SOURCE: “The Ending of The Shrew,” in Shakespeare Studies, Vol. 18, 1986, pp. 41-64.

[In the following essay, Burns asserts that the play's unity is established through the frame created by Sly's disappearance in the first act, and the “disappearance” of the shrew in the final act.]

The central thematic and formal principle in The Taming of the Shrew is its conversion of oppositions into dialectics, so that initially adversarial relationships or hierarchies become vehicles of reciprocal exchange. This is accomplished in the relationship between Kate and Petruchio, in the relationship between the Induction and the main play, and ultimately in the relationship between the ending and the “missing” ending. All of these relationships are subsumed by the ending of the play.

The conclusion of Shrew poses two famous problems, the remarkable disappearance of Christopher Sly and the other Induction characters after Act I, and the ambiguity of Katherina's self-extinguishing speech in Act V (ii.136-79).¹ At the beginning of the play, Sly disappears, to be replaced by Katherina the shrew; at the end of the play, Katherina the shrew disappears, to be replaced by someone evidently rather … sly.² As this charming symmetry of beginning and end suggests, I think, the play coheres, without the addition of any supererogatory ending. I shall argue that the two problems mentioned above are connected and that, by virtue of their connection, they can be resolved; the exchange between them—and between beginning and ending—partly indicates the formal complexity of the play, but also evidences the unity of the play. To explain the ending of Shrew, one should posit not that half a frame is missing, but that the unity of the play is its frame.³ Thus Sly's loss can be discussed as the play's gain, because the discontinuation of Sly's story actually helps develop the Kate-Petruchio story. Leaving aside for now the traditional assumptions of Shrew criticism, therefore, I shall concentrate at first on purely formal considerations. Rather than hypothesize a missing ending, I shall focus on the manifold connections between the Induction and the final scene in particular, and between the Induction and the main play overall.

Modern readers have reawakened to some of the thematic connections between the Sly story and the rest of the play, as sketched by Richard Hosley in his overview of the play: a “threefold structure of induction, main plot, and sub-plot, unified as these elements are by the ‘Supposes’ theme”⁴ Among recent readers, Maynard Mack guides the consensus, emphasizing the characteral parallels between Sly and Kate: “what the Lord [sic] and his servants do in thrusting a temporary identity on Sly is echoed in what Petruchio does for Kate at a deeper level of psychic change.”⁵ Sidney Homan similarly emphasizes the parallels between Sly and Kate, in his reading of the metadramatic parallels between, respectively, spectator and actor.⁶ Alongside the consensus on the links between Sly and Kate, however, other readers have noted analogous links between Sly and Petruchio, following the direction pointed out by the fair-minded Harold Goddard:

In the Induction to The Taming of the Shrew, Christopher Sly the tinker, drunk with ale, is persuaded that he is a great lord who has been the victim of an unfortunate lunacy. Petruchio, in the play which Sly witnesses (when he is not asleep), is likewise persuaded that he is a great lord—over his wife.⁷

Goddard's attractive insight, partly a corrective to a rather sexist and elitist emphasis on Kate and Sly as solely the weaker partners in parallel manipulations, will be pursued farther. First, however, to substantiate any of the larger characteral relations between Induction and play, one must observe the detailed relations between scene and scene in the Induction and Act V.

Both the Induction and the final scene necessitate a “banquet,” an atmosphere of communal festivity somewhat self-consciously evoked:

Sirs, I will practice on this drunken man.
What think you, if he were convey'd to bed,
Wrapp'd in sweet clothes, rings put upon his fingers,
A most delicious banquet by his bed,
And brave attendants near him when he wakes … ?

(Ind.i.36-40)

In each scene, the festivity celebrates a marriage and/or the reaffirmation of a marriage; in obvious burlesque of comedy's traditional celebratory ending, the Induction bestows a rejoicing wife on the semi-sentient Christopher Sly, before an onstage audience of the whole comic community. So complete a happy ending, indeed, almost obviates any other ending; in a structural pun, its very completeness jocosely explains the absence of a coda for Sly. In fact, the two “ending” scenes of the Induction and Act V jocosely reflect each other: the Induction festivity shows a husband restored to his senses; the final scene shows a wife restored to hers; so far, so good (though I think the ironies in the former pinpoint those of the latter, as Goddard suggested). As one would expect from Renaissance drama, especially Shakespearean, the same process of reflection extends further, throughout the structure of the play: the happy ending of the Induction is picked up in Act V, scene ii, and the unhappy ending of Kate and Petruchio's wedding in Act III is reflected in Sly's unconsummated marriage in the Induction and in the absence of any consummation at all for him after Act V.

With contradictory open-endedness, the end-stopped Induction belies its own form, partly by setting up further developments, as the players enter and commence arrangements for a play. Furthermore, it also sets up the audience: since anyone first seeing the play would expect Sly to be its protagonist, the swift transmutation of roles at the end of the Induction comes like a practical joke. Like the lord, the playwright has a near-supine creature to practice on, and in both cases the butt of the joke metamorphoses into bemused (and perhaps reluctant) spectator, his mind on other things. Beyond the initial foolery, however, the playwright's joke suggests a more fruitful sense of “practice,” and Sly's happy ending also provides a warm-up, a rehearsal, for that of the main play. Parallels between the Induction and the final scene generate what might be called a familial relationship between the Induction and the play. Seen in such perspective, the Induction stands as a sort of little sister to the main play, applying itself to “practice” as a younger sister should:

BAP.
Well, go with me and be not so discomfited:
Proceed in practice with my younger daughter;
She's apt to learn and thankful for good turns.

(II.i.164-66)

TRA.
Shall sweet Bianca practice how to bride it?

(III.ii.253)

Incidentally, the suggestions about “practice” for Bianca, while juxtaposing her to Katherina, hint subliminally at her constantly ongoing if quiet rehearsal as understudy in the role of shrew.

Following the overall pattern of familial resemblances (and familial stresses), the main play, which apparently must be finished before Sly's induction can be completed, falls into a kind of Leah-and-Rachel relationship to the induction, like an older sister who must be married off before the younger sister can marry. In The Taming of the Shrew, both the main play and the older sister are initially presented—objectified—as things to get rid of:

'Tis a very excellent piece of work, madam lady: would 'twere done!

(I.i.258-59)

I am agreed; and would I had given him the best horse in Padua to begin his wooing that would thoroughly woo her, wed her and bed her and rid the house of her!

