The Taming of the Shrew

This Norton Critical Edition of one of Shakespeare’s earliest and best-loved comedies is based on the First Folio (1623).

It is accompanied by “A Note on the Text” and detailed explanatory annotations. “Sources and Contexts” provides three possible analogues to Shakespeare’s controversial, high-spirited play from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, George Gascoigne’s “Supposes,” and “A Merry Jest of a Shrewd and Curst Wife Lapped in Morel’s Skin.” “Criticism” offers a wide range of scholarly commentary on The Taming of the Shrew’s in fifteen essays by Laurie Maguire, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, Bernard Shaw, Natasha Korda, Frances Dolan, Lynda E. Boose, Harold Bloom, Patricia Parker, Shirley Nelson Garner, Juliet Dusinberre, Marea Mitchell, Karen Newman, E. M. W. Tillyard, and Jan Harold Brunvand. “Rewritings and Appropriations” collects seven adaptations of The Taming of the Shrew from the last four centuries, by John Fletcher, David Garrick, Cole Porter, and Charles Marawitz. A Selected Bibliography is also included.

Author Biography

Dympna Callaghan is Dean’s Professor in the Humanities at Syracuse University. She is the author of Women and Gender in Renaissance Tragedy: A Study of Othello, King Lear, The Duchess of Malfi, and The White Devil, Shakespeare without Women, Shakespeare’s Sonnets: An Introduction, and co-author of The Weyward Sisters: Shakespeare and Feminist Politics. Her edited books include Feminist Readings in Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects (with Valerie Traub and Lindsay Kaplan), John Webster’s Duchess of Malfi: Contemporary Critical Essays, Romeo and Juliet: Texts and Contexts, The Impact of Feminism in English Renaissance Studies, and The Feminist Companion to Shakespeare.