Abstract

Roy Eriksen’s essay asks the question whether the notoriously unattributed The Taming of a Shrew might not in fact bear the trace of Marlowe’s hand. Recognising the tendency of critics to dismiss the play as a mere “bad quarto” of a lost play that Shakespeare drew on, Eriksen suggests that A Shrew may be Marlowe’s original work—a claim which the long-recognised presence of Marlovian allusions and Marlowe’s own propensity for self-quotation do not reject.

Highlights

  • Who is the author of A Pleasant conceited Historie, called The Taming of a Shrew (1594), or what can his craftsmanship reveal about his identity? The fact that Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, published for the first time in 1623, but written somewhere between 1590 and 1594 (Bullough 2002: 1: 57-58; Thomson 1984: 1-9), has a shorter precursor with an approximately identical title has until fairly recently hindered serious consideration of A Shrew in its own right.1 When editors and critics of Shakespeare have compared it to The Shrew, the majority has—not surprisingly—found it to be inferior in most respects.2 If we add to the deemed inferiority that A Shrew is shorter than many Elizabethan plays, it was early relegated to the slippery category of ‘bad quartos.’3 The problem is that the comedy is remarkably ‘good’ in terms of plot structure, the quality of the dialogue, and—I would argue—even in terms of some aspects of style.4 In A Shrew there are no blatant loose ends or obvious gaps, whereas in The Shrew the metadramatic Sly material does not survive the Induction

  • The evidence demonstrates that [the] A-version of Doctor Faustus reflects the impact of oral transmission on a play whose original text, where they have material in common, is better represented by the B-text (Pettitt 2006: 24ms)

  • Albeit on a different level, we are reminded of the double time scheme in Doctor Faustus, where in the longer and more complete B-text the protagonist’s twenty-four years of pleasure are circumscribed a symbolic ‘day’ of twenty-four hours running from morning to morning (Eriksen 1985: 55-6)

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Summary

Introduction

Who is the author of A Pleasant conceited Historie, called The Taming of a Shrew (1594), or what can his craftsmanship reveal about his identity? The fact that Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, published for the first time in 1623, but written somewhere between 1590 and 1594 (Bullough 2002: 1: 57-58; Thomson 1984: 1-9), has a shorter precursor with an approximately identical title has until fairly recently hindered serious consideration of A Shrew in its own right.1 When editors and critics of Shakespeare have compared it to The Shrew, the majority has—not surprisingly—found it to be inferior in most respects.2 If we add to the deemed inferiority that A Shrew is shorter than many Elizabethan plays, it was early relegated to the slippery category of ‘bad quartos.’3 The problem is that the comedy is remarkably ‘good’ in terms of plot structure, the quality of the dialogue, and—I would argue—even in terms of some aspects of style.4 In A Shrew there are no blatant loose ends or obvious gaps, whereas in The Shrew the metadramatic Sly material does not survive the Induction. Only bears on the status of the A-text and the longer B-text, but applies indirectly in the case of A Shrew, as well.9 The evidence demonstrates that [the] A-version of Doctor Faustus reflects the impact of oral transmission (memorization and reproduction from memory) on a play whose original text, where they have material in common, is better represented by the B-text (Pettitt 2006: 24ms).

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