Authorship of 'The Taming of a Shrew'

Excerpt from The Authorship of 'the Taming of a Shrew': 'The Famous Victories of Henry V' and the Additions to Marlowe's 'Faustus' The Famous Victories of Henry V and The Taming of a Shrew were both published anonymously, and there is no record of the names of their authors either in Henslowe's diary or anywhere else. Nor has any effort to determine the authorship of either play on internal grounds proved successful. The Famous Victories has been conjecturally assigned to the actor Tarlton, but the conjecture is unsupported by any evidence. The Taming of a Shrew has been ascribed to Marlowe, to Greene, to Kyd, and even (wholly or in part) to Shakespeare himself, but there are good reasons for rejecting all these ascriptions. In the following pages I shall endeavour to throw light upon the authorship of both plays, and incidentally upon the authorship of other anonymous dramatic work of the period. I shall set forth my evidence exactly in the way and in the order in which it presented itself to me, beginning with my first clue and showing how it took me from one play to another until, with the aid of a small piece of external evidence, I was led to conned! these plays with a dramatist who has hitherto occupied only a very humble place in the annals of Elizabethan dramatic literature. On first reading The Taming of a Shrew, a year or two since, I was struck by the constant appearance of the exclamation 'souns!' in the prose parts. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.