[In the following essay, Cook illuminates differences between Shakespeare's dramatic representations of marriage and the social customs of Elizabethan and Jacobean England.]

Courtship and marriage are such universal experiences that audiences assume familiarity with the subject when Shakespeare presents scenes of wooing and wedding. Yet in recent years social historians have presented overwhelming evidence to show that the customs and attitudes surrounding the Elizabethans' selection of a mate were vastly different from those now held in England and America. As a consequence, the judgment we make on such lovers as Kate and Petruchio or Portia and Bassanio may be somewhat warped.

Now obviously Shakespeare's plays were not written as true-to-life reflections of the world in which he lived. Any piece of literature, even one which aims at faithful representation, falsifies in subtle but significant ways. But it is important for a proper understanding of a work that the contemporary reader or viewer minimize the falsification he brings by virtue of his experience, his naiveté, or his presuppositions. In this task history can assist literature.

For almost twenty years men like Lawrence Stone and Peter Laslett have been studying patterns of marriage and family as they existed in Shakespeare's day.¹ Their findings point toward a situation radically unlike our own in at least three crucial ways.² First, to the modern mind there is an obvious difference between marriage for interest (i.e., for money, status, or power) and marriage for affect (i.e., for love, friendship, or sexual attraction). The former is wrong and the latter, right. Marry for love but not for money. Be led by sex but not by status. Establish a friendship but not a power base. Second, we assume that sex without love—or at least some significant emotion—is immoral and that marriage for personal gain alone is a form of prostitution. Ethical people do not make love in order to make money. Finally, the pursuit of personal happiness is now considered the primary good. In times of crisis, political or social good may take precedence over personal happiness—but only temporarily and only for a limited number of people.

In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries a far different set of values prevailed. Despite the romantic ideas expressed in plays and poetry, most marriages were contracted on the basis of interest rather than affect. Society demanded a legitimate male heir to preserve the family name and properties. Moreover, the financial arrangements of a marriage settlement were essential to insure that both parties could live securely until death. Marriage was also viewed as the safest outlet for the healthful discharge of sexual appetites. Finally, companionship was always mentioned as a reason for marriage, but in actuality most couples scarcely knew each other before the wedding and afterwards often spent much of their lives apart, as we suspect Shakespeare and his wife did. Clearly, then, the social customs dictated a marriage based primarily on wealth, status, or power and only secondarily on love, friendship, or sexual attraction. Sex was intended primarily for procreation or health and only secondarily as an expression of mutual affection and therefore took place within marriage—with or without love. And family advancement took a decided precedence over personal happiness.

Another striking difference between marriage then and marriage now revolves around the authority to contract a union. Today, provided a man and woman are legally of age, they alone make the choice of a mate. Parents and friends may counsel, cajole, or criticize, but they cannot command or countermand a union. Not so in Shakespeare's time. Parents or guardians negotiated matches for their children and wards, backed by the power of a patriarchal, authoritarian culture. The church canons of 1603 specifically forbade marriages without parental approval for anyone under the age of twenty-one, and it was considered a grave sin to contract a union after that age in defiance of family wishes. Only widows, widowers, and adult heirs whose fathers had died could exercise a free choice in marriage. Gradually, children were permitted a veto over the prospective spouse, but parents or guardians continued to make the initial selection and to conduct the pre-marital negotiations.³

Among the privileged in England, these negotiations were both complicated and crucial. Today, a swift ceremony constitutes a valid marriage, with such matters as financial support, ownership of property, inheritance, and the like relegated to a haphazard future settlement. But in Elizabethan England, financial arrangements were settled first. After all, in the upper levels of society every man was expected to “live idly and without manuall labour and … to bear the port charge and countenance of a gentleman.” Such a leisured lifestyle required money. Fathers thus counseled sons to marry richly, for “ritches will be comforts when other things ar amis, and save one from many mischiefs.” Or, again, “Let her not be poor … for a man can buy nothing in the market with gentility.” As the Earl of Northumberland put it, “love grows soon cold when want calls at your doors. … Time will tell you of many imperfections in her that plenty must make plasters for.” Of course the transfer of money in marriage required legal safeguards, just like any other financial transaction. Thus, as the most lucrative match became increasingly desirable and the contractual arrangements became increasingly complex, a specialized market for brokering marriages and drawing up marriage documents developed in London.⁴

Typically, the negotiations proceeded along the following pattern. Fathers of eligible children sought out potential mates from suitable families with suitable financial offers. Additional wealth might overcome defects of birth, appearance, or character, just as impressive family connections, uncommon beauty, or notable abilities might compensate for lesser riches. In any case, the bride's father agreed to provide a dowry, or portion, payable in cash over a one- or two-year period, together with a trousseau, jewels, and the wedding feast. In exchange, the groom's father agreed to make an allowance for the couple during his lifetime, to guarantee precisely what his son would inherit at the father's death, and to provide a pension, called a dower, or jointure, to the bride should she be widowed. The bargaining was especially intense for heirs and heiresses, since they would eventually inherit most or all of the family's property. However, all girls, even heiresses, constituted a financial drain on the family, since portions, or dowries, had to be paid in cash. On the other hand, for heirs or the fathers of heirs, marriage meant an immediate gain, with the direct payment of the bride's cash portion, while with luck and longevity the future widow's jointure could be deferred for payment in the next generation or avoided altogether if the wife died before her husband. For men, marriage thus constituted a ready means to repair sagging fortunes or to pay debts, even though it meant a long-term liability.⁵

