Bewitching The Shrew

Abstract

When Paulina boldly demands that he acknowledge the newborn Perdita as his child, Leontes vilifies her as both shrew and witch who shames her husband and threatens social order. Antigonus is said to be womantir'd or hen-pecked, unroosted by his Dame Partlet and worthy to be hang'd for control[ing] her tongue. Paulina herself is an audacious lady, a mankind a callet / Of boundless tongue, who late hath beat her husband, / And now baits me, and a gross hag. Finally, Leontes threatens her with a witch's death: I'll ha' thee burnt.1 The seeming irrationality of this name-calling is not merely a register of Leontes' misogyny and hysterical jealousy. For early moderns, these categories of female deviance (shrew, mannish diabolist, scold or callet, hag or witch) were conceptually rooted in a scheme of moral and social inversions that overlapped and often converged. Catherine Belsey has shown how in Tudor and Stuart drama transgressive (i.e., unwomanly) women demonized; and how, conversely, contemporary women actually convicted of witchcraft were characterized as unwomanly in appearance and demeanor especially in their volubility (184-91). While these patterns striking in later tragedies like Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra, and in numerous Jacobean witch-plays,2 they also prominent in Shakespeare's earliest works. The Ephesian women of The Comedy of Errors perceived as socially anomalous and consequently are termed, with mounting anxiety and violence, siren, witch, sorceress and devil (Roberts, 198). Witchcraft is intertwined with both gender transgression and treason in the earliest history plays, most obviously through Joan la Pucelle and Margery Jourdain (2,2 Henry VI) and in the witchcraft metaphors and accusations of witchcraft in 3 Henry VI and Richard III (see Howard and Rackin; Willis, ch. 6; Cox, Devils and Power, 57-64). My argument here is that another early play, The Taming of the Shrew, also exploits these linkages by representing Katherina through the Elizabethan cultural practices, the popular literary and dramatic types, and the political and theological discourses that identified scolds or shrews with witches. The play engages with these ideological manifestations of patriarchy in such a way, however, as to expose their internal contradictions