“Better a Shrew than a Sheep?”: Disobedience through Reticence in Shakespeare’s Contrasting Models of Femininity

Abstract

Shakespeare’s production has depicted female characters according to a dichotomic model of femininity which distinguishes between a talkative, often shrewish, woman and her silent counterpart (Friedman 1990; Boose 1994; Allen Brown 2003; Rackin 2005; Kamaralli 2012). Still, little attention has been given to female silence and reticence as a site of resistance and potential subversiveness of patriarchal control (Luckyj 2002).

The present paper analyses two couples of opposite models of female linguistic attitudes – Kate and Bianca in The Taming of the Shrew (1593) and Portia and Jessica in The Merchant of Venice (1595) – to show how silent unruliness may provide women with a safer means to disrupt the patriarchal notion of obedience while avoiding the threatful label of ‘shrew’.