Act One: The Sisters of Padua

The Induction. Outside an alehouse in the English countryside, a drunken tinker, Christopher Sly, was thrown out by the hostess for breaking glasses and not paying, and fell asleep on the ground. A Lord, coming home from hunting, found him there, and decided to play a joke on him. They carried him to the Lord's house, laid him in the best bed, dressed him in fine clothes, and when he woke, the servants waited on him and told him he was a great lord who had been out of his mind for fifteen years, dreaming that he was a tinker. A page dressed as a woman played his weeping wife. Sly, after a little doubt, accepted it all: "Upon my life, I am a lord indeed." And for his entertainment, and to cure his melancholy, a company of travelling players performed for him a comedy.

Sly and the Lord appear once more briefly at the end of the first act, and then disappear from the Folio text; in the 1594 Taming of a Shrew Sly returns at the end.

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Lucentio, a rich young man from Pisa, arrived in Padua with his clever servant Tranio, to study philosophy at the university. In the street, they saw an old gentleman, Baptista Minola, with his two daughters and two suitors. Baptista was telling the suitors — old Gremio and the younger Hortensio — that he would not let his younger daughter, Bianca, marry until he had a husband for the elder, Katherina; let them court Katherina if they liked.

"To cart her rather: she's too rough for me," said Gremio. Katherina turned on them both with a fury of contempt. She was famous in Padua for her temper and her tongue — "Katherine the curst." Bianca, meek and dutiful, went obediently indoors to her books and her music. Baptista was looking for schoolmasters to teach her.

Lucentio, watching, had fallen in love with Bianca at first sight. "Tranio, I burn, I pine, I perish, Tranio, if I achieve not this young modest girl." He had a plan: he would disguise himself as a schoolmaster, and get into Baptista's house as Bianca's tutor; and Tranio would put on his master's clothes and play Lucentio, the rich young gentleman, and court Bianca openly.

The two old rivals, Gremio and Hortensio, agreed for once that they must find a husband for Katherina — any husband — so that the way to Bianca would be open. "Thou wilt never get such a one." "Tush, Gremio, though it pass your patience and mine to endure her loud alarums, why, man, there be good fellows in the world, an a man could light on them, would take her with all faults, and money enough."

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And such a man arrived: Petruchio, a gentleman of Verona, an old friend of Hortensio's, whose father had just died and left him well off; he had come to Padua with his servant Grumio to see the world, and to find a rich wife. "I come to wive it wealthily in Padua; if wealthily, then happily in Padua." He did not care if she were as old as the Sibyl, or as curst and shrewd as Socrates' wife Xanthippe, or worse, if she had money. Hortensio told him of Katherina, the rich, young, beautiful, and intolerably shrewish daughter of Baptista. Petruchio was delighted. "Think you a little din can daunt mine ears? Have I not in my time heard lions roar? Have I not heard the sea, puffed up with winds, rage like an angry boar chafèd with sweat? . . . Tush, tush! fear boys with bugs."

Hortensio, for his part, decided to disguise himself too, as a music master, and get into Baptista's house to teach Bianca and court her in secret.