This play has become perhaps the most contentious that Shakespeare ever wrote. Critics and scholars disagree on almost everything about it, from its date of composition to the significance of its structure. Is it even finished? Has the text that we have, first printed in the First Folio edition of Shakespeare's collected works in 1623, been altered by people other than Shakespeare? And, given its subject matter, why should it be performed today? Yet it is one of the most popular plays in the theatre, rarely out of the repertoire of the Royal Shakespeare Company for long, and almost guaranteed to sell seats.
These questions cannot be answered in isolation. Fortunately, there is a huge repertoire of other plays and stories on the same theme: the 1594 Quarto The Taming of A Shrew, and John
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Citation: King, Ros. "The Taming of the Shrew". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 02 November 2004 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=7887, accessed 25 November 2024.]
