Whether The Taming of the Shrew (c. 1591) is wholly Shakespeare's or a collaboration has been suspected since the eighteenth century, yet the play is the only early Shakespeare work long recognized as potentially collaborative that had never been systematically tested. John V. Nance's 2020 lexical study — the only systematic test to date — sampled just four 173-word passages (under 4% of the play), finding Shakespeare's profile in the Induction and Kate's final speech and a strong Marlowe profile, corroborated by metrical anomalies, in the opening scene (1.1). The problem is to determine the authorship distribution of the entire play by comprehensive, methodologically defensible attribution analysis: sole Shakespeare, or collaboration, and if collaborative, an identification and localization of the co-author(s), with attention to the imitation confound and to the still-unsettled relationship with the 1594 quarto The Taming of A Shrew. No later study has extended coverage beyond the four samples, and the Marlowe hypothesis remains neither confirmed nor refuted.

Background

The Taming of the Shrew, printed first in the 1623 First Folio (the earliest collected edition of Shakespeare's plays) and usually dated around 1591, stands early in Shakespeare's career. A puzzling companion text exists: The Taming of A Shrew, an anonymous quarto (a single-play paperback edition) printed in 1594, which tells substantially the same story with different wording; scholars have debated for two centuries whether A Shrew is a source Shakespeare rewrote, a 'memorial reconstruction' (a text written down from an actor's memory of a performance), an imitation by another dramatist, or an alternative early version of Shakespeare's play — the standard modern edition is Miller (ed., 1998), and the debate remains unresolved (Jackson, 2022, is a recent contribution on the two plays' endings).

Suspicion that someone other than Shakespeare had a hand in The Shrew is old: eighteenth- and nineteenth-century commentators (as surveyed in Nance, 2020) proposed a second author for parts of the play on metrical and qualitative grounds, and as early as 1850 Hickson connected Marlowe with A Shrew. In the twentieth century defenders of single authorship included Waldo and Herbert (1959), who argued from the play's consistent handling of musical terms.

The question acquired new tools with computational stylometry (statistical analysis of authorial style). The New Oxford Shakespeare (NOS) project attributed parts of the Henry VI plays and other early works to Christopher Marlowe (Taylor & Egan, eds, 2017) — attributions that remain contested — and its chronology, by Taylor and Loughnane, dates The Shrew to about 1591. Taylor and Nance (2015) had already posed the key dilemma for the early canon: whether Marlovian passages in early Shakespeare reflect collaboration or imitation. Methodologically, scene-level attribution is fragile: Rizvi (2020, first published online 2018) showed how small samples mislead attribution tests, a caution directly applicable to short passages of a single scene.

Nance (2020) then made the first systematic test of The Shrew. He applied a 'unique-type' lexical test: for a sampled passage, count word sequences (bigrams, trigrams, quadgrams — two-, three-, and four-word strings) and collocations (recurring word combinations) that occur in exactly one other play first performed between 1576 and 1594. This includes the 'negative check': instead of searching only a favorite candidate's canon, one searches the whole field of surviving early modern drama, so that a match indicates rarity across the entire corpus. Testing four 173-word samples — from the Induction (the Christopher Sly framing scenes), from the opening scene 1.1 (called 'Sc.3' in continuous scene numbering; Lucentio and Tranio's arrival in Padua, sampled in two halves), and from Kate's final speech in 5.2 — Nance found Shakespeare leading by a wide margin in the Induction and Kate's speech, but Marlowe leading in both halves of 1.1 (with Shakespeare registering three unique types in the first half and none in the second). A metrical anomaly pointed the same way: eight monosyllabic initial measures occur in The Shrew's first act, a feature found over twenty times in Marlowe's two Tamburlaine plays but only twelve times in Shakespeare's entire dramatic canon. Nance concluded that the play is collaborative, with Marlowe the leading candidate for 1.1 — a pattern matching both the old scene divisions proposed by earlier commentators and the fact that the other plays associated with Pembroke's Men (the acting company thought to have first performed The Shrew before it passed to the Lord Chamberlain's Men), Titus Andronicus and 2 and 3 Henry VI, are all now regarded as collaborative.

