The first reference to The Taming of the Shrew appears in the diary of the theatre producer Philip Henslowe, who records a performance of “The Tamynge of a Shrowe” on June 13th, 1594. That same year, an inexpensive quarto edition of The Taming of a Shrew appeared, selling so well that it received new printings in 1596 and 1597. This text differs greatly from the play that was included in the 1623 folio of Shakespeare’s complete works; both follow the same plot (and feature a shrewish character named Kate), but the rewritten and unremarkable dialogue of The Taming of A Shrew leads scholars to believe that it was a pirated or knock-off version of The Taming of the Shrew.
This was not the last time Shakespeare’s play faced rewriting. Between 1642 and 1844, in fact, the original never appeared on stage. Instead, a series of adaptations replaced it, most famously a 1754 version called Catherine and Petruchio written by the actor/manager David Garrick. Garrick’s reworking held the English stage for a century and became the third most popular Shakespeare play in the young United States (behind only Romeo and Juliet and Richard III). Finally, in 1844, the actor/manager Benjamin Webster restored Shakespeare’s text in his Elizabethan-style production at London’s Haymarket Theatre. When the American manager Augustin Daly brought his 1877 original-text production to London, it marked the first time an American cast performed Shakespeare in England.
The 18th-century writer Samuel Johnson deemed the play “very popular and diverting,” and indeed early productions presented it as a raucous farce, with Petruchio often brandishing a whip to “tame” Katherina. Later stagings also highlighted the farcical elements of the plot, exploiting the play’s origins in Italian comedy to introduce slapstick clowning, acrobatics and masks.
But as society at large began to debate the question of inequality between men and women, The Taming of the Shrew became a lightning rod. Its theme of a wife’s obedience to her husband seemed antique and distasteful to a modern audience. As early as 1897, George Bernard Shaw wrote of “being extremely ashamed of the lord-of-creation moral.” Contemporary criticism and production invariably confront this aspect of the play. Michael Bogdanov’s 1978 production at the Royal Shakespeare Company, for example, featured Jonathan Pryce as a thuggish Petruchio, brutally breaking Katherina’s spirit.
The Taming of the Shrew has also been a popular source of adaptations, most notably Cole Porter’s hit 1948 musical Kiss Me, Kate, which depicts the feud between a divorced couple performing the leads in a musical version of Shakespeare’s play. On film, the play proved a strong vehicle for charismatic leads: a 1929 film starred celebrity couple Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, and a 1967 film starred celebrity couple Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. More recently, Ten Things I Hate About You adapted the plot of the play to a modern-day high school setting.
The Shakespeare Theatre Company has produced The Taming of the Shrew once before: Adrian Hall directed a 1995 production featuring Jonathan Epstein as Petruchio and Amy van Nostrand as Katherina.