The successful negotiation of marriage agreements was cemented by a public ceremony in which the contract was signed and approved before witnesses. The pre-marital contract was then eventually ratified by the marriage ceremony. However, physical consummation of the betrothal constituted a binding marriage even without the wedding, though a church ceremony was required for inheritance of property. The pre-marital agreements could be voided by the existence of a previous contract, and in fact the banns read before the wedding were to insure that no prior contracts existed. Before the wedding or consummation the agreement could also be voided by the failure of either party to provide what was promised or by proof of fornication. At this stage, the personal preference or aversion of the prospective couple had presumably been settled. Rare indeed was the case of Sir Richard Cholmley, who forfeited £1,000 of his daughter's wedding portion when Katherine finally admitted that she simply could not marry Lord Lumley. Sir Richard even permitted her to marry the man she loved, a poor younger brother, but this kind of indulgence was almost unheard of.⁶

Now it is true that a few couples defied convention to marry for love, against the will of family or guardian. But such daring lovers constituted only a handful. For the most part elopements and intrigues occurred at Court, which was virtually the only place where young men and women of equal status could meet freely. Yet even at Court, the Queen's severe displeasure fell upon those who married without her consent, as the Earls of Leicester, Hertford, and Essex, among others, soon discovered. Robert Tyrwhit and Sir Walter Raleigh went to jail for marrying secretly, while both Elizabeth Vernon and the third Earl of Southampton were put behind bars when they married after the lady became pregnant. The Queen beat Mary Shelton and bluntly refused Mary Arundell when those ladies asked permission to marry.⁷ Moreover, the Court's severity toward love matches was resoundingly echoed in society at large whenever such unions ran counter to the wishes of a parent or guardian. Children might rebel, but for Elizabethans marriage was a family matter far too serious to trust to the whim of love or the heat of passion.

What, then, are we to make of Shakespeare's treatment of love and marriage in his plays? First, I think we must acknowledge that at the most basic level Shakespeare was not attempting to present a realistic portrait of the customs of his day. Instead, he was following a long-standing literary tradition, reaching all the way back to the Middle Ages and particularly prevalent in Court circles, which placed romantic love ahead of all other considerations in the relationships between men and women. Second, as a man of his time and as a shrewd observer of human nature, he often brought conventional marriage customs into his plays and at the same time deftly commented upon those customs. Finally, we need to realize that the presuppositions about courtship and marriage that modern audiences apply to Shakespeare are far removed from those of the audiences for which he wrote. What is ultimately important, of course, is to see just where Shakespeare conforms to accepted custom and where he departs from it for his own dramatic purposes, so as to avoid making false interpretations either through ignorance of the past or inappropriate intrusion of the present. The best way to achieve such an aim is to consider a few plays.

The Taming of the Shrew is Shakespeare's earliest, longest, and most obvious commentary on the marriage market. In comic terms the play presents a confrontation of orthodox and unorthodox courtship. From the very beginning, even in the Induction, Shakespeare places an insistent monetary emphasis in the play—drunken, debt-ridden Sly being tossed out for refusing to pay for glasses he has broken and then surrounded with the trappings of wealth. All this is prelude to the Italian setting of the story, where everyone's father (or pseudo-father) seems to be a “merchant of great traffic through the world” (I.i.12). Words like “profit,” “commodity,” “business,” and “shipping” stud the dialogue, though indeed the bargaining for wives is obvious enough to require little secondary enforcement.⁸

The situation seems simple enough—a wealthy merchant with no sons but two daughters who will presumably make rich prizes for their husbands. Bianca, the younger, is eagerly sought after; but Kate, the elder, who must be married first, is such a shrew that “though her father be very rich, any man is so very a fool to be married to hell” (I.i.122-24). As with many another less-than-perfect prospect, however, “there be good fellows in the world … would take her with all her faults, and money enough” (I.i.126-29). And such a one is Petruchio. His father being dead, the young man may choose any wife he pleases and have unrestricted use of her portion: “I come to wive it wealthily in Padua—/ If wealthily, then happily in Padua” (I.ii.73-74). His straightforward declaration marks him not as a base fortune hunter but as one who cuts right through the superficialities to the substance of the marriage negotiations. It may not be true, as Gremio cynically claims, “Why give him gold enough and marry him to a puppet or an aglet-baby or an old trot with ne'er a tooth in her head” (I.ii.76-78). But it is short-sighted of Hortensio to claim that despite Kate's youth, her beauty, her excellent upbringing, and her fortune, he “would not wed her for a mine of gold” (I.ii.90). “Thou know'st not gold's effect,” sensibly replies Petruchio. “Tell me her father's name, and 'tis enough” (I.ii.91-92).

