Katharina Minola
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Katherina Minola, or Katharina Minola, is a primary character in the Shakespeare play, The Taming of the Shrew.
Katherine (Katherina or Kate), the “shrew” of the play’s title, is the daughter of Baptista Minola. Being sharp-tongued, quick-tempered, and prone to violence, she is widely reputed in Padua to be a shrew. She constantly insults and degrades the men and potential suitors around her.
Although most of the play’s characters imply believe Kate to be inherently ill-tempered, it is certainly plausible to think of her as simply misunderstood and that her unpleasant behavior stems from unhappiness. She may simply act like a shrew because she is miserable and desperate. Throughout the play, there are multiple sources for this unhappiness: she expresses jealousy about her father’s treatment of her sister, but her anxiety may also stem from feelings about her own undesirability, the fear that she may never win a husband, and her loathing of the way men treat her.
Overall, she is simply unwilling to play the role of the maiden daughter. She abhors society’s expectations that she obey her father and show courtesy toward her suitors.
However, she does not resist her suitor Petruchio forever, and eventually subjugates herself to him, despite her previous repudiation of marriage. Despite the humiliations and deprivations that Petruccio adds to her life, it is easy to understand why Kate might succumb to marry a man like him. In their first conversation, Petruchio establishes that he is Kate’s intellectual and verbal equal, making himself an exciting change from the easily dominated men who normally surround her. Petruccio’s forcible treatment of Kate is designed to show her that she has no real choice but to adapt to her social role as a wife. This adaptation must be attractive to Kate on some level, since even if she dislikes the role of wife, playing it at least means she can command respect and consideration from others rather than suffer the universal revulsion she receives as a shrew. Overall, having a social role would be less painful for her than continually rejecting any social role at all. Thus, Kate’s eventual compliance with Petruccio’s appears more rational than it might have seemed at first[1].
