The shrew – an unpleasant, ill-tempered woman characterised by scolding, nagging, and aggression – is a comedic, stock character in literature and folklore, both Western and Eastern. The theme is illustrated in Shakespeare's play The Taming of the Shrew.
As a reference to actual women, rather than the stock character, the shrew is considered old-fashioned, and the synonym scold (as a noun) is archaic. The term shrew is still used to describe the stock character in fiction and folk storytelling. None of these terms are usually applied to males in Modern English.
This stereotype or cliché was common in early- to mid-20th-century films, and retains some present-day currency, often shifted somewhat toward the virtues of the stock female character of the heroic virago.
Folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand collected over 400 literary and oral versions of shrew stories in 30 cultural groups in Europe in the middle 20th century.
In early modern law
Scold Being a "common scold" was once a petty criminal offense in the early-modern law of England and Wales and of colonial New England, during the 16th through 18th centuries. Punishments varied by region, but were usually meant to humiliate the guilty party. They included the imposition of the ducking stool, pillory, jougs, a shrew's fiddle, or a scold's bridle. Scold or shrew was a term which could be applied with different degrees of reprobation, and one early modern proverb allowed that "a shrew profitable may serve a man reasonably".
The shrew-taming plot
A common central theme of such literature and folktales is the often forceful "taming" of shrewish wives by their husbands. Arising in folklore, in which community story-telling can have functions of moral censorship or suasion, it has served to affirm traditional values and moral authority regarding polarised gender roles, and to address social unease about female behavior in marriage.
This basic plot structure typically involves a series of recurring motifs: A man, often young and penniless, marries a woman with shrewish or other negative qualities (laziness, etc.), for her dowry or other reasons unrelated to love, despite another trying to talk him out of it. She may have a more docile but unavailable younger sister, for contrast, and/or an even more shrewish mother.
The taming process begins immediately after the marriage, and does not last long, sometimes only the wedding night itself. It involves denial of intimacy by the husband to the bride, and often also has several other features, including coercion (e.g., by violence, sleep deprivation, and/or starvation) to induce submission, and psychological manipulation (e.g. animal abuse, usually targeting cats, in front of the wife). Capitulation by the "shrew" happens suddenly, she transforms into a "model" wife, and the couple lives happily ever after.
A variant suggests that the taming must be done early: The one who had tried to talk the young man out of the marriage (often the bride's own father) sees that it worked on the bride, and tries it on his own wife unsuccessfully because she already knows he is meek. Many of these elements, including denial of food (through trickery) and psychological manipulation (without animal abuse), were reused by William Shakespeare in his play The Taming of the Shrew, which closes with the reformed shrew giving a monologue on why wives should always obey their husbands.
This overall plot structure was retained in various works of silent-era and post-Second World War cinema.
Elements of the shrew-taming plot are still used today, though with less patriarchal messages since the rise of feminism. The Taming of the Shrew has itself led to various modern, loose adaptations to current societal views in differing Western and Eastern industrialized societies, while retaining the stock character and the underlying theme of consequences of female disagreeableness, but often giving the "shrew" much more agency, and portraying some "shrewish" traits in a positive light, blending with the stock character of the virago.