he principal five acts of the play are preceded by an Induction. Thus the five acts really compose a play-within-a-play, a Shakespearean device. In the Induction, a nobleman out for a laugh puts a drunken tinker and vagrant, Christopher Sly, into bed. He awakens to find a woman calling herself his wife. The wife, who is really the lord’s page dressed as a woman, claims that Sly is a lord. Sly wants his wife to join him in his bed, but she puts him off by asking him to watch a play performed by a newly arrived theater company.
In the central play itself, Lucentio, a young man from Pisa, arrives in Padua to attend its famous university. He quickly becomes enamored of the fair Bianca, who is also pursued by two other men, Gremio and Hortensio.
Bianca’s father, Baptista, will not give away his younger daughter before the elder Katharina—the shrew—is wedded, so Hortensio arranges for his friend the surly Petruchio to woo Katharina. Meanwhile, Lucentio disguises himself as one “Cambio,” a teacher of Latin, in order to woo Bianca. His servant, Tranio, arrives dressed as his master to bargain with Baptista for Bianca’s hand in marriage. Hortensio also comes to woo Bianca disguised as the musician Litio. Bianca favors the younger of the two, and secretly promises to marry Lucentio.
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