The Taming of the Shrew

by Shakespeare, William; Oliver, H. J.

• ISBN13: 9780192836090
• ISBN10: 0192836099
• Additional ISBN(s): 9780191732577, 9780192814401
• Edition: Revised
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-05-13
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
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Summary

"The Taming of the Shrew" is unique among Shakespeare's plays and is a perennial and compelling success in the theatre. Its reception is marked, however, by ongoing polarized debate over the meaning and worth of the play. This edition disengages Shakespeare's exuberant and disturbing marital farce from the tangled history of its reception. It views the two sixteenth-century Shrew plays as textually independent but theatrically interdependent and so includes the full text of "The Taming of A Shrew" in an appendix. While the Introduction and Commentary focus on the critical and theatrical debate surrounding the play, the original and comprehensive editing of the playtext makes available a 'different' Shrew, more open to the reader's interpretation than is usually the case.

Table of Contents

Introduction	1	(2)
The play in the First Folio	3	(10)
The Quarto: The Taming of A Shrew	13	(9)
The relation of Quarto and Folio	22	(12)
The story of Christopher Sly	34	(9)
The Bianca subplot and `supposes'	43	(5)
Katherine and Petruchio	48	(9)
The style	57	(7)
The play on the stage	64	(21)
Editorial Principles	77	(8)
THE TAMING OF THE SHREW	85	(152)
Appendix A The Christopher Sly scenes from The Taming of A Shrew	233	(3)
Appendix B The Song at 4.1.36	236	(1)
Index to the Commentary	237