rtal prototype of farce comedy, this play of the "Taming
of the Shrew." In the hands of a lesser author it would have lost its
comedy and degenerated purely into farce, restricting itself to more
ignoble aims and to a more indulgent public. For farce, after all, is
farcical, and the mood for its appreciation is not one which is
sympathetic to any great or moving thing. And in the hands of
interpreters less than intelligently fine, the play may still descend
into the lower class; but this cannot be done without degrading it
beyond any likeness to its real self.

Played rightly, however, Petruchio becomes not a brawler, not a kind of
damn-my-eyes bully and braggart, but a practical idealist, a man who,
happening by chance upon a creature of stupendous undirected power,
sets himself to the direction of that power toward nature's, if not
humanity's, ends. At the first he cares nothing for Katherine save
that the rumor of her fire and spirit has pleased his wild fancy. And
never is there the faintest hint of the sentimentalist about him; his
is never the softness of the lover, but rather the careful prudence of
the utilitarian. Yet he unstintedly admires Katherine; this is somehow
felt to be so by his rather pompous implication that he would hardly be
taking all this trouble about the woman were she not the makings of a
royal mate, fit even for his sky-wide vision and heart and humor.

Perhaps in Elizabethan days most of this was lost; possibly during the
author's own life the play assumed rather the wild gayety and license
of a farce, and all the comedy had to wait in abeyance for the years to
bring it into its own. Undoubtedly very few, if any, of the auditors
of Shakespeare's time felt the compunction to which Smith confessed
when the pride of a proud woman was seen dragged at a man's chariot
wheel. What the women of those days thought about it is not so
certain, but probably it was pretty much what they think to-day.
Certainly Helen's expressed view was in approximate accordance with the
presumably unexpressed opinion of Elizabethan ladies; and to this, in
the intermission before the last act, Smith called her attention.

"Do you realize that your belief that Katherine was pleased at being
conquered is not at all modern?--it's absolutely medieval."

"Well, we are all medieval--quite largely--are we not?"

"Possibly--in spots. When the girl of to-day is not overpoweringly
advanced, perhaps she is quite far be