So the Taming of the Shrew is a comedy from the early part of Shakespeare's career.

It probably dates from 1592 to 3, and it's first published in the folio in 1623.

Sorting out the order of Shakespeare's earliest plays is really critically still quite a moot point.

But if you look at an edition like the Oxford edition, Complete Oxford, which puts the plays

in chronological order, you'll see that the Tain with the Shrew comes second, second in all

of Shakespeare's works after two gentlemen of Verona and just before the play we now call the second part of Henry the 6th.

So that suggests that the most recent scholarship is putting it right at the beginning of Shakespeare's work.

I talked a bit when I talked about Comedy of Errors about what earliness tends to allow us to think about Shakespeare's plays, how it allows us to excuse certain

things or to see things as immature. And in the lecture on comedy there, as I suggested that that

might be slightly unhelpful. Okay, so it's an early comedy. And the question I want to try and

use to focalize our discussion of the play is probably the most obvious one. Is the shrew tamed? Is Katharina tamed? And so you know what happens next, if you've been at any of the other lecture. So what happens now is I give a short synopsis of the play in order that even if you haven't read it,

you can get a sense of what I'm talking about through the rest of the lecture.

I think uniquely in this lecture series and possibly uniquely in Shakespeare,

with the shrew, it isn't really possible to give an account of what happens in the play

that precedes the kind of interpretation we might want to perform on it.

So there isn't any such thing as a neutral plot summary of the play.

In fact, that's the crux of what I'm talking about.

That plot summary is already a contested part of critical interpretation,

and I'm just going to try and outline how that is.

So the Taming of the shrew is about two courtships,

the daughters of the Paduaian merchant Baptista,

Catherine and Bianca.

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