Slie. Sim gis some more wine, what's all the Plaiers gon: am not I a Lord ?

Tapster. A lord with a murrin: come, art thou dronken still?

Slie. Whose this? Tapster, oh Lord sirra, I have had

The bravest dreame to-night, that ever thou
Haddest in all thy life.

Tap. I marry, but you had best get you home,
For your wife will course you for dreaming here to-night.
Slie. Will she? I know now how to tame a shrew,

I dreamt upon it all this night till now,
And thou hast wakt me out of the best dreame
That ever I had in my life, but I'll to my
Wife presently and tame her too.

Of this hint, so far as appears, the author of the Induction to The Taming of the Shrew took no notice; and the curtain falls upon Petruchio and Katharine without a word from Sly. It is possible that a conclusion was designed, but never added. But it is equally conceivable that the reviser-who was almost certainly in this case Shakespeare-preferred to emphasise Sly's brute insouciance instead of his rude humour. In the earlier play after the

first act he calls for the Fool; in the later, he nods and is reproved for 'not minding the play': ''Tis a very excellent piece of work, madam lady; comes there any more of it?' And when the play ends, instead of vowing to emulate Petruchio's success, he is found to have fallen into a drunken stupor, in which condition he is dragged ignominiously out as the curtain falls.

No other play of Shakespeare has come home like The Taming of the Shrew to the business and bosoms of average men and husbands, and its afterhistory presents some curious points in the sociology of literary renown. Dekker's lost Medicine for a Curst Wife is plausibly supposed to have been an attempt to exploit its success for the benefit of the rival playhouse he served. A few years later Fletcher blew his lively counterblast, The Woman's Prize, or the Tamer Tamed (before 1625), in which a more astute successor of Kate the Shrew subdues Petruchio by effective variations on his own method. The later comedy, with its more elaborate and artificial humour, its morbid equivocations, its involved intrigue, marks with great distinctness the trend of English art and fashion in the intervening twenty years.

In 1633, both plays were performed at Court, Sir Henry Herbert recording in his Office-book that The Taming of the Shrew, played 26th November, was 'likt'; while The Tamer Tamed, played five days later, was 'very well likt.' The Taming of the Shrew was among the few Shakespearean plays 'revived' with success after the Restoration. Even the old Taming of a Shrew was not forgotten, chiefly in virtue of the homely humour of the clown, 'Sawny the Scot.' Lacy included this personage in his adaptation of the Shakespearean Shrew. It was this adaptation which Pepys saw on 9th April 1667, when he thought 'Sawny the best part,' adding, with naïve candour, that it 'hath not half its life, by reason of the words, I suppose, not being understood, at least by me.' When Pepys made this entry, the play had already for thirteen years had a place on the Dutch and for nine on the German stage, in vernacular versions. The Dutch version is the earliest extant translation of any Shakespearean play.1 The bourgeois Germany of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries found this bourgeois comedy extraordinarily stimulating, and turned the matter to fresh account in a series of adaptations: Kunst über alle Künste, ein bös Weib gut zu machen, 1672; Christian Weise's Die böse Katharina, 1705; Schink's Die bezähmte Wiederbellerin, 1781; and Holbein's Liebe kann Alles, 1822; finally the now current version by Deinhardstein (Kilian, Jahrbuch, xxxii. 129). In this last, gross as it is, the play has won a stage popularity which no other comedy of Shakespeare approaches, and Othello alone among his dramas surpasses. In 1894, out of 706 performances of 25 Shakespearean plays, The Taming of the Shrew was performed 83 times by 51 companies, exclusive of some 25 times in the earlier version of Holbein above mentioned (Kilian, Jahrbuch, xxxii. 353).

THE TAMING OF THE SHREW

INDUCTION.

SCENE I. Before an alehouse on a heath.

Enter HOSTESS and SLY.

Sly. I'll pheeze you, in faith.

Host. A pair of stocks, you rogue!

Sly. Ye are a baggage: the Slys are no rogues; look in the chronicles; we came in with Richard Conqueror. Therefore paucas pallabris; let the world slide: sessa!

Host. You will not pay for the glasses you have burst?

Sly. No, not a denier. Go by, Jeronimy: go to thy cold bed, and warm thee.

Host. I know my remedy; I must go fetch the third-borough.

[Exit.

Sly. Third, or fourth, or fifth borough, I'll

answer him by law: I'll not budge an inch, boy:

let him come, and kindly.

[Falls asleep.

Horns winded. Enter a Lord from hunting,
with his train.

Lord. Huntsman, I charge thee, tender well
my hounds:

Brach Merriman, the poor cur is emboss'd;
And couple Clowder with the deep-mouth'd brach.
Saw'st thou not, boy, how Silver made it good
At the hedge-corner, in the coldest fault?
I would not lose the dog for twenty pound.

First Hun. Why, Belman is as good as he, my
lord;

He cried upon it at the merest loss
And twice to-day pick'd out the dullest scent:
Trust me, I take him for the better dog.

Lord. Thou art a fool: if Echo were as fleet,
I would esteem him worth a dozen such.
But sup them well and look unto them all :
To-morrow I intend to hunt again.

First Hun. I will, my lord.

Lord. What's here? one dead, or drunk? See, doth he breathe ?

Sec. Hun. He breathes, my lord. Were he not warm'd with ale,

This were a bed but cold to sleep so soundly.

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