Karyn Hierl

As an audience, were are interested in situations that resemble our own lives. Money, employees, children, love, marriage, neighborhoods, duty, education, and the like are themes that are familiar and have been adapted by artists for centuries. It is through watching the fortunate and/or unfortunate unfolding of others lives that we are able to find an orientation for ourselves from which to make comparisons. That recognition by analogy entertains us and gives material to writers. There is no need, therefore to diminish the imitation of the plot elements and character types through a recombination of plots and social types drawn from previously known works. Shakespeare’s principal sources for The Taming of the Shrew, for instance, were probably among the many popular oral and written versions of stories involving either the taming of shrewish wives or tricks played on the gullible drunken. And it is believed that the Sly story in The Taming of the Shrew has been a well known folklore for many centuries.

Ill Suppositi, a play brilliantly adapted from Roman drama to the conditions of the sixteenth century and successfully performed in 1519 is another case in point. Adapted by Ludovico Ariosto, it is one of the earliest comedies written in the European language. In essence, the story is the Bianca subplot of The Taming of the Shrew, which is described below. Ariosto openly declared in the prologue that his text was derived from Terence’s Eunnuchus and Plautus’s Captivii, two plays ingeniously blended in order to produce a single play. The material was borrowed material, yet his analogies were subtle enough that it would take the most astute patron to recognize the similarities.

Another example is George Gascoigne’s comedy Supposes. He adapts Ariosto’s Il Suppositi to become the first prose comedy to be translated from Italian into English. When his production appeared in London in 1566, IlSuppositi had already achieved high status in Italy 47 years prior. Again, the plot here highly resembles the subplot of The Taming of the Shrew. “Deception becomes the nucleus of the play’s action. Deception, namely Erostrato’s impersonation of Dulippo, becomes the structural nucleus of the play’s action and a precondition to the romance plotting. While Erostrato, now call Dulippo, woos, wins, and beds his beloved, Dulippo, now called Erostrato, sets up a household of his own, attends the university, and feigns to be a rival for Polynesta. This ruse is determined upon in order to foil the plans of Cleandro, a rich old lawyer, who was also seeking to marry the girl, and who had the money to boot for a large dowry. That Cleandro’s offer could be accepted at any moment by the girls’ father is the crisis afflicting the lovers as the play opens. Much of the initial action consists of the efforts of the disguised lackey, the false Erostrato, to ward off his rival, Cleandro, by proposing an even larger dowry – a promise which demanded, in time, the presence of a father figure to back up the offer. The best solution he could devise was an elaborate cock-and-bull story put upon a foreigner that would set him up to play the part of Filogano, Erostrato’s father. This device of the invented father, however, redirects the play in two important ways. First, the real Filogano, father to the real Erostrato, arrives unexpectedly and is inevitably brought face-to-face with his impostor double, producing a farcical showdown that forces the real father to resort to the help of the lawyer, Cleandro, to establish his identity. Second, it is discovered that Cleandro, rival to the false Erostrato, is actually the boy’s father – that is to say, Dulippo the servant turns out to be the long lost son of Cleandro. Terms for a happy conclusion begin to emerge, now independently of all the duplicitous efforts of the tricksters. Meanwhile, the real Erostrato, in hi servant’s guise, has been apprehended and threatened with severe punishment by Polynesta’s father, Damone…The fathers are allowed to negotiate matters on their own and to reinstate the children through forgiveness; a trickster intrigue play thereby turns into the story of the return of a lost son, Dulippo, and of a prodigal son, Erostrato, to their respective fathers. The play ends as all go indoors to a banquet ( ).

Seventy years later similar material resurfaces in The Taming of the Shrew, which has been dated as early as 1589. According to Sources of Shakespeare’s Works and Elizabethan Literature, the sources that were used the The Taming of the Shrew were three: The Taming of a Shrew (1594), Thresor d’histoires admirable et memorable, S. Goulart, (1607 and Supposes (2566) ( ). But Shakespeare does not just rework the same material; he adds a main plot and relegates the Supposes tale to the sub-plot. “The Taming of the Shrew begins with a nobleman and his hunting party who discover a drunken tinker, Christopher Sly. They establish him in transient luxury, tell him that he is a lord who has been dreaming for fifteen years, and bring in a group of strolling players to entertain him. The play proper has an Italian setting. It is about the marriage and consequent taming of the shrewish Katharina, elder daughter of a wealthy Paduan, Baptista. No one wants her, but everyone wants her sister Bianca, who cannot be given in marriage until Kate is off her father’ hands. Hence the excitement when a swaggering adventurer, Petruchio, appears, seeking a rich wife. The contest for Bianca involves a battery of impersonations; the Petruchio/Kate story goes straight on, beginning with the first meeting, angry on Kate’s side, determined on her suitor’s, and reaching a wedding day when Petruchio, dressed with deliberate absurdity, carries off an unwilling bride to his country house near Verona. Here Petruchio contrives to keep Kate hungry, sleepless, and frustrated until she agrees to anything he says – and all ‘done in reverend care of her’. Though Kate’s agreement is severely tested on the homeward journey to Padua, the plot is resolved when at a wedding feast for Bianca and her Lucentio – who have been married secretly – Kate lectures Bianca and another new bride on the whole duty of a wife” ( ).

The Taming of the Shrew and The Taming of a Shrew are clearly related. The two plays agree in multiple ways. The main ‘taming’ plot is the same in both, and both have a sub-plot of romance intrigue; Christopher Sly appears in both plays; the shrew is tamed in both by the same means. In both plays the husband behaves scandalously at the wedding, starves his wife afterwards, rejects the word of a Haberdasher and a Tailor, and misuses his servant. In both the wife is brought to submission, asserts that the sun is the moon and pretends an old man is a young girl. Each play culminates in a feast at which men wager on their wives’ obedience ( ). Shakespeare is indebted to Gascoigne’s Supposes for the name of Petruchio in the Taming of the Shrew and for incidences which close the fourth act of that play.

Shakespeare has often been referred to as a natural psychologist. He had an innate sense of human nature. His plays were like looking in a mirror, which entertained, tickled and horrified people. Il Suppositi was known to entertain people of all ages, but Shakespeare knew he needed to do more than just entertain. And so, to it and Supposes he added a level of discontent in the form of a taming of the shrew. No one ever walks away from a Shakespeare play without being nudged in the unconscious levels of their mind. Shakespeare’s plays remind me of a song in the Mary Poppins movie about how a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down. Shakespeare took the entertainment value of his predecessors and added to them levels of thought provoking ideas. The Taming of the Shrew brings up questions about relationships between fathers and daughters, the balance of power and gender, the roles of women and their suitors. And of course the ever present question, are women in need of taming? Does our strong feminine selves make us shrew like? Is Kate really tamed or is she just quick to play her husband’s game? Is taming someone treating them more like an animal than a human? Just the idea of taming someone invokes our defenses. These issues are neatly wrapped in the the Il Suppositi and Supposes works so as to soften the blow. Shakespeare not only imitated, but creatively wove his story in with theirs.