(I.i.147-50)

Happily, the disregarded potential both in Katherina and in her story comes to fruition, as both become (cf. Kant) ends in themselves. Meanwhile, the Sly frame, like the sly Bianca, proves other than what it seemed originally, perhaps balks at expanded development, and finally disappears, subsumed within a larger perspective.

In the overall temper of energized humanism thus sustained by the play, a humanism based on a rather optimistic concept of the potentials in individualism, one outstanding quality in the play is its openendedness—at times, its double-endedness. The Induction and the final scene, for example, are enriched by the open-ended dialectic of literal and figurative language that connects the two scenes. Centered around parallel occasions, the scenes also center around parallel conversations about hunting; however, the literal hunting topos of the Induction metamorphoses into the figurative topos of the final scene:

This bird you aim'd at, though you hit her not;
Therefore a health to all that shot and miss'd.
O, sir, Lucentio slipp'd me like his greyhound,
Which runs himself, and catches for his master;
'Tis well, sir, that you hunted for yourself;
'Tis thought your deer does hold you at a bay.

(V.ii.50-56)

In the Induction, the men enter arguing about which of three hunting dogs is best; in the final scene, the men argue about which of three wives is best—an infelicitous parallelism which boomerangs on at least two of them since only one wife proves a retriever (of her husband's wager, and incidentally of the other wives). Beneath the jollification (often dubious, in such scenes in Shakespeare's plays), Lucentio and Hortensio's uneasy banter about escape, retrieval, and entrapment betrays their underlying unease, the contradictory sensations of hunters unsure of their prey and of objects of prey themselves. With the play's brilliant doubleness, the colliding forms of edginess produce, for the two characters, a hint both of their own possible entrapment and of a possibly slipping grasp on the yet-untamed wives. Briefly stated, the edginess comes from a tension between denial and fulfillment and is exploited in the wedding-night wager and exacerbated by the wives, who first leave the room (shift their “bush,” as Bianca says [V.ii.46])⁸ and then withhold their appearance. Again, the polite theatrical indication of the wives' future sexual behavior reflects or is reflected by the action of the Induction, when Sly's wife similarly withholds herself.

Drawing the two scenes yet closer together, the two hunt conversations employ not only the same images but even the same numbers. Like the lord, who enters boasting about his hound—“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” (Ind.i.19-21)—Lucentio proposes to wager “twenty crowns” on his wife's obedience (V.ii.70) and Petruchio boasts of his wife—“twenty crowns! / I'll venture so much of my hawk or my hound, / But twenty times so much upon my wife (ll. 71-73). In the dreamlike dependency of numbers as in other images, the final scene uses and re-uses the materials of the Induction and transposes them to higher terms—or at least to more expensive terms. Indeed, the earlier hunt may echo in the final scene even through the names of the hunting dogs, which chime interestingly with the wives' characters: “Bellman” suggests Kate's voice and function in the play; “Silver,” like “Bianca,” suggests light coloring; and “Echo” adequately describes the unnamed widow whose speeches largely just echo Bianca's.⁹ Such linguistic echoes reverberate Petruchio's implicit connection of his wife with his other hunting creatures, further widening the uneasy tension between a view of the wives as hawks, hounds, etc., and a view of the wives as “deer” (with the obvious pun). Whether in tandem or in opposition, the Induction and final scene interact to enrich each other; when the playwright pursues contradictions far enough, the progressive complexities involve release as well as tension. Like the progression from literal to figurative “sly” character mentioned before, the progression from literal to figurative hunt draws the beginning and ending of the play closer together and enlarges the play from the literal, confining bounds of its beginning.

The sense of expansion at the ending is amplified by Katherina. Following the men's jokes and the men's wager in a last-but-not-least position, Kate's big speech to the audience seems at first to endorse a downplaying of the woman's role. Its immediate impact in the theater, however, certainly does not downplay her role, and like many other readers, I think it proceeds through—and succeeds theatrically by means of—intentional though extemporaneous irony, along the lines of Kate and Petruchio's gamesplaying in Act IV, scene v.¹⁰ Kate's strategic rhetorical position at the end, her eyebrow-lifting overenthusiasm, the vivid language she uses to delineate women's weakness, all support the strongest possible reading of her part at this juncture:

Fie, fie, unknit that threat'ning unkind brow,
And dart not scornful glances from those eyes,
To wound thy lord, thy king, thy governor.

(ll. 136-138)

The haphazard order to the lord/king/governor terms, by the way, suggests their rather loose application. To support a political hierarchy, they should form a linguistic hierarchy, as in Portia's incomparably more serious and therefore more elevated use of the same terms:

Happiest of all is that her gentle spirit
Commits itself to yours to be directed,
As from her lord, her governor, her king.

(MV, III.ii.165-67)

Katherina, in contrast, sites the real power of her speech in women; above, she begins by emphasizing that women should avoid injuring men; continuing, she similarly emphasizes that women should avoid injuring themselves:

It blots thy beauty, as frosts do bite the meads,
Confounds thy fame, as whirlwinds shake fair buds. …

(ll. 139-40)

While Katherina warns women that they could injure themselves or others, the speech never introduces a more sinister dimension of any equivalent threat from men. Like Katherina herself at every point in the play, the speech continuously displays strength and animation. Thus it dwells on the concept of womanhood, and in such a way as to produce images of strong passions and elemental forces—pungently reinforced through Kate's own language and behavior (even in this speech):

Come, come, you froward and unable worms!
My mind hath been as big as one of yours,
My heart as great, my reason haply more,
To bandy word for word and frown for frown;

(ll. 169-72)

With a pre-Freudian and almost Victorian limpidity, she pronounces that “… our [women's] lances are but straws” (l. 173); but she nonetheless represents women's duty with a particularly “unfeminine” image which, in effect, endows women with “lances”:

Such duty as the subject owes the prince,
Even such a woman oweth to her husband;
And when she is froward, peevish, sullen, sour,
And not obedient to his honest will,

(surely the inclusion of the word “honest” is important here)

What is she but a foul contending rebel,
And graceless traitor to her loving lord?

(ll. 155-60)

Most appropriately, the multiply-ironic military idiom in this passage produces the reverse battle cry of “Let's lay down our weapons,” a genre whose energies carry it from the Lysistrata through the Sixties slogan of “make love, not war.” Of course, the strategy employed by Katherina at this juncture (as in the Lysistrata) is the time-honored one of carrying the battle to favorable terrain.

