katherina was the shrew in taming of the shrew.
katherina was the shrew in taming of the shrew.
who was the shrew in taming ofthe shrew?
katherina
perhaps the most extensive examination of the question came in 1998 in stephen roy miller's edition of "a shrew" for the new cambridge shakespeare: the early quartos series. miller agrees with most modern scholars that "a shrew" is derived from "the shrew", but he does not believe it to be a bad quarto. instead, he argues it is an adaptation by someone other than shakespeare. miller believes alexander's suggestion in 1969 that the reporter became confused is unlikely, and instead suggests an adapter at work; "the most economic explanation of indebtedness is that whoever compiled "a shrew" borrowed the lines from shakespeare's "the shrew", or a version of it, and adapted them." part of miller's evidence relates to gremio, who has no counterpart in "a shrew". in "the shrew", after the wedding, gremio expresses doubts as to whether or not petruchio will be able to tame katherina. in "a shrew", these lines are extended and split between polidor (the equivalent of hortensio) and phylema (bianca). as gremio "does" have a counterpart in "i suppositi", miller concludes that "to argue the priority of "a shrew" in this case would mean arguing that shakespeare took the negative hints from the speeches of polidor and phylema and gave them to a character he resurrected from "supposes". this is a less economical argument than to suggest that the compiler of "a shrew", dismissing gremio, simply shared his doubts among the characters available." he argues there is even evidence in the play that the compiler knew he was working within a specific literary tradition; "as with his partial change of character names, the compiler seems to wish to produce dialogue much like his models, but not the same. for him, adaptation includes exact quotation, imitation and incorporation of his own additions. this seems to define his personal style, and his aim seems to be to produce his own version, presumably intended that it should be tuned more towards the popular era than "the shrew"."
the taming of the shrew
with the rise of the feminist movement in the twentieth century, reactions to the play have tended to become more divergent. for some critics, "kate's taming was no longer as funny as it had been [...] her domination became, in george bernard shaw's words 'altogether disgusting to modern sensibility'." addressing the relationship between "a shrew" and "the shrew" from a political perspective, for example, leah s. marcus very much believes the play to be what it seems. she argues "a shrew" is an earlier version of "the shrew", but acknowledges that most scholars reject the idea that "a shrew" was written by shakespeare. she believes one of the reasons for this is because "a shrew" "hedges the play's patriarchal message with numerous qualifiers that do not exist in" "the shrew". she calls "a shrew" a more "progressive" text than "the shrew", and argues that scholars tend to dismiss the idea that "a shrew" is shakespearean because "the women are not as satisfactorily tamed as they are in "the shrew"." she also points out that if "a shrew" is an early draft, it suggests shakespeare "may have increased rather than decreased the patriarchal violence of his materials", something which, she believes, scholars find difficult to accept.
the taming of the shrew