The Taming of the Shrew steps forward and speaks directly to the audience as herself; "Well, I must own, it wounds me to the Heart/To play, unwomanly, so mean a Part./What – to submit, so tamely – so contented,/Thank Heav'n! I'm not the Thing I represented." Cole Porter's musical "Kiss Me, Kate" is an adaptation of "Taming of the Shrew". The music and lyrics are by Porter and the book is by Samuel and Bella Spewack. It is at least partially based on the 1935/1936 Theatre Guild production of "Taming of the Shrew", which starred husband and wife Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, whose backstage
The Taming of the Shrew 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