Throughout her speech, Katherina exhorts women to offer dutiful obedience freely; the speech addresses (ostensibly) not the men in the audience but the women themselves, and it argues not masculine coercion but masculine privation:

Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,
Thy head, thy sovereign; one that cares for thee,
And for thy maintenance; commits his body
To painful labor, both by sea and land;
To watch the night in storms, the day in cold. …

(ll. 146-50)

Indeed, as with the dubious image of the “foul contending rebel” preceding, Kate's evocation of the ways in which men can be distressed becomes almost a reverse cheer. Proclaiming in lavish detail the difficulties which men must face, Kate shows such gusto as to overwhelm any poor-little-woman argument in the speech; the zest which characterizes Kate's language certainly extends to the subject of men's burdens.

Overall, the speech presents the concept of mutual support between the sexes, clearly based on women's freedom as well as men's, to offer or to withhold. Critics of all political persuasions have passed over this salient point. Indeed, little serious analysis has been devoted to the language of the speech itself; most criticism has its starting point in the supposed tenor of the speech and then addresses itself to justifying or debunking the supposed message.¹¹ The language which presumably couches the message has been neglected. Partly diverging from such a pattern, however, Juliet Dusinberre notes the difference between this speech and the analogous one in A Shrew, though her conclusion differs from mine.¹² More in line with my own view of the presentation, Margaret L. Ranald refers to the concepts of partnership and mutuality in discussing both the speech and the play;¹³ and similarly Anne Barton takes as her emphasis “a Katherina of unbroken spirit and gaiety” at the end of the play, “who has learned the value of self-control and of caring about someone other than herself.”¹⁴ In this regard, the speech corresponds fully to the rest of Act V, scene ii: notwithstanding superficial appearances, the entire last scene of The Taming of the Shrew cleverly reinforces a fundamental reciprocity and equality (however raucous) between the sexes. Paradoxically, even the men's wager sustains the reciprocity (unbeknownst, probably, to Hortensio and Lucentio); after all, the men bet on their wives' willingness to appear rather than simply compelling their wives' appearance. It is not suggested that they could compel their wives to appear; what they do, instead, is to reciprocate the treatment asked of woman in Kate's speech, in a willing compliance, a submission based (in one case) on trust, they watch and wait for their spouses to return (from the “bush” outside). In other words, they bet on their wives. This reciprocity is sustained throughout the scene, even to the inclusion of slight touches like the final couplet—which comments equally on Petruchio's taming and on Kate's allowing herself to be tamed:

HOR.
Now go thy ways, thou hast tam'd a curst shrew.
LUC.
'Tis a wonder, by your leave, she will be tam'd so.

In the previous wedding scene, a similar tag expresses the same exchange:

BIAN.
… being mad herself, she's madly mated.
GRE.
I warrant him, Petruchio is Kated.

(III.ii.245-46)

Despite the belittlement in such comments, the audience can see that, if Katherina gives herself and her image into Petruchio's protection, Petruchio's stature—as either “tamer” or simply person—rests in Kate's keeping, in the reciprocal estate of marriage.¹⁵

I have been arguing that the inequalities ostensibly espoused by Katherina's speech are belied by the energizing individualism of her rhetoric—its vividness, strength and ironies combined in a game of seeming ease analogous to and infused with sprezzatura (even if the latter is more typically considered the exclusive property of the male courtier of the period). In this respect, the final speech reflects the play as a whole, where the same interaction of superficial inequalities against the more fundamental energies of developing individualism results in much the same outcome: a “taming” which stars Katherina as the pivot of the whole play. In particular, the ostensible or gamesmanlike imbalance of Katherina's speech reflects the fate of the Induction, further tightening the formal connections between Kate's problematic speech and Sly's problematic disappearance. With the unfinished Induction, after all, the play concludes on a seeming imbalance between the beginning and ending fully as audacious as the seeming imbalance between the sexes with which Kate's speech concludes. The imbalance itself thus generates a balance, both between the beginning and ending of the play and between the Induction and the play as a whole. The Taming of the Shrew seems to be poised at a moment of relative optimism, which envisions the energies of humanistic individualism as reconcilable with the stresses it imposes on family relationships.

In any case, the connections between the Induction and the final scene of the play lead inevitably to the larger connections between the Induction and the play as a whole. At this juncture, however, to argue for those connections becomes a more complex proposition, partly because to point out the parallels or connections between the Induction and the rest of the play often necessitates references from the text of the play to the context imposed by its history in criticism. Historically, criticism of the play shows that the apparent inequalities in Katherina's speech and in Sly's disappearance invite—or almost compel—speculation (as in this essay). Unfortunately, much such criticism, though by no means all, has reacted to these dazzling provocations to thought by hypothesizing a missing ending for Sly and a missing earnestness for Kate, extending both Sly's story and Kate's conversion beyond the text. Since I think that the play has more than sufficient aesthetic unity to justify its non-ending or its non-final ending (depending on one's preference for terms), I would hypothesize that the artificial extensions imposed by such readings serve chiefly to get both Sly and Kate home—and to keep them there. This point must, however, await the substantiation offered by the further formal connections between play and Induction.

To justify the ending of The Taming of the Shrew, I would term it not a missing ending but a non-final ending, and I would look to the advantages (formal and theatrical) for the playwright implicit in such lack of finality, as well as to the consistency of such lack of finality with the movement of the play as a whole. The metadramatic approach which has proved useful to other readers proves useful again in this context. One recent reader suggests, for example, that the difference between the play's Induction and ending reflects the difference between farce and comedy; thus with Sly's disappearance the farce also disappears, in a metadramatic sloughing-off of old wineskins which nicely signals the author's development into a playwright of genuinely comic stature.¹⁶ Similarly, a student concluded that as the Induction characters get farther and farther into the play, they simply get swallowed up; like the audience watching, they become lost in the play, and therefore the lord's joke partly metamorphoses into a joke on himself, as he and his attendants are swept away by the action which they themselves initiate. Reinforcing the metadramatic approach on this point, the traditional topos of the biter bit brings the Induction closer (once again) to the main play. For just as Kate has the tables turned on her, seeing her shrewishness reified in another personality, as in the therapeutic technique of commanding the double bind that requires correction, Petruchio also sees his game successfully played back at him by Kate, when she mimics and outdoes his Baroque flipflops (IV.iv. and V.ii). As Erasmus recommends in the former instance,

Malo nodo malus quarendus cuneus.—To a crabbed knot must be sought a crabbed wedge. A strong disease requyreth a stronge medicine. A shrewed wyfe a shrewed husbande to tame her. A boysteous horse, a boysteous snaffel.¹⁷

And in the latter, he similarly recommends,

Fallacia alia aliam tradit.—One discept driveth out another, As we see one nail driven out with another nail, so doth many times one craft and guile expel another.¹⁸

In the play, the energetic series of proverb-salted processes—tormentor tormented, fighting fire with fire, one nail drives out another—returns on itself (“Petruchio is Kated”), as Kate's domineering recoils on herself, Petruchio's supposed lordship on himself, and the lord's joke on himself, all combining in one of the more therapeutic veins of theatrical comedy.

