In
Elizabethan England,
shrew was widely used to refer to women and wives who did not fit into the social role that was expected of them. In William Shakespeare's
The Taming of the Shrew, Katherina "has a scolding, shrewish tongue," thus prompting Petruchio to try to tame her. More modern, figurative labels include
battle-axe and
dragon lady; more literary alternatives (all deriving from mythological names) are
termagant,
harpy, and
fury.
Shrew derives from
Middle English '''' for 'evil or scolding person', used since at least the 11th century, in turn from
Old English '
or ', 'shrew' (animal);
cognates in other
Germanic languages have divergent meanings, including 'fox', 'dwarf', 'old man', and 'devil'. The modern spelling dates to the 14th century. Connections between the stock character and animal can be seen in the fact that
shrews are highly territorial with each other and only come together during mating. They are also carnivores that can eat almost constantly, attacking all sorts of other small creatures. A few species, the
Eurasian Water Shrew in particular, are one of the very few mammals to have a venomous bite, although this is not harmful to humans. These traits are also reflected in the fact that historically, the animals called
shrews were superstitiously feared, leading to the now-obsolete word
beshrew, 'to curse or invoke evil upon'. Beginning in the mid-13th century, following on the belief that the animals could exert a wicked influence on humans exposed to them, the term was applied
metaphorically to a person of either sex thought to have a similar disposition, but by the 14th century, it was applied to women alone. This also led to a now obsolete verb usage,
to shrew meaning 'to scold'. , was used as mobile
stock for women in Austria and Germany during the
Middle Ages. The large hole was for the neck with the smaller holes being for the wrists. By the middle 16th century, the opposing extremes of wifely personality traits were contrasted as "shrew" vs. "sheep". The earliest-known formal definition of
shrew as applied to people is
Samuel Johnson's, in the 1755
A Dictionary of the English Language: "peevish, malignant, clamorous, spiteful, vexatious, turbulent woman". He described the use of the word in reference to males as "ancient", but also quoted Shakespeare using it to satirise a man by likening him to the shrewish woman central to his play: "By this reckoning, he is more shrew than she." (
Cf. modern use toward men of other female-targeted slurs like
bitch.) As a synonym for the shrew in literature and theatre, the word
termagant derives from the name
Termagant, an invented, mock-
Muslim, male deity used in
medieval mystery plays, characterised as violent and overbearing. Termagant features in many period works of the 11th through 15th centuries, from
The Song of Roland to
Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales (in "The Tale of
Sir Thopas"). The name was genericised into a term referring to male characters with ranting, bullying personalities. In the 16th century, Shakespeare used the word in this generic, masculine sense in
Henry IV, Part I (as an adjective), and in its original
proper name sense in
Hamlet. Such characters usually wore long gowns that gave them a feminine appearance in an era when female characters
were played by men or boys, and were dressed similarly. This led the gradual shift in meaning, to refer exclusively to an overbearing, turbulent, quarrelsome, even brawling woman, which was a well-established usage by the late 17th century. Female characters actually named Termagant appear in works including
Thomas Shadwell's play
The Squire of Alsatia (1688), and
Arthur Murphy's play
The Upholsterer (1758), while
Washington Irving's "
Rip Van Winkle" (1819) uses the word generically, to refer to the main character's wife.
Other similar terms The similar term
harridan, widely also considered a synonym of
shrew, originated as a late-17th-century slang term for 'aging prostitute' (probably from 16th-century French '''', 'old horse', in metaphor a 'gaunt, ill-favoured woman'). It has taken on the meaning of scolding,
nagging, bossy, belligerent woman, especially an older one, and is not tied to literary context. Another word with essentially the same meaning, and applying only to women since around 1300, is the noun
scold (later replaced with
scolder, as
scold became a verb toward the late 14th century). It dates more gender-neutrally to Middle English, ca. 1150–1200, as '
or ' (unrelated to the 'burn' sense, from Old French), and probably derives from
Old Norse '''', 'a
skald', i.e. poet. The skalds, like the
bards, were feared for their
panegyric satire, and this may explain the connection to verbal abusiveness. Johnson's 18th-century definition was: "A clamourous, rude, mean, low, foul-mouthed woman", suggesting a level of vulgarity and a
class distinction from the more generalised
shrew, but this nuance has been lost. In Johnson's time, the word formed part of a legal term,
common scold which referred to rude and brawling women . To the extent the noun form retains any currency, some dictionaries observe that it can (unusually) be applied to males, a recent re-development.
Scold, in its heyday, was not particularly limited to literary or theatrical contexts. ==See also==