Petruchio's courtship in fact follows a highly conventional procedure, exaggerated enough to make it amusing but perilously close to the real thing. Having located “One rich enough to be Petruchio's wife” (I.ii.65) and assured himself of her age, appearance, education, and family, the hero must now negotiate with Kate's father—who, it turns out, is an old friend of the family. (“I know her father though I know not her, / And he knew my deceased father well” [I.ii.99-100].) In his wooing, Petruchio receives the customary support of his friends, together with the highly uncustomary bonus of their agreement to pay his expenses if he is successful. Gremio, Hortensio, and the disguised Tranio all promise to “be contributors / And bear his charge of wooing whatsoe'er” (I.ii.211-12).

While the other suitors came loaded down with gifts for Bianca, Petruchio wastes no time in coming to terms for Kate with Baptista.

PETRUCHIO:
You knew my father well, and in him me,
Left solely heir to all his lands and goods,
Which I have bettered rather than decreased.
Then tell me, if I get your daughter's love
What dowry shall I have with her to wife?
BAPTISTA:
After my death the one half of my lands,
And in possession twenty thousand crowns.
PETRUCHIO:
And for that dowry, I'll assure her of
Her widowhood, be it that she survive me,
In all my lands and leases whatsoever.
Let specialties be therefore drawn between us,
That covenants may be kept on either hand.
BAPTISTA:
Ay, when the special thing is well obtained,
That is, her love, for that is all in all.

[II.i.116-29]

Several significant factors emerge in this conversation. For one thing, Petruchio is a capable man, having already enlarged his inheritance and now seeking to enlarge his wealth still further with Kate's dowry. Moreover, he sets up a jointure that goes to her only if he dies first and only for her lifetime. In this way he secures his estate for inheritance by his successors. No future husband or children of any future marriage can share in more than the income during Kate's lifetime. On the other hand, Petruchio gets a fortune in ready money—twenty thousand crowns, amounting to £5,000, more than double the sum most peers offered for their daughters⁹—and the prospect of half Baptista's lands unless he predeceases his father-in-law. Almost anyone in the audience would realize that Petruchio has made a splendid bargain. Let the papers be drawn indeed!

As for getting Kate's love, it seems clear that Baptista is motivated less by concern for her wishes than by fear of her temper. After all, with his favorite, Bianca, he says,

'Tis deeds must win the prize, and he of both
That can assure my daughter greatest dower
Shall have Bianca's love—

[II.i.344-46]

No nonsense here about gaining the girl's consent. Instead, he treats Bianca's love as a possession which is his to bestow. Were it not for Kate's vicious tongue, the private interview with Petruchio would doubtless be a mere formality. As it is, Shakespeare provides a salty burlesque of the awkward encounters many prospective couples endured, but he ends with the hard facts:

And therefore, setting all this chat aside,
Thus in plain terms. Your father hath consented
That you shall be my wife, your dowry 'greed upon,
And will you, nil you, I will marry you.

[II.i.270-73]

Despite Kate's protests to Baptista—“You have showed a tender fatherly regard / To wish me wed to one half lunatic, / A madcap ruffian and a swearing Jack” (II.i.288-91)—she has no real say in the matter. Petruchio sets Sunday for the wedding and bids Baptista to fulfill his obligations: “Provide the feast, father, and bid the guests.” “God send you joy! Petruchio, 'tis a match,” the father announces as the eager Gremio and Tranio immediately make it an official contract with, “Amen, say we, we will be witnesses” (II.i.318, 321, 322).

Petruchio's departure thus marks the end of a courtship that has followed, point for point, the customary pattern for wooing. Shakespeare has cleverly scraped away all the niceties to expose the necessities of marriage: money matters most, and the woman's wishes least. A wife is a possession to be bargained for and bought. At the wedding, Petruchio characteristically speaks the plain truth when he says,

I will be master of what is mine own.
She is my goods, my chattels; she is my house,
My household stuff, my field, my barn,
My horse, my ox, my ass, my anything.

[III.ii.225-29]

Meanwhile, the bargaining for Bianca exposes the true nature of the marriage market in another way. Petruchio has bought what seems to be a flawed “commodity” (II.i.330) at a cheap price. The suitors for Kate's sister frantically outbid each other to buy what seems to be a perfect piece of merchandise. Incredibly, they ask for no dowry whatsoever, and Baptista does not offer to provide one, as he does for Kate. Though presumably Bianca too would get half of his lands at her father's death, he never mentions such an inheritance. Instead, the auction centers on what each suitor bids as a dower, or jointure, in the event of Bianca's widowhood. Old Gremio first offers his city house with all its rich furnishings and many chests filled with crowns, together with his farm and its six hundred milk cows and six score oxen. “Myself am struck in years, I must confess, / And if I die to-morrow this is hers, / If whilst I live she will be only mine” (II.i.362-64). The reckless Tranio, disguised as his master Lucentio, offers three or four houses just as good, besides two thousand ducats (£400) a year in land. The desperate Gremio, whose entire holdings in land do not come to two thousand ducats, adds his argosy of ships. Tranio throws in three argosies, “two galliasses / And twelve tight galleys” (II.i.380-81), promising to double anything Gremio might add next.

