For Tuesday: The Taming of the Shrew, Induction & Act 1

Read the first two acts (the Induction and Act 1) for Tuesday's class, and think of the world of Much Ado About Nothing as you do so. In a sense, all of Shakespeare's comedies are like reading the same play, only the characters have different names and he adds or subtracts a few of them. The landscape should be familiar, though there will be a few significant changes--mostly in the language (see below). 

The Paper #1 assignment (which I gave out in class) is in the post BELOW this one.. 

Answer TWO of the following: 

Q1: This might seem like an obvious question, but what is the purpose of the Induction given that the characters seem to be English (Christopher Sly, etc.) and hardly make an appearance in Act 1? How might we regard the Induction as a theory, or a lens, for interpreting the rest of the play (and esp. Act 1)?

Q2: Do the characters in The Taming of the Shrew speak more in prose or verse? How does this affect how we ‘hear’ the characters or read the play? Does it make the play more or less comic? On the other hand, are there characters who only speak prose in the play? Why might this be?

Q3: To prepare you for your Paper #1, what moments of déjà vu do you experience when reading this play after Much Ado About Nothing? Where do we see Shakespeare using the same comic building blocks in his writing, or using some of the same characters and speeches (since he wrote for largely the same actors in play after play)? For fun, where we might we see one of the actors in Much Ado in this play?

Q4: In Wells’ William Shakespeare, he explains that many people had trouble accepting that the great William Shakespeare could have been born a lowly nobody from Stratford. How could such a person write the great plays of Hamlet, King Lear, and Othello? However, why might we argue that such a person is the ideal candidate for writing plays like The Taming of the Shrew? What could someone from small-town England be able to see and understand (as evidenced in this play) more than an Oxford-educated Londoner?