In part, I would contend that the combination succeeds because it is actually a re-combination, resulting from correspondences between Kate, Petruchio, and the other main-play characters and the figures from the Induction who actually offer shadowy equivalences for the main-play characters. The play's reversals, inversions, and reciprocities include an exchange which connects characters in the Induction to characters in the main play. Thus Kate's situation resembles not only Sly's, but—as has already been touched on—other links connect Kate to the lord and Petruchio to Sly. In fact, Kate's character includes, like Petruchio's, elements of both Sly and the lord (and in Kate's case, of the page and the hostess), relationships which derive support from the original doubling of actors' parts. Presumably, for example, the same actor played either Sly and Petruchio or the lord and Petruchio; perhaps the same boy actor played the hostess of the Induction and Kate; or perhaps, more appealingly, the page of the Induction played Kate, while the hostess doubled as either Bianca or the Widow.¹⁹ If the original pairings remain uncertain, their thematic import at least remains correspondingly open to conjectural use.

As one instance of key parallelism, when the page of the Induction becomes a lady, he also becomes, like Kate, a model wife. Consider the course of his instruction in how to personate a wife:

Tell him from me, as he will win my love,
He bear himself with honorable action,
Such as he hath observ'd in noble ladies
Unto their lords, by them accomplished. …
And say, “What is't your honor will command,
Wherein your lady, and your humble wife,
May show her duty and make known her love?”
And then with kind embracements, tempting kisses,
And with declining head into his bosom. …

(Ind.i.109-18)

If the page does play Kate, his practice in receiving instruction (“taming,” so to speak) amply fits him to do so; like Kate afterward, he rehearses the role of wife, under the tutelage of his “lord,” in order to win that lord's “love” (l. 109). Furthermore, the fact that the page's role as wife runs counter to his previous role does not make the theatrical joke any less effective—although it does, of course, prevent any ultimate consummation onstage (the page's story does not have an ending, either). Incidentally, the lord's speech indicates that the lord, like Petruchio, seems to have devoted some thought and energy to the course of instruction as a husband.

Where the page resembles Kate, Christopher Sly also resembles Petruchio; where Kate's character seems to contain elements of the page and the hostess, Petruchio's seems to contain elements of the lord and Sly, a transference which proves significant. In his own way, Sly shows a propensity, like Petruchio's, to treat his wife from the start as (as we say) a person:

SLY.
Where is my wife?
PAGE.
Here, noble lord, what is thy will with her?
SLY.
Are you my wife and will not call me husband?
My men should call me “lord”; I am your goodman. …

(Ind.II.102-05)

Fascinatingly, Sly's comic celerity here in assuming a social distance between him and his “men” anticipates the way Petruchio and Kate bond with each other, leaving other members of their respective genders to engage in a sort of post-play battle of the sexes as groups, rather than as individuals. To do so, however, he assumes the same distance between his servants and his wife—a distinction which, the play suggests, would be sloughed off swiftly by a “real” lord. As Petruchio expostulates, dogmatically,

She is my goods, my chattles; she is my house,
My household stuff, my field, my barn,
My horse, my ox, my ass, my anything;

(III.ii.232-34)

Petruchio's over-emphasis on the legal situation at least brings it out into the open and signals his own uneasiness here. Indeed, I think that the ensuing mock-heroic scene dramatizes Petruchio's genuine underlying desire to remove Kate from the situation enunciated:

I'll bring mine action on the proudest he
That stops my way in Padua. Grumio,
Draw thy weapon, we are beset with thieves;
Rescue thy mistress, if thou be a man,
Fear not, sweet wench, they shall not touch thee, Kate:
I'll buckler thee against a million.

(ll. 236-41)

The comedy points up an actual need for individual protection against a community of people like Baptista, a need which Petruchio seems to recognize.

Like Petruchio later, Sly shows his recognition of his wife as a person, by exploring the possibilities of the wife's name (also commencing the instant intimacy which he desires):

SLY.
What must I call her?
LORD.
Madam.
SLY.
Al'ce madam, or Joan Madam?
LORD.
Madam, and nothing else, so lords call ladies.

The last is a telling comment, underlined by the fact that the lord himself has no name, and evidently repudiated by Sly:

SLY.
Madam wife …

(ll. 108-12)

Similarly, Petruchio opens with Kate's name:

You lie, in faith, for you are call'd plain Kate,
And bonny Kate, and sometimes Kate the curst;
But Kate, the prettiest Kate in Christendom,
Kate of Kate-Hall, my super-dainty Kate,
For dainties are all Kates, and therefore, Kate,
Take this of me, Kate of my consolation. …

(II.i.185-90)

Sly and Petruchio attest the wife's identity by emphasizing the wife's name, in an authorial word-play which reflects adversely on the nameless Widow and the colorless Bianca—as well as on the unnamed lord and the name-changing “Supposes” characters, among the men.

From such connections, the roles in Induction and main play recombine, sometimes to produce rather androgynous results (e.g. the treatment of the page, both by his own lord and by Sly). In the doubling-up typical of the play, moreover, the characters also form their thematic bonds in pairs; when Petruchio becomes a lord, like Sly, and Kate becomes a lady, like the page, the two pairs of characters reflect each other's situations, partly in the mutuality of their mock-elevations. In fact, the social elevations are validated chiefly by their mutuality—converted, like so much else in the play, from oppositions to dialectics. As briefly stated at the beginning of this essay, each initial opposition or hierarchy—Kate and Petruchio, Sly and the lord, Induction and play—metamorphoses into a vehicle of dialectical exchange, as does even the opposition of “ending” and non-ending (or missing ending), where the non-ending can serve as an ending, and the ending can serve as an open door.

Here enters much of the thematic point of the ambiguous ending—again, attesting a moment of rather optimistic humanism, even in the form of the play; when the dichotomy between “formal” and “thematic” or contentual also becomes recognizable as dialectic, and the form can be seen as homologous with the relationships among the characters, then the open-endedness of the play vindicates the open-endedness of the central characters' relationship. If both Sly and Petruchio have jokes played on them, the ending of the play finally gives the jokes some point; Kate's mock-elevation of Petruchio results in a genuine elevation, a release from the limitations of his earlier role (fortune-hunter, bully, etc.), reflecting her release from her role. While the joke on Petruchio takes on a point, however, the joke on Sly—as just a joke—remains pointless, and the play outgrows it. The disappearance of Sly and the other Induction characters partly constitutes the disappearance of a sly joke, and the play proves its enlargement at the end by enlarging the audience from the sly state of mind.

