The Education of Shrews: Victorian and Edwardian Adaptations of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew for a Child Audience

My essay investigates the way a number of prose adaptations of The Taming of the Shrew for children and teenagers, from the Lambs to Leon Garfield, have been able to make sense of this problematic play in which female learning is a central theme, in order to turn them into an educationally valuable reading experience for a young audience. Special attention will devoted to Mary Cowden Clarke’s novella “The Shrew and the Demure” (in The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines, 1851), a typical example of nineteenth-century character criticism which draws attention to the way female characters’ intellectual and emotional education provided models (or anti-models) for a female (adult as well as teenage) audience.