"A Merry Jest of a Shrewd and Cursed Wife" - Some Thoughts

To be honest, I had quite a bit of difficulty reading this without the fun sidenotes and modernized spelling Norton has to offer.

What got me about this was the really overtly violence against women. If I follow, the husband wraps the wife in a horse's hide and beats her with a rod? And he even hits her in bed the morning after their wedding while "dallying together and having good game" - taming basically sounds synonymous with raping here. The author pronounces it all for the good at the end - I guess it makes Shakespeare seem enlightened on gender roles in contrast.

It's interesting to see here again repeated the correlation between ugliness of appearance and ugliness of action in the character of the mother (who is described as plain), just as Katherine brought up the issue in the final speech in The Taming of the Shrew. I wonder how long psychologically we have been groomed (I chose that word before I realized how appropriate it was) to see unattractive people as villains. Did it start during the Renaissance?