In examining this point, I found that the concept of a developing dialecticism in the form of the play elucidates the minor puzzle of Sly's name. While the significant name “Sly” can hardly be accident, given the way Shakespeare plays with names, the name seems not to fit Sly's egregiously straightforward personality.²⁰ Perhaps, then, the name conveys less the individual character than the frame of reference which he provides. In such a sly frame of reference, either Kate or Petruchio must be seen as beaten, while the other must be narrowly seen as victor, a reductive view which downgrades the characters to manipulators and bullies (or to shrews and slys). Given the direction of the play, such a view would result in the loss of Kate and Petruchio, and the playwright chooses fittingly to jettison Sly instead. Only characters like Lucentio and Hortensio cling to their sly jokes, and their attitude toward Kate and Petruchio tends if anything to arouse the audience's protectiveness toward the latter. In a neat structural pun, the “Supposes” remain sly—merely sly, like spectators, eavesdroppers, bystanders—at the frame rather than at the center of things, leaving the viewer or reader to identify (as most do) with the central intelligences. Finally, indeed, with Kate's address virtually directly to the audience, the playwright allows the audience itself to “frame” the play from its vantage point as bystanders in a different and larger sense, released—like Kate and Petruchio—from the initial configuration of response.

In other words, the playwright declines to put the lid on, recork the bottle, at the end of The Taming of the Shrew; to return to the Sly framework would imply regression, inappropriate to a play whose action celebrates so much progression. The confinement of a single limited role for Sly, whether in a manor or in the gutter, would diminish the playwright's options and those of his characters; and if Sly's story is not over, perhaps Kate and Petruchio's is not over either. Their wedding occurred back in Act III, after all, so the audience knows that a wedding does not necessarily signify closure any more than it necessarily signifies the happy ending; and the end of the play reinforces the point, partly through Bianca and the Widow's weddings and partly through its own lack of closure. For Kate and Petruchio, the open ending is the most persuasive happy ending, because the open threshold promises them room to grow; as Kate and Petruchio make their final exit with the other characters gaping after them, their development suggests a dimension beyond closure into the adult future of the “real world.”

Professor Anne Barton, introducing the play in a student text, observes of the traditional joke-on-a-beggar story that “inherent in all versions is the return of the beggar to his original state and his conviction that all the wonders he has seen and enjoyed were only an exceptionally vivid dream.”²¹ In The Taming of the Shrew version, perhaps the author wishes to do more than tell an old joke. Perhaps the Sly framework disappears because any enclosing form would ill-suit an action of release and expansion; like the audience watching and some of the characters within it, the play escapes from limits initially imposed on it, reflecting its own action in the farthest-reaching optimism of Renaissance dramatic mirroring. In such form, the story represents a dream come true, less for the tinker turned lord than for the married couple turned friends and for the audience turned party to its own entertainment in the fictional characters' happiness.²²

As mentioned, emphasis on the formal unity of the play extant has ramifications beyond the text of the play to the context of previous criticism. In my opinion, the play has traditionally been read with an elitist and antifeminist bias which reifies relationships as hierarchies and then endorses those hierarchies. Where the play itself makes elaborate jokes out of its hierarchies—including the highly sanctioned ones of youth and age (“Young budding virgin, fair and fresh …” [IV.v.37]), father and son (“Thy father! O villain! He is a sailmaker in Bergamo” [V.i.80-81]), and master and servant (“Knock you here, sir!” [I.ii.9]) critics have too often solemnly taken them to be fixed, normative, and ordained. The play itself leaves virtually nothing fixed; rather, its action proceeds and unfolds chiefly through a series of exchanges, including exchanges of role which entail exchanges of status, which leave status mobile and suspended in mobility at the end of the play.

Instead of focusing on the mobility, or suspension, sustained by the text, however, and analyzing the consequences or significance of such mobility, much criticism has concentrated instead on the “missing” ending, proceeding not from the text itself but from the underlying assumption that Sly should return to his “rightful” state. (Analogously, as observed above, Kate's final speech is often approached from the assumption that she, too, is coming to her senses and returning to the ordained subservient status of women). I wish to examine the assumptions underlying such criticism, despite the inexplicitness of the assumptions. Obviously, the fact that Sly does not have an ending leads to the question, “Why not?” But this valid question, with which I have attempted to deal on formal grounds, differs considerably from its implicit reformulation in much Shrew criticism, which asks not, “Why doesn't Sly have an ending?” but rather, “Of course, Sly must have had an ending; where did it go?” If the cumbersomeness of this proposition renders it suspect (in chess or in logic, an attempted resolution entailing two steps is called inelegant if only one is needed), its disingenuousness renders it even more suspect. As an ostensible starting point, it not only does not begin with the beginning—namely, with the text that we possess—but also conceals this slippage. I would argue that, in the absence of social or critical presupposition, the logical question would ask why the ending is the way it is, rather than why it is not as it is not.

I shall return to the presuppositions shortly, but only after dealing with the two most nearly solid grounds on which they rest. The idea that Sly should have an ending has two bases: an implicit comparison to the ending of the other extant “shrew” play, A Shrew, and an implicit comparison to a more overtly regular dramatic closure. In regard to the first: given the tremendous uncertainty, from the time of initial productions and revivals of The Taming of the Shrew to now, about the relationship between The Shrew and A Shrew—which is the source of the other, whether either is the source of the other, whether one or both draw directly or indirectly from yet a third play now lost, etc.²³—hypotheses about the relationship of any part of the plays must be cautiously advanced. In any case, Shakespeare altered so many sources in so many significant ways that “source” alone, today, would determine almost no textual decisions. In regard to Shrew, an instructive caution lies in earlier scholars' eagerness to excise parts of the play from the Shakespearean canon (the parts regarded as too brutal, too farcical, etc.).²⁴ And in regard to endings, given the augmented dramatic effect accruing to an ending, caution is also behooved; eighteenth-century readers of Shakespeare provided the all-time nadir of negative examples, as in altering the ending of King Lear (a trifling change from sad to happy) to resemble that of the sources.

