71 Lor. The reason is, your spirits are attentive; Which is the hot condition of their blood, By the sweet power of music; therefore the poet foods; 80 Por. You should in all sense be much bound to him, For, as I hear, he was much bound for you. Ant. No more than I am well acquitted of. Por. Sir, you are very welcome to our house. 140 It must appear in other ways than words, In faith, I gave it to the judge's clerk. Gra. About a hoop of gold, a paltry ring 151 You swore to me, when I did give it you, That you would wear it till your hour of death, And that it should lie with you in your grave. Though not for me, yet for your vehement oaths, 155 You should have been respective and have kept it. Gave it a judge's clerk! No, God's my judge, The clerk will ne'er wear hair on 's face that with you, To part so slightly with your wife's first gift; You give your wife too unkind a cause of grief. 176 Bass. [Aside.] Why, I were best to cut my left hand off And swear I lost the ring defending it. Gra. My Lord Bassanio gave his ring away 180 Unto the judge that begg'd it, and indeed Deserv'd it too; and then the boy, his clerk, That took some pains in writing, he begg'd mine; And neither man nor master would take aught But the two rings. 185 Por. What ring gave you, my lord? Not that, I hope, which you receiv'd of me. Bass. If I could add a lie unto a fault, I would deny it; but you see my finger Hath not the ring upon it; it is gone. Por. Even so void is your false heart of truth. By heaven, I will ne'er come in your bed Till I again see mine. Bass. Sweet Portia, 190 194 If you did know to whom I gave the ring, Por. If you had known the virtue of the ring, 200 Or half her worthiness that gave the ring, And begg'd the ring; the which I did deny him And suffer'd him to go displeas'd away; lady? say, sweet 215 I was enforc'd to send it after him; The ring of me to give the worthy doctor. 220 Por. Let not that doctor e'er come near my house. Since he hath got the jewel that I lov'd, 230 I'll not deny him any thing I have, If you do not, if I be left alone, 231 Now, by mine honour, which is yet mine own, I'll have that doctor for my bedfellow. Mark you but that! In both my eyes he doubly sees himself, In each eye, one. Swear by your double self, 245 And there's an oath of credit. Bass. Nay, but hear me. Pardon this fault, and by my soul I swear I never more will break an oath with thee. Ant. I once did lend my body for his wealth, Which, but for him that had your husband's ring, 250 Had quite miscarried. I dare be bound again, Por. Then you shall be his surety. Give him this And bid him keep it better than the other. 255 Ant. Here, Lord Bassanio; swear to keep this ring. Bass. By heaven, it is the same I gave the doctor! Por. I had it of him. Pardon me, Bassanio; For, by this ring, the doctor lay with me. Ner. And pardon me, my gentle Gratiano; 200 For that same scrubbed boy, the doctor's clerk, In lieu of this last night did lie with me. Gra. Why, this is like the mending of high Gra. Let it be so. The first inter'gatory 300 That my Nerissa shall be sworn on is, Whether till the next night she had rather stay, Or go to bed now, being two hours to day. But were the day come, I should wish it dark, That I were couching with the doctor's clerk. Well, while I live I'll fear no other thing So sore as keeping safe Nerissa's ring. 306 [Exeunt. THE Taming of the Shrew was first printed, so far as is known, in the First Folio. On this all subsequent texts have been based. Evidence for the date of composition is purely internal; and this is exceptionally weak on account of the doubt as to the extent of Shakespeare's part in the authorship. Metrical tests are inconclusive. Similarities to other plays, such as The Comedy of Errors in the treatment of the servants, and to Hamlet in the prince's reception of the players, suggest any date from 1590 to 1602. The wit-contest between Katherine and Petruchio in II. i. associates it with plays like Much Ado and As You Like It; while the occurrence of lines in the dancing measure of the speeches of the Dromios would lead us to place it before these plays. Perhaps 1596–97 is a fair guess. The immediate source was an earlier play of unknown authorship called The Taming of A Shrew, published in 1594. The story of the taming of a wife is found in German, Spanish, Italian, and, in a version considerably closer to that in the play, in Danish. In English it appears in the old verse tale of A Shrewd and Curst Wife Lapped in Morel's Skin. But no direct connection can be shown