Hortensio, Gremio and the newly arrived Lucentio, However, Baptista will not marry off his younger daughter until Kate, the shrew, is married. In this farce set in Padua there are three suitors for Bianca. In the play we have the rich and successful Baptista who has two daughters, one Katherine, the shrew if ever there was one, and the beautiful, gentle, kind, loving and graceful Bianca. For us the audience or reader, we can laugh at some of the over-the-top farce since we realize it is being done to tweak the unsuspecting Sly. Since he is fed and given plenty to drink he readily agrees to see the play. The play is the farce, The Taming of the Shrew.
Actually, they tell him, he is a very rich man with a beautiful wife (played by a young boy dressed as a girl) and they are there to serve his every wish.įirst, however, there is a theater troop that has come to his palace to perform a play for him. He has hired a group of servants to come in upon Sly while sleeping and pretend that he has just awaken from a 30 years sleep, and only mistakenly believes he is the poor Sly of the quote above. Nay, sometimes my toes look through the overleather.īut an expensive trick is being played upon him by a local lord. Ne’er ask me what raiment I’ll wear, for I have no more doublet’s than backs, no more stockings than legs, nor no more shoes than feet. This crazy farce is a play within a play, and that device allows the farce to be more farcical.Ĭhristopher Sly is poor and not what one would call a model person at all. See: List of Shakespeare’s play’s I’ve read and commented on COMMENTS ON THE TAMING OF THE SHREW However, I will keep a separate page listing each play I’ve read with links to any comments I would make of that particular play. At this time I have no idea how the project will go, nor if it will actually lead me through the entire corpus of Shakespeare’s plays. Thus I began with The Two Gentlemen of Verona. I wanted to go back, start with something not too serious or challenging, and work my way through the whole corpus. I hadn’t read a Shakespeare play since 1959, 50 years ago! But I had read nearly all of them in college.
General Note: In January 2009 I decided that I’d like to go back and read all the plays of William Shakespeare, perhaps one a month if that works out. THE TAMING OF THE SHREW By William Shakespeare Book review - THE TAMING OF THE SHREW William Shakespeare
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