SOURCE: Brooks, Charles. “Shakespeare's Romantic Shrews.” Shakespeare Quarterly 11, no. 3 (summer 1960): 351-56.

In the following essay, Brooks compares Adriana in The Comedy of Errors to Kate in The Taming of the Shrew.

The domineering wife has been a popular literary figure from Xantippe to Lichty's battle-axes. She has a male counterpart in the tyrannous husband, unreasonable masculine brutality being as much disapproved, at least in Christian civilizations, as feminine wilfulness; but the shrew is a more familiar character than the tyrannous husband, possibly because she not only behaves abnormally, as he does, but also violates our sense of order. While he overasserts a right, she overturns a hierarchy which men like to feel is divinely sanctioned. So men delight to laugh at the shrew or to see her justly disconcerted, and they smile with approval at her opposite number, the tender girl patiently and wholly devoted to serving her...