The Taming of The Shrew Third Series [Hardcover]

The Taming of the Shrew is unique among Shakespeare's plays and is a perennial and compelling success in the theatre. Its reception is marked, however, by ongoing polarised debate over the meaning and worth of the play. This edition disengages Shakespeare's exuberant and disturbing marital farce from the tangled history of its reception. It views the two sixteenth-century Shrew plays as textually independent but theatrically interdependent and so includes the full text of The Taming of A Shrew in an appendix.

While the Introduction and Commentary focus on the critical and theatrical debate surrounding the play, the original and comprehensive editing of the playtext makes available a 'different' Shrew, more open to the reader's interpretation than is usually the case. Barbara Hodgdon is a distinguished feminist scholar whose reading of the play offers a stimulating array of ideas and questions about this enduringly popular yet challenging comedy.

Barbara Hodgdon is Professor of English at the University of Michigan. She is the author ofThe Shakespeare Trade: Performances and Appropriations, the Arden 3 Online Performance Project,The End Crowns All: Closure and Contradiction in Shakespeare's History, and two books exploring Shakespeare'sHenry IV, Parts One and Twoas texts and in performance.

For more than a century educators, students and general readers have relied on The Arden Shakespeare to provide the very best scholarship and most authoritative texts available.
The Third Series editions' added emphasis on all aspects of Shakespeare performance extended the Arden editions readership to also become the preferred text for theatre professionals.

???Hodgson has piqued my interest again in her spry, supple introduction to the play...Her performance history is particularly impressive: closely aligned to the breadth of critical reading, but suggesting the comedy's challenges and, even, its charms.??? ???Plays InternatlS!