated Ariosto’s I Suppositi; he died October 1577 (Clark 102), just before it is thought that Oxford wrote an earlier version of The Taming of the Shrew, called A Morrall of the Marryage of Mynde and Measure, performed early January 1578/79 (Clark 102; cf. Ogburn and Ogburn 138, 158; Farina 73). Petruchio, in our current version of the play, still soliloquizes over the “measures” he will take (Clark 107), “the measures planned to tame the wilful mind” (Clark 108). Perhaps a sketchy, very early version of what became this play was written at Gray’s Inn (Ogburn and Ogburn 158) and became The Taming of A Shrew, published in 1594. (Cf. Jiménez 229f).
The persistent notion that this play proves Shakespeare was a sexist pig, that Petruchio is a gold-digger, that Kate’s spirit is eventually broken, comes from crappy preconceptions and superficial thinking. Let’s try to undo this.
The Taming of the Shrew, Act by Act
The Taming of the Shrew Intro
The Taming of the Shrew Act II
The Taming of the Shrew Act III
The Taming of the Shrew Act IV
Further Resources
Filmography
The Taming of the Shrew. Dir. D.W. Griffith. Biograph, 1908. 11 minutes. Here.
The Taming of the Shrew. Starring Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. 1929. Released both as a silent film and a talkie at a time when not all theaters had upgraded. Entirety here.
Kiss Me Kate. Starring Kathryn Grayson, Howard Keel. Music and Lyrics by Cole Porter. MGM, 1953. Lamentable adaptation of the play which assumes extreme sexism. “Brush Up Your Shakespeare.
The Taming of the Shrew. Dir. Franco Zeffirelli. Starring Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Michael Hordern. Columbia Pictures, 1967. Pretty terrific! Best bits.
The Taming of the Shrew. Choreography: John Cranko. 1969. Here. A Taming ballet?!
The Taming of the Shrew. American Conservatory Theatre of San Francisco, 1976. Entire play. Performed in an especially “commedia dell’arte” style, with a short introduction by Hal Holbrook.
The Taming of the Shrew. Starring John Cleese. BBC Television, 1980.
The Taming of the Shrew. Starring Len Carou. CBC, 1982. Film version of a Canadian stage play, unusual in its inclusion of Christopher Sly.
10 Things I Hate About You. Starring Heath Ledger, Julia Stiles. Touchstone Pictures, 1999. Eleven things I despise about this teen adaptation includes the fact that Katherina in the play does not have a breakdown, is not crushed emotionally.
The Taming of the Shrew. Starring Rufus Sewell, Twiggy. Shakespeare Retold. BBC One, 2005. This superbly entertaining adaptation places us in the British political world. Entirety here.
The Taming of the Shrew. Stratford Festival, 2016. Entirety here.
Best Editions
Bevington, David, ed. The Complete Works of Shakespeare. 6th ed. Pearson Education Inc., 2009. 108-147.
Hodgdon, Barbara, ed. The Taming of the Shrew. The Arden Shakespeare. 3rd Series. NY: Bloomsbury, 2010.
Weller, Philip, ed. The Taming of the Shrew. An annotated online edition.
Oxfordian Resources
Berney, Chuck. “Confidential Video Bard: Taming of the Shrew: Zeffirelli and Miller.” Shakespeare Matters 2.4 (Summer 2003): 34-35. Here.
Berney, Chuck. “Taming of the Shrew Revisited.” Shakespeare Matters 3.2 (Winter 2004): 30-31. Here. Discusses “documentary” vs. “commedia” productions.
Charlton, Derran K. “Doctor Faustus, Tamburlaine and The Taming of the Shrew.” The Oxfordian 12 (2010): 108-118. Here.
Clark, Eva Turner. Hidden Allusions in Shakespeare’s Plays. 3rd ed. by Ruth Loyd Miller. Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1974. 102-109.
Draya, Ren. “A New Shrew.” Shakespeare Oxford Newsletter 53.4 (Fall 2017): 35. Here. A performance review of Shrew in Chicago.
Farina, William. De Vere as Shakespeare: An Oxfordian Reading of the Canon. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2006. 72-76.
Hughes, Stephanie Hopkins. “The Taming of the Shrew.” In Dating Shakespeare’s Plays. Ed. Kevin Gilvary. Tunbridge Wells, UK: Parapress, 2010. 149-158. Here.
Jiménez, Ramon. “The Playwright’s Progress: Edward de Vere and the two Shrew plays.” The Oxfordian 14 (2012): 47-73. Here.
Jiménez, Ramon. Shakespeare’s Apprenticeship: Identifying the Real Playwright’s Earliest Works. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., Inc., Publishers, 2018. Chapter 4: 222-248. Jiménez definitively shows that the anonymous play published as The Taming of A Shrew was an early effort by Oxford and the source for his revised canonical play.
Magri, Noemi. “Shakespeare and Italian Renaissance Painting: 3 wanton pictures in Taming of Shrew.” De Vere Society Newsletter (May 2005): 4-12. Here. Likely actual Italian paintings as mentioned in the Induction scene.
Ogburn, Charlton. The Mysterious William Shakespeare: The Myth & The Reality. 2nd ed. McLean, VA: EPM Publications, Inc., 1992.
Ogburn, Dorothy and Charlton Ogburn. This Star of England. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, Pub., 1952. 973-991.
Roe, Richard Paul. The Shakespeare Guide to Italy. NY: Harper, 2011. Chapter 4: 87-113.
Swan, George. “The Woman’s Prize, A Sequel to The Taming of the Shrew. The Oxfordian 10 (2007): 121–141. Here. A.k.a. The Tamer Tamed, the play is a dismal Christopher-Sly-like misreading of the canonical play. And Kate’s dead.
And Other General Resources
Asimov, Isaac. Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare. NY: Gramercy Books, 1970. 253-316.
Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human.NY: Riverhead Books, 1998. 28-35.
Carey, Gary, ed. Cliffs Notes on Shakespeare’s Comedies. Lincoln, NE: Cliffs Notes, Inc., 1999.
Garber, Marjorie. Shakespeare After All. NY: Pantheon Books, 2004. 57-72.
Goddard, Harold C. The Meaning of Shakespeare. Vol. 1. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1951. 68-73.
Smidt, Kristian. Unconformities in Shakespeare’s Early Comedies. NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1986. 59-79. Smidt finds numerous time discrepancies suggesting significant revision.
Wells, Stanley. Shakespeare: A Life in Drama. NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 1995. 46-52.
Shakespeare Authorship Organizations
The Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship. Browse, get hooked, become a member.
The De Vere Society. Our Oxfordian friends and collaborators across the pond.
The Shakespeare Authorship Roundtable. We consider all possible authors behind the “Shakespeare” name.
The Shakespeare Foundation. You say you want a revolution.