Nay, I have off'red all. I have no more,
And she can have no more than all I have.

[II.i.383-84]

Tranio has won.

Even modern audiences enjoy the auction and revel in the joke that Tranio's bid is bogus. But what Shakespeare's audience would also have seen is the absurdity of the size of the offers for a dowerless bride. No woman was worth so much, and certainly no woman ever got all a man had. Even the widows of wealthy London merchants were entitled to no more than a third to a half of their husband's personal property.¹⁰ A man's land—his estate—was preserved for his heirs or his nearest male kin, not his widow. Gremio is a doting fool.

A further problem besets the offer of Tranio / Lucentio. Unlike Petruchio, the young man has a father who is very much alive and thus legally controls all the family assets. The careful Baptista therefore insists,

I must confess your offer is the best,
And let your father make her the assurance,
She is your own, else you must pardon me.
If you should die before him, where's her dower?

[II.i.388-91]

Bianca will be married to Lucentio “if you make this assurance. / If not, to Signior Gremio” (II.i.398-99). At these words Gremio quite properly takes heart:

Now I fear thee not,
Sirrah, young gamester, your father were a fool
To give thee all and in his waning age
Set foot under thy table. Tut, a toy!
An old Italian fox is not so kind, my boy.

[II.i.401-05]

And he is right. No father, whether Italian or English, would have assented to the kind of settlement Tranio proposes, nor would he (like Lear) have relinquished control of his estates before death. But, then, the bogus son supplies a bogus father with no such sensible scruples. Tranio says:

And he shall be Vincentio of Pisa,
And make assurance here in Padua
Of greater sums than I have promised.

[III.ii.129-31]

In the bargaining scene between the phony father and Baptista, the two old men do not even discuss specific terms, as Petruchio does. The Pedant-turned-parent asks for no portion in cash, makes no inquiry of Bianca's inheritance, and agrees to what Baptista calls “a sufficient dower” (IV.iv.45) with no question about what Tranio has pledged. Instead, they simply send for a scrivener and Bianca so that the agreement can be signed and witnessed “privately and well” (IV.iv.57).

Shakespeare's merry but merciless exposure of the marriage market takes a different turn when he reveals the “treasure” Bianca for what she truly is. For one thing, the audience is shown—long before the final wager—that Bianca is just as headstrong as Kate. She tartly informs her tutors,

I am no breeching scholar in the schools,
I'll not be tied to hours nor 'pointed times,
But learn my lessons as I please myself.

[III.i.18-20]

She flirts with her instructors, encourages Lucentio's masquerade and his suit, and after scarcely a week, elopes without so much as a careless thought for the future security her father is so keen to obtain for her. This paragon of female virtue has in fact committed serious moral offenses, first by behaving in private with “lightness”—“Fie on her, see how beastly she doth court him”—“See how they kiss and court” (IV.ii.24, 34, 27)—and then by marrying without her father's consent. Moreover, she and Lucentio have acted in a way that severely jeopardizes the stability of their marriage. Legally, since there is no pre-marital contract, Baptista is not obliged to pay any dowry. Nor is the groom's father obliged to make the couple a living allowance, to designate Lucentio as his heir, or to provide a jointure for Bianca should she be widowed. Shakespeare may be arching an eyebrow at marriage-for-money-and-never-mind-love, but he is also arching an eyebrow at marriage-for-love-and-never-mind-money. In this comedy Lucentio has only to kneel and confess all to obtain his father's pardon and his assurance to the outraged Baptista that “we will content you, go to” (V.i.123). But we have only to look at tragedies like Romeo and Juliet and Othello to see what catastrophe elopements could bring. In the real world, children were disinherited, jailed, and beaten for marrying without parental consent.¹¹ In the play world, Baptista provides the wedding feast and all is forgiven.

But Shakespeare makes it clear that Petruchio, who follows the conventional path to marriage—in his own unconventional way—gets a better bargain than Lucentio, who breaks the rules for love of a bogus “treasure,” or Hortensio, who settles for “a lusty widow … / That shall be wooed and wedded in a day” (IV.ii.50-51). As is consistent with the monetary matrix of the play, Lucentio and Hortensio literally lose money on their wives, while Petruchio wins his bet and more. Baptista observes:

The wager thou hast won, and I will add
Unto their losses twenty thousand crowns,
Another dowry to another daughter,
For she is changed as she had never been.

[V.ii.117-20]

Like Shakespeare, Petruchio has exposed all things for what they truly are and reshaped them to his own terms—including wooing, wedding, and wife.

