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    The Taming of the Shrew
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    The Taming of the Shrew
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    The Taming of the Shrew
    Ebook109 pages47 minutes

    The Taming of the Shrew

    By William Shakespeare

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    About this ebook

    The Taming of the Shrew is a comedy by William Shakespeare. It was one of his earlier plays, believed to have been written between 1590 and 1594. The play begins with a framing device in which a drunkard is deceived into thinking he is a nobleman who then watches the "play" itself, which depicts a nobleman, Petruchio, who marries an outspoken, intelligent, and bad-tempered shrew named Katherina. Petruchio manipulates and "tames" her until she is obedient to his will. The main subplot features the courting of Katherina's more conventional sister Bianca by numerous suitors.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSheba Blake Publishing
    Release dateJun 28, 2015
    ISBN9781329572850
    Author

    William Shakespeare

    William Shakespeare was born in April 1564 in the town of Stratford-upon-Avon, on England’s Avon River. When he was eighteen, he married Anne Hathaway. The couple had three children—an older daughter Susanna and twins, Judith and Hamnet. Hamnet, Shakespeare’s only son, died in childhood. The bulk of Shakespeare’s working life was spent in the theater world of London, where he established himself professionally by the early 1590s. He enjoyed success not only as a playwright and poet, but also as an actor and shareholder in an acting company. Although some think that sometime between 1610 and 1613 Shakespeare retired from the theater and returned home to Stratford, where he died in 1616, others believe that he may have continued to work in London until close to his death.

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    Reviews for The Taming of the Shrew

