Shakespeare Foreshadowed Alt-Right Sexism
How feminists should answer the conservative’s appeal to the natural differences between men and women
William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew is perhaps his most politically incorrect play, according to late-modern left-wing standards. It’s a wonder, then, that the Bard of Avon hasn’t been cancelled.
Specifically, Katherine’s climactic speech in the play posits that the differences between men and women should make for their different social roles. This is to say that the speech — and thus at least the play’s most superficial meaning, which spoke to the common patriarchal attitude of Shakespeare’s time — are quite sexist.
What Katherine says, in short, is that men are made to rule, and women to serve. Here’s the entire speech itself:
Fie, fie! Unknit that threat’ning unkind brow,
And dart not scornful glances from those eyes
To wound thy lord, thy king, thy governor.
It blots thy beauty as frosts do bite the meads,
Confounds thy fame as whirlwinds shake fair buds,
And in no sense is meet or amiable.
A woman moved is like a fountain troubled,
Muddy, ill-seeming, thick, bereft of beauty,
And while it is so, none so dry or thirsty
Will deign to sip or touch one drop of it.
Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy…
