Kate The Shrew Quotes

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Recommended: Essays on gender roles in taming of the shrew

In Shakespeare’s ‘The Taming of the Shrew’, the character Kate is the ‘shrew’ of the play. A shrew is a bad-tempered or aggressively assertive woman. In Elizabethan times being a labelled as a shrew may led to punishments and public humiliation. Modern day readers may look at Kate being labelled as a shrew and disagree as society today has changed since then and women are not inferior to men as they back then. Kate is often presented by Shakespeare more positively as a complex and vulnerable character due to the fact she receives abuse from other characters in the play, an example of this is: ‘”Mates”, maid? How mean you that? No mates for you unless you were of gentler, milder mould.’ This quote shows Hortensio picking up that Kate had referred to them (Gremio and Hortensio) as ‘mates’ however Hortensio criticises this saying she will have no ‘mates’ unless she was ‘gentler’ and ‘milder’ which is what the ideal woman would be at the time, a contrast to herself. He calls her a ‘maid’ which is an unmarried girl/woman often young and virgin (due to premarital sex being looked down on in this time period). This could be used to cause The reason she starts getting upset in the opening is due to her father asking Bianca’s suitors if they will marry Kate instead as he needs to marry her off before Bianca due to her being older than Bianca. Kate’s state of aggravation seems fair as she is just standing up for herself and being who she wants instead of submitting to what society at the time wants from her. Shakespeare presents her as complex as she is deemed a shrew but it does not seem fair to just define Kate as that when it is not right that she is seen by society as a shrew when other people such as Bianca is shrewish in reality, yet seem like the definition of the perfect woman on the outside to the

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