, has a shorter precursor with an approximately identical title has until fairly recently hindered serious consideration of A Shrew in its own right. 1 When editors and critics of Shakespeare have compared it to The Shrew, the majority has-not surprisingly-found it to be inferior in most respects. 2 If we add to the deemed inferiority that A Shrew is shorter than many Elizabethan plays, it was early relegated to the slippery category of 'bad quartos.' 3 The problem is however that the comedy is remarkably 'good' in terms of plot structure, the quality of the dialogue, and-I would argue-even in terms of some aspects of style. 4 In A Shrew there are no blatant loose ends or obvious gaps, whereas in The Shrew the metadramatic Sly material does not survive the Induction. In view of its relative shortness, A Shrew may have been cut for provincial acting during the plague of 1592-94, but then the cuts were arguably executed with discernment. Still, the play's Italianate integration of plots is advanced even for the year of its publication while its style of speech construction, I propose, strongly suggests that it antedates 1590 and is by a playwright intimate with the compositional techniques of Marlowe.
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