ROMEO AND JULIET - Stratford Festival

THE TAMING OF THE SHREW
By William Shakespeare
Director – Peter Hinton
Festival Theatre
Designer – Santo Loquasto May 19 to October 25
Lighting Designer – Robert Thomson Opens May 31, 2008
Composer – Allen Cole
Movement – Jo Leslie
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ABOUT THE PLAY
OVERVIEW
It is believed the play was written sometime between 1590 and 1594, around the same
time as The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Comedy of Errors.
In 1594, an anonymous play, The Taming of the Shrew, was published. It is now believed
to have been either a pirated, incorrect version of Shakespeare’s play or a bad quarto of
another play, which may have influenced Shakespeare.
First published in the First Folio of 1623.
SYNOPSIS
Baptista Minola, a wealthy widower of New Padua, has decreed that his younger
daughter, the pretty and popular Bianca, cannot be married until a husband has been
found for her elder sister, the evil-tempered Katherina. To the relief of everyone –
especially Bianca’s three rival suitors, Lucentio, Gremio and Hortensio – a would-be
husband for Katherina actually appears, in the form of Hortensio’s friend Petruchio, who
professes himself willing to marry this “shrew” however sharp her tongue.
Turning up late for the wedding, dressed in an absurd costume, swearing at the priest and
generally behaving in an outrageous manner, Petruchio refuses to stay for his own
reception, but at once carries the protesting Katherina off to his house in Verona, where
he subjects her to a series of farcical humiliations in a calculated effort to break down her
shrewish disposition.
The results of his unorthodox program of “re-education” are made startlingly apparent at
a subsequent celebration of Bianca’s wedding, when a seemingly much changed
Katherina offers the other women present some unexpected advice.
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