SOURCE: “The Taming of the Shrew and the Theories; or, ‘Though this be badness, yet there is method in ’t,’” in Textual Formations and Reformations, edited by Laurie E. Maguire and Thomas L. Berger, University of Delaware Press, 1998, pp. 251-63.

In the following essay, Miller compares Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew with the 1594 version of Taming of a Shrew written by Peter Short. Miller argues that while Shakespeare's version is superior literature, the other version deserves study.

Arguably the most persistent and difficult of the textual questions relating to Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, first published in the Shakespeare folio of 1623, is the question of its relationship to The Taming of a Shrew, printed twenty-nine years earlier in 1594 by Peter Short. During the twentieth century critics have found it difficult to agree upon a theory to account for the variation between the two versions. The...