FullReads

“But a character in the Taming of the Shrew is borrowed from the Trinummus, and no translation of that was extant.”

Mr. Colman indeed hath been better employ’d: but if he had met with an old Comedy, called Supposes, translated from Ariosto by George Gascoigne, he certainly would not have appealed to Plautus. Thence Shakespeare borrowed this part of the Plot (as well as some of the phraseology), though Theobald pronounces it his own invention: there likewise he found the quaint name of Petruchio. My young Master and his Man exchange habits and characters, and persuade a Scenaese, as he is called, to personate the Father, exactly as in the Taming of the Shrew, by the pretended danger of his coming from Sienna to Ferrara, contrary to the order of the government.

Still, Shakespeare quotes a line from the Eunuch of Terence: by memory too, and, what is more, “purposely alters it, in order to bring the sense within the compass of one line.”–This remark was previous to Mr. Johnson’s; or indisputably it would not have been made at all.–“Our Authour had this line from Lilly; which I mention that it may not be brought as an argument of his learning.”

But how, cries an unprovoked Antagonist, can you take upon you to say that he had it from Lilly, and not from Terence? I will answer for Mr. Johnson, who is above answering for himself.–Because it is quoted as it appears in the Grammarian, and not as it appears in the Poet.–And thus we have done with the purposed alteration. Udall likewise in his Floures for Latine speakyng, gathered oute of Terence, 1560, reduces the passage to a single line, and subjoins a Translation.

We have hitherto supposed Shakespeare the Author of the Taming of the Shrew, but his property in it is extremely disputable. I will give you my opinion, and the reasons on which it is founded. I suppose then the present Play not originally the work of Shakespeare, but restored by him to the Stage, with the whole Induction of the Tinker, and some other occasional improvements; especially in the Character of Petruchio. It is very obvious that the Induction and the Play were either the works of different hands, or written at a great interval of time: the former is in our Author’s best manner, and the greater part of the latter in his worst, or even below it. Dr. Warburton declares it to be certainly spurious: and without doubt, supposing it to have been written by Shakespeare, it must have been one of his earliest productions; yet it is not mentioned in the List of his Works by Meres in 1598.

I have met with a facetious piece of Sir John Harrington, printed in 1596 (and possibly there may be an earlier Edition), called, The Metamorphosis of Ajax, where I suspect an allusion to the old Play: “Read the booke of Taming a Shrew, which hath made a number of us so perfect, that now every one can rule a Shrew in our Countrey, save he that hath hir.”–I am aware, a modern Linguist may object that the word Book does not at present seem dramatick, but it was once almost technically so: Gosson in his Schoole of Abuse, contayning a pleasaunt inuective against Poets, Pipers, Players, Jesters, and such like Caterpillars of a Common-wealth, 1579, mentions “twoo prose Bookes plaied at the Belsauage”; and Hearne tells us, in a Note at the end of William of Worcester, that he had seen “a MS. in the nature of a Play or Interlude, intitled, the Booke of Sir Thomas Moore.”