Bargaining for a bride nowhere else figures so prominently as it does in The Taming of the Shrew, but the issue does crop up in other Shakespearean plays. There, too, a glance at the accepted customs of the period can help to reveal the dramatic techniques involved. In The Merchant of Venice, for example, we find a repeat of the Italian mercantile setting, combined with marriage ventures and an attempt to set a money value on “worth.” However, because the play also seriously explores the problems of risk and indebtedness, Bassanio's wooing is much more subject to misunderstanding than is Petruchio's or Lucentio's.¹² Bassanio has come into an inheritance but like countless young men in London has “disabled mine estate / By something showing a more swelling port / Than my faint means would grant continuance” (I.i.123-25). With liberality touted as a virtue and thrift denounced as a niggardly vice, gentlemen of “faint means” often fell into debt and as often looked to a good marriage to mend matters.¹³ In Shakespeare's world Bassanio would have seemed quite sensible in going after Portia, rather than opportunistic, mercenary, or selfish, as he tends to appear today. In backing Bassanio's endeavor to retrieve himself with some credit, Antonio plays the then-expected part of a friend. Antonio has, after all, lent money gratis to others. The sum he risks in outfitting the wooing party is large—three thousand ducats amounting to about £600—but it is no more than a man of his means can afford to risk in such a significant cause and it offers the best way of getting payment on his loans to Bassanio. Or so it seems at first.

Bassanio, however, bears an even greater risk. He is like all the suitors:

You must take your chance,
And either not attempt to choose at all
Or swear before you choose, if you choose wrong
Never to speak to lady afterward
In way of marriage.

[II.i.38-42]

To an Elizabethan, the forfeiture of marriage and the extinction of one's family line was a truly fearsome penalty, so severe that most of Portia's wooers simply depart.¹⁴ Morocco and Aragon, who do make the attempt, are both princes. They leave chagrined but scarcely destitute. If Bassanio fails, he will leave impoverished, indebted, and disgraced, forever cut off from the only honorable means of establishing himself—marriage. He alone among the suitors “must give and hazard all he hath” (II.vii.16) to gain his Portia—a name quite intentionally akin to “portion.”

But Bassanio's is not the only courtship and marriage that has disturbed modern critics. It troubles some that Jessica not only steals out of her father's house of “hell” (II.iii.2) but also steals Shylock's gold and jewels.¹⁵ The elopement is softened by the repeated references to the Christian salvation she thereby obtains. Moreover, even Shylock's references to Jacob ally his house to the Old Testament family where deceit and trickery are used to secure a husband and wealth—with no apparent loss of God's favor. As for the “gold and jewels she is furnished with” (II.iv.31), Jessica is entitled to a large portion as the daughter of a rich man and thus takes what her father would assuredly but unfairly have denied her. No girl, especially a Jewess, could expect a man to take her for nothing. And if the young couple's liberality with her fortune turns into prodigality, this sin is perhaps preferable to Shylock's sins of usury and parsimony. Besides a proper portion, however, Jessica also is entitled to be her father's sole heiress. This benefit Antonio secures for her at the end of the trial:

So please my lord the Duke and all the court
To quit the fine for one half of his goods,
I am content; so he will let me have
The other half in use, to render it
Upon his death unto the gentleman
That lately stole his daughter.
Two things provided more: that for this favor
He presently become a Christian;
The other, that he do record a gift
Here in the court of all he dies possessed
Unto his son Lorenzo and his daughter.(16)

The critical furor over the forced conversion has obscured the fact that Shylock is also obliged to act justly towards Jessica and Lorenzo. Lorenzo has taken Jessica only for her fair self and her purloined dowry, but as a further reward he also receives her rightful inheritance. As was customary, the young couple will not receive the inheritance until Shylock dies, but then they will get everything—with the half of it in Antonio's hands ventured in commerce and thus not tainted by usury. In this regard, Antonio stands as surrogate for a careful, loving father, just as he does for Bassanio.¹⁷ In both cases he uses the means at his disposal to assist his friends to a secure and thus a happy future. Any Elizabethan gentlemen would have understood and applauded the actions of the Merchant of Venice, many no doubt wishing they had a similar father/friend.

I shall pass over such comedies as Much Ado about Nothing and The Merry Wives of Windsor, where marriage negotiations also figure significantly, to discuss a play that has doubtless attracted the most attention on this subject—Measure for Measure. Pages of books and learned journals are filled with arguments over the differences between the Claudio-Juliet commitment and the Angelo-Mariana commitment. Fine distinctions between spousals de futuro and de praesenti are drawn to explain why it was wrong for Claudio to sleep with Juliet before any wedding and yet quite proper for Angelo to lie with Mariana.¹⁸ Surprisingly, very little has been said about the financial arrangements in the two cases, even though that aspect is crucially important to the major concerns of the play.

The facts are clearly, even bluntly, set forth in the dialogue, when Claudio says,

Thus it stands with me: upon a true contract
I got possession of Julietta's bed.
You know the lady, she is fast my wife
Save that we do the denunciation lack
Of outward order. This we came not to,
Only for propagation of a dower
Remaining in the coffer of her friends,
From whom we thought it meet to hide our love
Till time had made them for us. But it chances
The stealth of our most mutual entertainment
With character too gross is writ on Juliet.

[I.ii.140-50]

In other words, the young couple have made a private commitment, which was indeed considered binding, but have delayed the church ceremony until a more favorable property settlement can be worked out. The fact that “friends” control her dowry means that Juliet's parents are dead and the marital arrangements thus lie in the hands of her guardians. Shakespeare's audiences would not have missed this oblique reference to the very real difficulties of wards who were often bought and sold in marriage with little regard for their best interests or their own wishes.¹⁹ Claudio too is obviously parentless, since he has only his sister to plead for him and he has contracted a marriage for himself. Juliet's dowry thus assumes increased importance, since the money comes directly to him rather than his father. No matter how much he loves his intended bride, he would be quite foolish to forego one of the chief advantages of his marriage, though admittedly his financial prudence does not excuse his sexual imprudence.

The facts of Angelo's alliance with Mariana are set forth by the disguised Duke/Friar:

She should this Angelo have married, was affianced by her oath, and the nuptial appointed: between which time of the contract and limit of the solemnity, her brother Frederick was wracked at sea, having in that perished vessel the dowry of his sister. But mark how heavily this befell to the poor gentlewoman: there she lost a noble and renowned brother, … with him the portion and sinew of her fortune, her marriage dowry; with both, her combinate husband, this well-seeming Angelo. … [He] Left her in her tears, and dried not one of them with his comfort; swallowed his vows whole, pretending in her discoveries of dishonor; in few, bestowed her on her own lamentation, which she yet wears for his sake.

[III.i.209-23]

In this case, Angelo and Mariana had obviously entered into a property settlement, publicly and properly witnessed. Such a premarital contract could be nullified on the grounds of fornication or failure to pay the promised sum. Angelo makes both charges, though only the dowry is lost, and not Mariana's virtue. Legally, Angelo has a valid reason to break off the match, and his decision certainly rests on sound financial grounds. But morally, he is guilty of shameful lying and cruel indifference. The withdrawal from his contract did not have to include either the ruin of Mariana's reputation or the refusal to comfort her grief.

Money, or rather the lack of money, is the critical issue in both these situations. Neither Claudio nor Angelo wants to accept a bride who pays him less than her full price, yet each winds up accepting a “devalued” wife through sexual involvement with her. In the process, each man experiences public humiliation and very nearly loses his life. When Juliet becomes obviously pregnant, Claudio goes to prison and is sentenced to die, saved only by a providential substitution and the Duke's secret intervention. Similarly, through the Duke's secret intervention and his providential substitution of Mariana for Isabella in Angelo's bed, the result is the deputy's public exposure and a death sentence. Angelo's lust, like Claudio's, earns him a dowerless wife with a blemished reputation. The Duke offers Mariana a better chance at the marriage market with Angelo's goods:

                                                                      For his possessions,
Although by confiscation they are ours,
We do instate and widow you with all,
To buy you a better husband.

[V.i.418-21]

However, the proffered jointure, certainly more generous than any which might have been written in her original contract with Angelo, is not so large that Mariana would buy a second husband with the life of the first.

The buying and selling of lives, wives, and bodies stands at the core of Measure for Measure.²⁰ The pimps, whores, and bawds in the subplot merely engage more blatantly in the same “trade” as Angelo and Claudio. This trade in female flesh of course cheapens and degrades the women involved: “The stealth of our most mutual entertainment / With character too gross is writ on Juliet” (I.ii.149-50). Mariana's “reputation was disvalued / In levity” (V.i.219-20) and she is instantly married at the Duke's orders, “else imputation, / For that he knew you, might reproach your life” (V.i.416-17). Yet the trade degrades the men involved too, leading them to lie, deceive, and connive, often with indifference towards the suffering their female partners must endure. In the final bargain, each man gets far less than he had hoped for but far more than he deserves.

I am not convinced that Shakespeare held firm, consistent views on the marriage practices of his day. Instead, he seems to have turned a clear, undeceived eye upon those negotiations that so critically shaped the future of every couple, sometimes exposing absurdities, sometimes righting injustices, sometimes exploring corruptions. Always, however, he manages to integrate the marriage material into the aesthetic concerns peculiar to each play. Across a distance of almost four centuries, social history helps to show us both the distortions and the faithful reflections in Shakespeare's mirror of marriage. And we appreciate his art all the more.

Notes

1. See Lawrence Stone, “Marriage among the English Nobility in the 16th and 17th Centuries,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 3 (1960-61), 182-206; The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), esp. pp. 175-78, 192-95, 589-671; The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), esp. pp. 3-62, 85-218; Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost (New York: Charles Scribner's, 1965), esp. pp. 81-106; Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1977), esp. pp. 1-49, 102-73. Among earlier studies, see Wallace Notestein, “The English Woman, 1580-1650,” Studies in Social History, ed. J. H. Plumb (London: Longmans, Green, 1955); and Carroll Camden, The Elizabethan Woman (Houston: Elsevier Press, 1952). A study which appeared following the symposium in January 1979 is Margaret Loftus Ranald, “‘As Marriage Binds, Blood Breaks’: English Marriage and Shakespeare,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 30 (1979), 68-81. In this paper I will be concerned exclusively with the marriage patterns for the privileged in the society, since circumstances were somewhat different for the commonality.

2. See Stone, Family, pp. 86-87, for the distinction between “interest” and “affect.” See also G. R. Hibbard, “Love, Marriage and Money in Shakespeare's Theatre and Shakespeare's England,” The Elizabethan Theatre VI (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1977), pp. 134-55. Hibbard views Raleigh's marriage for love as atypical, Bacon's marriage for interest as the norm. Moreover, he uses Middleton's realistic treatment of marriage as a sharp contrast to Shakespeare's unrealistic treatment. As Stone's work in Family amply documents, the great shift from marriage based on affect to marriage based on love was influenced not so much by literature as by the Puritan insistence upon love and harmony between spouses. However, Puritan teachings did not have a significant impact until after Shakespeare. For further accounts of the Puritan view of marriage, see Edward S. LeComte, Milton and Sex (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1978); John Halkett, Milton and the Idea of Matrimony (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1970); Katherine Rogers, Troublesome Helpmate: A History of Misogyny in Literature (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1966), pp. 140-51; and Roland M. Frye, “The Teachings of Classical Puritanism on Conjugal Love,” Studies in the Renaissance, 2 (1955), 148-59.

3. Stone, Family, pp. 151, 171-72; Crisis, pp. 594-99, 608-09, 619; “Marriage,” pp. 182-85. For the 1603 canons, see E. Gibson, Codex Juris Ecclesiastici Anglicani (London: Clarendon Press, 1761), p. 421.

4. Stone, Crisis, pp. 49, 613-15, 623 ff., 50; Family, p. 181; “Marriage,” pp. 193-95. Hibbard also points out the profiteering of the London lawyers who arranged marriages, p. 142.

5. Stone, Crisis, pp. 621, 632-45; “Marriage,” pp. 187-89, 192, 194-95. Note that younger sons rarely figured in significant negotiations, since they had nothing to offer except what the father or the eldest brother allowed. Many never married.

6. Ernest Schanzer, “The Marriage Contracts in Measure for Measure,” Shakespeare Survey, 13 (1960), 85-86; Stone, Crisis, pp. 609-10; “Marriage,” pp. 198-99.

7. Stone, Crisis, pp. 605-06, 609-10; Family, pp. 103-04, 181; “Marriage,” p. 186; Hibbard, pp. 135-36.

8. In rather different contexts from my own, George Hibbard and Coppélia Kahn have also discussed some aspects of the marriage market in Shrew. See Hibbard's “The Taming of the Shrew: A Social Comedy,” Shakespearean Essays, ed. Alwin Thaler and Norman Sanders for Tennessee Studies in Literature (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1964), pp. 16-30; and Kahn's “The Taming of the Shrew: Shakespeare's Mirror of Marriage,” Modern Language Studies, 5 (1975), 88-101. Kahn's assertion that Baptista's negotiations “provide insurance against having to support his daughters in widowhood” reveals her imperfect understanding of the financial responsibility for widows, always a burden on the husband's family. All citations come from the Pelican Shakespeare, ed. Alfred Harbage (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969).

9. Stone, Crisis, pp. 638-39. For the English equivalents of crowns and ducats, I am indebted to Professor Sanford Sternlicht, who is an authority on Elizabethan money. A crown equalled 5s., a ducat 4s., with 20s. to the pound.

10. Stone, Crisis, pp. 628-29.

11. Stone, pp. 602, 606; Hibbard, “Love,” pp. 135, 140-42.

12. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch calls Bassanio “a predatory young gentleman” in his Introduction to the New Cambridge Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1926), p. xxv. In a more temperate vein, Albert Wertheim feels that Bassanio's “interest in Portia's wealth outweighs his undoubtedly genuine affection for her,” in “The Treatment of Shylock and Thematic Integrity in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Studies, 6 (1970), 77, 79. Neil Carson says Bassanio and all the other young men in the play “seem at times little better than determined fortune hunters,” in “Hazarding and Cozening in The Merchant of Venice,” English Language Notes, 9 (1971-72), 168. Herbert S. Weil scores the hero for his “unappealing selfishness” in “The Options of the Audience: Theory and Practice in Peter Brook's Measure for Measure,” Shakespeare Survey, 25 (1972), 27. James Smith thinks Bassanio's project “smacks of an optimism, a presumption, a recklessness, a levity … inconceivable unless fortified by ignorance,” in Shakespearean and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1974), p. 44. And Elizabeth S. Sklar, in “Bassanio's Golden Fleece,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 18 (1976), sees Bassanio as “something of an opportunist who uses the affection he inspires in others for material gain” (p. 500). Sylvan Barnet, among others, claims that Bassanio's prodigality is “clearly not immorality but generosity,” in “Prodigality and Time in The Merchant of Venice,” PMLA, 87 (1972), 28-29. See also Norman N. Holland, The Shakespearean Imagination (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1968), who takes a more historical approach in pointing out that for Elizabethans, “a man's estate, or a woman's, was just as much a part of them as the color of their hair or the sound of their voice” (p. 102).

