The Fable. Christopher Sly, a tinker lying drunk by a tavern, is found by a lord, who causes him to be put to bed and treated, on waking, as a nobleman newly cured of madness. Part of the treatment is the performance of this play before him.
The play has two plots. In one of them, Petruchio woos and tames the shrew Katharina; in the other, Katharina's sister Bianca is wooed by lovers in disguise. The two plots have little connection with each other. That which relates to Petruchio and Katharina is certainly by Shakespeare. The other seems to be by a dull man who did not know his craft as a dramatist.
In the Induction, and in the speech of Biondello (in Act III) Shakespeare enters a mood of memory of the country. In the song at the end of Love's Labour's Lost he showed a matchless sense of country life. That sense, at once robust and sweet, now gives life to a few scenes in the plays. These scenes are mostly in prose; but they have the rightness of poetry. In writing them, he wrought with his daily nature, from something intimately known, or inbred in him, during childhood. Man can only write happily from a perfect understanding. All men can describe with point and colour what they knew as children. These country scenes in Shakespeare are happier than anything else in the plays because they come, not from anything read or heard, but from the large, genial nature made by years of life among the farms and sheep-walks at the western end of the Cotswolds.
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!
Hostess. 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.
In the third act, Biondello's description of the appearance of Petruchio's horse has the abundance of the great mind.
" ... possessed with the glanders and like to mose in the chine; troubled with the lampass, infected with the fashions, full of wind-galls, sped with spavins, rayed with the yellows, past cure of the fives, stark spoiled with the staggers, begnawn with the bots, swayed in the back and shoulder-shotten; near legged before and with a half-cheeked bit and a headstall of sheep's leather."
It is something no longer possible in a city theatre. Neither the dramatist nor the audience of to-day knows a horse as the Elizabethan had to know him. The speech sets one wondering at the art of the unknown Elizabethan actor who first spoke hurriedly this speech of strange words full of sibilants.
Shakespeare's share in the play (the scenes in which the shrew and her tamer appear) is farce with ironic philosophical intention. He indicates the tragedy that occurs when a manly spirit is born into a woman's body. Katharina is vexed and plagued by forced submission to a father who cannot see her merit, and by jealousy of a gentle, useless sister. She, who is entirely honest, sees the brainless Bianca, whom no amount of schooling will make even passably honest, preferred before her. Lastly, she is humbled into the state of submissive wifely falsehood by a boor who cares only for his own will, her flesh, and her money. In a page and a half of melancholy claptrap broken Katharina endeavours to persuade us that