Bewitching The Shrew

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 "woman-tir'd" or hen-pecked, "unroosted" by his "Dame Partlet" and "worthy to be hang'd" for "not control[ing] her tongue." Paulina herself is an "audacious lady," a "mankind witch," 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 are 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 are striking in later tragedies like Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra, and in numerous Jacobean witch-plays,² they are also prominent in Shakespeare's earliest works. The Ephesian women of The Comedy of Errors are 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 (1, 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 and thus destabilize the logic of its patriarchally contrived ending. For the capricious, bluff Veronese who's "come to wive it wealthily" is—no less than the "shrewd and froward" Katherina Minola—inscribed within the discourse of demonology—its types, categories, and motifs. Petruchio is therefore the unwitting agent of his own system's failure.

Given the prominence of the unruly woman-witch nexus in so many of Shakespeare's other plays, it is odd that recent historicized feminist readings of The Shrew, like those of Lynda Boose which focus ("outside the text") on the early-modern "obsession with taming unruly women" ("Husbandry," 196), have not considered it. While Boose's emphasis on the gendering of antisocial crime and punishment has produced important insights into the cultural construction of scolds and has illuminated some of "the realities that defined the lives of sixteenth-century 'shrews'" ("Scolding," 181), the scold or shrew cannot stand alone as the "veritable prototype of the female offender in this era" ("Scolding," 185), for the ultimate embodiment of female unruliness was the witch, whose early-modern archetypal identity was simultaneously being constructed by the same cultural practices and discourses that helped produce "shrews" and "scolds."

As in Shakespeare's plays, so in Elizabethan culture generally, the categories "shrew" and "witch" were often conflated. An unruly woman's social "disorderliness," popular wisdom held, "led her into the evil arts of witchcraft" (Davis, 124-25). Indeed, accusations of witchcraft were aimed not at actual village sorceresses, who were largely tolerated, but at "inassimilable women," including spinsters, widows, prostitutes, and obstreperous wives (Comensoli, 49). The skeptic Reginald Scot was aware of this, averring that the "cheefe fault" of supposed witches "is that they are scolds" (Discoverie of Witchcraft [1584], 2.10; 50).³ Punishments for lesser crimes of witchcraft, in the form of ritualized public humiliation, sometimes overlapped with those for other female transgressions, thus confirming their perceived affinity.^4...