If the norm provided by A Shrew is obscure, the norm provided by a sense of closure or by any desire for such sense in regard to this play is invisible. In the first place, one might reasonably ask whether the desire for a more regular ending—whatever regularity entails—prescribes any particular ending for Sly, especially if the irregularities of the ending coalesce with the larger irregularities of the play. An a priori application of invisible norms of regularity actually begs the question, for Shakespeare manipulates and/or disappoints expectations of satisfactory endings in a multitude of forms throughout the canon. Looking at that segment of the canon into which The Taming of the Shrew falls, one notes immediately that Love's Labor's Lost ends with no marriages at all but only the commutation of the men's original sentence from three years to one; and The Two Gentlemen of Verona ends with the surprising denouement of attempted rape which produces the final reaffirmation of love and friendship. Needless to say, both endings strike numerous readers as in some way unfinished. With a paradoxical symmetry, therefore, the relevant period of the author's career comprises three lopsided or oddly ended comedies in a row, framed by Comedy of Errors before and Midsummer Night's Dream after, both of which self-consciously call attention to their links between beginning and ending in play-within-play devices which constitute frames. If I were forced to speculate about this period of the author's career, I would conclude that Shakespeare is metadramatically memorializing his own development in the virtuosity of beginnings and endings, by playing off frame plays against skewed-frame plays.

When neither the norm provided by A Shrew nor the norm provided by a priori appeals to a sense of closure dictate any particular ending for The Shrew, I consider the historically variable and laborious explanations of where Sly's ending “went” to be a social reflex to Sly's change in status, a reflex of some emotionalism. Although this proposition cannot be proven ultimately, one could create a strong supposition to such effect. Thus, it is remarkable that wherever a reading of this play deals with the “missing ending,” its thrust deals exclusively with Sly's story. Despite the lord's longer speeches, greater number of lines, greater complexity of character and greater impact on the action—which the lord, after all, initiates—criticism never focuses on the lord's story as unfinished, presumably because he at least remains in the manor house which is his rightful place. Such a consistently limited focus suggests that the truncation of Sly's story jars less our sense of closure than our sense of status. Further corroborating this position, the page's story also lacks completion, leaving the page in a position surely even more anomalous than Sly's, but far less regarded by scholarship than Sly's.

Here I am reluctantly forced to differ with readers who have, with some courage, argued explicitly in favor of the missing ending theory (in contradistinction to those who simply finesse the argument altogether). Both types of readers have applied themselves seriously and responsibly to hypothesizing an ending which fills the perceived gap. One ingeniously constructs an ending designed, in regard to the “ladies of London” in the audience, to be non-sexist: Sly awakens at the end of the play with a hangover, starts home to tame his own wife, and is foreseen (though not shown) to fail signally in the attempt.²⁵ This surmise, however, relies entirely on the existence of a character unmentioned in the play, a wife for Sly. While such a character could arguably be added by a director interested in the concept, the text itself provides absolutely no support for such an addition. Therefore, it seems implausible: how, in speeches of such detail as Ind.ii.18-26 and 85-98, which mention personae never heard of again such as “Cicely Hacket,” “old John Naps of Greece,” and “twenty more such names and men as these” (ll. 95, 97; italics mine), could a wife of Sly's fail to be mentioned?

The other reader employs a casting analysis of the last scenes—also purely hypothetical—to argue that a Sly ending was cut from the play because of its excessive demands on the personnel.²⁶ The problem with this hypothesis, however, is that the idea of insufficient personnel to include Sly still does not establish that an ending for Sly was written and then dropped. Even admitting the problem, which cannot easily be established, given the uncertainties attendant on part-doubling, it could equally have been obviated by never writing an ending at all; could the author not see the end coming? In general, efforts in academe to prove a previously existing ending for Sly do founder on this objection; while A Shrew and numerous theatrical productions prove the relative ease of inventing an ending, nothing shows how one came to be lost. There is great difficulty in accounting for a hypothetical ending's being lost or cut, leaving not a wrack behind.

For the alert reader, the Induction of The Taming of the Shrew should provide a foretaste of the limitations of supposititious lordship. In a simulacrum of the dialectic that develops in the main play, just as Petruchio becomes a lord when Kate becomes sly, so Christopher Sly becomes a lord when the lord becomes sly; Sly's induction into the aristocracy depends on an induction of the aristocracy into slyness. Both parts of the play translate a hierarchy—less rigid than it seems, even in the Induction—into mobile reciprocity. Nor does the Induction circle back to repress Sly, although the play puts him to sleep before he can tinker (to use the word in its Elizabethan sense) with it further.²⁷ Rather, Sly's comic-economic mobility commences before the start of the play (I.ii.18-22) and continues beyond the end. If the exchange between real and mock lords chiefly indicates that any man can be induced to think himself a lord, the flimsy distinction evaporates completely in the metadramatic reminder that both roles depend on an actor and a few props. The distinctions between the real and the mock lords undermine themselves, as the lord successfully dupes Sly only by demoting himself to Sly's mock-entourage—“O noble lord, bethink thee of thy noble birth” (I.ii.32-48)—becoming a “tinker” in order to create Sly a “lord.” As with any delusional victim, the ironies of the joke on Sly resemble those of the treatment of Don Quixote, where others must participate in the victim's fantasy (a fantasy, by the way, foisted off on the victim by the “real world” to begin with) to bring him into their world; victimized by the victim, they enter into his order of things as much as or more than he enters theirs (as with Kate and Petruchio). Where the Induction ends, both key characters display “sly”-ness and “lord”-ship in a hierarchical relationship coterminous with their persons and their roles, which disappears when they disappear.

Evidently, the wish to provide an ending to Sly's story proceeds from a wish to “complete” two actions: to return Sly to his original lowly state, and to send Sly home to tame his own wife. What the reader must question, however, is the nature of such completion. One who does not view the dual repression as necessarily desirable will probably not view it as a priori more complete than the play extant; such a concept of completion rests on presuppositions about the hierarchies initially presented in the play. But notwithstanding an emphasis on putatively Elizabethan terms of “degree” by readers in the vein of E. M. W. Tillyard,²⁸ a hierarchy in practical politics is not an essentialist entity, external to and independent of the persons who in their various relationships sustain it. Hierarchies change when the persons, roles, and relations which compose them change. As the action of The Taming of the Shrew reflects, the potential of such alteration is the regenerative potential of such social constructs; when the initial oppositions in the play become vehicles of reciprocity, Sly can enliven the lord's house, Kate and Petruchio can enliven and regenerate stale courtship patterns (including those of the theater), and a surprise non-ending can enliven the traditional ending of comedy. Thus the wish for closure can be exchanged for the pleasures of vitality. In the play's structural exchange between ending and non-ending, neither is entirely either, and both have qualities of the other, with a self-reflexiveness which would seem almost vertiginous in modern literature but which is contained within the effortless dialecticism of Renaissance drama. In the similar exchange between main play and frame, incidentally, the crucial thematic shift between “inner” and “outer” within the action of the play is reflected when the apparent play-within-a-play becomes the outer half, at the end, while the apparent frame disappears within the play.²⁹

