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Shakespeare's Comedy of the Taming of the Shrew (10)
Shakespeare's Comedy of the Taming of the Shrew - 10 Author:William Shakespeare Volume: 10 General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1904 Original Publisher: American book company Subjects: Drama / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh Drama / Shakespeare Literary Criticism / Shakespeare Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or... more » missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: APPENDIX " The Curst Wife Lapped In Morel's Skim " The social condition of England in Shakespeare's day was rude and in many respects cruel and brutal. The general position of woman was that of a domestic drudge or slave. It was the age of the ducking-stool and the branks, or scolding bridle, and these means of punishment for shrews and scolds were in frequent use. The literature of the time shows that stories like that of The Taming of the Shrew were common and very popular -- at least with the men, and the men of the better classes as well as those of the lower. One of the most notable of these productions which has come down to our time, and which some critics have supposed that Shakespeare had in mind in the composition of the play, was a poem entitled "A Merry Jest of a Shrewd and Curst Wife lapped in Morel's Skin for her Good Behaviour " -- that is, to teach her better behaviour. Only two or three copies of the poem have survived the lapse of time. It was first printed without date, but about 1550 or 1560, and several editions were published. As proof of its popularity with the gentlemen of the day, I may refer to the mention of it in Laneham's celebrated description of the Kenil- worth pageant of 1575 in honour of Elizabeth's visit to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. He says it was one of the stories which Captain Cox had " at his fingers' ends." The heroine of the story was the daughter of a shrewish mother, and we are told that sh...« less