The Taming of the Shrew (Wordsworth Classics) - Softcover

Shakespeare, William

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1853260797 ISBN 13: 9781853260797

Publisher: Wordsworth Editions, 1993

Synopsis

Edited, introduced and annotated by Cedric Watts, Research Professor of English Literature, University of Sussex. The Wordsworth Classics' Shakespeare's Series presents a newly-edited sequence of William Shakespeare's works. The textual editing takes account of recent scholarship while giving the material a careful reappraisal., The Taming of the Shrew is one of the most famous and controversial of Shakespeare's comedies. The central relationship, in which Petruchio boisterously `tames' a rebellious Kate, has often appeared problematic. In the theatre, it has been treated in a diversity of ways, so that Kate's apparent capitulation varies between the ironic and the sincere., Feminists have been divided in their responses. The provocative vitality of this comedy has been transmitted by numerous adaptations for stage and screen, notably the film directed by Franco Zeffirelli and the Cole Porter musical, Kiss Me, Kate.

About this title

Review:

One of the most controversial and problematic of all of Shakespeare's plays, The Taming of the Shrew is a typical Elizabethan domestic comedy written around 1592. Petruchio, a gentleman of Verona, arrives in Padua and announces to his friends that "I come to wive it wealthily in Padua; / If wealthily, then happily in Padua". He soon finds that a group of men keen to marry Bianca, the younger daughter of rich old Baptista, are frustrated by her elder, "shrewish" sister, Katherine. There is much subsequent hilarity as Bianca's suitors make a bet with Petruchio that he cannot "tame" and marry Katherine. Despite Katherine's protestations, Petruchio goes ahead with the match, using deliberately unorthodox behaviour to confuse Katherine (including a scene where he starves her), claiming that "this is the way to kill a wife with kindness". The play culminates with a scene of Katherine's apparently spontaneous subjection to her husband's will, where she places her hand beneath her husband's foot, and tells the other wives present that "thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper". The play's gratuitous scenes of women being abused and vilified in the name of "comedy" has made many directors and critics very uncomfortable with the play, and many feminist critics have condemned contemporary productions of the play as reproducing certain 16th-century stereotypes concerning women who speak out against male authority. --Jerry Brotton

Review:

'Stanley Wells' OUP Complete Works of Shakespeare is now eight years old and has spawned a new Oxford Shakespeare which appears now in splendidly affordable volumes in that nonpareil of libraries of good reading The World's Classics.'The Oxford Times

About this edition

• Publisher: Wordsworth Editions
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 1853260797
• ISBN 13: 9781853260797
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 144
• Editor: Watts M.A. Ph.D. Professor Cedric