In A Merry Jest, two sisters figure prominently, the younger of which is favored by the girls' father and sought after by gentlemen callers while the older sister is shrewish and headstrong. The ballad proceeds much like Shakespeare's Shrew, with the curst daughter marrying a man who spends the rest of the ballad trying to break his wife of her headstrong ways and bring her into line with societal expectations. In the end, though, Shakespeare's Shrew ends nothing like the ballad wherein the wife's husband plots to break his wife by beating her and then wrapping her in the freshly salted hide of a horse (formerly) named Morel. Predictably, the wife repents after this treatment (which, admittedly most Elizabethans would not have seen as unusually cruel) and lives the rest of her life peaceably, serving and obeying her husband.
Just as Shakespeare found precedent for his discussion of shrewish women, so too did he find precedent in ways to deal with them. Where there are shrews, of course, there must be shrew tamers — and it is in this regard that Shakespeare is perhaps his most tacitly crafty. Whereas Kate fits quite well within the traditional paradigm of the shrewish woman (being bold, aggressive, talkative, and physical), Petruchio does not so readily fit the stereotype of the shrew tamer. His actions reflect a degree of restraint and understanding not commonly seen in other shrew-tamers of the period. The husband in A Merry Jest of a Shrewd and Curst Wife, for example, sees nothing at all wrong with beating his wife bloody and then wrapping her in a salted horse's hide until she repents her shrewish and headstrong ways. He believes it is his right as her husband, a notion which the wife's family is quick to corroborate. No punishment, however painful and seemingly unjust (by modern standards, anyway), is too harsh for a shrewish wife. Petruchio, though, doesn't resort to such means. He is clever, and it is that cleverness that allows him to reform his wife without ever laying a hand on her. He keeps her awake and denies her a bit of food, but these punishments are small compared to the punishments routinely doled out in the literature and stories of the time.
