SOURCE: Candido, Joseph. “The Starving of the Shrew.” Colby Quarterly 26, no. 2 (June 1990): 96-111.

In the following essay, Candido examines motifs of eating and drinking in The Taming of the Shrew.

… it is clear that newly caught shrews always eat about their own weight of food daily. … What is astonishing is that the shrew should require so much food of such high energy content. … their physiology is adjusted for a rapid turnover of energy, and when supplied with excess food, they are unable to ‘change gear’, but continue to burn up energy as they did when it was necessary to search for food. Whenever awake they will be either feeding, burrowing, or rushing about poking their noses into everything.¹

There is a lot of eating and drinking in The Taming of the Shrew. One may be justly accused of rhetorical impertinence for saying that the play is marbled with...