ABSTRACT
The opening of The Taming of the Shrew is strikingly different from that of the related play The Taming of a Shrew in offering the audience in the first ten lines a battle between the sexes. The Beggar, who calls himself Christopher Sly, threatens to “pheeze” the Hostess who throws him out of her inn, not just for drunkenness, but for not paying for broken glasses. Threatening Sly with the stocks, the Hostess exits, determining to send for the constable. In A Shrew, the innkeeper is a Tapster, and Slie's offence simply inebriation. Shakespeare's Sly defies the Hostess in a strange little speech: “Ile not budge an inch boy. Let him come, and kindly.” He has in the course of eleven lines quoted Kyd's Spanish Tragedy and challenged her abuse of him as a rogue: “Y'are a baggage, the Slies are no rogues. Look in the Chronicles, we came in with Richard Conqueror: therefore paucas pallabris, let the world slide: Sessa” (First Folio). He sounds momentarily like John Durbeyfield in Hardy's Tess, claiming an ancient and declining stock. The little interchange offers a vignette in which a man and woman engage in a power struggle: she, only a woman, but with a trade and a function which give her access to authority over him: he a beggar with illusions of grandeur, ancestral memories of great men, culture, a power he no longer possesses. But why does he call her “boy”?
