page_title: The Taming of the Shrew
section_title: The relationship with A Shrew
hierarchical_section_title: The Taming of the Shrew / Analysis and criticism / Critical history / The relationship with A Shrew
caption_attribution_description: Petruccios Hochzeit. Signiert und datiert unten links: Carl Gehrts. 1885. Aquarell auf Papier, auf dünner Pappe montiert. 68 x 112 cm.
context_page_description: The Taming of the Shrew is a comedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1590 and 1592. The play begins with a framing device, often referred to as the induction, in which a mischievous nobleman tricks a drunken tinker named Christopher Sly into believing he is actually a nobleman himself. The nobleman then has the play performed for Sly's diversion.
  The main plot depicts the courtship of Petruchio and Katherina, the headstrong, obdurate shrew. Initially, Katherina is an unwilling participant in the relationship; however, Petruchio "tames" her with various psychological torments, such as keeping her from eating and drinking, until she becomes a desirable, compliant, and obedient bride. The subplot features a competition between the suitors of Katherina's younger sister, Bianca, who is seen as the "ideal" woman. The question of whether the play is misogynistic has become the subject of considerable controversy, particularly among modern scholars, audiences, and readers.
context_section_description: One of the most fundamental critical debates surrounding The Shrew is its relationship with A Shrew. There are five main theories as to the nature of this relationship:
  The two plays are unrelated other than the fact that they are both based on another play which is now lost. This is the Ur-Shrew theory (in reference to Ur-Hamlet).
  A Shrew is a reconstructed version of The Shrew; i.e. a bad quarto, an attempt by actors to reconstruct the original play from memory.
  Shakespeare used the previously existing A Shrew, which he did not write, as a source for The Shrew.
  Both versions were legitimately written by Shakespeare himself; i.e. A Shrew is an early draft of The Shrew.
  A Shrew is an adaptation of The Shrew by someone other than Shakespeare.
  The exact relationship between The Shrew and A Shrew is uncertain, but many scholars consider The Shrew the original, with A Shrew derived from it; as H.J. Oliver suggests, there are "passages in [A Shrew] [...] that make sense only if one knows the [Follio] version from which they must have been derived."
  The debate regarding the relationship between the two plays began in 1725, when Alexander Pope incorporated extracts from A Shrew into The Shrew in his edition of Shakespeare's works. In The Shrew, the Christopher Sly framework is only featured twice; at the opening of the play, and at the end of Act 1, Scene 1. However, in A Shrew, the Sly framework reappears a further five times, including a scene which comes after the final scene of the Petruchio/Katherina story. Pope added most of the Sly framework to The Shrew, even though he acknowledged in his preface that he did not believe Shakespeare had written A Shrew. Subsequent editors followed suit, adding some or all of the Sly framework to their versions of The Shrew; Lewis Theobald (1733), Thomas Hanmer (1744), William Warburton (1747), Samuel Johnson and George Steevens (1765) and Edward Capell (1768). In his 1790 edition of The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare, however, Edmond Malone removed all A Shrew extracts and returned the text to the 1623 First Folio version. By the end of the eighteenth century, the predominant theory had come to be that A Shrew was a non-Shakespearean source for The Shrew, and hence to include extracts from it was to graft non-authorial material onto the play.
  This theory prevailed until 1850, when Samuel Hickson compared the texts of The Shrew and A Shrew, concluding The Shrew was the original, and A Shrew was derived from it. By comparing seven passages which are similar in both plays, he concluded "the original conception is invariably to be found" in The Shrew. His explanation was that A Shrew was written by Christopher Marlowe, with The Shrew as his template. He reached this conclusion primarily because A Shrew features numerous lines almost identical to lines in Marlowe's Tamburlaine and Dr. Faustus.
  In 1926, building on Hickson's research, Peter Alexander first suggested the bad quarto theory. Alexander agreed with Hickson that A Shrew was derived from The Shrew, but he did not agree that Marlowe wrote A Shrew. Instead he labelled A Shrew a bad quarto. His main argument was that, primarily in the subplot of A Shrew, characters act without motivation, whereas such motivation is present in The Shrew. Alexander believed this represents an example of a "reporter" forgetting details and becoming confused, which also explains why lines from other plays are used from time to time; to cover gaps which the reporter knows have been left. He also argued the subplot in The Shrew was closer to the plot of I Suppositi/Supposes than the subplot in A Shrew, which he felt indicated the subplot in The Shrew must have been based directly on the source, whereas the subplot in A Shrew was a step removed. In their 1928 edition of the play for the New Shakespeare, Arthur Quiller-Couch and John Dover Wilson supported Alexander's argument. However, there has always been critical resistance to the theory.
  An early scholar to find fault with Alexander's reasoning was E.K. Chambers, who reasserted the source theory. C
caption: Petruccio's hochzeit by Carl Gehrts (1885).
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