| Christopher Sly | |
|---|---|
| The Taming of the Shrew character | |
 The Hostess demands payment from Sly, illustration by H.C. Selous from The Plays of William Shakespeare: The Comedies, edited by Charles Cowden Clarke and Mary Cowden Clarke (1830) | |
| Created by | William Shakespeare |
Christopher Sly is a minor character in William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. He is a drunk man who is easily dominated by women, set up as a foil to Petruchio, the central male character in the play.
The Taming of the Shrew is a play within a play. The frame play, where the action opens (called the "Induction," just prior to Act One), shows a drunk Christopher Sly being ejected from a bar by its hostess. A wealthy lord arrives, finds Sly in a drunken stupor, and decides to play a prank on him. With Sly asleep in his intoxication, the lord's men dress Sly in fine apparel and the men in turn dress up as servants and one even as Sly's wife, in an effort to persuade Sly when he wakes up that he is an aristocrat. After this task is accomplished, the lord's men perform what we know as The Taming of the Shrew. He briefly is seen again making a comment about having some privacy with his "wife" (actually a pageboy in drag).
In the standard version of the play the audience never sees or hears from Christopher Sly again and thus assume that he has probably fallen asleep. Another version has a closing segment in which Sly, deposited back outside the tavern in a stupor once more, says he will return home to deal with his own shrewish wife, having had "the best dream that ever I had in my life" in which he learned how to "tame a shrew". The closing part of the frame-play does not appear in the text of The Taming of the Shrew as it was published in the First Folio. It only appears in the version published in quarto as The Taming of a Shrew (rather than "the" Shrew).
Sly says he is from Burton Heath, where Shakespeare's aunt and uncle lived. He also mentions a "Marian Hacket, the fat alewife of Wincot". Wincot is where Shakespeare's mother was born. Both these villages are near Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, where Shakespeare grew up. Marian Hacket is said to be the landlady of an ale house, who allows Sly to build up an unpaid tab of 14 pence, but ejects him when he fails to pay up (presumably the same person as the "hostess" who appears at the beginning of the play). Reference is also made to a barmaid called Cicily Hacket, probably Marian's daughter. A Hacket family lived in Wincot at this time, but it is not known whether Marian and Cicily Hacket were real innkeepers. [1]
Sly lists his past occupations, insisting that he was born a peddler, trained as a cardmaker, but worked as a "bearherd", (meaning a keeper of bears used in bear-baiting entertainments) before becoming a tinker. [2]
Christopher Sly is mentioned in the novel The Eyre Affair , by Jasper Fforde. A man named Victor Analogy explains that the reason why Christopher Sly does not appear after Act One of The Taming of the Shrew is because the character of Sly was, in fact, summoned out of the original copy of the play and thus was removed from the play's plot. Victor Analogy explains, "Six years ago an uneducated drunk who spoke only Elizabethan English was found wandering in a confused state just outside Warwick. He said that his name was Christopher Sly, demanded a drink and was very keen to see how the play turned out." [3]
The Taming of the Shrew is a comedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1590 and 1592. The play begins with a framing device, often referred to as the induction, in which a mischievous nobleman tricks a drunken tinker named Christopher Sly into believing he is actually a nobleman himself. The nobleman then has the play performed for Sly's diversion.
Love's Labour's Won is a lost play attributed by contemporaries to William Shakespeare, written before 1598 and published by 1603, though no copies are known to have survived. Scholars dispute whether it is a true lost work, possibly a sequel to Love's Labour's Lost, or an alternative title to a known Shakespeare play.
Lost in a Good Book is an alternate history fantasy novel by Jasper Fforde. It won the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association 2004 Dilys Award. It is the second in the Thursday Next series.
Petruchio is the male protagonist in Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew.
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The shrew – an unpleasant, ill-tempered woman characterised by scolding, nagging, and aggression – is a comedic, stock character in literature and folklore, both Western and Eastern. The theme is illustrated in Shakespeare's play The Taming of the Shrew.
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There have been numerous on screen adaptations of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. The best known cinematic adaptations are Sam Taylor's 1929 The Taming of the Shrew and Franco Zeffirelli's 1967 The Taming of the Shrew, both of which starred the most famous celebrity couples of their era; Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks in 1929 and Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in 1967. On television, perhaps the most significant adaptation is the 1980 BBC Television Shakespeare version, directed by Jonathan Miller and starring John Cleese and Sarah Badel.
The Taming of the Shrew in performance has had an uneven history. Popular in Shakespeare's day, the play fell out of favour during the seventeenth century, when it was replaced on the stage by John Lacy's Sauny the Scott. The original Shakespearean text was not performed at all during the eighteenth century, with David Garrick's adaptation Catharine and Petruchio dominating the stage. After over two hundred years without a performance, the play returned to the British stage in 1844, the last Shakespeare play restored to the repertory. However, it was only in the 1890s that the dominance of Catharine and Petruchio began to wain, and productions of The Shrew become more regular. Moving into the twentieth century, the play's popularity increased considerably, and it became one of Shakespeare's most frequently staged plays, with productions taking place all over the world. This trend has continued into the twenty-first century, with the play as popular now as it was when first written.
Christopher Sly is an opera in one act and two scenes and an interlude by composer Dominick Argento. The work uses an English language libretto by John Gay Manlove that is based on William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. Commissioned by the Mu Phi Epsilon fraternity, the opera was given its world premiere at the Scott Hall Theater at the University of Minnesota on 31 May 1963 under the baton of William Johnson. The premiere cast included tenor Vern Sutton as the Lord.
Katherina (Kate) Minola is a fictional character in William Shakespeare's play The Taming of the Shrew. Referred to in the play as the titular "shrew" and the "ingenue", the play focuses on Katherina's taming by Petruchio into a more conventional role of a good wife. She is the elder daughter of Baptista Minola and the sister of Bianca Minola.
The Cobbler of Preston is a 1716 comedy play by Christopher Bullock, although a separate play of the same title was written by Charles Johnson the same year. A one-act afterpiece is the origin of the phrase "Tis impossible to be sure of anything but Death and Taxes". In the preface to the published version Bullock suggested that he had begun writing the play just four days before its premiere. It takes inspiration from The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare and is set in Preston, Lancashire. The town had recently been scene of fighting during the 1715 Jacobite Rebellion at the Battle of Preston. Bullock's play does not overtly reference the rebellion, but has undertones supportive of the Hanoverian Dynasty.
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