Four distinct theories have formed around the relationship between A Shrew, published in 1594, and Shakespeare’s play, written sometime in the early 1590s but not published until the First Folio of 162311. The first theory sees A Shrew and Shakespeare’s play as “parallel or alternate versions, by two different authors, of an older lost play12.” The text and themes of both plays are similar enough to be related, but the setting, character names, and even particular misogyny of both plays are distinct enough that it is possible, and even likely, that they were written by two separate individuals. The second theory stems from the first, designating A Shrew as the source upon which Shakespeare bases his text. It is certainly possible that Shakespeare could have revised the inferior text and dramatic weaknesses of A Shrew without an earlier source; he worked within a small community of actors and playwrights that frequently borrowed from one another. And since published plays of unknown playwrights rarely, if ever, announced the author on their title pages (Shakespeare’s name did not appear on any of his plays until the Love’s Labour’s Lost quarto of 1598), many scholars suggest that authorship and indeed, the printed text, mattered less than the company and its patron and that the surviving theatrical texts of the period were probably collaborations anyway. The third theory holds that A Shrew is simply an early version of Shakespeare’s play. The final theory argues that “A Shrew is derived from a now-lost earlier version [perhaps even a reconstruction from an actor or playgoer’s memory] of Shakespeare’s play, to which the compiler added original material and borrowed or even plagiarized from other literary sources as well13.” Whatever the dizzying academic relationship, A Shrew has remained relevant to producers of theatre and thus, playgoers, only inasmuch as it contains an expanded version of the Sly material and as it offers an alternate view of shrew-taming that is contemporary to Shakespeare’s. The text for Theatre for a New Audience’s production of The Taming of the Shrew is based on the text printed in the 1623 Folio, but some lines from A Shrew have been incorporated into the production script.
11 12 13
6
Bevington, “Shakespeare’s Sources,” 214. Dolan, Texts and Contexts, 144. Bevington, “Shakespeare’s Sources, 214.
the taming of the shrew 360°
Second quarto of The Taming of a Shrew, 1596; A Shrew was published in quarto three times: 1594, 1596, and 1607
Since women, A Shrew’s Kate claims, are created from men and bring about the fall from grace (tempting Adam to eat the fruit from a forbidden tree), they are inferior, both physically and morally. Therefore, husbands are masters to be obeyed and followed. Further, she says, “If they by any means do want our helps; / Laying our hands under their feet to tread, / If that by that we might procure their ease.” She then ends the speech where Shakespeare’s Katharina does, with her hand under the foot of her husband. Her sentiments express the prevailing theological philosophy on gender and marital relations that dominated both religious and secular society in Elizabethan England.
The Fall of Man by Peter Paul Rubens, 1628–29
THE PLAY: sources