The Kerzman–Stein operator is the skew-hermitian part of the Cauchy operator defined with respect to an unweighted hermitian inner product on a rectifiable curve. If the curve is continuously differentiable, the Kerzman–Stein operator is compact on the Hilbert space of square integrable functions; when there is a corner, the operator is noncompact. Here, we give a complete description of the spectrum for a finite symmetric wedge and we show how this reveals the essential spectrum for curves that are piecewise continuously differentiable. We also give an explicit construction for a smooth curve whose Kerzman–Stein operator has large norm.