The Taming of the Shrew
William Shakespeare
Stephen Orgel (Editor)
A. R. Braunmuller (Contributor)
ISBN 9780143128625
eISBN 9780698410824
ASIN B01DJZWA6Y
Seven years back I started reading Shakespeare again, as my children were being introduced to it in High school. Then four years ago my son who is now 18 found he had a love for the Bard and for his plays, much as I did at that age. We had been sticking to the Oxford School Shakespeare editions as those were the versions they were reading in school, but my son decided to collect these Pelican editions because they are all available as individual volumes. We loved that the Pelican has the complete works of Shakespeare in individual volumes, and we have been picking those up to read, he gets the physical and I grab the eBooks. I loved that there are eBooks for all volumes in this series, because of a dual form of dyslexia. This year we picked up tickets for three Shakespeare plays at The Stratford Festival, including this play, we did three of the Bards plays each of the last few years well.
The Pelican Classics were among my favourite editions of the plays when I was a youth myself. I often hunted used bookstores for the hard cover edition. I think the last time I read this would have been about 35-40 years ago. This has always been among my favourites plays by Shakespeare. The description of this edition states:
“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.”
Based on the commonly accepted chronological order of Shakespeare’s plays this usually ranked as one of his earlier plays. It varies between 2nd, 3rd or 7th depending on the list. Often believed to have been written between 1590 and 1591. The sections in this volume prior to the text of the play are:
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 publishers note states:
“THE PELICAN 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.”
And the introduction begins with:
“MODERN CRITICISM HAS HAD a difficult time accommodating The Taming of the Shrew to the models we have wanted Shakespeare to provide for us of the relations between the sexes, but attempts to rescue the play from charges of sexism have been halfhearted at best, and are, in any case, historically uninformed. Shakespeare here participates in an ongoing debate throughout the early modern era about the place of women within the patriarchal system, and one of the greatest pleasures the play would have provided for a Renaissance audience certainly lay in its conviction that a shrewish woman could indeed be successfully managed. The play would also doubtless have been seen as a fairy tale, but the pleasure would have been no less acute for that. Critics wishing to recuperate Shakespeare for the cause of feminism can take comfort in the fact that the playwright was at least not discriminatory: Portia in The Merchant of Venice and Paulina in The Winter’s Tale offer equally sexist object lessons to wives on the management of their husbands.”
Later we are informed:
“Kate and Petruchio have always been irresistible roles, not least for husband and wife teams, and not always for artistic reasons. In the twentieth century, Sybil Thorndike and Lewis Casson, and Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne were notable successes in the play. The only film Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks made together, in 1929, one of the first talking films for either, was a quite wooden but very successful Taming of the Shrew – despite the stars’ obvious ineptitude at speaking Shakespearean verse, audiences loved seeing the most famous couple in Hollywood going at each other at a time when the gossip columnists revealed that their marriage was falling apart. And Franco Zeffirelli’s handsome 1966 film starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor made the roles appear to have been written for the notorious, glamorous, squabbling pair.”
The introduction concludes with:
“Nor is it even clear that Lucentio’s success with Bianca constitutes a happy ending within the patriarchal system. When the marriage is revealed to her father, Baptista, instead of offering his blessing he merely resolves “to sound the depth of this knavery” (V.1.127), and Lucentio’s father, Vincentio, swears vengeance on Tranio, the hapless servant whom his son has employed to manage his romantic fraud. All that is satisfied in these conclusions is the appearance of normalcy: whatever Kate feels in her heart, she publicly declares herself an obedient wife; though Bianca is ignoring her father’s authority, she nominally obtains his consent to her marriage. The play’s resolution, in fact, may be seen as a version of the Elizabethan Settlement, the compromise Elizabeth succeeded in negotiating among the various religious factions of her realm, whereby what was required of all subjects was outward conformity, but so long as the externals were observed – regular attendance at church, the execution of the oath of allegiance – the question of belief was not at issue.
Perhaps the best epitome of the fortunes of this very popular but disquieting and endlessly amended play over the past four hundred years is provided by the work in which it has had its most widespread modern success, Sam and Bella Spewack and Cole Porter’s great Kiss Me, Kate, a musical about a troupe of actors always about to perform, or in the midst of performing, or having just finished performing The Taming of the Shrew. We never quite see the play. We see the actors, and the preparations, and some bits of various scenes; but the full implications of Shakespeare’s comedy are assumed to be a little more than we can handle.”
This play comprises 5 acts and a total of 12 scenes, the play takes place over approximately a week to 10 days. It is interesting play both intense and at times humorous. One of Shakespeare’s earliest comedies it is full of humour, and wit. I have seen a few excellent productions over the years, both on stage and film. And am reading this as it has been announce for the Stratford Festival in 2027. My favourite production was at Stratford in 1997.
My son and I are I am glad we picked up this edition to read before going to see a performance next season at the Stratford Festival. It is another play reminded me how much I loved these editions when I was young and we have started collecting the eBook versions now. If you are looking for a good copy of the play to read or study I can easily recommend this edition.
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