Although Kate's
shrewishness is tamed in Shakespeare's play, Catarina's struggle for genuine agency leads her to a more active and autonomous societal position.
(30) Schneider insightfully notes that "there is a paradox in that when women transgress bonds associated with the private (adultery, husband scolding, or
shrewishness), they are punished by being exposed to public humiliation; they are not shoved more deeply into the private, but carted, cucked, bridled.
The sterile hags are associated repeatedly with noise: discordant music, chanting, gossip, emasculating
shrewishness that both reflects and creates an image of female sexuality as unruly; similarly, the shrill gossips of Epicoene are the bane of their comic target, Morose, a recluse with a pathological hatred of noise whose bride has been offered to him solely on the basis of her supposed modesty and silence.
Petruchio is altered both by Kate's witty
shrewishness and his desire for her from the moment he hears of her.
(32) As Robertson describes her entrance, however, it becomes clear that this Kate was no placid contessa: Not a whit of her
shrewishness did she spare us; her storms of passion found vent in snarls, growls, and even inarticulate screams of fury; she paced hither and thither liked a caged wild beast, but her rages were magnificent like an angry sea or a sky of tempest, she blazed a fiery comet through the play, baleful but beautiful.
They were processions 'accompanied by cacophonous drumming and music, with one or more men, sometimes costumed (frequently as women), and either walking, riding a horse (usually backwards or facing each other if there were two riders), sitting astride a pole, or being carried in a cart.' (10) Communities sometimes used skimmingtons as a form of community justice through public humiliation for adultery or
shrewishness, but they also used them for social and political purposes as well.
As other interpreters have noted, (25) Shakespeare's audience would understand her unbridled speech as "
shrewishness"; in order for Petruchio to prove to an early modern audience that he has tamed Katherina, he must silence her.
(55) Tempting as it may be to see in Hamlet's critique of Termagant an invective against theatrical
shrewishness of the kind purveyed by Katherine, the character's associations were in Shakespeare's day still exclusively male and pagan.
The nearest the canonical Shakespeare ever comes to using the word is in the opening scene of Much Ado, where Benedick jokily refers to Beatrice's
shrewishness "so some gentleman or other shall escape a predestinate scratched face" (1.1.123-5).