Robin Norton-Hale
Into Shakespeare
The Taming Of The Shrew
BY
Josey De Rossi
As Shakespeare’s comedy The Taming Of The Shrews highlights, the history of gender politics goes further into the past than the history of suffragettes and equal rights. The idea of a ‘shrew’ is steeped in a mythological ancestry in which furies of one kind or another, once provoked, go on their destructive rampage. Arguably, what Shakespeare shows us in Katherine is the shrew in modern terms, when economic power forms a decisive part of ‘love and marriage’ and aggression has feminine as well as male characteristics.
