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    The Taming of the Shrew
    The Taming of the Shrew
    The Taming of the Shrew
    Ebook1,007 pages2 hours

    The Taming of the Shrew

    By William Shakespeare and Stephen Orgel

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    About this ebook

    The acclaimed Pelican Shakespeare series, now in a dazzling new series design

    Winner of the 2016 AIGA + Design Observer 50 Books | 50 Covers competition

    This edition of The Taming of the Shrew is edited with an introduction and notes by series editor Stephen Orgel and was recently repackaged with cover art by Manuja Waldia. Waldia received a Gold Medal from the Society of Illustrators for the Pelican Shakespeare series. Cover artist Manuja Waldia received a Gold Medal from the Society of Illustrators for the Pelican Shakespeare series.

    The legendary Pelican Shakespeare series features authoritative and meticulously researched texts paired with scholarship by renowned Shakespeareans. Each book includes an essay on the theatrical world of Shakespeare’s time, an introduction to the individual play, and a detailed note on the text used. Updated by general editors Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller, these easy-to-read editions incorporate over thirty years of Shakespeare scholarship undertaken since the original series, edited by Alfred Harbage, appeared between 1956 and 1967. With stunning new covers, definitive texts, and illuminating essays, the Pelican Shakespeare will remain a valued resource for students, teachers, and theater professionals for many years to come.

    For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Publishing Group
    Release dateNov 1, 2016
    ISBN9780698410824
    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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      Book preview

      The Taming of the Shrew - William Shakespeare

      Cover for The Taming of the Shrew

      THE PELICAN SHAKESPEARE

      GENERAL EDITORS

      STEPHEN ORGEL

      A. R. BRAUNMULLER

      The Taming of the Shrew

      PENGUIN BOOKS

      An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

      375 Hudson Street

      New York, New York 10014

      penguin.com

      The Taming of the Shrew edited by Richard Holsey published in the United States of America in Penguin Books 1964

      Revised edition published 1970

      New edition with an introduction by Stephen Orgel published 2000

      This edition published 2016

      Copyright © 1964, 1970, 2000 by Penguin Random House LLC

      Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every read er.

      Ebook ISBN 9780698410824

      Cover art & design: Manuja Waldia

      Version_1

      Contents

      Title Page

      Copyright

      Publisher’s Note

      The Theatrical World

      William Shakespeare of Stratford-Upon-Avon, Gentleman

      The Question of Authorship

      The Texts of Shakespeare

      Introduction

      Note on the Text

      The Taming of the Shrew

      Names of the Actors

      Ind.1 Enter Beggar (Christophero Sly) and Hostess.

      Ind.2 Enter aloft the Drunkard [Sly] with Attendants,

      I.1 Flourish. Enter [below] Lucentio and his man

      I.2 Enter [below] Petruchio and his man Grumio.

      II.1 Enter Kate and Bianca [with her hands tied].

      III.1 Enter Lucentio [as Cambio], Hortensio [as Litio], and Bianca.

      III.2 Enter Baptista, Gremio, Tranio [as Lucentio],

      IV.1 Enter Grumio.

      IV.2 Enter Tranio [as Lucentio] and Hortensio [as Litio].

      IV.3 Enter Kate and Grumio.

      IV.4 Enter Tranio [as Lucentio] and the Pedant

      IV.5 Enter Petruchio, Kate, Hortensio [, and Grumio,

      V.1 Enter Biondello, Lucentio [as Cambio], and

      V.2 Enter Baptista, Vincentio, Gremio, the Pedant,

      Publisher’s Note

      T

      HE

      P

      ELICAN

      SHAKESPEARE has served generations of readers as an authoritative series of texts and scholarship since the first volume appeared under the general editorship of Alfred Harbage over half a century ago. In the past decades, new editions followed to reflect the profound changes textual and critical studies of Shakespeare have undergone. The texts of the plays and poems were thoroughly revised in accordance with leading scholarship, and in some cases were entirely reedited. New introductions and notes were provided in all the volumes. The Pelican Shakespeare was designed as a successor to the original series; the previous editions had been taken into account, and the advice of the previous editors was solicited where it was feasible to do so. The current editions include updated bibliographic references to recent scholarship.

