The Taming of the Shrew (Vol. 31) | Juliet Dusinberre (essay date 1993)
Juliet Dusinberre (essay date 1993)
SOURCE: "The Taming of the Shrew: Women, Acting, and Power," in Studies in the Literary Imagination, Vol. XXVI, No. 1, Spring, 1993, pp. 67-84.
[In the following essay, Dusinberre examines ways in which the play calls attention to the Elizabethan practice of using boy actors in female roles and examines the effect of this metadramatic element on the play's portrayal of gender relations.]
The opening of The Taming of the Shrew is strikingly different from that of the related play The Taming of a Shrew in offering the audience in the first ten lines a battle between the sexes. The Beggar, who calls himself Christopher Sly, threatens to "pheeze" the Hostess who throws him out of her inn, not just for drunkenness, but for not paying for broken glasses. Threatening Sly with the stocks, the Hostess exits, determining to send for the constable. In A Shrew, the innkeeper is a...
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