Across Cultures

The ‘tongue’ of Shakespearean shrews offers a crux of diverse cultural discourses, referring to early modern gossips and shrews, the examination of which proves instructive both in synchronic and diachronic aspects, across geographical borders. The present paper focusses on cultural phenomena surrounding the figure and the etymology of the ‘shrew’ in sixteenth-century England and Hungary which provide intriguing parallels, while showing – as the social contexts of written and printed materials of the age differ radically – a breach in the cultural memory of the two peoples after the sixteenth century, with a concomitant influence on the translation and reception of William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew in Hungary in the course of the following centuries. Besides examining the early modern contexts of the ‘shrew’ both in England and Hungary, with a special emphasis on popular printed texts, the paper also reflects on how Jan Assmann's tenets regarding cultural memory may be applied in such research, and makes use of Bakhtin's carnival theory as practised in early modern studies.