The debate regarding the relationship between the two plays began in 1725, when Alexander Pope incorporated extracts from A Shrew into The Shrew in his edition of Shakespeare's works. In The Shrew, the Christopher Sly framework is only featured twice; at the opening of the play, and at the end of Act 1, Scene 1. However, in A Shrew, the Sly framework reappears a further five times, including a scene which comes after the final scene of the Petruchio/Katherina story. Pope added most of the Sly framework to The Shrew, even though he acknowledged in his preface that he did not believe Shakespeare had written A Shrew. Subsequent editors followed suit, adding some or all of the Sly framework to their versions of The Shrew; Lewis Theobald (1733), Thomas Hanmer (1744), William Warburton (1747), Samuel Johnson and George Steevens (1765) and Edward Capell (1768). In his 1790 edition of The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare, however, Edmond Malone removed all A Shrew extracts and returned the text to the 1623 First Folio version. By the end of the eighteenth century, the predominant theory had come to be that A Shrew was a non-Shakespearean source for The Shrew, and hence to include extracts from it was to graft non-authorial material onto the play.
The debate regarding the relation.ship between the two plays began in 1725, when Alexander Pope incorporated extracts from A Shrew into The Shrew in his edition of Shakespeare's works. In The Shrew, the Christopher Sly framework is only featured twice; at the opening of the play, and at the end of Act 1, Scene 1. However, in A Shrew, the Sly framework reappears a further five times, including a scene which comes after the final scene of the Petruchio/Katherina story. Pope added most of the Sly framework to The Shrew, even though he acknowledged in his preface that h:e did not believe Shakespeare had written A Shrew. Subsequent editors followed suit, adding some or all of the Sly framework to their versions of The Shrew; Lewis Theobald (1733), Thomas Hanmer (1744), William Warburton (1747), Samuel Johnson and George Steevens (1765) and Edward Capell (1768). In his 1790 edition of The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare, however, Edmond Malone removed all A Shrew extracts and returned the text to the 1623 First Folio version. By the end of the eighteenth century, the predominant theory had come to be that A Shrew was a non-Shakespear?ean source for The Shrew, and hence to include extracts from it was to graft non-authorial material onto the play.