between any of these and the play. In the transforming of the earlier into the present play, phrases and occasionally whole lines are retained, and the incidents in the KatherinePetruchio plot are essentially the same; but the dialogue is greatly polished and invigorated, and the details of the stage-craft bettered throughout. Greater changes are made in the Bianca plot. The older play gives Katherine two sisters, each of whom has a lover; and their wooing, hindered only by the necessity of getting Katherine married first, and lacking the interest of rival suitors, is flat and stupid. The device of inducing a casual stranger to personate a suitor's father had been borrowed by the author of A Shrew from George Gascoigne's Supposes, a translation of Ariosto's I Suppositi. This source was used in the revision also for most of the incident in the Bianca plot. In Supposes we have no shrew, but a plot turning on the wooing of a lady by two lovers; and from it were taken direct the aged suitor and the device by which Lucentio and his servant exchange characters. Hortensio and his widow occur in neither of the earlier plays. The trick of the feigned instructors is elaborated from a scene in A Shrew in which Tranio's prototype attempts to give Kate a music lesson in order to afford his master and his friend an opportunity to court her sisters. The Latin lesson may have been suggested by a somewhat similar scene in Robert Wilson's Three Lords and Three Ladies of London, printed in 1590. The Induction is taken from A Shrew. A story similar to that of the tinker is found in The Arabian Nights, and the trick played on him by the lord is said by Heuterus (De Rebus Burgundicis, ca. 1580) to have been actually perpetrated by Philip the Good about 1440. But none of the several English versions of the narrative of Heuterus appeared before 1598. Warton mentions a similar tale as told by Richard Edwardes in 1570, and some have thought that this version has survived in The Waking Man's Dream, an undated fragment of a lost book. A ballad in Percy's Reliques is based on a version later than the play. In A Shrew the characters of the Induction appear from time to time throughout the play, and at the close Sly again falls asleep and is restored to his former state. A reason for dropping the Induction at the end of 1. i. of the Shakespearean play may perhaps be found in the necessity of clearing the gallery, from which Sly is viewing the play, for the appearance of the Pedant from a window in v. i. It is generally agreed that in the working over of A Shrew into the present play another hand than Shakespeare's is evident. The revised Induction and the scenes between Kate and Petruchio are usually assigned to Shakespeare, while the lines in the Bianca plot are thought not to show his style. This points either to an intermediate play, or to revision in collaboration. It has been tacitly assumed that the part of each author was confined to the scenes in which his style appears in the verse and diction. But it is clearly possible that a joint author might have a large share in planning the action of scenes which his partner wrote, and vice versa. Thus no one knows, or is ever likely to know, that Shakespeare is not entitled to credit for the remarkable ingenuity exhibited in the remodelling of the minor plot. SCENE I. Before an alehouse on a heath.] Enter HOSTESS, and beggar, CHRISTOPHERO Sly. I'll pheese you, in faith. Sly. Y are a baggage; the Slys are no rogues. Look in the chronicles; we came in with Richard Conqueror. Therefore paucas pallabris; let the world slide; sessa! Host. You will not pay for the glasses you have burst? Sly. No, not a denier. Go by, Jeronimy! Go to thy cold bed, and warm thee. 10 Host. I know my remedy; I must go fetch the thirdborough. [Exit.] Sly. Third, or fourth, or fifth borough, I'll answer him by law. I'll not budge an inch, boy; let him come, and kindly. 15 [Falls asleep. Wind horns. Enter a LORD from hunting, with his train. Lord. Huntsman, I charge thee, tender well my hounds, Brach Merriman, the poor cur, is emboss'd; And couple Clowder with the deep-mouth'd brach. 1 Hun. I will, my lord. SO Lord. What's here? One dead, or drunk? See, doth he breathe? 2. Hun. He breathes, my lord. Were he not warm'd with ale, This were a bed but cold to sleep so soundly. Lord. O monstrous beast! how like a swine Balm his foul head in warm distilled waters, And burn sweet wood to make the lodging sweet. 50 Procure me music ready when he wakes, 66 Some one be ready with a costly suit 55 |