      Certain textual features of the new Pelican Shakespeare should be particularly noted. All lines are numbered that contain a word, phrase, or allusion explained in the glossarial notes. In addition, for convenience, every tenth line is also numbered, in italics when no annotation is indicated. The intrusive and often inaccurate place headings inserted by early editors are omitted (as has become standard practice), but for the convenience of those who miss them, an indication of locale now appears as the first item in the annotation of each scene.

      In the interest of both elegance and utility, each speech prefix is set in a separate line when the speakers’ lines are in verse, except when those words form the second half of a verse line. Thus the verse form of the speech is kept visually intact. What is printed as verse and what is printed as prose has, in general, the authority of the original texts. Departures from the original texts in this regard have the authority only of editorial tradition and the judgment of the Pelican editors; and, in a few instances, are admittedly arbitrary.

      The Theatrical World

      E

      CONOMIC

      REALITIES

      determined the theatrical world in which Shakespeare’s plays were written, performed, and received. For centuries in England, the primary theatrical tradition was nonprofessional. Craft guilds (or mysteries) provided religious drama – mystery plays – as part of the celebration of religious and civic festivals, and schools and universities staged classical and neoclassical drama in both Latin and English as part of their curricula. In these forms, drama was established and socially acceptable. Professional theater, in contrast, existed on the margins of society. The acting companies were itinerant; playhouses could be any available space – the great halls of the aristocracy, town squares, civic halls, inn yards, fair booths, or open fields – and income was sporadic, dependent on the passing of the hat or on the bounty of local patrons. The actors, moreover, were considered little better than vagabonds, constantly in danger of arrest or expulsion.

      In the late 1560s and 1570s, however, English professional theater began to gain respectability. Wealthy aristocrats fond of drama – the Lord Admiral, for example, or the Lord Chamberlain – took acting companies under their protection so that the players technically became members of their households and were no longer subject to arrest as homeless or masterless men. Permanent theaters were first built at this time as well, allowing the companies to control and charge for entry to their performances.

      Shakespeare’s livelihood, and the stunning artistic explosion in which he participated, depended on pragmatic and architectural effort. Professional theater requires ways to restrict access to its offerings; if it does not, and admission fees cannot be charged, the actors do not get paid, the costumes go to a pawnbroker, and there is no such thing as a professional, ongoing theatrical tradition. The answer to that economic need arrived in the late 1560s and 1570s with the creation of the so-called public, or amphitheater, playhouse. Recent discoveries indicate that the precursor of the Globe playhouse in London (where Shakespeare’s mature plays were presented) and the Rose theater (which presented Christopher Marlowe’s plays and some of Shakespeare’s earliest ones) was the Red Lion theater of 1567.

      Extensive parts of the foundations of the Rose theater, apparently the fourth public theater to be built, were uncovered in 1989. A few years later, a much smaller portion of the second Globe (rebuilt after the first burned in 1613) was located. The remains of the Rose indicate that it originally (1587) had a rather small thrust stage that tapered into the open area from which a standing audience, the groundlings, watched. The stage was approximately 25 feet wide at the front, more than 36 feet wide at the back, and about 16¹⁄2 feet deep; it was placed at the northern end of a north-south axis, presumably to maximize the amount of light falling on the stage during the spring-summer playing season. In early 1592, the Rose’s owner, Philip Henslowe, paid to renovate and expand his theater; the new stage was at least 18 feet deep, perhaps more if the stage boards projected out over the newly laid brick foundations. The seating area also increased, but both theater and stage remained relatively small compared to the rectangular stage at the Fortune (1,600), over 40 feet wide and supposedly based upon the Globe. The Globe building may have been as much as 100 feet in diameter, while the Rose’s diameter was about 72 feet. Both theaters were irregular polygons, multistoried, with areas for the groundlings, and with a covered gallery that seated perhaps 2,200 (Rose) or 3,000 (Globe) very crowded spectators.