Problem Statement

Determine the authorship distribution of the whole of The Taming of the Shrew. Specifically: (1) test the entire play — every scene and structurally distinct segment, not only the four 173-word samples already examined — using methodologically defensible attribution analysis, to establish whether the play is solely Shakespearean or collaborative; (2) if collaboration is supported, identify the co-author or co-authors and localize their shares at scene or passage resolution, evaluating the Marlovian hypothesis for the opening scene (1.1) against alternative candidates and against the imitation confound (Shakespeare writing in a self-consciously Marlovian register, as staged in Taylor and Nance's 'imitation or collaboration?' dilemma) and against revision explanations, subject to the chronological constraint of Marlowe's death on 30 May 1593. The unresolved provenance of The Taming of A Shrew (1594) is a flagged dependency: attribution arguments that lean on verbal parallels between the two plays inherit the source / memorial-reconstruction / imitation / alternative-version uncertainty.

References

  1. John V. Nance, 'Early Shakespeare and the Authorship of The Taming of the Shrew', in Rory Loughnane and Andrew J. Power (eds.), Early Shakespeare, 1588–1594 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 261–283. DOI: 10.1017/9781108861748.013. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108861748.013
  2. Rory Loughnane and Andrew J. Power (eds.), Early Shakespeare, 1588–1594 (Cambridge University Press, 2020). DOI: 10.1017/9781108861748. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108861748
  3. Gary Taylor and John V. Nance, 'Imitation or collaboration? Marlowe and the Early Shakespeare Canon', Shakespeare Survey 68 (2015), 32–47. DOI: 10.1017/cbo9781316258736.003. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781316258736.003
  4. Gary Taylor and Gabriel Egan (eds.), The New Oxford Shakespeare: Authorship Companion (Oxford University Press, 2017). DOI: 10.1093/actrade/9780199591169.001.0001. https://doi.org/10.1093/actrade/9780199591169.001.0001
  5. MacDonald P. Jackson, 'A New Perspective on the Endings of The Taming of the Shrew and The Taming of a Shrew', Notes and Queries 69(2) (2022), 102–103. DOI: 10.1093/notesj/gjac042. https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjac042
  6. Darren Freebury-Jones, 'Rory Loughnane and Andrew J. Power (eds), Early Shakespeare, 1588–1594' (review), Notes and Queries 68(1) (2021), 142–144. DOI: 10.1093/notesj/gjab033. https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjab033
  7. Darren Freebury-Jones, Shakespeare's Borrowed Feathers (Manchester University Press, 2024). DOI: 10.7765/9781526177339. https://doi.org/10.7765/9781526177339
  8. Pervez Rizvi, 'Small Samples and the Perils of Authorship Attribution for Acts and Scenes', ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews 33(1) (2020), 32–33 (first published online 13 November 2018). DOI: 10.1080/0895769X.2018.1537841. https://doi.org/10.1080/0895769X.2018.1537841
  9. Samuel Hickson, 'Marlowe and the old "taming of a shrew"', Notes and Queries s1-i(13) (26 January 1850), p. 194. DOI: 10.1093/nq/s1-i.13.194. https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/s1-i.13.194
  10. Tommy Ruth Waldo and T. W. Herbert, 'Musical Terms in The Taming of the Shrew: Evidence of Single Authorship', Shakespeare Quarterly 10(2) (1959), 185–199. DOI: 10.2307/2866926. https://doi.org/10.2307/2866926
  11. Stephen Roy Miller (ed.), The Taming of A Shrew, The New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge University Press, 1998). DOI: 10.1017/9781316563984. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316563984
  12. Pervez Rizvi, 'Shakespeare and principal components analysis', Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 36(4) (2021), 1030–1041. DOI: 10.1093/llc/fqab013. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqab013