Shakespeare and Marriage: An Open Question

Marriage is a focus of conflict today, from lamentations about divorce rates to legal contests over same-sex marriage. It was equally contested in Shakespeare’s England, even if the issues at stake were somewhat different. Recent scholarship on the history of marriage has unsettled many of the assumptions that once governed discussions of early modern marriage and its representation on the stage. It is no longer safe to assume we know what early modern marriage meant, how it felt, or what it achieved or required. This essay focuses particularly on new research on rates of marriage in early modern England, on married women’s agency, will, and work, and on same-sex attachments. What are the implications of these new approaches for our readings of Shakespeare’s plays? Is marriage a happy ending? Is it an ending at all? ‘Shakespeare and Marriage’ seems at first a dispiritingly familiar conjunction of topics. For centuries now, biographers have speculated about Shakespeare’s own marriage, literary critics have turned to the history of marriage in an effort to make sense of the puzzling details and mixed messages about marriage one finds in the plays, and historians have looked to the plays for evidence regarding early modern marriage, or the timelessness of love, or the limitations of literature as historical evidence. Peter Laslett epitomizes that last approach in his assertion that it ‘is not true’ that ‘English women in Shakespeare’s day’ married in their early teens as several of Shakespeare’s heroines (most notably Juliet and Miranda) do (81). Even in Laslett’s stern phrasing, the relationship between marriage in Shakespeare’s day and in Shakespeare’s plays is not self-evident. For example, Katherine’s last speech detailing the gendered division of spousal temperament and labor in The Taming of the Shrew has been quoted as proof of the centrality of reciprocity and shared responsibility in long-standing Anglo-American ideals of marriage (Cott 12‐3; Hartog 155‐6; Underdown 117); it has also been read as articulating values that were, in the 16th century, either obviously anachronistic or boldly new (Boose 184; Korda 52‐75). It can be viewed as moving testimony to an enduring vision of married love or as stomach-churning proof of the gender inequities of a former era. The play as a whole can be read as evidence of the persistence of English patriarchy as an aspiration and fantasy and of its internal contradictions and robust contestation; of the acceptance or censure of domestic violence; of changing or persistent spousal roles; of the enormous effort the model of male headship in marriage required and its dependence on wives to ‘say as I say’; of the rewards women might secure through performative submission or the costs they might pay for peace, and love and quiet life; of violent subordination or of erotic and verbal mutuality. The play bears out all of the above contentions, suggesting that they are all viable ways of thinking about marriage in the early modern period, all available in the play itself. Much of the play’s action focuses on that uncertain phase between the wedding and the consummation when the terms of the marriage are being negotiated and the spouses are not quite joined yet. The fact that one might make a bet