Page:Taming of the Shrew (1921) Yale.djvu/140

128 The immense success of Garrick's piece is its own best justification. For ninety years it held the stage and was presented hundreds of times throughout the English-speaking world. Henry Woodward was its first Petruchio, and Mrs. Pritchard, later followed by Kitty Clive, the Katharine. It is recorded that as Woodward and Mrs. Clive were not upon good terms personally, the horseplay in the taming scenes was more boisterous and lifelike than necessary; once Woodward threw his Katherine to the ground in the course of the action, and another time he is said to have stuck a fork into her finger. Among the famous Petruchios to follow Woodward in Garrick's farce were Edward Shuter, John Philip Kemble, J. W. Wallack, and Charles Kemble; its Katharines have included Mrs. Greene, Mrs. Siddons, Eliza O'Neill, and Helena Faucit. Garrick's piece held the stage from 1754 until 1844, when Benjamin Webster revived The Shrew according to the text of Shakespeare and according to contemporary ideas about Elizabethan stage conditions. The play produced by John Philip Kemble in 1810 under Shakespeare's title had proved to be Garrick's version once again, and the four performances at Drury Lane in 1828 were of an opera based on the play. In 1856 Samuel Phelps revived the original drama with scrupulous fidelity to the text and 'according to the usage of the modern stage,' restoring the Induction so that he might himself appear as Sly; Henry Marston was Petruchio and Miss Atkinson, Katherine. More recent English performances in these parts have been those of Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, 1867 (their first appearance together), Johnston Forbes-Robertson and Mrs. Bernard-Beere, 1885, Mr. and Mrs. F. R. Benson, 1890, Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Beerbohm Tree, 1897, Mr. and Mrs. Oscar Asche (Lily Brayton), 1904,—Mr. Asche acted both