Hello everyone and welcome to, you guessed it, TWIL NUMBER 2!! Our class’s main focus this week was beginning The Taming of the Shrew, a classic Shakespearean play. As someone who had never heard of this play and had also never heard of a shrew you could understand that I had very little clue as to what we would be studying. Thankfully we started by watching a movie version and with Ms Willemse’s brief explanation I was able to catch on. A shrew is a small mammal, similar to a rodent but technically not, and are known for being aggressive and feisty creatures. In olden times women who refused to marry or weren’t considered ladylike would be called shrews. This is the case for our main character Kate. In the first seen she’s introduced she’s yelling and throwing stools at people so I guess calling her a shrew is a pretty understandable comparison at this point.

Now while I probably should be discussing the play as it’s our topic for this unit I would like to instead direct you into my recent studies of shrews. Like I said I had never even heard of a shrew my first impression of it was the multiple images of them Ms Willemse kept putting in Basecamp. So for some extended learning I read some articles and watched some videos about shrews. This video was my personal favourite as it shows shrews doing what looks like a conga line at the end.

It was interesting doing some research about the animals because in a way it helped me understand the metaphor to Kate, the main character in the Shakespeare play. She was labeled as a shrew for always causing drama and being aggressive. However as seen in that video, shrews despite being like rodents or reptiles actually care for their children and have loving instincts. They let their children feed off them and then protect them in a line form out open the wild. While I don’t know Kate’s character arc I’m sure the audience is going to feel bad for her or empathize and this might be because she, the shrew, has loving and caring instincts. I realize this is a reach, but I do think it’s interesting how this term of shrew was used in such a derogatory way when the animals don’t see that bad. I’m excited to keep reading and watching the play to find out if my theory is correct. I believe this whole shrew research of mine, shows the cheesy yet true moral of not judging a book by its cover. Shrews are seen as nasty and gross and that’s how society wanted to think of independent women but in both situations there’s so much more to each of them that people just aren’t aware of.