Under Development
The basic elements of the story are present in the 14th-century Castilian tale of the "young man who married a very strong and fiery woman". The play's subplot, involving the characters Bianca and Lucentio, derives from Ludovico Ariosto's I Suppositi, either directly or through George Gascoigne's English version Supposes (performed 1566, printed 1573).
The subject of the performance and publication of The Taming of the Shrew is complicated by the existence of an alternative version of the story, The Taming of a Shrew, which is "now generally believed to be either a pirated and inaccurate version of Shakespeare's comedy or else a "bad quarto" of a different play, now lost, which also served Shakespeare as a source...." While A Shrew was printed in 1594, 1596, and 1607, Shakespeare's play was first published only with its inclusion in the First Folio in 1623.