BY THE REV. JOHN HUNTER, M.A. One of the National Society's Examiners of Middle-Class Schools; Malone I. 132. LONDON: LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. THE FIRST Collection of Shakspeare's plays, the folio of 1623, contains the earliest known copy of The Taming of the Shrew. There was printed, however, in 1594, an anonymous play called The Taming of a Shrew, very much like Shakspeare's in incidents and plan, and possessing very considerable merit, but not, as we think, bearing to be regarded as a previous production of his pen. We may reasonably suppose that the popularity of the subject of the earlier play induced him, or induced others to request him, to remodel and improve that play for his own theatre. His comedy is obviously founded upon it, and was probably prepared not later than 1600. The older comedy opens with an Induction, the characters of which are a Nobleman, Slie, a Tapster, Page, Players, and Huntsmen; and its incidents are the same as those in Shakspeare's prelude. In both plays the shrew is wooed in the same style, and the bride similarly treated and subdued. In both we have the wager about the obedience of the wives, and a lecture by Kate on the duty and propriety of submission to husbands. Shakspeare's underplot, however, is different from that which, in the older play, was derived from The Supposes of George Gascoigne, a drama founded on Ariosto's Il Suppositi. Douce thinks that the tale of The Sleeper Awakened, in the Arabian Nights' Entertainments, is the original of the story of the Induction. There have been, however, many distinct anecdotes relating to practical jokes like that played upon Christopher Sly. The Emperor Charles V. is said to have practised such a trick on a drunkard found lying in the streets of Ghent. And in an old collection of diverting stories, by Richard Edwards, printed in 1570, there is an anecdote about Philip, Duke of Burgundy, having similarly treated a drunken tradesman in Brussels. The details of this anecdote so nearly resemble those of Sly's adventure, that we have no doubt the author of The Taming of a Shrew derived the notion of his prelude from Edwards's compilation. REMARKS OF VARIOUS AUTHORS ON SHAKSPEARE'S 'TAMING OF THE SHREW."' 'The Taming of the Shrew has the air of an Italian comedy: and indeed, the love of intrigue, which constitutes the main part of it, is derived, mediately or immediately, from a piece of Ariosto. The characters and passions are lightly sketched; the intrigue is introduced without much preparation, and in its rapid progress impeded by no sort of difficulties; however, in the manner in which Petruchio, though previously cautioned respecting Katharine, still runs the risk of marrying her, and contrives to tame her, the character and peculiar humour of the English are visible. The colours are laid somewhat coarsely on, but the ground is good. That the obstinacy of a young and untamed girl, possessed of none of the attractions of her sex, and neither supported by bodily nor mental strength, must soon yield to the still rougher and more capricious but assumed self-will of a man: such a lesson can only be taught on the stage, with all the perspicuity of a proverb. 'The prelude is still more remarkable than the play itself: the drunken tinker removed in his sleep to a palace, where he is deceived into the belief of being a nobleman. The invention, however, is not Shakspeare's; Holberg has handled the same subject in a masterly manner, and with inimitable truth; but |