Look, I teach Shakespeare to teenagers who would rather be literally anywhere else. So when I say I listened to this LibriVox version of The Taming of the Shrew while grading their half-hearted essays on Hamlet, understand the irony wasn't lost on me. Here I am, red pen in hand, marking up their work while volunteers on the internet perform one of the Bard's most controversial comedies for free. God bless the public domain.
The LibriVox Gamble
Here's the thing about LibriVox—and I say this with genuine affection for the project—it's volunteer work. That means you're rolling the dice every time. Sometimes you get a retired theater professor who's been waiting their whole life to voice Petruchio. Sometimes you get someone reading Shakespeare like they're announcing train departures.
This version? It's somewhere in the middle, honestly. The energy is there. Whoever coordinated this production clearly loves the material, and that enthusiasm carries through most of the performance. The comedic timing lands more often than it misses, which is no small feat when you're dealing with four-hundred-year-old jokes about dowries and wife-taming. (My students would be horrified. I love it.)
But I won't pretend the audio quality is consistent. Some sections sound crisp and clear, others have that slightly muddy quality that reminds you this wasn't recorded in a professional studio. It's the audio equivalent of a community theater production—charming in its imperfections, occasionally distracting because of them.
What the Play Is Really Asking
Okay, so let's talk about what Shakespeare is actually doing here, because this is the conversation I have with my students every single year. Is The Taming of the Shrew a misogynistic nightmare, or is it a satire of misogynistic nightmares? The answer, frustratingly, is probably both. And maybe neither. Shakespeare was nothing if not slippery.
The genius of listening to this as an audiobook—rather than reading it on the page—is that you hear the performance choices. The LibriVox crew nailed that same interpretive challenge in their Strange Case of Jekyll and Hyde (Version 4 - Dramatic Reading)—you can actually hear them wrestling with how much menace versus camp to bring to Hyde. When Petruchio delivers his absurd "taming" speeches, does the narrator play it straight or with a wink? When Kate gives her famous final monologue about wifely submission, is there subversion in the delivery? These are the questions that make or break a production.
This version leans into the comedy, which I think is the right call. Petruchio comes across as ridiculous rather than menacing, which softens some of the play's more uncomfortable moments. Kate's sharpness feels genuinely witty rather than shrewish. The subplot with Bianca and her suitors—all that disguise nonsense with Lucentio—moves along briskly enough that you don't get lost in the who's-pretending-to-be-whom of it all.
The Two-and-a-Half Hour Question
At just under two and a half hours, this is Shakespeare you can actually finish in a single afternoon. I listened to most of it during a particularly tedious faculty meeting about budget allocations. (Principal Martinez, if you're somehow reading this—I was definitely paying attention. I wasn't. I was listening to Elizabethan comedy about marriage as economic transaction, which felt weirdly relevant to discussions about departmental funding.)
The pacing works. The play moves. You're not checking how much time is left, which is more than I can say for some of the professional productions I've sat through.
Now, is this the definitive audio version of The Taming of the Shrew? No. If you want polish, there are professional recordings with actors like Simon Russell Beale that will give you a more refined experience. But those cost money, and this is free, and honestly? For a first encounter with the play, or a refresher before you teach it for the twentieth time, this does the job.
Who Should Listen (And Who Should Skip)
If you're new to Shakespeare and intimidated by the language, this is actually a pretty decent entry point. The neutral accents are easy to follow, and hearing the words performed—even imperfectly—is so much better than staring at them on a page wondering where the joke is. The prose deserves to be savored, and sometimes you need someone else to show you the rhythm before you can find it yourself.
If you're a Shakespeare purist who needs every iambic pentameter delivered with precision, maybe sample first. The volunteer nature of the production means the quality varies by reader. Skip this one if inconsistent audio quality is a dealbreaker for you.
If you loved the 1967 Taylor-Burton film version—which is a camp classic, by the way—this will feel like a very different animal. Less glamour, more grassroots.
My students would hate this, probably. They'd say it sounds old and weird and why can't we just watch the movie. They said the exact same thing about Romeo and Juliet last semester, and half of them ended up actually enjoying it once they stopped fighting the language. But that's exactly why I'll keep assigning it. The classics persist because they keep asking uncomfortable questions. Who's really being tamed here? Who's performing submission, and who's performing dominance? Shakespeare knew what he was doing. Four centuries later, we're still arguing about it.