13. His debts are negligible compared to those incurred by spendthrifts like Rutland, Southampton, Essex, Oxford, and Northumberland, who compiled massive obligations in an astonishingly short time; see Stone, Crisis, p. 582. See also Hibbard, “Love,” pp. 136-37, for Bacon's efforts to solve money problems with a rich marriage.

14. As E. Pearlman points out in “Shakespeare, Freud and the Two Usuries,” English Literary Renaissance, 2 (1972), 217-36, the loss of money is equated with castration in the play.

15. Again, Quiller-Couch voices the harshest pronouncement on Jessica: she is “bad and disloyal, unfilial, a thief; frivolous, greedy, without any more conscience than a cat and without even a cat's redeeming love of home. Quite without heart, on worse than an animal instinct—pilfering to be carnal—she betrays her father to be a light-of-lucre carefully weighted with her sire's ducats” (p. xx). Even a recent interpreter can speak of “Jessica's unnatural theft and desertion”; see R. Chris Hassel, “Antonio and the Ironic Festivity of The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Studies, 6 (1970), 70. Jessica's stout defenders include John Russell Brown, Shakespeare and His Comedies, 2nd ed. (London: Methuen, 1962), p. 74; Austin C. Dobbins and Roy W. Battenhouse, “Jessica's Morals: A Theological View,” Shakespeare Studies, 9 (1976), 107-20; and R. F. Hill, “The Merchant of Venice and the Pattern of Romantic Comedy,” Shakespeare Survey, 28 (1975), 82.

16. IV.i.378-88. Joan Ozark Holmer is one of the few who even note what Jessica and Lorenzo receive at the trial's outcome. See “Loving Wisely and the Casket Test,” Shakespeare Studies, 11 (1978), 66. Herbert S. Donow incorrectly claims that Portia secures “a daughter's portion” for Jessica in “Shakespeare's Caskets: Unity in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Studies, 4 (1968), 92. Wertheim is simply wrong when he claims that “Shylock, like all the other Venetians, is offered the opportunity to lose his money and find grace” (p. 86), since Shylock receives the offer of life, Christian baptism, and the restoration of half his goods at the same time. The original sentence is loss of life and goods with no grace at all.

17. The argument for Antonio as surrogate father is at least as valid as that for him as homosexual lover of Bassanio. Among the proponents of the latter view are Graham Midgley, “The Merchant of Venice: A Reconsideration,” Essays in Criticism, 10 (1960), 119-33; John D. Hurrell, “Love and Friendship in The Merchant of Venice,” Texas Studies in Language and Literature, 4 (1961), 328-41; and Leslie Fiedler, The Stranger in Shakespeare (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972).

18. W. W. Lawrence, Shakespeare's Problem Comedies, 2nd ed. (1931; rpt. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1960), pp. 95-96; Harding P. Davis, “Elizabethan Betrothals and Measure for Measure,” JEGP [Journal of English and Germanic Philology], 49 (1950), 139-58; Schanzer, pp. 85-86; S. Nagarajan, “Measure for Measure and Elizabethan Betrothals,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 14 (1963), 115-19; J. Birje-Patil, “Marriage Contracts in Measure for Measure,” Shakespeare Studies, 5 (1969), 106-11; A. D. Nuttall, “Measure for Measure: The Bed-Trick,” Shakespeare Survey, 28 (1975), 51-56; Harriet Hawkins, “What Kind of Pre-Contract Had Angelo? A Note on Some Non-Problems in Elizabethan Drama,” College English, 36 (1974-75), 173-79. To indicate the kind of debate this question has generated, Schanzer argues that the Claudio-Juliet contract was de praesenti and the Angelo-Mariana agreement de futuro, while Nagarajan and Birje-Patil claim the reverse was true. Hawkins says the whole issue is irrelevant, insisting that modern views are just as valid as Elizabethan ones, and that in any case all audiences have probably had the natural common sense to react in the same way, regardless of differing attitudes or conventions.

19. Stone, Crisis, pp. 600-05; Joel Hurstfield, The Queen's Wards: Wardship and Marriage under Elizabeth I (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1958).

20. For another view of the way money figures into the primary concerns of the play, see R. J. Kaufman, “Bond Slaves and Counterfeits: Shakespeare's Measure for Measure,” Shakespeare Studies, 3 (1967), 85-97.