In the same multiplicity of self-reflection, the play's stories also exchange patterns on a broader basis: the public relationship, the hierarchy of status between Sly and the lord's household, becomes a “marriage,” while the private relationship, the marriage of Kate and Petruchio, becomes a highly public political division, a battle of the sexes which polarizes the entire comic community. The relationship between Induction and main play—again, one of reciprocal exchange—manifests itself in the movement from division to marriage in the former, from marriage to division in the latter (and back), an ironic series of inversions where each marriage results in an “equality” of sorts—more apparent than real in the Induction, more real than apparent in the main play. Undermining conventional distinctions between the personal and political, the class division between Sly and the lord translates into a tongue-in-cheek familial relationship, and the union of Kate and Petruchio (initially characterized by the language of commerce anyway [II.i.115-31]) creates a politicized struggle for dominance or, in modern jargon, sexual politics.

The resultant continuum between psychological and political, between private and public and individual and society, provides a healthful perspective for reading the play. With the transformation of Sly and Petruchio into supposed lords, The Taming of the Shrew administers to the audience the traditional sugar-coated pill of comedy. Beneath the humor, one salient phenomenon manifests itself through the symmetrical action: predictably, where there is a lord around, the spectator will often be confronted with the choice of beholding a shrew or beholding the sly. If this parallelism is indeed pointed thus, then the audience has a lesson to learn. Christopher Sly has a name but no title; the lord has a title but no name; and when the anonymous lord and the eponymous Sly vanish together, the play suggests a to-be-dreamed-of dimension of life from which both lordship (or repression, or force) and slyness (or resistance, or fraud) can be excluded. Such a dimension is not created entirely by the play, of course; Petruchio and Kate just drive the same terms into a higher plane of material and emotional satisfaction, creating a vital little realm of their own, relatively independent of the pettiness around them. If Sly and the lord are excluded by the world of the play, Kate and Petruchio seem themselves to exclude that world—at least insofar as represented by the other key characters.

Since the play does not assert the completeness (or even the complete possibility) of either alternative, excluding “the world” or being excluded from it, both alternatives leave a sense of unfinished work behind them. Only thus, however, does Shrew leave something unfinished: it recognizes that in human relationships, including relationships between the individual and the social structures, much remains to be done and few solutions to be found. To insist that the play is literally, formally unfinished violates its formal expansiveness. In the absence of textual or historical evidence, the idea of a missing ending must be regarded as myth with the usual function of myth, to explain puzzling sensations or puzzling phenomena, such as the impression created at the end of The Taming of the Shrew that much does indeed hang in the balance.

Notes

1. All citations of text refer to The Complete Works of Shakespeare, Hardin Craig, ed. (Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman, 1961).

2. Tightening the parallel between the words shrew and sly, the OED gives the latter repeatedly as a noun (thirteenth through fifteenth centuries) to describe a person, a sly. Chaucer's Miller's Tale provides an instance not recorded in the OED: “Alwey the nye slye / Maketh the ferre leeve to be looth.” (The “nye slye,” of course, is “hende Nicholas.”)

3. In regard to the concept of “frame,” especially the implied necessity of completing a frame, it should be pointed out that modern use of the word frame differs from that found in Shakespeare. Of some seventy-seven instances including variants in The Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare, Marvin Spevack, ed. (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1973), most are verbs. Shrew itself uses the word only as a verb (Ind.ii.135; I,i,232); nor does any other language in the play suggest a finished product or an unfinished product. In Shakespeare's plays overall, frame signifies an internal shape, an order of principle, rather than a finite or rigid structure externally imposed (e.g., a picture frame, a cucumber frame). Only Sonnet 24 approaches the latter, but even there the frame is held within, allowing a play on the senses of human form or human body. The complexity of the concept of a frame stems partly from the related word “induction.” While I, too, have found the term useful, it nonetheless remains an addendum, not found in the Folio but inserted later by Pope. According to the Concordance, Shakespeare never uses the word in Pope's sense; while induce and inducements, etc., appear on occasion, induction signifies only “plot” (1H4, III.i.11, and R3, IV.iv.5 and I.i.32). One wonders what a difference Pope might have made for scholarship, had he applied a term like “proem,” “prologue”; no reader insists that a play with a prologue requires an epilogue or vice versa.

4. Richard Hosley, “Sources and Analogues of The Taming of the Shrew,” Huntington Library Quarterly, 27 (1964), 289-308.

5. Maynard Mack, “Engagement and Detachment in Shakespeare's Plays,” in Essays … in Honor of Hardin Craig, Richard Hosley, ed. (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1962), pp. 279-80. Among other readers who pursue the same idea, Brian Morris provides a useful history of the problems arising from the segmentation of the play, in the New Arden edition of Shrew (New York: Methuen, 1981).

6. Sidney Homan, “Induction to the Theater,” unpublished reprint from the 1978 MLA Convention Special Session, “Shakespearean Metadrama.”

7. Harold Goddard, “The Taming of the Shrew,” in The Meaning of Shakespeare (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1960), I, 68-73. For a similar point see Sears Jayne, “The Dreaming of the Shrew,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 17 (1966), 41-56.

8. Wordplay gives Shrew much of its liveliness and explains part of its longevity; when Bianca uses the word bush, for example, she puns on the senses of bird in the bush and a bush for wine; when students read the line today, current slang adds yet another sense. The play lends itself to wordplay in the classroom, in the following suggestions for alternative titles: “Sly and the Family Minola,” “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sly,” and of course, “The Turn of the Shrew,” used elsewhere.

9. Cf. Goddard's analogous discussion of the echoes of the hunt in MND, I, 75-78.

10. Perhaps Goddard is the most famous of the older generation of readers to agree with this sense of Kate's speech. More recent readers include Nevill Coghill, Margaret Webster, and Coppélia Kahn, all cited in a useful overview by John C. Bean, in “Comic Structure and the Humanizing of Kate in The Taming of the Shrew,” in The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, Carolyn Lenz, Gayle Green, and Carol T. Neely, eds. (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1980), pp. 65-78. While I find Bean's article helpful and intelligent, I disagree with his use of the terms “revisionist” and “anti-revisionist,” borrowed from Robert B. Heilman's “The Taming Untamed, or, The Return of the Shrew,” Modern Language Quarterly, 27 (1966), 147-61. If readers who emphasize the ironies in Kate's language and demeanor are to be called “revisionists,” I think the usage begs the entire question. Rather than insist, as such readers seem to do, that irony entails a narrow perspective of Kate as sneak and Petruchio as dupe, I would suggest that the effortless dialecticism of Renaissance dramatic verse (especially Shakespeare's) allows some latitude on the point; irony and earnestness, joke and gravity, etc., are related to each other, not merely antitheses.

