The Arden Shakespeare

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Audio Extra

Listen to an Audio Extra interview with Barbara Hodgdon on the challenges of editing the Arden Third series edition of THE TAMING OF THE SHREW.

Unique among Shakespeare’s plays and a perennial theatrical success, this play is often marked by heated debate over its meaning and tangled history of interpretation. The Arden edition explores Shakespeare’s exuberant and disturbing marital farce from its literary genesis through its vibrant contemporary performances. The Introduction and commentary focus on the critical and theatrical debate surrounding the play while the original and comprehensive editing of the playtext reveals a “different” Shrew, more open to the reader’s interpretation than previous editions under the editorial direction of Barbara Hodgdon, a distinguished feminist scholar.

The Arden edition also explores the roots of the play’s composition and its unsettled relationship with another Elizabethan play called A Pleasant Conceited Historie, called the taming of a Shrew, which is almost identical to Shakespeare’s. Textually independent but theatrically interdependent as plays, the Arden edition also includes the full text of The Taming of A Shrew in an appendix.

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