Page:Taming of the Shrew (1921) Yale.djvu/138

126 toothache, until she discomfits the Barber who is introduced to extract the offending member. Ultimately the shrew is brought to her senses by a mock funeral in which she figures as the corpse and is bound on a bier. Her cries of protest are interpreted by Petruchio as being the words of a demon within her body, and it is only with Margaret's final surrender, 'My dear Petruchio, you have overcome me, and I beg your pardon,' that she is released in time for the final wager scene. This piece was revived at Drury Lane in 1698 and at Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1725.

Other offshoots of Shakespeare's play have been The Cobbler of Preston, a two act farce by Charles Johnson, performed at Drury Lane in 1716, and a slighter version of the same piece by Christopher Bullock, given at Lincoln's Inn Fields in the same year. This latter play was revived at Covent Garden in both 1738 and 1759, and Johnson's work was again given at Drury Lane in 1817, a century after its original performance. These works dealt with the Sly story of the Induction in a somewhat enlarged form, Johnson's play even including a love story for Sir Charles Briton, the 'Lord' of The Shrew; but a great deal of The Shrew's original dialogue is retained. More distantly related to Shakespeare is Jevon's The Devil of a Wife; or a Comical Transformation, acted in 1686, a curious combination of the Shrew and Induction plots with an admixture of magic, satire on the Puritans, and incidental songs, a strange piece, which ultimately became an opera outright under the title of The Devil to Pay; or the Wives Metamorphos'd. Other acting plays somewhat indebted to The Shrew are John Fletcher's Rule a Wife and Have a Wife (1624), and more especially, John Tobin's comedy of The Honeymoon (1805). It is also interesting to note that Fletcher wrote a sort of