11. See, for example, Heilman; Marilyn French in Shakespeare's Division of Experience (New York: Summit Books, 1981), pp. 82-85; and George Bernard Shaw, Shaw on Shakespeare, Edwin Wilson, ed. (New York: Dutton, 1961), among widely varied others.

12. In Juliet Dusinberre, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women (London: Macmillan, 1975), pp. 78-79.

13. Margaret L. Ranald, “The Manning of the Haggard; or The Taming of the Shrew,” Essays in Literature, 1 (1974), 149-65.

14. Anne Barton, Introduction to Shrew in The Riverside Shakespeare, G. Blakemore Evans, et al., eds. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

15. Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale, which ends with Alison adjured to keep her husband's estate and honor and fully willing to do so—if another husband comes along—provides fascinating parallels; some are noted by David M. Bergeron, “The Wife of Bath and Shakespeare's Shrew,” University Review, 35 (1969), 279-86. Each work, segmented into an introduction and a marriage story, portrays a power struggle between the sexes, structured with attendant ironies through a series of inversions and dialectical exchanges.

16. Mark Scheid, unpublished discussion, 1978. See also Bean: “Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew rises from farce to romantic comedy to the exact extent that Kate, in discovering love through the discovery of her own identity, becomes something more than the fabliau stereotype of the shrew turned household drudge” (p. 66). This approach recasts and dynamizes an older distinction between the Kate-plot as farce and the Bianca-plot as comedy; cf. E. M. W. Tillyard, “The Taming of the Shrew” in Shakespeare's Early Comedies (London: Chatto and Windus, 1965).

17. Desiderius Erasmus, Proverbes or Adagies with newe addicions gathered out of the Chiliades of Erasmus, by Richard Tauerner, London, 1539 (repr. Amsterdam, New York: Da Capo Press, 1969), fol. 5v.

18. Ibid., fol. 33r. Erasmus has been cited in other respects as part of the influence behind this play; see Peter Alexander, “The Original Ending of The Taming of the Shrew,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 20 (1969), 111-16.

19. Frustratingly little direct evidence exists on the doubling of parts in early productions of the plays. Furthermore, doubling in the comedies even from the nineteenth century is “intermittent and hard to trace” (Arthur Colby Sprague, The Doubling of Parts in Shakespeare's Plays [London: Society for Theatre Research, 1966], p. 29), making it difficult to infer an earlier stage tradition from one more recent. However, as a “matter of course” Sly was removed at the end of the first act in nineteenth-century productions (Sprague, Shakespeare and the Actors [Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1945], p. 56). Sly's remaining on stage until the end of the first act does not insuperably bar the actor from doubling the parts of Sly and Petruchio, in any case; modern stagecraft offers the easy solution of concealing Sly in darkness, from which his voice can be heard while Petruchio exits into the same darkness. While the broad daylight of Elizabethan staging offered less concealment, by the same token it also demanded less deference to verisimilitude in physical details—cf. Oberon's “I am invisible” among countless examples.

20. Several influences probably operate here. Since one actor in Shakespeare's own troupe was named Will Sly, the character's name suggests some joke on the casting of the play. Marston subsequently uses the same name, emphasizing its low-life tenor: two characters in the Induction to The Malcontent are named Will Sly and Sinklo, suggesting a possible tradition in connection with the name. As Thelma Greenfield suggests, the name may be retained from sources, since A Shrew uses the same name (The Induction in Elizabethan Drama [Eugene: Univ. of Oregon Press, 1969], p. 104). For a larger discussion of Shakespearean name-play, see Harry Levin, “Shakespeare's Nomenclature,” in Shakespeare and the Revolution of the Times (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 51-77.

21. Anne Barton, op. cit., p. 108.

22. For the topic of “dream” in connection with Shrew, see Goddard, Jayne, and Marjorie Garber, Dream in Shakespeare: From Metaphor to Metamorphosis (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1974). The dynamics of dream energize the play; dream imagery pervades the language, the main play has a dreamlike dependence on the Induction, and the entire play with its open-ended structure serves as an induction to the author's next play, A Midsummer Night's Dream. While I disagree with the idea that Sly falls asleep and dreams the Kate-Petruchio story, it certainly has more dignity than the idea which is its deep structure—that Shakespeare fell asleep and neglected to finish the play. Furthermore, the undoubted relevance of dream to the play has the appeal of uniting two different literary influences—the folk tale of the joke on a beggar, and the literary genre of dream-visio narrative—in a dialectic which contributes to this play among others of Shakespeare's.

23. See, among others, Greenfield, Hosley, “Sources and Analogues,” and “Was There a ‘Dramatic Epilogue’ to The Taming of the Shrew?” Studies in English Literature, 1 (1961), 17-34; as well as Morris.

24. As mentioned by Tillyard, op. cit.

25. Peter Alexander, op. cit.

26. Karl P. Wentersdorf, “The Original Ending of The Taming of the Shrew: A Reconsideration,” Studies in English Literature, 18 (1978), 201-15.

27. In Elizabethan usage, the word tinker is generally deprecatory, cf. OED c. 1592: “to work at something clumsily or imperfectly, esp. in the way of attempted repair or improvement,” a definition relevant not only to Sly's role in Shrew but also to Petruchio's and the lord's (to say nothing of producers who either add an ending or subtract a beginning, as Jonathan Miller did in the BBC production of Shrew. Revealingly, I think, Miller's open assertion of Shrew as anti-feminist resulted in a lifeless production, which robbed both Shrew and John Cleese of much of their comic genius).

28. E. M. W. Tillyard, in The Elizabethan World Picture (London: Chatto & Windus, 1943). Predictably, Tillyard, in Shakespeare's Early Comedies, supports the theory that Sly once had an epilogue, p. 74. But see Ernest P. Kuhl, “Shakspere's Purpose in Dropping Sly,” Modern Language Notes, 36 (1921), 321-29.

29. For related use of the terms inner and outer, see Rene Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956), p. 140.