ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some of the implications of persistent trope for editing The Taming of the Shrew in a Britain and America where, to borrow language used by Anne McClintock of colonialism more generally, the 'long dream of colonial conquest' has regularly been figured through 'an erotics of ravishment', and the dynamics of colonial power has regularly been imagined through the dynamics of gender. It concentrates on the folio version, The Shrew, and considers some of the startling ways in which the editorial process has transformed the folio text. The Taming of the Shrew has since very early in its history been caught in the cross-currents of a gender politics that has sought to define itself as enlightened by contrast with that of non-Western cultures while at the same time it has privately nurtured its own misogyny that is uncomfortably analogous to the 'barbarous' customs it repudiates.
