Christopher Sly

Christopher Sly
The Taming of the Shrew character
The Hostess demands payment from Sly, illustration by H.C. Selous from The Plays of William Shakespeare: The Comedies, edited by Charles Cowden Clarke and Mary Cowden Clarke (1830)
Created by	William Shakespeare

Christopher Sly is a minor character in

In the standard version of the play the audience never sees or hears from Christopher Sly again and thus assume that he has probably fallen asleep. Another version has a closing segment in which Sly, deposited back outside the tavern in a stupor once more, says he will return home to deal with his own shrewish wife, having had "the best dream that ever I had in my life" in which he learned how to "tame a shrew". The closing part of the frame-play does not appear in the text of The Taming of the Shrew as it was published in the First Folio. It only appears in the version published in quarto as The Taming of a Shrew (rather than "the" Shrew).

Warwickshire connection

Sly says he is from Burton Heath, where Shakespeare's aunt and uncle lived. He also mentions a "Marian Hacket, the fat alewife of Wincot". Wincot is where Shakespeare's mother was born. Both these villages are near Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, where Shakespeare grew up. Marian Hacket is said to be the landlady of an ale house, who allows Sly to build up an unpaid tab of 14 pence, but ejects him when he fails to pay up (presumably the same person as the "hostess" who appears at the beginning of the play). Reference is also made to a barmaid called Cicily Hacket, probably Marian's daughter. A Hacket family lived in Wincot at this time, but it is not known whether Marian and Cicily Hacket were real innkeepers.^[1]

Sly lists his past occupations, insisting that he was born a peddler, trained as a cardmaker, but worked as a "bearherd", (meaning a keeper of bears used in bear-baiting entertainments) before becoming a tinker.^[2]

Appearances in other works

Christopher Sly is mentioned in the novel