      These theaters might have been about half full on any given day, though the audiences were larger on holidays or when a play was advertised, as old and new were, through printed playbills posted around London. The metropolitan area’s late-Tudor, early-Stuart population (circa 1590–1620) has been estimated at about 150,000 to 250,000. It has been supposed that in the mid-1590s there were about 15,000 spectators per week at the public theaters; thus, as many as 10 percent of the local population went to the theater regularly. Consequently, the theaters’ repertories – the plays available for this experienced and frequent audience – had to change often: in the month between September 15 and October 15, 1595, for instance, the Lord Admiral’s Men performed twenty-eight times in eighteen different plays.

      Since natural light illuminated the amphitheaters’ stages, performances began between noon and two o’clock and ran without a break for two or three hours. They often concluded with a jig, a fencing display, or some other nondramatic exhibition. Weather conditions determined the season for the amphitheaters: plays were performed every day (including Sundays, sometimes, to clerical dismay) except during Lent – the forty days before Easter – or periods of plague, or sometimes during the summer months when law courts were not in session and the most affluent members of the audience were not in London.

      To a modern theatergoer, an amphitheater stage like that of the Rose or Globe would appear an unfamiliar mixture of plainness and elaborate decoration. Much of the structure was carved or painted, sometimes to imitate marble; elsewhere, as under the canopy projecting over the stage, to represent the stars and the zodiac. Appropriate painted canvas pictures (of Jerusalem, for example, if the play was set in that city) were apparently hung on the wall behind the acting area, and tragedies were accompanied by black hangings, presumably something like crepe festoons or bunting. Although these theaters did not employ what we would call scenery, early modern spectators saw numerous large props, such as the bar at which a prisoner stood during a trial, the mossy bank where lovers reclined, an arbor for amorous conversation, a chariot, gallows, tables, trees, beds, thrones, writing desks, and so forth. Audiences might learn a scene’s location from a sign (reading Athens, for example) carried across the stage (as in Bertolt Brecht’s twentieth-century productions). Equally captivating (and equally irritating to the theater’s enemies) were the rich costumes and personal props the actors used: the most valuable items in the surviving theatrical inventories are the swords, gowns, robes, crowns, and other items worn or carried by the performers.

      Magic appealed to Shakespeare’s audiences as much as it does to us today, and the theater exploited many deceptive and spectacular devices. A winch in the loft above the stage, called the heavens, could lower and raise actors playing gods, goddesses, and other supernatural figures to and from the main acting area, just as one or more trapdoors permitted entrances and exits to and from the area, called hell, beneath the stage. Actors wore elementary makeup such as wigs, false beards, and face paint, and they employed pigs’ bladders filled with animal blood to make wounds seem more real. They had rudimentary but effective ways of pretending to behead or hang a person. Supernumeraries (stagehands or actors not needed in a particular scene) could make thunder sounds (by shaking a metal sheet or rolling an iron ball down a chute) and show lightning (by blowing inflammable resin through tubes into a flame). Elaborate fireworks enhanced the effects of dragons flying through the air or imitated such celestial phenomena as comets, shooting stars, and multiple suns. Horses’ hoofbeats, bells (located perhaps in the tower above the stage), trumpets and drums, clocks, cannon shots and gunshots, and the like were common sound effects. And the music of viols, cornets, oboes, and recorders was a regular feature of theatrical performances.

      For two relatively brief spans, from the late 1570s to 1590 and from 1599 to 1614, the amphitheaters competed with the so-called private, or indoor, theaters, which originated as, or later represented themselves as, educational institutions training boys as singers for church services and court performances. These indoor theaters had two features that were distinct from the amphitheaters’: their personnel and their playing spaces. The amphitheaters’ adult companies included both adult men, who played the male roles, and boys, who played

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