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      The introductory scenes with Sly were a surprise to me! I was also somewhat surprised by how much of the musical Kiss Me Kate is directly from the play.
    • 4/5
      It sounds like an extreme and ludicrous statement, but I don't actually know that Shakespeare has a more interpretable play. It all comes down to that moment at the end: Katherine's gonna come out and deliver her closing speech (and for those who still somehow see this as straight-up misogyny, consider all the past versions that haven't done so, and that the ultimate power of meaningmaking is here in Kate's hands--okay, and those of her director--which is easy enough to see as a definitive repudiation of Petruchio's efforts to take away her reality and signifying power with all the no-no-the-sun-is-the-moon stuff earlier). And I mean, relations between the sexes? A friend of mine says about class relations (which are also, naturally, at play here, and what is Kate from one perspective but another tinker, an overturner of the social order? A hero?), he says, "of course it's complicated, it's a gas, baby, you dig?" You can play the speech totally straight--but even then, like, what does Shakespeare think about it? Has Kate found strong manlove or been broken by a sadist?--and you can play it ironically, in about a billion permutations.So well done, Shakespeare. (You're suuuuuch a good writer. I'm sooooo impressed.) But here's what came to me watching this guy the other day at Bard on the Beach, not about that director's interpretation--which was basically "two stong-willed eccentrics find each other, embrace, and turn their rapier tongues on the rest of the world"--not about any interpretation at all, but about what the last scene says about real life. Because you can have your single simple reading of a play if you wanna and walk away and not have any problems come of it, but when you do that with real life there's that certain excess that'll always trip you up and mug you and leave you unsure where it all went wrong.So what came out at me was the way both things are true. Petruchio can king-of-the-castle Katherine around all he wants and it will always be repulsive, to our sensibilities as well as (it has been convincingly argued) those of the Elizabethans. That doesn't mean it's the whole story here. In that final scene, when Kate is the only obedient wife, what we see is a dark shadow over the future of these marriages--and leaving aside for the moment whether that includes Kate and Petruchio's and what the implications of that are, think about the others. Lucentio's marriage to Bianca and Hortensio's to the Widow may be under threat because the wives are not obedient--or maybe they're just gonna make their husbands into buffoons and that's in the normal way of things--but what is it that makes either of those eventualities a problem? It's that they're weaklings. And calling them out on that doesn't make Petruchio any less of a bully. But forget the bully thing for a second: he's also a man who knows what he wants and won't settle for any less. And in this milieu, Katherine doesn't have the same privilege--she has to be a shrew or a possession. But are the other wives much happier with their carping men? Not at all. The men still have all the power on paper, but their sense of manhood depends on a submission they're not going to be able to secure.And I hope we've left all the submission stuff behind. What we need in our relationships is to be responsible for ourselves. Kate's paradox is that in submitting completely to her husband she has total freedom to move--he kisses her hand rather than step on it. It's repulsive. But they're strong people who (perhaps? depending on your interpretation?) respect each other. And I think there's something to be said for a partner who just rides out your storms, who has themself enough in hand to make their expectations clear (thankfully, today this is a mutual process). And I have spent a lot of time trying to please people I was with and needing to protect them to feel okay myself, and that that's emotional brinksmanship and will never actually help them feel better, and then I'll feel distress too. The great thing about The Taming of the Shrew is to see a marriage without any tally of needs and catalogue of fears and litany of resentments and haunting cloud of failures--where whatever anyone does it'll be laughed off in the end. The question it leaves me with is whether the only way to have that is for marriage to be something even worse--a chattel relationship instead of one between messy, needy, hypersensitive equals.
    • 2/5
      I'm sure we could argue the feminist interpretation for ages, but though full of Shakespeare's usual wit I couldn't figure out what he was going for here and it ended up just being a frustrating read.
    • 5/5
      Enjoyable, funny and entertaining Bacon was a gifted writer.
    • 5/5
      My second review (check out my review of The Count of Monte Cristo) and this book is an amazing play. I had to read this for school and I thought this was going to be boring and non-entertaining but, to my surprise, It is hilarious! This book is a clever comedy in which Shakespeare shows two very different sisters and a plot so complex and difficult It is interesting. Some people may think Shakespeare is dull and I can see why but, this is a book i recommend from middle school to the rest of your life. You see Bianca (the innocent, boy fanatic girl who is very vain) and Kate (a feminist who is more reserved to herself and never wants to marry). Kate is very strong and has her dignity. This play is a page turner for sure. I have also seen the movie and the TV series (now gone) and none of them compare to the humorous English vernacular of Shakespeare. (Even though Elizabeth Taylor plays one hell of a Kate!)- Paulina
    • 4/5
      This is a clever play. However, it revolves massively around the directors interpretation of Bianca (sweet and innocent, or scheming and bitchy) and more importantly on the dynamic between Petruchio and Katherine (does he break her, or does she finally understand him and willing go along with it). I really wanted it to be the later but, as a feminist, I couldn't understand how a free minded woman would say the things said in Kate's last speech.And one MAJOR nit pick; where did Sly go? He's there at the beginning, but not anywhere else.
    • 5/5
      I recently read this in my tenth grade English class. Of course, the play itself was at it always is: hilarious and incredible. Every time I read something by Shakespeare, I marvel at his creativity, originality, and skill for crafting puns and witty wordplay.The version of this book that I read included many other sections relating to Shakespeare's works: his life, his writings, and how his plays were shown, plus a section entitled "A Modern Perspective," which was somewhat of an overview of the themes in the play and revealed many things people in my English class missed while reading the text (not that they actually looked at the extra stuff: that's like watching Lord of the Rings without the bonus footage). I found all of the extra details quite interesting and it gave me enough background to participate fully in class discussions where most of my peers were left behind. Thank you, Folger Library!
    • 4/5
      The author made an interesting choice to make the story of his own research the focus of this book. I think it worked really well in this case, given that there's so little known about the actual John Henry. Nelson is very up-front about the fact that much of his results are based on theory or conjecture, but overall the transparency of his research process gives a lot of weight to his conclusions. This is an interesting book both for what it tells us about the research process, but also for what we learn about John Henry's world.
    • 5/5
      Unlike any other Shakespeare's plays, THE TAMING OF THE SHREW has an induction, which lives up to its name in the sense that the prologue scene does indeed lead into the play that follows. It seems likely that Shakespeare had adopted the device from medieval narrative poetry, where it was extensively used to introduce a story in the form of a dream. In the induction, far more is involved than the mere setting of a scene and the informing to audience. In fact, Christopher Sly seems to have lapse into a dream as he is forced to adopt a new identity. The brief yet vigorous altercation between Sly and the hostess with which the induction begins is a curtain raiser for the dramatic struggle between Petruchio and Katherina that is to follow. Equally as significant is the Lord's instructions to his servant-boy as to the behavior he is to assume when he appears disguised as Sly's wife forebode the main theme of the play. THE TAMING OF THE SHREW has a powerful appeal for the Elizabethan audience at the time it opened because the struggle for mastery in a marriage remained a fact of existence and hot topics for writers. A true-to-life domestic scene opens the play and instantly grasps attention: Signor Baptista forbids all suitors to court his younger daughter Bianca until he finds a husband for the ill-tempered, difficult, and waspish elder daughter Katherina. She is notorious for her hot temper, foul tongue, and caprice. Out of jealousy and the qualm not remaining single, she often vents out her anger on her sister. Suitors of the younger sister, who decide to put aside their rivalry, contrive to find a match for Katherina. Gremio and Hortensio bear the cost of Petruchio's courting Katherina while Lucentio, who is madly in love with Bianca, and his crafty servant Tranio cunningly switch role to infiltrate the Baptista house. What inevitably follows is a facetious pursuit of love and a farcical melodrama that culminate in a riotously funny final scene in which Lucentio's real father, who has no clue of his son's betrothal, confronts the pedant-disguised impostor who reverse-accuses him of a charlatan. Equally as clueless of the entire crafty scheme is Baptista whom the suitors have tricked and outmaneuvered. He is consistently mistaken about everything and everybody, so that he does not even understand why Bianca later asks for his forgiveness. He and Vincentio are merely the butts for all the intrigues that go on throughout the play. THE TAMING OF THE SHREW maintains an irresistible appeal among the comedies owing to the intriguing trickery with which characters rival for courtship. Just as suspenseful and entertaining is Petruchio's calculated, punctilious campaign to tame his wife. His line of attack is psychological, although persuasive words carefully planned for each step accompany his actions. He somehow outsmarts his wife and deliberately outdoes her in his perversity and bad temper. The quintessential spleen of tantrum flourishes in the scenes in which Petruchio abuses his servants and tailor. His being abusive, tyrannical, violent, and capricious functions more than a reflection - it is evident of a caricature of Katherina through an exaggerated parody of her wild behavior. His evaluation of her mind is confirmed by her softening and surrender for she welcomes the opportunity of meeting an antagonist who will put up a good fight. THE TAMING OF THE SHREW is highly rhetorical (even more so than AS YOU LIKE IT). Whether it is Petruchio's aggressive, vituperative taming or the milder courting of Bianca, the play never lacks an elite style with which Shakespeare exploited language to a linguistic virtuosity. For example, Petruchio's taming distinguishes from the usual method that might involve violence. What differentiate his campaign are the subtlety, the sophistication, and the ingenuity of his conceiving of Katherina's mind. His perspicacious mind justifies the use of highly rhetorical, puny, and literary discourse that somehow alienates the ordinary speech in the play and paradoxically brings in a fuller, more intimate possession of his witty scheme.