Commandery Players - Taming of the Shrew Friday August 8th 2025 7.30 pm

Shakespeare’s comedy was controversial from the start. Not everyone enjoyed a play in which a man bullies a woman into submitting to his will. One such objector was fellow-playwright John Fletcher who wrote a sequel to The Taming of the Shrew in which the main character, Petruchio, marries again and his new wife takes revenge on his misogyny. Appropriately, it was called The Tamer Tamed. Shakespeare might well have admired Fletcher’s play as the two men subsequently worked together on three plays at the end of Shakespeare’s career.

This unique adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew brings the two playwrights together again – largely Shakespeare but with some additional material by Fletcher – making an entertaining and amusing version of the play.

The play will be peformed inside the Commandery at Ansty, an Elizabethan banqueting hall built on the site of a medieval hospice. The grounds, next to the…