The Taming of the Shrew (Arden Shakespeare, Third Series) » (Third Edition)

Barbara Hodgdon is Professor of English at the University of Michigan. She is the author of The 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’s Henry IV, Parts One and Two as texts and in performance.

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 polarized 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.

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.