The Taming of The Shrew: Third Series (Arden Shakespeare) [Paperback]

William Shakespeare (Author), Barbara Hodgdon (Editor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1903436931 | ISBN-13: 978-1903436936 | Publication Date: June 8, 2010 | Edition: Third Edition

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.

 

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Hodgson has piqued my interest again in her spry, supple introduction to the play...Her performance history is particularly impressive: closely aligned to the breadth of critical reading, but suggesting the comedy's challenges and, even, its charms."—Plays International

 

"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."—Sardines Theatre Magazine

About the Author

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.

Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Arden Shakespeare; Third Edition edition (June 8, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1903436931
• ISBN-13: 978-1903436936
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #246,684 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in April 1564, and his birth is traditionally celebrated on April 23. The facts of his life, known from surviving documents, are sparse. He was one of eight children born to John Shakespeare, a merchant of some standing in his community. William probably went to the King's New School in Stratford, but he had no university education. In November 1582, at the age of eighteen, he married Anne Hathaway, eight years his senior, who was pregnant with their first child, Susanna. She was born on May 26, 1583. Twins, a boy, Hamnet ( who would die at age eleven), and a girl, Judith, were born in 1585. By 1592 Shakespeare had gone to London working as an actor and already known as a playwright. A rival dramatist, Robert Greene, referred to him as "an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers." Shakespeare became a principal shareholder and playwright of the successful acting troupe, the Lord Chamberlain's Men (later under James I, called the King's Men). In 1599 the Lord Chamberlain's Men built and occupied the Globe Theater in Southwark near the Thames River. Here many of Shakespeare's plays were performed by the most famous actors of his time, including Richard Burbage, Will Kempe, and Robert Armin. In addition to his 37 plays, Shakespeare had a hand in others, including Sir Thomas More and The Two Noble Kinsmen, and he wrote poems, including Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. His 154 sonnets were published, probably without his authorization, in 1609. In 1611 or 1612 he gave up his lodgings in London and devoted more and more time to retirement in Stratford, though he continued writing such plays as The Tempest and Henry VII until about 1613. He died on April 23 1616, and was buried in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford. No collected edition of his plays was published during his life-time, but in 1623 two members of his acting company, John Heminges and Henry Condell, put together the great collection now called the First Folio.