SOME CELEBRATED SHREWS.
IN treating of Celebrated Shrews, there is, manifestly, small need of calling in the aid of Legend, Fiction or Fancy. Even Poetry must give place to her more sedate sister—History; else we might meander among the early plays of mediaeval days, which, scriptural in subject, are far from solemn in tone, and in which even Mrs. Noah is held up to ridicule and contempt as the veriest type of shrew—a horrible heresy which Chaucer seems to put faith in, as witness that ungallant speech of Nicholas, in the "Canterbury Tales:"
"Hast thou not herd," quod Nicholas, "also
The Worwe of Noe, with his felawship,
Or that he mighte get his wif to ship?
Him had be lever, I dare wel undertake,
At thilke time, than all his wethers blake,
That she had had a ship, hireself alone."
But the domestic discords (Noah-westers, so to speak) of the patriarch do not come within the purview of our present inquiry. Let us rather, with muck-rake and drag-net, make prize of more modern material, which may be found lying loose around and within comparatively easy reach.
In passing, however, from the distant past into regions this side of the first great navigator, we must not slight the claim which, despite the labored endeavors of friendly expositors in her behalf. Job's wife presents to be lifted into bad eminence as, perhaps, the earliest of shrews. Her provoking speeches and scant sympathy, while schooling her poor partner's patience, reflect small credit upon herself, except in so far as she was honored in being made a means of grace. The perfect work of patience had not else been wrought out in Job, if, losing all beside, the sparing of his wife were not an added bitter in his cup! Sons and daughters, cattle and sheep, lands and houses—all were taken; but a wife was left, a "miserable comforter," who could urge the model man to "curse God and die." Thus, briefly, our version writes her biography and gibbets her temper. But the Septuagint translation expands her speech into the following shrewish oration: reading it one thinks Douglas Jerrold a plagiarist, and Mrs. Caudle a Bible heroine:
After much time had passed, his wife said unto him, "How long wilt thou persist, saying, Behold I will wait a little longer in expectation of my deliverance? Behold thy memorial is blotted out of the earth; even the sons and daughters, the pains and toils of my womb, whom I have brought forth in vain. Even thou thyself sittest among loathsome worms, abiding all night in the open air; while I, a drudge and a wanderer from house to house and from place to place, long for the setting of the sun that I may rest from the toils and sorrows I now endure. Utter some word against the Lord, and die."
