SARAH: Polonius now realizes that Hamlet does love Ophelia, and that it may have been a mistake to order her to refuse to see him.

RALPH: When Polonius says, "beshrew my jealousy", he means, "curse my suspicious nature".

SARAH: Shakespeare uses jealousy, not in the narrow sense of suspicion of, say, a spouse's fidelity, but in a broader sense of suspiciousness in general.

RALPH: As for "beshrew", its meaning goes back to the shrew, the funny looking mole-like animal that bears the same name. Folklore held that shrews were evil and wicked, maybe because they have sharp fanged teeth, and some species are venomous.

SARAH: To beshrew someone came to mean to invoke evil on them, or to curse them.

RALPH: Likewise, shrew was also used metaphorically to refer to disagreeable or troublesome women, as we see in another of Shakespeare's plays, "The Taming of the Shrew."

SARAH: Actually, Ralph, the term shrew was not used just for women — it could refer to any troublesome or vexatious person.

RALPH: It could be used that way — but I think you'll find that from Chaucer to Shakespeare, and certainly after Shakespeare, the term applied especially to women — there are even compound words like shrew-tamer, shrew-wife, ...

SARAH: Let's move on.